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Emma Dortins Bennelong and Phillip Frank Bongiorno Raimond Gaita Mireille Juchau Sigrid Nunez Kevin Foster David McBride Stuart Kells Alan Joyce
Summer reading Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlisted poems Arts Highlights of the Year
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Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Advances
The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its twentieth year, attracted 1,066 entries, from twenty-one countries. Warmly we thank our three distinguished judges – Lachlan Brown (shortlisted in 2020), Dan Disney (winner in 2023), and Felicity Plunkett – who have shortlisted the following poems: ‘Poem of the Dead Woman’ by Judith Nangala Crispin (NSW) ‘Immigration Triction’ by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (WA) ‘Workarounds’ by Dan Hogan (NSW) ‘Cuttle’ by Meredi Ortega (Scotland) ‘Blagaj Mostar’ by Dženana Vucic (Germany)
qua ethical consciousness, in which the poem is shown again to be a tool with which to construct new thinking, new idealisms, new hope for renewed possibilities to stride across often-bleak horizons.
The shortlisted poems appear in this issue (from page 29). This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom on Tuesday, 23 January (6pm). The shortlisted poets will read their poems, then the overall winner (who receives $6,000) will be named. To register your interest, please visit the Events page on our website and RSVP to rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au. Meanwhile, our talented quintet is recording the
(L-R): Judith Nangala Crispin, Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon, Dan Hogan, Meredi Ortega, and Dženana Vucic
On our website we list the eleven poems that comprised the official longlist. There you will also find the judges’ report, including their remarks about the individual poems. Our judges had this to say about the overall field: Arriving at this shortlist of five stylistically diverse poems, each of us was reading for language that was concise and perspicacious, language that arrested our attention in ways that immediately rewarded re-reading. In uniquely different ways, each shortlisted poem demonstrates compelling awareness of the function not only of the poetic line but, more broadly, of syntax, grammar, diction and the power relations transmitted therein. Each of these linguistic thought experiments remains inherently cognisant of the materiality of language. Accordingly, each plays a fascinating language game. Beyond matters of style, each shortlisted poem focuses outwardly towards social modes/models that bear the weight of creative critique; therein, each text parlays a critical
shortlisted poems for the ABR Podcast. This will be available just prior to the ceremony. Finally, we congratulate the other six poets who appeared on the longlist and who added such lustre to this year’s Porter Prize: Paula Bohince (USA), Marguerite Bunce (France), John Foulcher (ACT), Greg McLaren (NSW), Petra Reid (Scotland), Meredith Wattison (NSW).
Prizes galore
Thanks to all those who have entered the Calibre Essay Prize, from many countries. The Calibre Prize, now worth a total of $10,000 and one of the most lucrative prizes for an unpublished essay in English, closes at midnight on 22 January. The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on 15 January. The total prize money this year is $12,500 (with three individual prizes). Full details will appear on our website from 15 January. The Jolley closes on 22 April. g
Vitality and Change in Warlpiri Songs Edited by Georgia Curran, Linda Barwick, Valerie Napaljarri Martin, Simon Japangardi Fisher and Nicolas Peterson A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 1
Australian Book Review January–February 2024, no. 461
First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose | Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Georgina Arnott | Assistant Editor assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Rosemary Blackney | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Deputy Chair Billy Griffiths Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Johanna Leggatt, Lynette Russell, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Katie Stevenson, Geordie Williamson ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014), Robyn Archer (2016), Sheila Fitzpatrick (2023) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019), Sarah Walker (2019), Declan Fry (2020), Anders Villani (2021), Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Interns Phoebe Rawlinson, Jessie Wyatt Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $100 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Amy Baillieu Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment ABR is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.
Image credits and information Front cover: Man resting on beach and reading book in Phuket,Thailand, 2014 (Prasit Rodphan/Alamy) Page 37: Italian novelist Elsa Morante at Casina Valadier, Rome, Italy 1962 (Colaimages/Alamy) Page 59: Warwick Fyfe as Wotan in Melbourne Opera’s Die Walküre (photograph by Robin Halls)
ABR January–February 2024
MEMOIR
9 11 17
Kevin Foster Nick Hordern Gordon Pentland
The Nature of Honour by David McBride An Unlikely Prisoner by Sean Turnell The Abuse of Power by Theresa May
ESSAYS
12
Frank Bongiorno
Justice and Hope by Raimond Gaita
BIOGRAPHY
14 24 36 48
Emma Dortins Paul Kildea Seumas Spark Theodore Ell
Bennelong & Phillip by Kate Fullagar Ian Fleming by Nicholas Shakespeare Paul and Paula by Tim McNamara Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson
PANDEMIC
18
Ben Brooker
Life As We Knew It by Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham
BUSINESS
19
Stuart Kells
Alan Joyce and Qantas by Peter Harbison with Derek Sadubin
LITERARY STUDIES
21
Ronan McDonald
James Joyce by Gabrielle Carey
SCIENCE
22 50
Robyn Arianrhod Killian Quigley
The Best Australian Science Writing 2023 edited by Donna Lu The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox
SHAKESPEARE
23
Carol Middleton
Shakespeare by Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea
COMMENTARY
26 54
Ebony Nilsson Peter Edwards
The lives of ‘ordinary’ people Political interference in official histories
PETER PORTER POETRY PRIZE SHORTLIST
29 30 32 33 34
Meredi Ortega Judith Nangala Crispin Dženana Vucic Dan Hogan Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon
‘Cuttle’ ‘Poem of the Dead Woman’ ‘Blagaj, Mostar’ ‘Workarounds’ ‘Immigration Triction’
FICTION
38 39 41 42 43
Mireille Juchau Morgan Nunan Laura Elizabeth Woollett Lily Patchett Julie Janson
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez Paradise Estate by Max Easton Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee Three new Young Adult novels
POETRY
44
Anders Villani
46 47
David Mason Geoff Page
parallel equators by Nathan Shepherdson camping underground by Greg McLaren Prickly Moses by Simon West Near the Border by Andrew Sant
INTERVIEWS
49 62
Catriona Menzies-Pike Cameron Lukey
Critic of the Month Backstage
LAW
51
Zoe Smith
Courting by Alecia Simmonds
MUSIC
52 56
Des Cowley Malcolm Gillies
Full Coverage by Samuel J. Fell Schoenberg by Harvey Sachs
ABR ARTS
58 63
Ian Dickson et al. Clare Monagle
Arts Highlights of 2023 The Seagull
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Drylands by Thea Astley
FROM THE ARCHIVE 64
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Our partners Australian Book Review ABR is supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), Australian Communities Foundation, AustLit, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
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Flanagan’s book of questions Catriona Menzies-Pike Are referendums over? Anne Twomey A tribute to Charles Simic Jelena Dinić A maddening country Joel Deane Uncommonly good history Marilyn Lake ‘The Morning Belongs to Us’ Siobhan Kavanagh Shipping Sunshine Julian V. McCarthy State-of-the-nation books Zora Simic
A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 7
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Calibre Essay Prize One of the world’s leading essay prizes The 2024 Calibre Essay Prize is open for submissions. The Prize is now worth $10,000 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek non-fiction essays of 2,000 to 5,000 words on any subject: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the eighteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. The first prize is $5,000, the second $3,000, and the third $2,000. The judges are Amy Baillieu, Shannon Burns, and Beejay Silcox. Entries close 22 January 2024. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au
On winning the Calibre Essay Prize ‘To win on the back of the Jolley Prize brings an immense double happiness. ABR sets a high benchmark with the way they run Calibre and the Jolley. Having worked with Editor Peter Rose and the ABR staff on the Jolley Prize last year, I can testify to their integrity, refreshing lack of cynicism, and genuine respect for writers. These awards and acknowledgements do matter – they help enormously on both a professional and practical level. I’m extremely grateful to ABR, the judges, and Patrons, and give thanks for my good fortune.’ Tracy Ellis, 2023
‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’
Theodore Ell, 2021
ABR thanks founding Patrons Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan for support for the Calibre Essay Prize. 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B Rtheir U A R Y continuing 2024
Memoir
The lives of the saints David McBride’s ethic of self-interest Kevin Foster
The Nature of Honour by David McBride
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Viking $36.99 pb, 288 pp
ometimes, for the faithful, it doesn’t do to look too closely into the life of your chosen idol. Saul of Tarsus had been an enthusiastic persecutor of Christians before his spiritual detour en route to Damascus. St Camillus de Lellis, patron saint of nurses and the sick, to whom we owe the symbol of the red cross, spent his early life as a con man, a mercenary, and a compulsive gambler – little wonder he went far in the Church. Where our secular martyrs are concerned, matters become still murkier. Mahatma Gandhi tested his chastity by sleeping naked with nubile young women and girls – one of whom was his grand-niece. And as for Julian Assange ... The latest celebrity martyr, David McBride, has been fêted for handing over the documents that paved the way for an inquiry into the actions of Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan and the resulting revelations of killings and cover-ups detailed in the Brereton Report. Yet the popular account of him as a selfless man of conscience, a champion of transparency, and thereby a de facto enemy of a Defence establishment wedded to cover-ups and secrecy, could hardly be further from the truth. Indeed, as he tells it himself, it would be hard to conjure a more entitled, self-interested, establishment figure than McBride. The son of Sydney obstetrician William McBride, famed for alerting the medical establishment to the dangers of Thalidomide, McBride enjoyed a privileged upbringing and education. Sent to board at Tudor House in the Southern Highlands at the age of six, he later moved on to the King’s School in Parramatta, where, bedazzled by tales of Knight’s errant and the dulce et decorum est spirit of the old boys, he dreamed of duty and service and was an earnest if indifferent scholar. He played rugby, in a team captained by one Tony Abbott, and read Law at Sydney University, mostly in that order. On graduation, his academic shortcomings were no bar to the glittering prizes as the old school tie, a little networking, and a slice of luck opened doors closed to all but the outstanding. When he applied for the scholarship King’s offered old boys to study at either Oxford or Cambridge, he placed second. However, as the awardee could not take up the offer that year, McBride lucked in. Even then, he only squeaked into a Diploma course at Oriel because his father knew the then College Principal, Sir Zelman Cowen. Despite the political and social turmoil in mid-1980s Britain, of which he was dimly conscious, McBride’s Oxford was a Brideshead fantasy of titled friends, Dickensian College porters,
dress-ups, and debauches. In between college balls, skiing trips to Interlaken, and a bare minimum of study, McBride, like Abbott, won a boxing blue, discovering in the process ‘how much it hurts to get hit in the head, and how it can cause you to lose consciousness’. Who would have thought? His exploits in the ring led to an invitation to join the University’s most exclusive club, the Bullingdon. Distinguished by their dark navy-blue tailcoats, its members were renowned for their drunken rampages, ‘Buller Blinds’, vandalism of restaurants and college rooms, and a tradition of on-the-spot payment for damage. Recently graced by Boris Johnson, when McBride joined the club was chaired by another future British prime minister, David Cameron. It was not a blaze of light but a glimpse of tight trousers and spurs that set McBride – ever a dedicated follower of fashion – on his true path. Having heaved himself and his tailcoats over a wall to gatecrash the Christ Church Summer Ball, McBride spotted three Guardsmen in their distinctive uniforms and in that moment ‘knew exactly where I wanted to be next’. Who knew that the road to Damascus ran along Whitehall? After graduating from Oxford (just) and officer training at Sandhurst (just), McBride traded the social cachet of an Oxbridge degree and the connections that brought for a commission with the Royal Horse Guards, the second most senior regiment in the British Army and another élite establishment club. When not undertaking foot patrols in Northern Ireland, keeping a watchful eye over the iron curtain, or performing ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace, McBride commanded a vehicle troop at Windsor and set his sights on playing representative polo at the mecca of the English game, Smith’s Lawn. (He didn’t.) When interviewing for Sandhurst, McBride affirmed that he wanted to join the Army so that he could ‘fight for democracy and the law’ and that he could best contribute by ‘being a leader’. Noble stuff. But what becomes clear as his memoir unfolds is that, propelled by an unreflective ethic of unshakeable entitlement, the principal object of his service is himself. He shamelessly invokes the language of religion to vindicate his self-interest, professing ‘a strong belief in the God of my own understanding’, who answered his prayers ‘when the shit hit the fan’. It appears that his Bible studies passed over Proverbs 3:5 and its wise counsel to ‘Trust the Lord with all your heart, / And do not lean on your own understanding … Be not wise in your own eyes.’ In the context of such idolatry, whatever McBride wants is good and right, per se. Anything that stands between him and his desires is to be surmounted, evaded, or ignored. As a result, despite his responsibilities as a leader of men and an exemplar to others, he demonstrates an increasingly cavalier disregard for authority. The book is punctuated by small acts of defiance, where the arrogance of privilege is passed off as an expression of irrepressible personality or profound principle. ‘You had to act for your conscience whatever the orders were. Sometimes it was the rule-breakers who were happier with themselves than the prefects.’ On one occasion he dismisses a Northern Irish transport official who refuses to let him sit a motorcycle licence test on an unregistered bike as ‘nit-picky’ and ‘a little lacking in gratitude’ given that McBride and his troopers had been keeping his streets safe for the past months. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 9
Memoir Whenever his eye turns to new challenges, he rebels against kill or capture missions. He had no qualms about his role and the constraints that frustrate him. Preparing himself for SAS was keen ‘to be a part of the direct targeting process, killing key selection, the pointless routines of base life chafe and he spends Taliban from a distance with drones and helicopters’. Yet his more time skiving off and skirting his duties. Likewise, when enthusiasm for the cause soon wanes. Affronted by the disparity between the reality on the he realises that he will fail ground and the ‘airbrushed selection he disregards the optimism’ of the ADF ’s absolute discipline required public statements about the of recruits, defiantly contraprogress of the war, he is vening the rules, and daring enraged when senior leadthe selectors to dismiss ership elaborate the Rules of him. Characteristically, his Engagement (ROE) which interest in joining the Spegovern the circumstances in cial Forces extended little which soldiers can use their further than ticking it off weapons. In his view, the his been-there-done-that finessing of these well-unlist and adding its coveted derstood guidelines was emblem to the tailcoat an inexcusable exercise in and spurs in his one-man moral window dressing that Wunderkammer, claiming exposed the men on the that ‘much as I’d desperatefront-line to greater danger ly wanted the SAS badge, and compounded their legal I didn’t really want to take peril. McBride believed that orders’. Thank God he failed. for senior commanders ‘it Once he leaves the milwas all about appearances, itary, the threadbare camgetting promoted and movouflage of duty and service ing on’. The careers of their fall away, and McBride’s subordinates, forced to make self-centredness comes into split-second decisions about clear focus. Working as when to open fire, were a security contractor for blithely sacrificed on the alUNICEF soon after the tar of positive PR. When the genocide in Rwanda, he chain of command ignored scorns the aid workers he his complaints that the ADF protects, denouncing their was too readily pursuing too careerism when they should many cases against soldiers have been ‘helping the peowho had pulled the trigger, ple of Rwanda’. Yet despite McBride passed on the making ritual obeisance to material that formed the the horror of the massacres, basis of the Afghan Files to his own indifference towards David McBride (Penguin Random House/Urban Dystopian) journalists at the Australian the Rwandans is breathtaking. His driver, he recalls, ‘was one of the few surviving Tutsi Broadcasting Corporation, reflecting that ‘At the end of the day civilian men. His wife and family had been killed. He was called you have to answer to your own conscience not just the ROE.’ It Gabriel or Celestine – something biblical – as most of them were.’ is a rich irony that his efforts to protect the trigger-pullers from Back in Australia he joins the New South Wales Labor persecution led to the discovery of credible evidence that rogue Party, but within months is recruited by his old university rugby elements among them had killed dozens of innocent civilians. coach, Peter King, Liberal MP for Wentworth, who makes him That McBride then accepted the moral credit for these revelations, a more tempting offer. Justifying his crossing of the political while earnestly playing the martyr at his own secular canonisation, floor, McBride proposes that ‘as a staffer you were really just like is entirely in keeping with a career dedicated to self-interest. McBride’s memoir reminds us that the lives of the saints are a lawyer, arguing your client’s case. And could just as easily work for one party as another.’ The concept of political loyalty, with its full of awkward biographical details, unexpected revelations, and tribal attachments and antipathies, completely eludes him. Yet disappointing truths. To keep the faith, sometimes you have to gloss over the facts. g again, the ethic of self-interest provides moral absolution. When he joins the Australian Defence Force (ADF) as a lawyer, he does two tours of Afghanistan in the latter days of Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of the nation’s commitment there, one with Special Forces, pro- Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash viding on-the-spot advice about the legal quandaries raised by University. 10 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Memoir
The Box
A personal account of imprisonment Nick Hordern
An Unlikely Prisoner by Sean Turnell
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Viking $35 pb, 300 pp
ean Turnell is an Australian economist who was detained by Myanmar’s military regime from February 2021 until November 2022. An Unlikely Prisoner, his account of the ordeal, has quite a personal tone as he relates his struggle with unjust imprisonment by a regime whose hallmark was ‘a mix of the needlessly brutal, the petty, and the incompetent’. This personal story is also mixed with politics, for Turnell has an insider’s view of Myanmar’s ongoing struggle for freedom, one of the great dramas of modern Asian history. In the 2000s, Turnell’s expertise on Myanmar’s economy drew the attention of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – ‘Daw Suu’, as he respectfully calls her – the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the main opposition to the military regime. For two decades, Daw Suu had been under either house arrest or some other type of restraint, until in 2011 the military tried to change its spots by introducing a new, quasi-democratic constitution. In national elections in 2015, the NLD won an overwhelming victory, forming a government led by Daw Suu, and Turnell joined her team as an adviser. While it kept an iron grip on security matters, the military had to sit back and watch as the NLD steered the country towards greater democracy and a more open economy. In the 2020 national elections, the NLD once more swept the board. This time, refusing to accept this fresh mandate, the military mounted a coup, imprisoning Daw Suu and members of her government, Turnell, and at least ten thousand of her civilian supporters. Turnell is circumspect in his assessment of the NLD’s time in government. He gives it credit for laying the groundwork for the reform of Myanmar’s economy, among other things. But he makes only the slightest allusion to the military’s genocidal campaign, which began in 2016, against the Rohingya people of northwestern Myanmar, and none at all to Daw Suu’s defence of that campaign, including before the International Court of Justice. The prison conditions Turnell endured were extremely harsh. He himself was physically maltreated. He knew of other prisoners who had been tortured. One, a great friend who stood up to the guards on Turnell’s behalf, was later beaten to death. Initially held in Yangon, Turnell was kept in ‘The Box’: a room within a room where the lights stayed on round the clock (except when the power failed, invariably in daytime). Moved to another jail in the new capital of Naypyitaw to face trial, he discovered that his fellow prisoners there were friends and colleagues from the
deposed NLD government, including Daw Suu. Among them were his co-accused in his trial, a process Turnell describes as ‘Kafkaesque’. For example, he was charged under Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act, even though, as a foreigner, he wasn’t actually subject to it. Turnell is frank about the difficulty he had in coping with his sense of isolation and powerlessness. He had a tenuous line of communication to the outside world, to his family, and to Australian and other foreign diplomats, but even so he confesses to having occasionally ‘lost it’. There was, however, one thing which ‘more than anything kept me going’: books.
Turnell merely alludes to the military’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya people He read whatever he could get his hands on, and mentions more than thirty authors across a range of genres: biography (Alexander Hamilton, John Maynard Keynes), history (Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, Noel Mostert’s The Line upon a Wind), modern fiction ( Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan), children’s literature (Enid Blyton), and The Lord of the Rings. He and Daw Suu shared a particular enthusiasm for Tolkien. Turnell didn’t just read to escape from his predicament, he read to engage with it as well. He steeped himself in the literature of imprisonment, including that ‘seminal work of freedom’, 1984 (George Orwell, he notes, has a particular following among the Myanmar opposition). He rekindled his enthusiasm for the prisoner of war stories, such as Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape and Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, which were standard fare for young Australian men of his vintage. These raised the question for Turnell as to whether he should be trying to defy his captors – something he dismissed as impractical. During his imprisonment, Turnell’s view of the political struggle in Myanmar was, by definition, limited to what he could see and hear from his jail cell: that is, the junta’s suppression of the NLD by brute force. One might infer from this that the generals will hang on to power indefinitely, but this is not necessarily the case. Both the junta and the NLD leadership belong to Myanmar’s majority Bamar ethnic group, but the conflict between them is only one element in the country’s unfolding political dynamic. The other is the relationship between the Bamar and Myanmar’s many other nationalities – including the Shan, Karen, Rakhine, and Mon – whose homelands lie along the country’s borders. Beginning in late October 2023, armies aligned with these ethnic groups inflicted a string of military reversals on the army, reversals which have substantially weakened the regime. As a result, there is a real prospect that the junta might, if not be overthrown, then at least have its authority largely restricted to the central part of the country. At the recent Lowy Institute launch of An Unlikely Prisoner, Turnell described these developments as ‘hopeful’, while tempering his comment by pointing out that the struggle against the junta had been going on for decades. Even so, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Turnell may one day again be asked to put his expertise at the service of Myanmar’s people. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 11
Essays
Gaita on love
Notes from a life of the mind Frank Bongiorno
Justice and Hope: Essays, lectures and other writings by Raimond Gaita
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Melbourne University Publishing $65 hb, 599 pp
or a man many would regard as the very epitome of the type, Raimond Gaita seems rather hostile to the concept of the intellectual. It is ‘irredeemably mediocre’, he explains, inferior to the kinds of moral and political responsibility that attach to teacher or politician. Intellectuals are active in the public domain, grappling with ideas, culture, and politics, but they have often lacked independence of mind, he says, ‘because they never had it or because they sacrificed it to the cause’. When Gaita articulates his ideal of a university, the vision is of ‘a community of scholars’, of a contemplative life that requires ‘inwardness with values slowly apprehended by living the life of the mind in community with fine exemplars of it’. In that sense, he believes, the university is finished. And while some academics might take time out of their teaching and research to become public intellectuals, it is not an obligation. Yet Gaita would seem to many the archetype of the Australian academic as intellectual, one of a fairly small number of humanities scholars in this country who have left a significant imprint on the culture. He is best known as the author of a much-admired memoir of his childhood as the son of European migrants, Romulus, My Father (1998), later a film, but here he is essayist, reviewer, and lecturer. The pieces range from the short, sharp reflection on a current event, such as ‘Why the War Is Wrong’ (2003) on Iraq, through to extended reflection of a more challenging – and perhaps ‘academic’ – kind, such as that on whether torture can be a lesser evil. It was arguably in those early years of the century that Gaita came into his own as an Australian public intellectual, a moral philosopher able to address an Australian audience of the educated and troubled and anxious kind as their government lied to them, took them to war, locked up asylum seekers, and sent the army into Aboriginal communities. To the right, Gaita would probably fill the role of Howard-hater, but in the essays of that time we find a genuine concern about the decline of dignity and honesty in political life that cannot be reduced to this or that politician. We see the continuities between the worlds of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard, and of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Scott Morrison, without Gaita needing to spell them out. In attacking the very conditions needed by citizens to ‘call their fellow citizens to seriousness’, Trump has polluted political life, rather as Primo Levi thought the fascists’ lies did in Italy. 12 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Levi is one of Gaita’s lodestars – Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Albert Camus are others – and among the earliest essays is a 2019 reflection on If This Is a Man, a book to which Gaita often returns. Viewed in the wider context of Gaita’s preoccupations, it is easy enough to see why this greatest of Holocaust memoirs should play such a role. For Gaita is an author who returns repeatedly to love. The passage in If This is a Man that has made its greatest impression on him is one in which Levi’s friend Charles tenderly cleans up a young Dutchman named Lakmaker suffering horribly from dysentery. For Gaita, the pure love of ‘saints’, such as Charles, lies in their recognition of a fellow human being’s ‘preciousness’ even in a moment of the deepest degradation. For Gaita, such claims move well beyond rights discourse, which, he suggests, has a thinness compared with this kind of love. It is justice, rather than mere fairness; a full recognition of humanity, and not just egalitarianism. These are the ideas to which Gaita returns when he considers same-sex marriage (in 2005), as well as when he contests the claim – one that gained particular momentum during the ‘war on terror’ – that torture could be justified under some circumstances, such as to save lives. Here, in a moving essay, Gaita recalls when working in a psychiatric hospital as a young man his encounter with a nun who was somehow able ‘to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible’; in demeanour, word, facial expression, and body language, she was utterly devoid of condescension. It is the same gift Gaita attributes to Charles – one of ‘saintly love’ – a capacity to recognise humanity even in ‘the degradation of the afflicted’. Most interestingly, Gaita compares the nun’s qualities not to the brutish behaviour of a number of employees in the hospital towards the patients, but to a small group of virtuous psychiatrists who had come into the hospital insisting on better treatment of the patients because, as one said, they had an ‘inalienable dignity’. Again, the contrast is between a recognition of rights and the deep love of another that recognises their humanity as well as one’s own. What we find here in Gaita is an ideal of how we might live with one another, and in the world, in an ethical manner. It is demanding in many ways because it calls us to ‘seriousness’ and ‘lucidity’ – key words in his writings – when the temptation offered by a complex, corrupt, and confronting world might be to retreat into misanthropy or at least detachment. For Gaita, engagement with the world – a love of it, despite its wrong and evils – is a moral responsibility, a large part of what makes us fully human. It is a world, too, in which a common humanity is expressed through political communities that we usually call nations. It is striking how much of Gaita’s writing is concerned with the particular obligations that attach to belonging to a nation. For him, jingoism is bad but not love of country, which brings with it certain responsibilities among which is a collective ownership of both the good and the bad in a country’s history. These are responsibilities that a recent immigrant will be unable to feel; it takes time, perhaps generations, to become sufficiently embedded in a place to take them on in a meaningful way. It was, of course, a live question in the Howard era, when the idea of an apology to the Stolen Generations ran into the conservative argument that
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
DIRECTOR PETER EVANS Category
2 – 30 MARCH SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE 25 APRIL – 11 MAY ARTS CENTRE MELBOURNE 7 – 15 JUNE CANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE
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Essays one should not apologise for something that one has not done. It remains alive for us today. Nonetheless, as Gaita remarks, the same people who deny such responsibility seek to foster a sense of pride in ancestors’ achievements. The essays – edited and introduced by the ABC’s Scott Stephens, himself a moral philosopher – are a distinguished and valuable contribution to Australian public discourse, given new life here. They were often responding to a particular controversy, issue, or moment, and there are very big issues of our times – such as climate change – that do not much figure. Yet it is striking how many of the pieces resonate in the present, or just grapple with issues that remain as debatable today as they were in the time of Socrates. Sometimes, tragically so. There are reflections on Indigenous reconciliation that still are pertinent to that unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable business, in the aftermath of the Voice referendum. And Gaita’s reflections on the conflict between Israel and Palestine remain tragically relevant. Informed by his respect for national community – to which he sees both Israelis and Palestinians as entitled – he wonders why Israel is ‘the only
state in the world whose injustices have given rise to serious doubts about its right to exist’. In 2010, he was warning of the danger of a one-state solution that would not be of the kind envisaged by Palestinians and their Western supporters on the left, but one favoured by the Israeli right. That danger seems to loom even more seriously now than then. There is a worldliness about this book: a recognition that people feel as well as think, that literature, art, and film, and not only philosophy, are necessary both to understand the world and to change minds, that those untrained in moral philosophy will be understandably resistant to its fine distinctions, and that politics is no vocation for saints – but that if it attracts only the worst kinds of sinners, we are all lost. It is a generous vision, often practical, compassionate – a word that Gaita would probably reject in favour of loving – and mainly hard-headed and unsentimental. It will challenge receptive readers to consider how we might better live together in deeply troubled times. g
Intertwined lives
of the time they spent together. She also wants to break free from the ever-forwards idea of progress, in itself a European narrative form that shaped the idea of British colonisation and, more specifically, Phillip’s own sense of rationalism. As Fullagar observes, European historians have helped to ‘license imperial injustices by presenting them as the necessary if sad cost of modernity itself ’, a historiographical project that took off in earnest not long after the two men’s deaths. Going backwards may not bring us closer to how Bennelong and his people understood time and the past, Fullagar admits, but at least it sets his and Phillip’s histories into an ‘equally unfamiliar framing’. Most importantly for this pair of intertwined stories, going backwards shucks off the sense of inevitability that has skewed our understandings of Phillip’s life to some extent, and Bennelong’s. Going backwards takes some additional effort for the reader, but most of it is productive in the way Fullagar hopes it will be. Bennelong and Phillip were intensely engaged with each other for about six years from November 1789, when Bennelong and Colebee were taken prisoner on Phillip’s orders, to early 1795, when Bennelong left Phillip in England and returned home. This combined biography of two intersecting lives finds deep resonances that go beyond this short period and put it into perspective – both on the personal scale and on the larger stage, as Fullagar advances her ongoing project of drawing out and contextualising cross-cultural exchanges in the context of British expansionism. Bennelong and Phillip largely built and maintained their relationship in Eora Country, and in and around London, where Fullagar examines the perspectives each gained on the world of the other. The book also looks towards a more global view than that embodied in those two poles: the two men exchanged gazes via Rio de Janeiro and the window onto British India offered by the trial of Warren Hastings (Bennelong attended sessions while in London). Aboard the Atlantic on his journey to the northern
Bennelong and Phillip’s extended encounter Emma Dortins
Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled by Kate Fullagar
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Scribner $55 hb, 316 pp
he story of the extended encounter between Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of the British colony at Sydney, has often been told as both emblematic and predictive of the history of British possession of Australia, and of Aboriginal dispossession. Historians such as Grace Karskens and Keith Vincent Smith have peeled back the layers of this narrative to find ways of telling more complex, contextualised, and open-ended stories. Fullagar reaches a new stage in this journey, and the journey of Australian history more generally. She offers a fresh perspective on Bennelong and Phillip, on the nature of their exchange and the broader currents in which they swam. Fullagar writes the history of these two men backwards, beginning with their deaths and burials in 1813 (Bennelong) and 1814 (Phillip) and with analysis of their surviving next of kin. She then plots events towards and beyond their births, revealing their defining characteristics and the unfolding changes that shaped their respective worlds. Fullagar does this to better understand the context of each man’s life, and the relative importance for each life 14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Frank Bongiorno teaches at the Australian National University and is President of the Australian Historical Association.
Biography hemisphere, and the Reliance on the return journey, Bennelong ation and resilience of Eora lifeways, laws, and cultural systems, was also immersed in the close circles of patronage that shaped and played the role of negotiator in line with this commitment. Phillip’s life and career as a man dedicated to naval service (the His decision to move out of the affairs of the colony after he engine of British imperialism), and left his mark there, with returned from England was not made readily, or immediately, two-way cultural exchanges documented by several shipboard but was decisive and saw him again completely engaged in the work of his own culture. companions. A second result of Fullagar’s contexA strong thread in the book is Fultual reading is a nuanced and questionlagar’s analysis of the role of women in ing view of the détente between Eora Bennelong’s and Phillip’s lives. She pays peoples and the colony from October close attention to Phillip’s connections 1790. She shows how Bennelong and with and separation from women, with Phillip played leading roles in navimuch of his life lived in the homosocial gating through a number of serious world of ship and naval service, as well as conflicts during that period to maintain his linked ideas about the proper role and equilibrium, including the spearing of place of women. She takes careful account Phillip’s gamekeeper John McEntire of Bennelong’s three marriages and his near Kamay-Botany Bay. Around this relationships with his sisters. Fullagar incident, she argues, both men made rereads documented events such as Bensignificant diplomatic mistakes, but they nelong’s wounding of and then marriage can be seen to learn from them as they with Kurubarabula in late 1790, to find a exercised a range of approaches to the story in which women are part of the Eora shifting situation, maintaining general political world. Phillip’s and his officers’ peace across the following three years. confused responses to these events come The concept of détente provides an from a place where women are separated Bennelong (1793) by ‘W.W.’ overarching framework for a steady infrom the public sphere. Bennelong’s first and third wives, Barangaroo and Boorong, also feature strongly, terpretation of series of events (and interventions) that can seem with Boorong playing a key,though much less recognised role as a stop-start and incoherent. It is a framework similar to Stephen translator and negotiator, as Meredith Lake has also established. Gapps’s interpretation of the period under the rubric of the Fullagar seeks to understand both men’s wider cultural Sydney wars, but from a contrasting perspective. Bennelong and Phillip offers a reinworlds. With Phillip, the current ideas are terpretation of Britain’s move away from well documented, though Fullagar must negotiating a treaty with the Eora and still ascribe particular positions to Phillip surrounding Aboriginal peoples following as an individual with some circumspection. Phillip’s departure. Fullagar builds on her For example, she considers it important, but previous work in The Savage Visit (2012), finds it hard to place Phillip’s own thoughts where it is clear that British imperial polon the European collection of and trade icy was shifting in the last decades of the in human remains. With Bennelong, it is eighteenth century away from its former more difficult, especially within Fullagar’s emphasis on gaining territories legally. Philacknowledged limitations as a settler hislip, however, had New World precedents torian. For example, she meditates briefly firmly in mind, and was expecting that on Bennelong’s connection with whales – Bennelong and Yemmerawanne would be he summoned Phillip to his spearing at a received in England as envoys, who might whale feast, and commemorated the death meet with the sovereign and discuss formal of his wife Barrangaroo at a similar feast. arrangements for claiming land. Of course, Bennelong’s totem has been documented Fullagar notes, Bennelong and Yemmeras a ‘large fish’, and she wonders whether awanne may have rejected any terms offered. perhaps this fish was the whale. She strikes That no such discussions took place, and no a good balance between acknowledging that Captain Arthur Phillip (1786) by Francis Wheatley (Mitchell Library) acknowledgment of Eora sovereignty was her interpretation may not be right, while offered, highlights afresh how far Australia remaining committed to showing what historians should be looking and listening for to have a fuller picture. has to go to arrive at recognition and conciliation. g Via her unravelling process, Fullagar finds two men who, notwithstanding some mistakes and diversions, stayed true to Emma Dortins trained as a historian and published her first themselves. Phillip, in brief, was dedicated to the service of a book, The Lives of Stories: Three Aboriginal-Settler friendships, in particular vision of British imperialism, in which the governorship 2018. She now works in government roles in heritage and planof the Sydney colony (1788–92) was one chapter in a long and ning. An earlier version of this review appeared in the Profesvaried service career. Bennelong was committed to the continu- sional Historians Australia reviews pages, 8 November 2023. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 15
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Memoir
Goody two-shoes A pious and vicarish apologia Gordon Pentland
The Abuse of Power: Confronting injustice in public life by Theresa May
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Headline $34.99 pb, 344 pp
t takes some considerable effort to remember Theresa May’s time as prime minister. Her two governments ran from the resignation of David Cameron immediately after the political earthquake of the Brexit referendum in 2016, to May’s own tearful resignation in the summer of 2019 as the aftershocks swallowed her minority government. The distending effects of the past three years of UK (and world) politics have already made the May era a kind of historical curiosity. The consequent danger is that we look back to her stint as prime minister as the last gasp of sensible politics avant le déluge. This volume, we are assured, is not a political memoir. Readers in search of materials with which to reimagine with cosy nostalgia the world before those twin horsemen of the apocalypse – coronavirus and Boris Johnson – will be disappointed. So too will those who want an unvarnished and melodramatic tale of dastardly misdeeds, mendacious populism, and stage villains getting their just deserts. May has instead set her sights on loftier goals. She largely eschews the opportunities to embroider her own life story or to settle scores. Instead, she sets out, crusader style, to slay injustice in public life. May almost avoids the juicier opportunities of the political memoir genre. We get a light dusting of autobiographical crumbs. These hit notes well suited to conventional Tory autobiography, and dwell on the ways in which May’s status as a daughter of the rectory subconsciously groomed her for a career in politics. Such slim fare nonetheless establishes her personal virtue and moral incorruptibility. This is the same goody two-shoes whose most explosive confession ahead of the 2017 general election was to having run through wheat fields as a girl. In spite of her moral loftiness, the mortal flesh is weak. There are scores to settle and villains to best, and they rear their heads throughout this volume. Boris Johnson is there in a minor key, haunting the narrative as one of those vampires who have sucked the marrow out of public life. The first substantial bad guy we encounter, however, is the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. His egregious bullying of his staff earns him what one suspects constitutes a vicious sandbagging at the hands of May. This chapter sets the tone for the remainder of the book. Overall, its register is pious and vicarish. May repeats herself frequently and favours quoting, at length, from government reports. While Bercow’s bullying provides a pretty clear example of the abuse of power, May’s account segues into an altogether more
awkward fit for the theme: Brexit. In her doomed efforts to craft a workable deal, Bercow was not the only malign actor, abusing his power to stymie May’s efforts to enshrine ‘the democratic will of the people’. A large cross-section of democratically elected MPs is also in the dock. These men and women, Brexiteers and Remainers alike, abused their own share of power by not demonstrating sufficient foresight and flexibility to ‘look to a new future’, as defined by Mrs May. It is a curiously naïve view of politics, especially from one who has made it her career. And it is a jarring inclusion in a book which is largely about other matters. Perhaps an animal urge to settle scores or the insistence of the publisher or a combination of both explain its inclusion. May’s other illustrations of widespread and endemic abuse of power within UK public life – around the tragedies at Hillsborough in 1989 and Grenfell in 2017, the sexual abuse scandal in Rotherham and half a dozen others – are sound enough. Few would disagree that her case studies contain ample and often damning evidence of the sorts of self-interested conduct or institutional deafness that May decries. They still contain conventional instances of score-settling. As we might expect from a long-term home secretary who had a torrid relationship with the police, HM’s constabulary do not come off too well in a number of chapters. In the absence of responsible public institutions, May seems to have near limitless faith instead in the ability of public inquiries and commissions to uncover ‘the truth’ behind these abuses. Hence the constant and distracting quotation from ‘grey literature’ to make her points. The cumulative effect of her different examples is to render a portrait of a hollowed-out public life. The implied angelic contrast to those brutes who use office and position solely as vehicles for the exercise of power or the pursuit of self-interest are those who use them to nourish an ethic of service. May, we can only assume, is patron saint of this latter group, though she is far too self-effacing to say so bluntly. This is, of course, one of the self-justifying credos of the Oxocracy. It sits alongside a hereditary ‘born to rule’ mentality and a refurbished sense of aristocracy as technocratic government ‘by the best’. Some readers may smell a rat at the bottom of this case. The odour is perhaps most pungent around those public scandals which clearly and unequivocally took place on May’s patch and on her watch. The most egregious is the treatment of Windrush migrants. May pretends to embark on a frank and brave accounting. She quickly changes tack. The history of UK immigration is placed in a long historical frame so that governments from Clement Attlee’s to her own, and every one of the twenty-seven different home secretaries since 1948, get to shoulder a little portion of the blame. It comes across as the protest of an errant child: ‘It’s not my fault, it was like that when I got here.’ The luxury of rich historical context and the careful faux-ethical reasoning to demonstrate that there was no ‘deliberate intent to use power in a way which could only damage others’ stand in stark contrast to the summary justice and moral absolutes meted out willy-nilly to others in her book. May’s account of how UK politics got to its present impasse is quite conventional: the growth of a dysfunctional civil service; the iniquities of the twenty-four-hour media cycle and its corrosive impact on politicians and their relationships with civil servants, A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 17
Memoir special assistants (colloquially SPADs), and electors; careerism in politics, and a consumerist attitude to public life. But her solution to these ills is frankly bizarre: the revitalisation of a Victorian public service ethic and government by grey literature. These seem weak solvents for the muscular populism and corruption of a Boris Johnson or the posing technocratic globalism of a Rishi Sunak. May’s mechanisms for achieving this moral revolution – which include changing the selection procedures for MPs – seem
laughably unfit for the challenge. At best, this manages to be a book for our times, a distant lament from England’s imagined political past, and an impassioned plea for the restoration of decency. At worst, it comes across as having been written by someone self-interestedly making the case for unself-interestedness in public life. g
Far from over
ripe for the telling. Life As We Knew It provides, for the most part, an insider’s perspective of the pandemic, the authors’ reportage peppered with recent interviews with premiers, state and federal ministers, and a range of health experts. As you would expect, state chief health officers – those formerly faceless apparatchiks who acquired minor celebrity status during the Covid years, attracting everything from eroticised fandom to death threats – feature heavily. Dow and Cunningham’s brisk, journalistic prose is efficient, if a little colourless, and assembles a complex picture from a wealth of research (which, unfortunately, is undercut by the absence of endnotes). Testimony from ordinary people – shelf-stackers, tradies, and the like – introduces a balancing, ‘people’s history’ flavour, reminding the reader that, while Australia’s pandemic response was orchestrated by those with the most power, its effects were felt by those with the least. The book is, perhaps necessarily, a patchwork. Depending on your postcode, Australians’ individual experiences of the pandemic’s first waves varied widely. Dow and Cunningham reflect this by wisely dedicating chapters to each state and territory, attesting that – just as with the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic – Federation is both a uniting and dividing construct. In South Australia, where I lived at the time, the pandemic barely registered for most of the population. In Western Australia, which has long flirted with the idea of secession, the state government’s lengthy border closures saw Covid kept more or less at bay for years, and then-premier Mark McGowan soar to extraordinary levels of public approval. In the east, of course, it was a different story. Sydney’s ‘gold standard’ of infrequent lockdowns and superior testing and tracing proved unsustainable, especially during the Ruby Princess cruise ship debacle, when dozens of Covid-infected passengers were allowed to disembark at Circular Quay, leading to hundreds of further cases. It was Victoria, though, that would emerge as the epicentre of Australia’s pandemic, enduring the longest lockdown of any major city in the world – a gruelling 262 days – in 2021. Dow and Cunningham also paint another picture of the virus in Australia, one defined less by state borders than those which demarcate the comfortable from the underprivileged. Health economist Stephen Duckett describes a ‘tale of two pandemics’ whereby the physically, psychologically, and emotionally stable were able to experience Covid as a manageable disruption to their lives while those living in disadvantaged and often culturally diverse suburbs were devasted. Of all of Australia’s pandemic mistakes, the failure to translate Covid and vaccine messaging into the languages of the country’s many migrant communities was surely among the most conse-
An insider take on the pandemic Ben Brooker
Life As We Knew It: The extraordinary story of Australia’s pandemic by Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham
I
Scribe $35 pb, 325 pp
n October 2014, an article by health reporter Aisha Dow appeared in Melbourne’s Age newspaper titled ‘Deadly flu pandemic could shut down Melbourne’. It began with a dystopian vision of Australia’s second most populous city plunged into a Spanish flu-like crisis: A deadly pandemic could shut down Melbourne as we know it. Public transport could be terminated, AFL games cancelled and the casino, schools and office towers forced to close. It has been predicted that the first wave of a pandemic could cause 10,000 deaths in Victoria. But families and friends may not be able to publicly mourn lost loved ones, because funeral services could be stopped as part of [a] policy of social distancing.
Reading this piece as the first years of the pandemic recede into memory in only the way the recent past can is to be struck by its far-sightedness. So prescient does it seem now, as Dow and co-writer Melissa Cunningham point out in their new book on Australia’s experience of Covid-19, that conspiracy theorists latched onto it as ‘evidence’ that the pandemic was manufactured by the authorities (presumably it makes perfect sense to the deranged minds of conspiracy theorists that the mainstream media, which they claim to distrust, would disseminate details of such a ‘plandemic’ years in advance). There may not have been 10,000 deaths in Victoria during the pandemic’s first wave – the deadliest by far would prove to be the fourth, or Omicron, wave, which began in late 2021 – but much of what Dow prophesied did come to pass. For this reason, she is perhaps uniquely positioned to write the story of the pandemic in Australia, which, though far from over – the nation is facing its eight wave and yet another ‘Covid summer’ as I write – seems 18 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Gordon Pentland is Professor of History at Monash University.
Business quential, leaving culturally and linguistically diverse families vulnerable to disease, economic precariousness, and the kind of over-policing seen in the hard lockdown of nine public housing towers in Melbourne in mid-2020. The pandemic’s toll on young people and the elderly was similarly stark and shocking. Teenagers and young adults, cut off from schools and other social outlets for extended periods of time, experienced record levels of mental health disorders, self-harm, and suicidal ideation – a ‘shadow pandemic’ in the words of youth mental health expert Patrick McGorry, and one that is expected to worsen over the next few years. Not many Australians could forget, at the opposite end of the age scale, the horrific scenes – body bags on gurneys, family members banging forlornly on windows – which emerged from the country’s broken aged care system as the virus made a mockery of inadequate health and staffing protocols. So, in the final analysis, how did the country fare in its pandemic response? The answer is undoubtedly mixed. The authors give credit to the Morrison government for acting swiftly in the early days of the pandemic to close the borders, introduce quarantine and isolation requirements, and provide economic support for workers and businesses. Looking back, it is easy to forget now just how radical some of these interventions were, upending decades of neoliberal ‘small government’ shibboleths virtually overnight. On the other hand, the federal government’s mismanagement of the acquisition and rollout of vaccines (‘It’s not a race’) and failure to order enough rapid tests showed a side of the coun-
try’s pandemic response that was chaotic, miserly, and bereft of forethought. Such missteps contributed to the perception that Scott Morrison was inept at dealing with crises – as his disastrous handling of the Black Summer bushfires had proven – but Dow and Cunningham let the former prime minister off the hook in surprisingly softball interviews. Morrison’s anodyne answers reveal little more than what we already knew – that few politicians before or since possess the same skill for self-aggrandisement where there is credit to be claimed, and deflection onto others where there is criticism to be made. The accounting, however, as Dow and Cunningham make clear, is, like Covid itself, far from over. Doherty Institute director Professor Sharon Lewin tells the authors that, relative to other Western countries, Australia’s collecting of data on the health outcomes of Covid and long Covid has been poor. We still don’t know, among other things, how effective Victoria’s harsh lockdown rules were, or exactly which measures contributed to the state’s remarkable success in crushing its second wave in 2020. The national inquiry currently underway, the final report of which is due by the end of September next year, will more than likely fill in some of the blanks. But it remains to be seen whether, as the Albanese government is promising, the report will improve the nation’s preparedness for future pandemics. We were, after all, warned once before. g
Fasten your seatbelts
to-get United States investor intended to agree at the last minute but miscalculated the time difference, faxing his confirmation ‘five hours too late’. During a 2019 share buy-back, Qantas was criticised for ‘using cash that could have been spent on newer planes and keeping good staff ’. The rollercoaster intensified during the pandemic. Just one of many problems: the airline could not get parts such as 787 windscreens and GE engine thermostats, the latter produced by ‘a small company of a father and two sons’. The father died during the pandemic, while his sons left the industry. In October 2011, the Qantas fleet had been grounded after the airline announced (‘to widespread shock’) that it was locking out employees covered by three principal unions. Further disputation followed. In 2023, the Federal Court determined that Qantas’s efforts to outsource its ground-handling operations contravened the Fair Work Act 2009. ‘This is the largest finding by a country mile,’ TWU national secretary Michael Kaine said, ‘of illegal sacking and outsourcing in Australian corporate history.’ Harbison’s book is as much a biography of Alan Joyce as it is a history of Qantas. A ‘working-class boy from Dublin’, Joyce had contemplated becoming a pilot at Irish carrier Aer Lingus, ‘but his short-sightedness meant he failed the test’. Some people detected in Joyce a ‘heart of gold’, but his rise through the ranks was more about brains. Harbison is candid about how Joyce adopted a technocratic, numbers-driven approach to win the top job at Qantas in 2008. Harbison’s book helps tell a wider story about corporate
Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas Stuart Kells
Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison with Derek Sadubin
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Penguin $36.99 pb, 400 pp
early everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient SydneyMelbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal. Widespread anger at Qantas provides the context and backdrop for Peter Harbison’s revelatory book (with Derek Sadubin) about ‘the oldest continuously operating airline in the world’. At a sprightly pace, the book walks through Qantas’s recent history of turbulence. Industrial disputes, corporate machinations, and pandemic challenges punctuate the rollercoaster. In 2007, an attempted private-equity buy-out failed, evidently because a hard-
Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and bookseller.
A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 19
Business Australia. Across sectors as diverse as banking, telcos, insurance, gers on trunk routes – weren’t needed but just kept on coming.’ Retraining senior pilots to fly the A380s was expensive and energy, superannuation, retailing, and aviation, the past decade or so has been a period of corporate decline. Lower service time-consuming. Then there was the cost of keeping them in standards and less respect for the customer are two aspects of the air: ‘more than US$30,000 an hour in direct operating costs that decline. Hypocrisy is another. Corporate leaders pretended alone, so [the service] had to generate large numbers of economy to be champions of commerce, but their success often depended and premium travellers just to break even.’ The hubristic behemoths were kept in the air by money – on publicly granted monopolies and other advantages. That was true at Qantas, whose status as the ‘national carrier’ and luck. Harbison details a harrowing incident in November 2010 above Batam Island, Indonesia. came with sundry benefits, and where That morning, Qantas’s first A380 to Joyce’s key achievement was to create enter service was flying to London from a low-cost subsidiary, namely Jetstar. Sydney; 440 passengers and twenty-nine (The subsidiary was to be called ‘JetX’ crew were on board. A faulty oil pipe fracbut Joyce’s predecessor reportedly said tured in an engine, leading to a fire and that sounded ‘like a gas station’.) the fracture of a turbine disc. An unconThe whole idea of a low-cost airtained explosion blasted out shrapnel that line subsidiary is rife with tensions. punctured the wing, severing fuel and hyThe subsidiary cannot be too attracdraulic lines, disabling landing flaps and tive, or it will cannibalise the parent’s narrowly missing a fuel-tank. Someone on market. But the scope for different the ground tweeted a picture of an engine service standards is limited, because, cowling: ‘a large, white aircraft part with a at bottom, the service is about safe prominent Qantas kangaroo logo lying in flying. The cost differential between a school playground’. Luckily, the aircraft parent and subsidiary is therefore was not lost. The crew made a successful narrow, especially where (as efficienemergency landing in Singapore. cy demands) the subsidiary shares This is the closest Qantas has come to systems with the parent, such as for losing a jet aircraft. Joyce recalled that the ticketing and scheduling. incident created ‘huge concerns around In the United Kingdom, facing the brand … But it’s a very robust brand – competition from Ryanair and easyJet, and we rebounded.’ (Oddly, Joyce referred British Airways experimented with to Qantas consistently as a ‘brand’, not a a subsidiary called ‘Go!’. Aer Lingus company or business.) also created an offshoot: Aer Lingus Yet another feature of the corporate Express. Both experiments failed, as decline: a surge in executive pay. Joyce did similar ventures in North America. was again at the forefront. In 2017, he Qantas and Jetstar solved the Alan Joyce with John Travolta, wearing Qantas was the highest-paid executive of all the problem by working hard to remind pilot’s uniform, Melbourne Airport, 2010 companies on the ASX200. During his travellers that flying with Jetstar could (ManWithaCamera Melbourne/Alamy) fifteen years as CEO, Joyce received more be terrible. ‘To stop the cure becoming than $130 million in salary and benefits. worse than the disease,’ Joyce said, ‘we Harbison also traverses the theme of class. At the age of coordinated a lot and made sure the brands were very different on the network.’ Hence Jetstar’s pattern of preventable stuff-ups, twenty-three, Joyce flew Business Class from Dublin to Chicago. such as frequently delayed and cancelled flights, and repeated It was his first ever flight and it was a baptism. ‘This was living!’ strandings of passengers on distant shores. That strategy, which Harbison writes. ‘He never looked back.’ Joyce’s Qantas claimed in economic terms was a departure from efficiency and funda- to be quintessentially Australian, but it had very unAustralian mentally bad for consumers, could only work thanks to a lack of attributes, such as the ultra-exclusive Chairman’s Lounge, freely genuine competition in Australian aviation. If we had stronger and secretively available to influential customers who relished competition laws and regulators, deliberate inefficiency would ‘the cocooning effect of complete separation from the masses’. In 2002, I researched the demise of Ansett Airlines – the be impossible. Harbison illuminates another dimension of corporate decline: biggest corporate collapse in Australian history. I remember the faddish and hubristic decision making. As with dual-brand air- poignant moment when airline models and other artefacts were lines, corporate Australia’s taste for expensive gimmicks and frol- cleared from the shelves of Ansett’s former headquarters at 501 ics was only possible because of entry barriers and market power. Swanston Street, Melbourne. More than two decades later, as Joyce himself had a gimmicky side. He thrived on the atten- Harbison’s book shows, the artefacts of corporate Australia need tion of reporters who delighted in his endearing pronunciation of a thorough clear-out. g ‘third’ as ‘turd’. Qantas’s acquisition of eight A380 super-jumbo jets was another gimmick. ‘These new craft [Harbison writes] – Stuart Kells’s book on the ‘Alice’ financial market invention will hub-to-hub giants specifically designed to carry over 500 passen- be published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2024. 20 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Literary Studies
‘Human, erring, condonable’ A posthumous tribute to James Joyce Ronan McDonald
James Joyce
by Gabrielle Carey
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Arden $39.95 hb, 131 pp
he death of Gabrielle Carey earlier this year was a cruel loss for the Australian literary world, especially its Joyce community. I first met Gabrielle shortly after moving to Sydney from London in 2010. She invited me to her annual Bloomsday celebration, which took place in a Glebe pub. I was new in town and delighted to join the readings and revelry. I suspected, rightly, that my Dublin accent would glean me some credibility, if nothing else did. Gabrielle’s interest in Joyce was deep and enduring, and part of her broader affinity with Ireland, where she had lived for a spell. But that was only one facet of her open and intensely enquiring nature. She had accidentally achieved literary celebrity in her teenage years, as joint author of Puberty Blues (1979), the iconic Australian coming-of-age book. While her co-author, Kathy Lette, gained fame in London, as a raunchy, in-your-face Aussie, Gabrielle went in the opposite direction, eschewing cheap publicity, seeking out quality and truth in her life and interests, living with dignity, grace, and style. She wrote with a ring of authenticity and often with Joycean frankness (and humour) about her life, the terminal illness of her mother, her relationship with a prisoner in a Parramatta jail, her literary passions and connections, her father’s suicide, her own struggles with mental illness. She went through a Mexican phase as well as an Irish one, which endured in the annual ‘Day of the Dead’ parties in her Ashfield home. In the last ten years, she excelled in a hybrid genre, linking literary biography and personal memoir, producing three successive books on Randolph Stow, Ivan Southall, and Elizabeth von Armin. These authors come alive through the intensity of her relationship with them, imbuing her beguilingly clean prose with the qualities of a romance or even a whodunnit. Joyce had long been an obsession, one that Carey had written about in a series of essays. She hosted the Finnegans Wake reading group in Sydney, which took seventeen years to read through Joyce’s last masterpiece, before (of course) turning round and starting again. She took delight when this group, which met over tea in her home, was described by one wag as ‘the most pretentious reading group in Sydney’. My favourite parts of James Joyce: A life are about Finnegans Wake (1939), but I was surprised that Carey is much less visible as an authorial presence here than in her other work on Joyce. Perhaps her untimely death meant that the finished product was brought out by her publisher as itself a ‘work in progress’, the name by which Finnegans Wake was known
during its long composition. Incompletion is a Joycean motif: think of the ‘gnomon’ with which he begins ‘The Sisters’, from Dubliners (1914), or the definition in Ulysses (1922) of a pier as a ‘disappointed bridge’. An authorial ‘Apologia’ quotes him here: we are all ‘human, erring and condonable’. This short biography is made up of eighty-four vignettes and a coda, each one chronologically reproducing an instant or anecdote from Joyce’s life, richly laden with quotations, mainly from letters, though also (with delightful apposition) from the Wake. Carey compares her approach in this book to that of a bower bird, gathering bits and pieces. She reminds me more of a swan (to borrow something that Barbara Bray said about Samuel Beckett), dipping serenely in and out Joyce’s life, offering us choice slivers without extraneous comment.
Carey’s interest in Joyce was deep and enduring Joyce inherited the spendthrift habits of his father, ill-suited to a family man seeking to overcome the extraordinary obstacles placed before his writing career, often by timid and hostile publishers and printers. Yet he was well served by great supporters, his wife Nora Barnacle, his brother Stanislaus, various writers. The hero is Joyce’s long-suffering patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, an English heiress, feminist, and editor who gave Joyce, Carey tells us, the equivalent of $1 million in today’s money, a significant proportion of which was spent on his favourite wine, Fendant de Sion du Valais, the ‘urine of a Duchess’ (alas, unavailable in Australia, so far as I can make out). This foray across the peaks of Joyce’s life is a quick and pleasurable read. It is learned but wholly unstuffy. It has only one footnote, a digressive one which sees a rare (for this book) appearance of Carey herself. She is quoting a letter from Weaver to Joyce: ‘You are good for the soul, I think medicinal, you are so unflattering to our human nature: so, though you are neither priest nor doctor of medicine, I think you have something of both.’ We all know the idea of Joyce as a priest of the imagination. That he is also a physician is less familiar, to me at any rate. But he did go to Paris originally to study medicine and in the final decade of his life the healthcare of his daughter Lucia, who developed schizophrenia, was his main extra-literary preoccupation. ‘Personally speaking,’ says Carey, ‘I have long considered Finnegans Wake a highly effective anti-depressant.’ Carey was close friends with psychiatrists, one of whom was a devoted attendee at her Wake reading group. She would, I think, howl with laughter at the idea that this famously difficult book might nudge Prozac off the prescription lists. But she might agree that the lure of Joyce is often towards the affirmative, towards Molly Bloom’s ‘Yes’. In the ballad from which Finnegans Wake gets its name, Tim Finnegan’s ‘corpse’ wakes up when a splash of whiskey falls on him during a brawl. Joyce’s book is a call to revivify and awaken. The same is true of Carey’s final tribute to Joyce, her ‘loving in memoriam’, as she puts it. g Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 21
Science
Why science matters A welcome new anthology Robyn Arianrhod
The Best Australian Science Writing 2023 edited by Donna Lu
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NewSouth $32.99 pb, 328 pp
he Best Australian Science Writing (BASW) anthology is here again, and readers are in for a treat: a wide-ranging selection of easy-to-read articles describing some of the amazing science that is happening right now. Of course, it is an impossible task, choosing the ‘best’ writing, and in her introduction editor Donna Lu acknowledges her subjectivity. It is the same for a reviewer, and since I don’t have room to name everyone, I won’t single out my own favourites. Instead, I will offer some general thoughts, sparked by Lu’s welcome attempt to grapple with the question of what constitutes great science writing. She takes her lead from a surprising source, novelist Ian McEwan. In a 2006 Guardian essay on the importance of a literary science canon, McEwan asked, ‘Is accuracy … the most important criterion for selection? Or is style the final arbiter?’ Lu finds her answer in another of McEwan’s suggestions: ‘We know what we like when we taste it.’ Unfortunately, out of context, this sounds like the old joke ‘I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like’, from American humourist Gellett Burgess’s satirical psychological critique Are You a Bromide? (1906). Science is one of humanity’s greatest intellectual and cultural achievements; repurposing Gellett, it used to be that the best science writing challenged readers intellectually – just as fine art and literature challenge our perceptions. But as science becomes ever more sophisticated, and issues such as climate change ever more pressing, it is difficult to find the right balance between writing that distils complex scientific concepts – about the physics of climate, say – and that which documents scientific projects, such as those tracking the effects of climate change. In the relatively short, diagram-free spaces available in BASW, conceptual writing that gives readers ‘aha’ moments of deep understanding is more difficult to pull off than the descriptive, topical journalism that is increasingly favoured. A third of the pieces this year are from general rather than science-focused outlets. More than half are nature stories, and nearly a quarter relate to health. (Giving readers what they already like, like a social media algorithm? Or is it bringing science to a wider audience?) Still, there are gains in the current trend towards science journalism rather than science writing, for traditional popular expositions used to be strong on ideas but not on the broader picture. Historiographers now insist that science be discussed in context, rather than as a triumphant story of great scientists and 22 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
ideas, so it’s good to see many stories in BASW 2023 emphasising institutional or political contexts – from the geopolitics of Antarctic research to the political and legal implications of rising sea levels in the Pacific and Torres Strait. Several stories offer important critiques of science and its context, such as the tech-industry nexus that is creating so much space junk and light pollution; the sexism behind the public’s support of a macho bird-spotter over the female scientist who unmasked his fraud; and what it takes to obtain relevant scientific data. In addition, in most pieces the scientists and/or the writer are central, providing a human face to science. For instance, you will follow journalists as they go into the field with naturalists documenting the ecological effects of climate change, logging, or invasive pests, and the evocative writing will make you weep anew at our collective failure to act. People and their perspectives feature in many other fascinating stories, from the importance of dark skies to First Nations astronomers and to the environment, to the courtroom drama that used new DNA techniques to pardon Kathleen Folbigg twenty years after her conviction for infanticide; from what loneliness does to our cells, and a fresh lockdown take on the once-ubiquitous bogong moth, to the surprising ecological importance of dingoes, and more. On the other hand, science journalism can tend to overemphasise context, personalities, and ‘breakthroughs’ at the expense of the science itself. At times, when reading some of the stories reporting from lab and field, I felt outside looking in – amazed at the ingenuity of the clever scientists profiled and delighted to learn new facts, but little the wiser about the foundations of their work. Journalistic science writing also focuses on the present. Yet, as McEwan went on to suggest, history offers insight into the curiosity-driven thinking that created the core sciences underpinning today’s topical stories. (Disclosure: I write on core maths and physics, and their history.) In this year’s BASW, however, there is only one short piece on physics, and none on mathematics – the very subjects that have made possible much of the technology implicit in many of the stories here. And they are exciting stories, about scanning brains to understand their neurobiology; scanning the skies with ever-better telescopes; tracking animals and plant distributions to understand and conserve them; dating ancient ice to study climate tipping points; sequencing bat genomes to understand how to fight viruses such as Covid-19; creating antimatter; and more. Interestingly, a decade ago, male writers dominated BASW anthologies, but in recent years it has been women’s turn: this year there are seven male, one non-binary, and twenty-five female authors. Among Australian STEM graduates and students, girls dominate the biological, earth, medical, and health sciences, but are under-represented in physics, engineering, computing and technology, and mathematical sciences. It would be good to see more articles on these topics, to change the culture and turn this imbalance around. Either way, it’s an honour for a writer to be chosen for BASW, and readers are always guaranteed hours of pleasure. Some of the essays this year are masterpieces of style – beautiful writing that weaves scientific endeavour into stories as inspiring as the best fiction. And every author is excellent at showing us why science matters. g
Shakespeare
Corpsing with Branagh
Profound insights into Shakespeare’s language Carol Middleton
Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent by Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea
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Michael Joseph $36.99 pb, 384 pp
n 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by since then, but none has erased the memory of her stage presence that night. Not all the critics approved of the performance. The role of Ophelia was taken off the newcomer for the tour to Paris and the United States, but restored to her on the company’s return. Benthall’s instinct proved right, of course. Dench went on to become part of the Old Vic company for four years before migrating to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at Stratford. Until the 1970s, Shakespeare provided the bread and butter for Dench and her husband, fellow RSC actor Michael Williams. They dubbed Shakespeare ‘the man who pays the rent’. Shakespeare is still Dench’s passion, and her prodigious memory is a storehouse of his plots and scripts, his sonnets and soliloquies. Through her recollections, Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent captures decades of theatrical history: various performances of twenty Shakespeare plays and the thirty roles that Dench performed in them, with appearances from revered actors and directors at the Old Vic and the RSC. A chapter is devoted to each of the twenty plays, interspersed with segments on related topics: failures, audiences, and critics. The book started life as a series of conversations, held over the course of four years, between Dench and her fellow actor and director, Brendan O’Hea. The recordings were destined for the archives of the Globe Theatre, but at some point a decision was made to publish the edited transcripts for a general audience. There is no index, no footnotes. It is not an intellectual conversation, but a playful discussion between two old friends, with hilarious anecdotes and relentless ribbing. Yet the core of the conversation is a profound insight into the language of Shakespeare, the emotions and relationships of his characters, and how to convey these in performance. O’Hea must take credit for the masterful editing; he foregrounds Dench’s words to recreate her distinctive voice and gift for repartee; and limits his role to that of interviewer. His questions act as prompts to trigger her memories and clarify the
plot of the play for the reader. Regardless of whether you have seen the play performed or read the script, it is easy to follow the stories and be captured by the drama. If you have witnessed any of these productions, prepare to be thrilled a second time. Dench’s eloquence brings the performances back to life. We hear the actors, many of them household names, speak their lines and whisper their wicked asides. She has played their wives, sweethearts, and mothers – from Lady Macbeth to downstairs maids and fairies with attitude. She has teamed up regularly with Kenneth Branagh. The anarchic pair are prone to ‘corpsing’ (theatre slang for getting the giggles). Benedict Cumberbatch played her son in the film of Richard III, after popping the question – ‘Will you play my mother?’ – from the front row of the audience at the Hay Festival. She was mother to Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hamlet at the National Theatre, in what turned out to be his final stage performance (he had suffered a nervous collapse onstage). Much to everyone’s surprise, she was cast as Cleopatra to Anthony Hopkins’s Antony. The production had extraordinary reviews. ‘I thought Tony Hopkins was thrilling – dangerous, daring, unsurpassable,’ she says. For Dench, language is the key to performing Shakespeare. If you pay attention to the line breaks, the rhythm of the iambic pentameter – akin to the beating of the heart – and the shifts in tone from blank verse, to rhyming verse, to prose, the drama will play itself. Shakespeare ranges across every situation in life, every emotion, and each actor brings her own life experience to the role. It is Dench’s belief that you don’t play a character, you play a situation and let the lines do the work. She takes us by the hand and leads us through the process in each play. When we come to the twentieth play under the spotlight, we are back at the opening season of Dench’s career at the Old Vic. Franco Zeffirelli was over from Italy, directing Shakespeare for the first time. His Romeo and Juliet was ‘a revelation, even perhaps a revolution’, according to critic Kenneth Tynan. It broke from the formal tradition of Shakespearean productions with its naturalistic approach and the raw emotion at its heart. I still remember the earthy Mediterranean colours of the set and costumes, and the exuberant passion of the perfectly paired adolescent lovers, Dench and John Stride. Franco was nothing but emotion. And to play Shakespeare you need both. It’s no good thinking just about the iambic pentameter, and it’s no good just focusing on the passion – it’s a marriage of the two. The one informs the other … the poetry is what sustains the play and holds it together – but the emotion is the petrol.
The decision to publish the transcripts of these fascinating discussions was an inspired one, giving us a chance to be included in the conversation. Dench is adamant that the audience is part of the equation in any production. The book comes as a relief after Dench’s memoir And Furthermore (2010), a pleasant enough romp through her career. Shakespeare: The man who pays the rent is made of sterner stuff. g Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author, based in Melbourne. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 23
Biography
Q’s exploding pen Everything came at once Paul Kildea
Ian Fleming: The complete man by Nicholas Shakespeare
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Harvill Secker $42.99 pb, 850 pp
he smallest, dullest link in the fateful chain binding John F. Kennedy and his assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is that both men were big fans of the fictional spy James Bond. In the immediate aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, when investigators searched the tiny boarding room in Dallas that Oswald rented for $8 per week, they found the four Bond books that citizen Oswald had assiduously borrowed from a local library. One of these was From Russia with Love, Ian Fleming’s novel from 1957, which has at its heart the cat-and-mouse relationship between Bond and the crack SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant, who is tasked and determined to take out Bond, and with him the agency he represents. Six weeks beforehand, the spy’s creator had attended the première of the film version of the same book, the second such to be adapted for cinema. Lines of people had snaked around Leicester Square all day in anticipation of the celebrity crowd expected on the red carpet that night. After the première, a slice of this crowd attended a lavish party at Fleming’s London home, swilling good champagne and supping on £300 (£7,500 today) worth of caviar, funded by a blackjack win and sourced according to Nancy Mitford’s exacting standards and instructions. Present was a fair smattering of literary London: Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Peter Quennell, and Fleming’s older brother Peter, still in possession of his considerable pre-war reputation as a writer. It was the highpoint of the younger Fleming’s career, the politeness of the highbrow guests he had warily idolised for so long (barely) disguising their sneering response to their host’s middlebrow success. ‘I crept upstairs,’ Fleming wrote to his editor William Plomer, himself an eminent writer, ‘beaten to the ground at about 1 a.m.’ Yet it was both a highpoint and a turning point: Fleming’s wife, Ann, would later say that ‘the tragedy of his life was that everything came at once – the bestsellerdom, the films, the heart attack’. Fleming was dead in less than a year, aged fifty-six. Ann was right, though she is a difficult source to trust or like. Yet more or less everyone in this book is either one or the other: Fleming’s mother was a monster, his wife a manipulative narcissist, his son a sociopath (only later diagnosed as bipolar). There are girlfriends eager, sceptical, heartbroken, and poorly treated – often one and the same person. Fleming’s grandfather 24 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
comes across well – both in the graft he showed in building his rags-to-riches banking fortune and in the directions he put in place for how it should be distributed after his death – but he is a lonely sentinel on this particular watch. To a close observer in the 1930s, Ian was merely an attractive black sheep, and no one could have guessed that he would become world famous. And world famous he became, though only in the last ten years of his life. The first Bond book, Casino Royal, was published in 1953 (either coincidentally or Zeitgeist-ly the year Elizabeth II was crowned), and the last, posthumously, in 1966. They contribute to a tally of a dozen novels and two collections of short stories, one written after another in Fleming’s modest home in Jamaica, to which he adjourned every year in flight from the English winter. The real-life tragedy may well have been that everything came all at once; the tragedy in this book is that these years of plenty occupy only the last third of its pages, which constitute a pretty sad read. Additionally, there is the uneasy sense throughout that the real Bond fun kicked in only posthumously – Cubby Broccoli its architect and fund manager – a story outside the scope of this book. When Waugh wrote to Mitford, ‘Ian Fleming is being posthumously canonised by the intelligentsia. Very rum,’ he was on track, though Waugh would today be stunned by what literary ghostwriters and literate filmmakers have done with Fleming’s source material in the last couple of decades. Nicholas Shakespeare’s rationale for weighting his biography thus is to locate Bond’s genesis and behaviour in Fleming’s own war activities as an intelligence agent. This is wholly proper: Bond’s backdrop may be the Cold War, but his M.O. is stubbornly rooted in the intelligence and subterfuge of World War II. There are stretches in the book where Shakespeare clutches hard at long-embargoed straws, however, which makes for a looong war. And even if every dot is drawn – and they’re not – we are still left with the invidious comparison between Bond and his slightly younger confrère George Smiley, John le Carré’s fictional spy, who is mired in the psychological cruelty of postwar Eastern Europe, facing something more real and relevant than the physical sadism Bond’s cartoon-character tormentors direct at him. Burgess and Maclean defecting to Russia in real time are somehow less compelling to Fleming – though perhaps not to Shakespeare – than Q’s exploding pens. Shakespeare writes in his preface about how he weighed up what was new to say about his subject before undertaking the project. Sometimes the newness leads to structural decisions that do not quite land – the jumps between third-person, past-tense prose, and present-tense reportage, for example. Not even his lovely style can diminish the impression that Fleming himself is something of a monster, repeating the behaviour of his teen years in an endless cycle of charm and betrayal. Perhaps this is Shakespeare’s goal. He portrays the creator of ‘Peter Pan with a gun, Biggles with a cock’ as a morally vacuous writer stepping out of the shadow of his brother and father just in time. And now we all live with the consequences. g Paul Kildea is Artistic Director of Musica Viva Australia and the author most recently of Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2019).
Category
Commentary
The lives of ‘ordinary’ people From Siberia and Shanghai to Kings Cross
by Ebony Nilsson
I
t was mid-afternoon when I turned a typewritten foolscap page from 1939 and found the name I had been searching for: Detective Sergeant Mischenko. The report was a pretty banal cry for resourcing. Poor Mischenko was doing the work of two detectives in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and desperately needed some assistance. On turning the page, I felt like Archimedes himself (though running through the US National Archives yelling ‘Eureka!’ might have been a touch dramatic). My journey to the suburbs in the middle of a clammy Washington DC summer had held no guarantees of finding this. Feeling like Kafka’s Josef K., I had been sent from the second floor of the National Archives’ sterile concrete building to the fourth, then the fifth, and back again. I waited hours while these boxes from the CIA’s record collection were located, only to find that I wasn’t booked into the correct room. Without a staff member named Randy – who assured me with a kind wink and an ‘I got you’ that he could wrangle me a seat – I might have given up and headed back to my hotel for room service. My hopes of striking archival gold deflated with each obstacle. But here he was: Vladimir Mischenko, as real as one can be in black ink on yellowing paper. Why so much effort for a few old files? I had been part of a working party consulting with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the online encyclopedia of the lives of notable Australians. We were looking at their listings for migrants: what significant people, who were not white men of Anglo origin, were missing? I was researching the Petrov Affair at the time, so Vladimir Mischenko – also known as Bill Marshall – sprang to mind. The trouble was that I knew relatively little about him: the information was usually classified. Mischenko was one of ASIO’s earliest recruits, from the late 1940s. But he was also a recent migrant and a refugee. The lives of ‘ordinary’ people have, for me, long been one of history’s central attractions. I often wonder whether being a little nosy is an occupational requirement for historians. Working on immigration and surveillance, I gradually moved towards reading lots of government documents. Spend enough time reading files produced by bureaucrats and government 26 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
departments, and you will become thoroughly convinced of the importance of ‘little’ people in big events. Great men (and they usually are men) may dominate our accounts of war, diplomacy, policy, and political scandal, but there are always others, lurking in the background. They tend to be harder to find. But their work behind the scenes is often equally – if not more – significant. And when we dig into the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, they often turn out not to be so ordinary after all. Vladimir Mischenko was no exception. Mischenko grew up in a small Siberian railway village in tsarist Russia, where his father was the local priest. His grandfather was an army general; young Vladimir seems to have been more interested in this path, attending military school in St Petersburg. He was a teenager when the revolutions of 1917 broke out. What he made of workers and soldiers taking to the street, where he was, and what he saw – all of this remains a mystery. But he definitely left the new Soviet Russia. He would be an itinerant exile for the next few years: he drifted through Europe, Japan, and China before landing in northern Queensland in 1924. What did he expect far-off Australia would be like? Vladimir was twenty when he arrived and worked as a labourer: first at a smelting works, then at a mine near Mount Isa. He was promoted to foreman, became naturalised, and signed up for the Army Reserve: everything expected of a self-made migrant and more. But then the Depression began to bite. Workers everywhere were being laid off. New jobs were hard to come by. If you sported a thick accent and a foreign name like Mischenko, your prospects were even worse. Vladimir began to look further afield; he managed to get a job as a probationary sergeant with the Shanghai Municipal Police, and left Australia for China. When I initially discovered that Mischenko was recruited by ASIO in the late 1940s, I was surprised. Australia’s security organisation hiring a Russian who had been in the country only eighteen months? It seemed too great a risk. There was every chance he was a Soviet agent, planted to infiltrate Australian intelligence. Once I connected Mischenko to the Shanghai Municipal Police, I had my answer. Shanghai
Commentary through Shanghai in the early hours of the morning, rounding was awash with espionage in the 1930s. In Shanghai, a up Brits and Americans in 1942, Mischenko was one of those cosmopolitan treaty-port city, you were often as likely to hear roused from bed, ordered to dress, and escorted to the police Russian, German, French, or English spoken as you were station. Having been naturalised in Australia, Mischenko was, Chinese. Spies of all sides carried out clandestine operations, at least in official terms, British. He was interned in a camp trying to keep tabs on one another. The most famous of for the remainder of the war. Vera these was probably Richard Sorge, and Donald were interned, too, but a German journalist and one of the sent to a different camp. These were Soviet Union’s most successful spies. dark years for many, including the But thanks to the efforts of author Mischenkos. Ben Macintyre, Ursula Kuczynski After the war, the family moved (or Agent Sonya) has also received briefly to Hong Kong before deciding attention recently. The Shanghai to head for the country of their Municipal Police, run by the British, citizenship. The Mischenkos arrived did regular police work but it also in Sydney in 1947 and, within a had a ‘Special Branch’, which handled few months, became the Marshalls. spying. Vladimir had experienced living in Historians, committed to rigorous, Australia with a foreign name once methodical searches, don’t always before. It would take longer to shake think about how much luck plays the accent. From now on, he would into their work. But I do wonder how be known as William (usually Bill) much we owe to fortune. I connected Marshall. Mischenko to Shanghai weeks before Australia’s newly formed a research trip to the United States, intelligence service, meanwhile, and, as it happened, that’s where the was on the lookout for a Russian Shanghai Special Branch archives translator. It was running extensive had ended up. The files were captured surveillance operations on Soviet and sold to the Americans during officials – and potential spies – the tumult of China’s Communist stationed in Australia. Its phone Revolution. A few boxes were dropped taps and bugs produced an array of in the Huangpu River and others intelligence in the Russian language, were damaged in a typhoon, but which was generally unintelligible most reached the custody of the CIA to ASIO’s roster of (mostly) former and then the US National Archives Vladimir Mischenko in police uniform, c.1940s police and army officers. The new (including, thankfully, my new friend (courtesy of the Marshall family) Bill Marshall – with a wealth of Randy). This was how I ended up in experience working in the British Washington DC, with a trolley full of intelligence apparatus, straight from the streets of Shanghai archive boxes and a handful of files from which I could piece and Hong Kong – was an ideal candidate. In 1950, Marshall together Mischenko’s life in Shanghai. was employed to work full time on translating the tapes from a Soviet official’s bugged apartment in Kings Cross. ischenko started off as a regular cop in 1933 but One imagines these were not easy years for the Marshalls. was soon transferred to Special Branch, where he Bill had lived in Australia before, but in North Queensland’s distinguished himself. Mischenko’s work was mostly mining country, not Sydney’s suburbs. Vera and Don were in the Boarding House Section. This may sound innocuous, completely new to the country, having spent the previous but it was a key part of surveillance in Shanghai. These decade between cosmopolitan Shanghai and internment. 1950s officers monitored the city’s lodgings: they kept tabs on vice Sydney – where the pubs shut at six and staples like garlic and (gambling, prostitution, and the like) but also the movements coffee were still hard to come by – must have been something of foreign visitors and political radicals. Many of the boarding of a shock. But Marshall was thriving at work, at least. houses in Shanghai’s International Settlement were run by It wasn’t just his linguistic ability that was useful – he Russians – Mischenko gained their confidence and, with it, could relate to the Russians. Marshall ran one of ASIO’s bits of the unique information they had access to, as they earliest attempts at securing a Soviet defector, in 1952, watched lodgers come and go. approaching a departing Soviet official. They played chess, Mischenko also married in Shanghai, to a stenographer drank, and talked of home (while ASIO footed the bill). named Vera Kruse. Their son Donald was born just as war Marshall could see early on that he was not a promising broke out in Europe in 1939. Although Mischenko tried to defection target. But it was an important dry run. The enlist with the British Army to fight Nazi Germany, he was preparations proved useful two years later, when they got ordered to remain at his post: espionage was perhaps more a much better candidate: Vladimir Petrov. important now than ever. When Japanese security police swept
M
A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 27
Commentary When Petrov, a colonel in Soviet intelligence, officially defected in April 1954, Bill Marshall was ready and waiting to meet him at ASIO’s safe house. The following day, Marshall travelled to Canberra with ASIO’s top officials to brief Prime Minister Robert Menzies. After Evdokia Petrov defected too – under more dramatic and better-known circumstances
Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov with ASIO officer Ron Richards (Historic Collection/Alamy)
at Darwin airport – Marshall spent hours upon hours with the two Russian spies. He worked as the safe house team’s interpreter but didn’t just provide translations. Marshall assisted in managing the couple’s difficult adjustment to defection and their fractious marital relationship, in addition to attending hours of debriefing interviews. He helped the Petrovs – whose grasp of English was sound but not excellent – to tell their life stories, to explain the documents Vladimir had brought with him, and to provide detailed, technical explanations of the inner workings of Soviet intelligence. This work only increased when a Royal Commission into Soviet espionage was called. ASIO’s big men – figures like Charles Spry, the Director-General, and Ron Richards, the New South Wales Director – would appear publicly at the Royal Commission hearings. But people like Marshall remained largely invisible. ASIO officers’ identities remain
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classified in perpetuity, not usually revealed even after their deaths. Marshall was named publicly for the first time in 2014, in the Official History of ASIO. But he – and other officers like him – had played a role in one of Australia’s great political dramas, the Petrov Affair. He shaped ASIO’s public face, particularly in translating the words and presenting the stories of the agency’s two star defectors. It was with the Royal Commission and the Petrovs that the Australian public learnt for the first time about its own intelligence service and about the activities of foreign agents in Australia. This was a narrative that Marshall helped to produce – though his name rarely appears in relation to the Affair. Historians don’t always think about how much luck plays into their work Figures like Menzies, Spry, and Opposition leader H.V. Evatt tend to dominate accounts of the Petrov Affair, and Australia’s 1950s generally. But there were lots of Bill Marshalls who had a hand in these events. Not all of them had lived through the Russian Revolution, spied in Shanghai, and spent hours with the Petrovs. I am sure there were other extraordinary stories among these ordinary figures. My undergraduate students have been researching their own families’ migration histories, and I have been continually astounded by the tales they have dug up: everything from refugees to ‘blackbirded’ labourers, war criminals, mail-order brides, and surveillance. ‘Ordinary’ folk like these are harder to find in documentation. Their papers are rarely preserved in boxes neatly labelled with their names in national archives and libraries. Bits of their lives and experiences are always lost. But the work of piecing together their stories – with tattered files from Washington DC, forums in sketchy corners of the Russian internet, and plastic shopping bags of photographs, souvenirs, and documents stored in the spare bedrooms of the generous Marshall family – is, in my view, well worth it. g Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University and an ABR Laureate’s Fellow. This Fellowship is funded by the ABR Patrons. Her essay ‘‘‘A happy white men’s club”: The Australian Labor Party’s uneasy history with immigration’ was published in the July 2023 issue.
Peter Porter Poetry Prize The Shortlisted Poems
Cuttle writes stippled starry lines to no one, signing all meaning’s meaning out to sea. Surfs the internal board of itself inside the green room of everything. Ink-storms seals & sharks. Hawking up, stainedspit sputtered, its body double. Eye, the double-u. Crab mesmeriser, shrimp hypnotiser. Midnight feast tongue of teeth. Paris Las Vegas of lights, riot of lies & the mop-faced truth. Coral sunlight seaweed whelk. Cuttleskin is dotted with metaphor. Matador as bull. Split-screen zebra bloom. White square out of nowhere. Flamboyantly buoyant & invisibly visible. Ah, the joy of pebbles. Headto-head in the burly billows. Loaf skirt scrolling through meadows. S t r e a m i n g c l o u d s & o p e r a, h i d i n g e g g s d y e d s e p i a. Tu r n i n g i n t o s u r g e a r m s t r e a m e r s w a v e w a v i n g o f f w a v e w a v e ||
Meredi Ortega ❖
A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 29
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Poem of the Dead Woman for Marvin Bell
The dead woman rides a motorcycle, out of Ord River Valley, beyond sand plains, into the serpentine Bungle Bungle Ranges. And the black sun is over her. A white dog leans against her back, motorcycle-goggled, his ears flying. He holds himself like a gunslinger, muscling into oncoming wind. They carve a single-wheeled track into the bulldust of a 360-million-year-old cone-karst plateau. And as she rides, the unveiled land reveals itself in lucid detail – termite nests and grevilleas. Livistona palm trees stand like thin gods between rock faces, burnished by dusk. They pass into the valley of the shadow. The dead woman has never once said what she intended. ‘Before I knew you,’ she tells the dog, ‘I walked the luminous earth. But I am in Country now, and the Country is in me.’ The dog has no opinion on this, or any other matter. The motorcycle bears them north over monsoonal savannahs, into deeper valleys studded with orchids and ferns, into the shelter of steep red cliffs. The dead woman introduces herself to the Country she rides through. She surrenders her name to silverleaf bloodwoods, acacias and rough leaf range gums. And she tells them how she crossed the desert thirty-six times alive – and once dead. How she stockpiled electrolytes and anti-venom, water bladders, multi-tools and rope. How the dog survived a king brown bite and the hungry gaze of eagles. How she was run over in a remote desert town by a single mum, shouting at the kids in a gigantic SUV. Grey nomads do not notice the dead woman passing. They’re cooking sausages on Webbers outside their camping trailers or adjusting solar panels for satellite TV. She does not stop at the Ranger’s office for permits, kayak hire or a personal locator beacon. At the bus bay, disembarking hikers upload Instagram selfies under banded domes, lifting 300 meters above the grasslands like titanic beehives. And the tour guide explains how their tangerine stripes are iron and manganese, but the grey ones are cyanobacteria – ancient organisms living in a surface-deep layer of clay. They have colonised multitudes of domes, holding them in their forms over millions of years. The slightest touch could break their living skin, crumbling these sandstone minarets back into dust. The dead woman introduces herself to the cyanobacteria, to the iron and manganese. She claims no ownership of this or any other land. She is tolerated like seeds of subtropical trees, carried inland on the feet of migrating birds, and dropped where they will not grow. Country knows this but is too polite to say so. The dead woman’s panniers carry journals filled with coloured pencil drawings – maps and pressed plants. There are poems. There are notes on the movements of honeyeaters, wood swallows and white-quilled rock pigeons.
30 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
The journals have many missing pages – torn out, loosed into wind like pollen or white nocturnal moths. The dead woman knows some stories can’t be spoken. Over the still world, Gouldian finches turn in kaleidoscopic arcs. Their bone-curved wings are written with the mystery of seeds – yinirnti and mulga. Seeds of the ground. Sky seed. The dog and his dead companion pass in chasms where waterfalls cascade down sheer rock, between fig vines and moss. Snappy gums regard themselves in the surface of mirrored pools. The dog shouts at lizards skittering over shiny river stones. Dunnarts and planigales in the hollows. A nailtail wallaby crashes through the bush, where cliffs cycle through their colour spectra at dusk, gold to purple, and a baritone wind explores reefs of an inland sea. The dead woman has finally understood that this is not a dress rehearsal. She dismisses inner whispers that it’s already too late, that her efforts can wait for some future life. She sees who it is that whispers. She is no longer an animal with an angel inside her chest – the animal rejecting the angel, the angel always looking for an escape. The dead woman holds her arms up into the sky. ‘How pale this sky is,’ she says to no one in particular. ‘How pale.’ She slows the motorcycle where palm trees drop into rockholes, and the cliffs glow as if lit from the inside. She chooses a campsite. Looking down from a tourist helicopter, you’d see an elliptical plateau, 7.5 kilometres wide, surrounded by domes. This is the remnant of Picaninny Crater, the seventh gate, where the star fell down. The dog clambers over boulders tossed by the meteorite. He is a whiteness on incarnadine stone. All the creeks and pools are silver on night’s border. Ursa Minor, Centaurus and Crux are sparks on the watered roots of trees. She hears palms conversing in their slow vegetal language. Crows and their dark spies are signalling across the gorge. Their cries sound like machineguns or breaking glass. And the dead woman answers, ‘My crow. My black-breasted buzzard.’ Her hair is dark and bright in the sky. Her rivers flow from these ranges to the sea, returning again to the mountains in deep subterranean veins. She is a circulatory system, a new topography of light. The dead woman is not looking for a door. She will not get drunk and join the Scientologists, won’t search for answers in grimoires, tarot cards or wormholes, or in boxing matches, or late-night confessions with online language bots. She has already written her history in blood and milk and venom. She perches above the rockholes like a kingfisher, waiting for the flash of something silver in the deep. There are mountains and rivers beneath the dead woman’s skin. Her breath drifts over them.
Judith Nangala Crispin ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 31
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Blagaj, Mostar
The sky was crumbling; so full of sun it burnt at the edges and hit the cracked earth of my aunt’s garden in waves. It was a summer dense with figs splitting flesh on the tree. Pomegranates had burst open against the concrete drive, spilling their insides. On the steps: red chillis drying in neat rows on a white keranje she had made herself. Bundles of herbs. Thyme for čaj and sage to cure a sore throat. A tidy line of orthopaedic shoes, his and hers, a pair on each step. Months before the lilac had been in bloom, the forsythia. We had walked around the garden breathing them in, my aunt pointing to her silver beet, trellised beans, zucchini ripening against the soil. Neat rows of carrot and potato. The apple and cherry trees had just shrugged off their blossoms; there had been elderflower juice. Today my aunt has cooked with a bountiful harvest: spirals of cheese and spinach rolled in pastry so thin you can see the new moon through it; quarter chunks of tomato and cucumber dressed in oil; spring onions in yoghurt; a loaf of fresh yellow bread. There’s a watermelon cooling in the river for dessert. Beside it, too: plums, persimmons, ripe fruit scattered across the ground to be fetched after the meal. Inside: baked apples stuffed with walnuts and fried dough soaked in sugar. We are waiting for my uncle, gone fishing. If he’s lucky, my aunt will fry a river trout or two – lightly, with a little flour, a little salt. Skin on and crispy. My uncle will make his same jokes, needling my kind aunt with her plum-soft heart. Take this one away with you, he’ll tell me. She’s no good – just look at all this food she hasn’t made. In the war, almost my lifetime ago, my aunt took her children in her arms and crossed the barebone mountains to our house. Hers had become a waiting grave. My uncle arrived every three weeks, a two-day hike each way. Limping, he wore a trail into the stone earth to find her, to sit in her weather for three days. Alhamdulillah my aunt said. Well, where’ve you been? my uncle replied. Then he was gone. Then, as now, my aunt filled our plates: palačinke and uštipci when there was flour; pickled cabbage; stewed pears; bean soup stretched for weeks. My mother was a nurse in the village and in the evening the sisters sat together, drinking coffee when there was some, cracking walnuts between their palms, waiting for the men to come home. Take this one with you, my uncle jokes. But he would follow. He knows the way. Above us the old fort looms its jagged teeth across the mountain. After coffee we will walk to its base picking blackberries and water mint along the way, then stand on the karstic lip overlooking history: the tekija where old Sufi clerics chanted Dhikr and where the mountain splits itself open to send the green Buna swirling past the house. They say that after his death, a great cleric had his body buried in seven tombs across the Balkans – choosing always small towns, out of the way places, so that as pilgrims made their journeys to honour him, they would spread the word that there are as many paths to God as there are breaths in a human body. My aunt knows all the names of Allah, though like all our people she says sabur, forbearance, most. My uncle is not a religious man, though he has been a pilgrim.
Dženana Vucic 32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Workarounds
We completed tasks while your computer was nonplussed. Never under any circumstances outgather the USB cables as they are known to the fossil record. Is anyone using this rubric? A strongly worded mop bides here. An epoch before us, an equivalent energy. The moral to the story is a horny talkathon. Posting generally is a captive curation. A scared village buys now, pays later. Bags odourous gains. Inside everywhere is time. Skeletons made of other skeletons undergo workarounds. Withdraw a like. Troubleshoot the jig if it starts to look like your brain on internet, dollied blunt. Histories of conspiratorial durdum are loading. Uh oh. A tiptoe extravaganza engrooves serious laughlines. Deceives blessedly. The droplets collecting on necks are owed to the multipurpose fog. Order an adapter while buff. Moths single out appliances to dent. Great magistrates are coming your way. The depth of a field is a streaming service. Who humours the non-electric fence? Is it you who licks it clean? Resemble the viral. Property the essential. Outdo outcomes as opposed to going home on time. Plumb the blameless. Countdown to glitches. Spondulix when? Depolished chitchat, gutbucket sunrise. Lunch on the old roof fizzles out. You can fail the creek. But the bike. The bike is in the creek. Bestow little quizzes. Then the second moment of area (clue: see toward a federation of etcetera crises). Surface a length of singsong worseness, refranchise exquisite doldrums. Swanky exits expect better. It is time for your next marathonic ache. Enrapture well, dear salad and lots of mozzies. An existential kneecapping. Real windsock hours. Unhallowed visits from tricky miniatures clog the month. Eventually, prescriptions. Entablature. Maximum research. Netlike greenth. Bigheadedly nod if you want to defragment. Reevaluate persuasions over mild interludes. Up the revelry. Roster on fleetingness. Consult moments. Misallocate enthusiasm for stakeholders. Dream-eating surucucus warm the pit. Indispensable attunements are down the hall. Minimalism is for jerk apologists. According to resorts the cement world is everything a unit of productivity could want. Put it this way: the forest wasn’t November. Allegedly joyless. Heart an an infographic. Repot survival news. Favourite an unopened secret.
Dan Hogan ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 33
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
34 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon ❖ This is an erasure poem created by hand, using white out to remove portions of the source text. Reference: Immigration Restriction Act 1901. (1901, Dec 23). Federal Register of Legislation. https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C1901A00017 (Commonly known as the White Australia Policy). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 35
Biography
Labour of love
Uncovering and understanding a family story Seumas Spark
Paul and Paula: A history of separation, survival and belonging by Tim McNamara
I
Monash University Publishing $32.99 pb, 207 pp
n Working: Researching, interviewing, writing, published in 2019, the great biographer Robert A. Caro tells of his writing methods and the lengths to which he goes to gain a better understanding of his subject. Reading Tim McNamara’s Paul and Paula, I was reminded of Caro’s way of research and writing and of his determination to place himself in his subject’s milieu. McNamara spent considerable time in Vienna researching Paul and Paula, stalking the streets for clues, and his efforts show. He writes with verve about the book’s three main characters – Paul Kurz and his wife, Paula, and the city of Vienna, before and during the Nazi occupation – and his search to uncover and understand their stories. Much like Caro with Lyndon Johnson, the story of Paul and Paula Kurz followed McNamara across a lifetime. For McNamara, this work was a labour of love. He met Paul Kurz, an industrial chemist, in Melbourne in 1968, when Kurz was approaching seventy and he was nineteen. Kurz was learned and thoughtful, a wise and welcoming presence for McNamara and his university friends. As they struggled with existential questions provoked by their youth and the heady times, Kurz seemed often to have the answer, through study or experience. McNamara came to see Kurz as a father figure, reassuring and beneficent. Kurz, who was Jewish, had been rendered stateless by Nazism and World War II. He left Vienna for Britain in April 1939, and in July 1940 was deported to Australia as an ‘enemy alien’ on the infamous ship Dunera. Paula (also Jewish) was trapped in Vienna throughout the war. After eight years apart, they were reunited in Melbourne in April 1947 and together rebuilt something of their lives, to the extent that was possible under the shadow of tragedy and dislocation. The Nazi regime had murdered friends and relatives, while the war and its effects eventually forced both of them from Vienna, which had been home and sanctuary to their family since the nineteenth century. For Paul in particular, the war poisoned his relationship with the city. The story of Paul Kurz, and the events that led him to Melbourne and a friendship with McNamara, is at the heart of this book. It is a hard book to describe, for the whole is comprised of several, ostensibly disparate, strands – a paean to friendship, part memoir and part biography, that serves simultaneously as an urban history of Vienna, and a Holocaust history. In many ways the book shouldn’t work; that it does is testament to McNamara’s skill as a writer, and his determination to illuminate the lives 36 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
of Paul and Paula and to show their intersection with his. For instance, he writes with compelling candour about his Irish Catholic childhood, of practising and then losing religion, and the gradual discovery of his sexuality, and explains Kurz’s place in his life. Kurz offered McNamara a dynamic world in which he found thrilling ideas and motivation to fill the social and intellectual gaps engendered by a confined suburban childhood. The second half of this book is concerned with the forced separation of Paul and Paula from 1939–47. This part of the book draws heavily on letters written by Paul, Paula, and members of the wider family. The letters provide a confronting glimpse of the trauma inflicted by the Holocaust, including on those who survived. They tell also of how mindless bureaucracy and inertia on the part of Western liberal democracies, including Australia, condemned Jews to suffering and death. In a telling irony, Kurz had wanted to emigrate to Australia before the war. His professional expertise was in making lanolin using wool grease, his skills of clear relevance to a country riding on the sheep’s back, but his ambition to emigrate and find a productive role in Australia’s economy was thwarted by Australian authorities. The letters show, in painful detail, the many barriers – racial, administrative, and downright obtuse – erected against Jewish emigration from Europe before and during the war. At a time when there was every good reason to abandon bureaucracy in the cause of humanity, the international community too often chose pitiful procedure over saving lives. While this failure has long been known, the correspondence cited here offers a searing example of bureaucracy as an omnipotent instrument of repression, and the way in which it betrayed a Viennese Jewish family. A second feature of the letters is the degree to which Kurz came to order his life by fate. If he were inclined to fatalism before the war, the conflict certainly confirmed this tendency. He learned not to plan, and counselled caution and stoicism in others. He hoped for good news, but denied himself the liberty of expecting it. To embrace optimism enthusiastically would be to ensure disappointment. In some ways, his fatalism was at odds with his scientific education and commitment to careful, rational thought. But the effects of war are many. For Kurz, the cloak of fatalism helped him to endure the pain of his long separation from Paula and family. McNamara wrote Paul and Paula while terminally ill with cancer. The manuscript offers some signs that the book was written against time. There are minor instances of repetition, and in places more detail might have been useful, but none of this distracts from the scale of McNamara’s achievement. Working under physical and, I imagine, emotional duress, he somehow managed to produce a polished, stirring, and lyrical book. In writing Paul and Paula, which he did not live to see published, McNamara intended to honour a profound friendship, and to bear witness to the bravery and tragedies of an Austrian Jewish family so that their history might endure. He has achieved both aims magnificently. g Seumas Spark is co-author (with Carol Bunyan, Bill Gammage, Ken Inglis, and Jay Winter) of the two-volume Dunera Lives (Monash University Publishing, 2018–20).
Category
F I C T I O N A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 37
Fiction
Unhomely spaces
A new novel from a ‘writer’s writer’ Mireille Juchau
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
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Virago $32.99 pb, 242 pp
hat does it mean to narrate the humiliations of ageing, loneliness, and death in the first person when your background is working class? For such a writer, saying ‘I’ is political too, said Annie Ernaux in her Nobel Prize lecture, because it involves claiming an authority rarely granted in other parts of life. Ernaux uses her incendiary, affectless ‘I’ not just to recount one individual experience, but to transcend it. For ‘I’ to speak to the reader it must become, she says, ‘transpersonal’. Ernaux’s manifesto on the first-person voice appears in Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables. It’s one of many moments when another writer consoles, guides, and inoculates the unnamed narrator from despair. She is a writer herself, with workingclass roots, and her frank, confiding voice narrates her experience of ageing and intimacy during Covid. When the novel opens, she is struggling with lockdown isolation in New York and so agrees to pet-sit a parrot in a luxury condo, and soon her life is upended. Since they are rich, the bird’s owners have fled the city for one of three homes elsewhere. Whatever care you received during the pandemic depended on wealth and geopolitical luck. Think of Colm Tóibín, marooned in Venice, his walks passing through ‘the most beautiful city in the world now become the most beautiful ghost town’. Even so, he thought: ‘One of the subjects to muse on as old age begins is how unfair life is.’ Ahem. Instead of Venetian wonders, Nunez’s narrator moves in with the miniature macaw. In the condo, jungle scenes are painted on the walls: ‘bright butterflies and exotic flowers and other wild birds, all exquisitely drawn and vibrantly colored, as well as a pair of monkeys with keenly expressive, lifelike features’. This chimes with the themes of unhomely spaces, of wildness curtailed. The Vulnerables is Nunez’s third novel in which a narrator is altered by the demands and rewards of care. In each, domesticated animals bring consolation. In The Friend (2018), the narrator bonds with a dead friend’s Great Dane. In What Are You Going Through (2020), the protagonist agrees to help a dying woman end her life. In the house they rent for this purpose, a cat delivers a four-page monologue. The Vulnerables is the most digressively chatty of these loosely linked works. A generous reading might see the novel’s wandering quality as a deliberate recreation of lockdown mental drift. Any attempt to stage that time faces its peculiar challenge: how to imbue stasis and sensory deprivation with vivacity? Voice, it turns out, is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Nunez’s narrator says, ‘I like this clarification by 38 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
the narrator of a book by Stendhal: “It is not out of egotism that I say ‘I’; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.”’ ‘How do you reveal yourself without asking for love or pity?’ That’s Margo Jefferson, in the epigraph. How indeed when you are classified as ‘a vulnerable’, the double-edged term used to chastise the narrator for overstaying her outdoor time. To be ‘a vulnerable’ is to undergo special regulations under the guise of communal care. But in Trump’s America, ‘care’ is degraded. Walking through Union Square, the narrator hears a cyclist approaching. ‘Yo! Outta my way! […] But this was a pedestrian plaza. And what did he mean by bearing down on me, when there was plenty of space around us? […] Faceless in dark goggles and a black balaclava. As he wheeled past, he said, Ain’t you scared, lady?’ Later, he hawks, and coughs on her. She sprains her ankle and develops vertigo. What if she’d been badly injured? Would the distant staring witnesses have come to help? After human-animal harmony is established in the condo, a young troubled vegan who is connected to the parrot’s owners, arrives to disturb it. He is staying, whether the narrator likes it or not, and his proprietorial attitude sparks her ornery side. Beyond this frame is a preoccupation with the writer’s role, partly because our narrator is creatively blocked. At times of crisis the writer has a greater purpose, Nunez suggests, bridging individual experience and enabling shared understanding. As the narrator ruminates on writing, she considers the novel she is trying to create: ‘Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.’ In a recent New York Times profile, Nunez rejected autofiction as an ‘inaccurate’ description of her work, because ‘memory is a less capacious mental mechanism than the imagination’. Aren’t both inextricable? What we remember is embellished by time, experience, the act of narration; and memory often grounds invented scenes that might otherwise float free of human fallibility. Line after quoted or paraphrased line, Rousseau, Didion, Coetzee, Woolf, and others offer respite from Trumpian doublespeak and form an Interlude between Parts One and Two. Writers’ lives feature in many of Nunez’s books (especially her biography of Susan Sontag, Sempre Susan [2011]) but crescendo in The Vulnerables. If someone is known as a ‘writer’s writer’, this can only delight me. But at times these literary guiding lights outshine the novel’s more thinly drawn passages. As the narrator comes to know her new housemate – handsome, arrogant, estranged from his parents, fighting with his girlfriend – she confronts her prejudices. Soon they are getting high on psilocybin, and she grudgingly accepts vegan meals. If the writer must transcend her consciousness to speak to the reader, so too pandemic ‘vulnerables’ must connect with others to survive. ‘For the writer, obsessive rumination is a must. Imagination must follow dark thoughts to dark places, you can’t ever just say, Stop, don’t go there. And isn’t that the job, to imagine the lives of others and what they are going through?’ g Mireille Juchau is a Sydney-based novelist, essayist, and critic. She won the 2020 Walkley-Pascall Prize for arts criticism and her most recent novel is The World Without Us (2016).
Fiction
Share-house mould
Max Easton’s ‘collectively minded’ novel Morgan Nunan
Paradise Estate by Max Easton
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Giramondo $32.95 pb, 304 pp
ax Easton’s second novel begins in early 2022 when an ensemble of thirty-somethings loosely connected through mutual friends and subcultural scenes decide to lease a four-bedroom share house.The house in Sydney has its flaws. Mould colonies grow on ceilings and walls in a ‘rich spectrum’, aided by a series of La Niña weather events. Situated just off a main road and surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings, the property offers little in the way of privacy. The fascia gutters are blocked by champagne corks popped from the apartment balconies above. Paradise Estate follows Easton’s successful début, The Magpie Wing (2021), of which the chief protagonists – siblings Helen and Walt Coleman – also feature in this loose sequel. Reeling from the break-up of her relationship and in mourning for her younger brother, it is Helen, with the assistance of resourceful friend Sunny, who instigates the move to the share house which Sunny later dubs the ‘Paradise Estate’. Rather than anything material, the name refers to a song by the post-punk band Television Personalities, yet it might also speak to the property’s accessibility in the context of Sydney’s housing crisis, as well as its potential for building something more ‘collectively minded’. Early on, the characters commit to engaging better with one another and the surrounding community, thinking of the household as something approaching a ‘commune’. It is this endeavour that the novel probes over the course of the year that follows. Within short, episodic chapters, Easton’s third-person narration shifts between Paradise Estate tenants, carefully building a portrait of a household desperate for social connection. Scholarly couple Alice and Nathan see the share house as an opportunity to re-engage with ‘real struggle’, having spent the early stages of the pandemic living rent-free with Alice’s father. Tradie and semi-professional rugby league player Rocco has returned to Australia from Italy, while sculptor, and hospitality worker Beth joins the house after a stint with her parents, where she was recovering from a serious car accident. Preceding each chapter is an italicised fragment of less than a page, ranging from flashbacks that inform plot or characterisation to vignettes that signpost the narrative’s temporal position while adding texture to the broader world of the novel (the 2022 federal election, a State of Origin match, Rocco’s quest for a panini amongst a suburban food desert limited to a McDonalds, an RSL and a servo). These fragments are a particularly inspired structural touch, performing as micro-fictions which, through their brevity and self-containment, effectively charge otherwise mundane situations
with intensity and humour, often closing with a pithy quip (‘Sunny wanting to yell at the world: “Just let me shit where I eat!”’) or something more suggestive (‘they were living together in a sharehouse with four people who seemed to Helen to be deeply untrustworthy’). Importantly, this approach allows for the inclusion of detail that might have felt gratuitous in the body of the narrative, but adds to Easton’s nuanced composition of both character and place. As a household, there is general opposition to things like rugby union, landlords, escape rooms, and paint-and-sips (or really any of the ‘corporate getaway traps’ that have edged out local businesses in Sydney’s inner-west). There is more enthusiasm for rugby league, underground music, Resch’s beer, and Marxist cultural critique. Among other things, the group disagrees on the standard of care to be provided to feral cats (specifically one flea-ridden feral called ‘Dale’, named after the ‘black sheep’ of the household) and the ethics of housemates electing to co-parent a child. They otherwise attempt to support each other in activities which include occupying public spaces through DIY music gigs and guerrilla gardening, attending reading groups, and supporting grass-roots community sport. Indeed, much of the novel is spent detailing the character’s array of side hustles and passion projects. Alice and Nathan devotedly attend political rallies with Nathan’s colleagues at his ‘socialist research hub’ called ‘the Centre’. Beth supplements her income through Twitch streams and Only Fans, while Rocco arduously prepares for a chance to compete for the Italian national team in the upcoming Rugby League World Cup. Sunny makes zines, plays music, and archives lost recordings from Sydney’s underground punk and hardcore scenes, while also taking responsibility for gathering Walt’s papers. Walt, like Thomas Pynchon’s Pierce Inverarity from The Crying of Lot 49 (1963), has left behind a trail of cryptic correspondences, much of which has been smuggled onto op-shop bookshelves and feature titles like ‘The Manifesto of The Western Sydney Separatists (Third Revised Edition)’. Despite a relative lack of hobbies, it is Helen who is the anchor of Easton’s novel. Her response to crisis – both personal and public – is marked by inaction and passivity. Whether she is reflecting on increasingly dire climate events (‘As the mould rushed through their house, and the news carried images of Lismore being washed away, she felt the same oblivious complacency’), her job at the local cinema (‘Most days, she realised she was waiting for the cinema to go bust so she wouldn’t have to make a decision’) or advising disillusioned housemates (‘Just do what I do … try not to think about it’), Helen’s lack of affective response – mirrored aesthetically by Easton in the muted, nonchalant prose – becomes representative of a broader cultural sickness. Easton stages a series of attempts to counter this disaffection. While the narrative never allows a clear antidote, neither does it wallow in despondency. Instead, the book’s emphases resonate with what Ben Lerner – speaking in a 2015 interview for The Public about his novel 10:04 (2014) – has described as ‘glimmers of potentiality’, moments that glimpse at alternative futures beyond the cultural hegemonies imposed under late-capitalism (fittingly, Lerner also cites the Antonio Gramsci quotation which features as an epigraph to Paradise Estate). As if from the vantage point of a Hurlstone Park high-rise, Easton expertly animates such glimpses, once again enriching a compelling contemporary milieu. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 39
Category
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Fiction
‘Long-ago man’
A thorough exploration of character Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Days of Innocence and Wonder by Lucy Treloar
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Picador $34.99 pb, 321 pp
hrough the gates of a kindergarten in Melbourne’s innernorth, a man strikes up a conversation with two little girls, which violently alters the course of their lives. The bolder of the pair, a child who ‘runs at life’, goes with him. The meeker stays behind, becoming the serial predator’s only known survivor. Eighteen years on, Till – as the survivor renames herself, after Cat Stevens’s song ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ – is back living with her parents in Brunswick and leading a slow existence in the weeks after Melbourne’s final lockdown. That is, until her flight response is triggered upon recognising that ‘long-ago man’ while walking her greyhound, Birdy. Despite its thriller-like set-up, Lucy Treloar’s third novel, Days of Innocence and Wonder, is less concerned with the details of the crime and its perpetrator than it is with Till’s identity construction in the wake of her childhood trauma. As well as having changed her name, she eschews brightly coloured clothing (her friend, referred to only as ‘E’, wore a red coat on the day of her abduction), is trained in Krav Maga, and sings professionally, believing herself to be channelling E when she is performing. It goes without saying that individuals respond to trauma differently. While some undergo arrested development, others may be forced to mature early; studies have even shown that experiencing childhood trauma makes the body and brain age faster. That Till often seems older and more self-possessed than a typical twenty-three-year-old of her generation is likely a deliberate choice on Treloar’s part. Even at her most reckless, fleeing across the border into South Australia, squatting at an abandoned railway station, and drinking with a rapacious rural cop, Till has her wits about her and is capable of defending herself. Her motives are sometimes obscure, but never self-destructive. The most unusual choice that Till makes – and the most critical to the narrative – is to settle at the aforementioned railway station on the outskirts of a moribund town, Wirowie. With the aid of YouTube DIY videos, she begins renovating the station and later accepts an offer from the owner to purchase it. While the notion of a musician in her early twenties having the means to buy property on a whim (even at a discounted rate) after two years of successive lockdowns is somewhat hard to swallow, this narrative turn grounds Till in Wirowie, allowing Treloar to unpack central questions around land and community. Treloar is no stranger to these themes; her début, Salt Creek
(2015), draws on the story of her settler ancestors in the Coorong region, while Wolfe Island (2019) follows the sole inhabitant of a climate change-ravaged island. As Till becomes increasingly intertwined with the residents of Wirowie and its surrounds, gaining employment and enlisting a local’s help with her renovations, the community’s fault lines are thrown into relief. These include issues of police corruption and violence against women, along with a history of colonial terror. In the novel, narrated at a remove from Till, Treloar employs an undefined yet omniscient first-person voice, which has the effect of both preserving the protagonist’s mystery and inviting scrutiny – of her behaviour and of the systems around her. Whether this voice is that of E in the afterlife, à la Susie Salmon in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), another version of Till, or someone entirely different, hardly matters. At times, the narrator’s interjections may strike readers as patronising or sanctimonious (‘Remember that you are judging a traumatised six-year-old. Remember that’). Nonetheless, Treloar’s willingness to step back from her protagonist rather than explaining (and encouraging sympathy with) her every thought and action is refreshing, allowing Till to be fallible without luxuriating in her flaws. It also lends dignity to the townspeople, whose occasional prickliness towards Till is understandable, well before their backstories are made manifest. In the main, the novel’s supporting characters are fleshed-out and compelling. Till’s interactions with the townswomen bristle with significance, while the predator feels specific even in his shadowiness. By comparison, Till’s love interest, Ed, is a nonentity, and their scenes together have little purpose beyond demonstrating the gradual dissolution of Till’s commitment phobia. Treloar’s sentences often delight. Through well-placed descriptions, she evokes the strengths of her female characters in a way that is both economical and suggestive of transcendence: Till’s mother, Zoe, dressed in vintage Comme des Garçons, appears ‘like some rich ragamuffin, an avenging angel’; Marian is ‘a tall redheaded woman with her hair streaming down her back like Boadicea’; Bev is ‘a big Buff Orpington strutting around, scratching at doorways, pecking at people to make them jump’. Recurring ideas and images, such as Zoe’s ‘categories of womanhood’ and the killing of the last thylacine, hint at Till’s textured inner world while signalling Treloar’s wider preoccupation with women, nature, and violence. As a work of outback noir, Days of Innocence and Wonder delivers some genuinely chilling moments within a distinctive rural setting, although aficionados of the genre may find the first half of the novel to be overly languorous. Meanwhile, aspects of the central crime require a level of suspended belief (particularly for readers familiar with Brunswick), as does the action-packed denouement, which clashes tonally with the slow burn of the earlier sections. As a meditation on the long-reaching consequences of violence, and the healing properties of land and community, Treloar’s third novel is more successful (even though it can wear its morals a bit too heavily) and offers a hopeful counterpoint to literary examinations of misogyny like Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). It is also a thoughtful exploration of character and the limits of individual consciousness, which showcases Treloar’s confidence as a stylist. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 41
Fiction
Passing clouds
A delirious and epic Künstlerroman Lily Patchett
Lies and Sorcery
by Elsa Morante, translated by Jenny McPhee
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NYRB Classics US$24.95 pb, 789 pp
lena Ferrante declared Elsa Morante’s début novel Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) ‘fundamental’ to her literary formation. The novel is now available unabridged in English for the first time as Lies and Sorcery, in a brilliant translation by Jenny McPhee. Like Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Morante’s novel begins with the loss of the woman closest to the narrator, propelling a first-person epic to recover a shared past. However, this novel has little of the visceral realism that Ferrante has become famous for in the Anglophone world. It is instead a delirious mix of ghost story, romantic epic, and Künstlerroman that remains almost as difficult to categorise today as when it was published at the height of Italian neorealism. The novel’s narrator, Elisa, whose name recalls the author’s, has been orphaned by her birth parents for fifteen years when her adoptive mother, Rosaria, ‘a fallen woman’ and her ‘only friend’, passes away. For Elisa, the solitude that follows is not unfamiliar. Even when Rosaria was alive, Elisa preferred her room – with its ample supply of fantasy books, legends, ancient epics, loves stories, and lives of saints, as well as a crowd of ghosts, many of whom are dead or long-lost family members – to the capricious company of humans, which, with her tendency to form quick and intense attachments, only caused her pain. Besides, her imagination so well nourished, Elisa had already created an effective double of her friend, ‘equally joyful, exuberant, and magnificent’, but also ‘loyal’, a rarity among the living. The flesh-and-blood version having long been killed off in her mind and its ghost double preferred, Elisa does not even cry upon Rosaria’s death, expecting her happy delusion to assuage all grief. After returning from a rare outing to bury her guardian, Elisa finds her room deserted, her ghosts having betrayed her. With her ‘fantasises disintegrating’, her old sensitivity returns in full force. She finds herself so raw that, eyes closed, she senses even ‘a passing cloud’. Memory is the only shield now against this harsh reality. It is not only her own past that returns to console her but also ‘their pasts … those of [her] entire dead family’. When Rosaria was alive, Elisa had been so enchanted by the ghosts that writing, an active and worldly pursuit, did not concern her. Now possessed only by memory, Elisa finds that these tales must be gleaned through the pen. As she begins to write, the faces of her ghosts (with ‘the voracious, unrelenting movement of their 42 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
sharp tongues’) reappear out of the corner of her eye. If she lifts her eyes from her paper, they vanish, returning her to isolation. Elisa inherits the ‘disease of delusion’ from her biological family and is, by her own admission, the ‘sickest … of all’. Despite this insistence on her unreliability, as we delve into these ancestral stories, however mythical, the relationship between truth and falsity becomes increasingly uneasy. Elisa’s characters, though drenched in fantasy, are realistically drawn. Morante seems to be asking: how do we tell the difference between consoling fantasy and true fiction? Elisa recognises a distinction here when she wonders whether her family members, in getting her to write, are ‘feeling guilty for having sickened the sensible Elisa with their fabrications’ and ‘now want to cure her’. Rosaria’s death, and the act of writing that it produces, throws Elisa out of the Edenic paradise she had created. However, the tension between reality and fantasy is never fully resolved. In one ancestral tale, Edoardo, Elisa’s second cousin, falls into a feverish illness that gives him a taste for the ‘miraculous’ quality of death. Upon waking, though his fear of mortality does not leave him, he finds that his life can never ‘be as rich as his lingering dreams’. Is Elisa’s writing a lingering dream? Her delirium strikes her readers as deeper than consoling fantasy, but her spark of imagination seems brightest in its separation from reality. The genre of the romantic epic never fully fades from view. Morante furnishes Elisa, her fictional double, with the money and private space that Virginia Woolf argued were necessary to write. She also removes Elisa from (patriarchal) society. Though Elisa inherits her name ‘de Salvi (literally ‘of the Saved’) from her father, it seems that her namesake most obviously applies to the women in Elisa’s life, whose traumas, torments, and egoistic fantasises are wrested from a fading history. Ferrante says that it was in this work that she first discovered that ‘an entirely female story – entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings – could be compelling’. Elisa may be delusional, but her imagination is her own. Elisa’s maturing as a writer parallels Morante’s own artistic development, as the novel acts to transfigure self-absorbed, private fantasy into crystallising and empowering female narrative. Though partially written while Morante, who was Jewish, was in hiding during World War II, the novel contains little of the trauma its author lived through. This is found later, in Morante’s most popular novel, History (1974), which is now out of print in English. The setting of Lies and Sorcery is ambiguous and possesses no direct commentary on the world-forming sweep of her epoch. Though Elisa’s native city is almost always ‘drenched by a full southern sun’, suggesting Sicily, it lacks sufficient detail to satisfy as literary tourism. Moreover, the sprawling quality of the work may disappoint Ferrante fans looking to find another page-turner like the Neapolitan quartet. However, this disorientating and dreamy work, with its fraught relationship to reality, will reward readers compelled by literature that ventures inwards. g Lily Patchett is a PhD student in Italian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her thesis traces the role of mysticism in Elena Ferrante’s female symbolic to three of her most prominent influences: Clarice Lispector, Anna Maria Ortese, and Elsa Morante. ❖
Fiction
Speak louder
Three Young Adult novels by Indigenous writers Julie Janson
ness of Koori families resonates through his story. We are thrust into the terrible reality of Aboriginal incarceration. ‘Don Dale’ echoes in our heads. We hear of the breakdown between fathers and sons, and of the never-ending love of Koori aunties. We hear terror and poetic skill: ‘I run into the blackness, the red and blue spilling over me. Hudson’s heavy boots pound away on the dirt behind me.’ ‘I can’t stand the sight: Big men/ Beating the hell out of/ Small boys.’ ‘In ‘ere, I can kick back with my mates, I get free food …’
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elanie Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer living in Tulmur (Ipswich), is a fresh and insightful storyteller. Her first Young Adult novel, Burn (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 296 pp), is a tumultuous narrative about an Aboriginal youth, Andrew, and his obsession with lighting fires. It has a touch of Trent Dalton’s Brisbane struggle street, but the story draws us into psychological observation in Goori Andy’s cries for help and his longing for his parent’s attention. The novel begins with a bushfire lit by an unknown arsonist, in which a boy dies. This tragedy frames the narrative as we go on the journey with Andy and his mates Trent and Doug, wild teenagers who like to smoke dope and eat at McDonald’s. They are innocents in a world that ignores them as the author interrogates relationships between the lads and several irresistible young females. Andy’s fragile inner world is torn apart by his parents’ and his stepfather’s neglect. Andy’s sadness and fear of never finding security pervade the small fires and the clicking of cigarette lighters in this pyromaniac’s pockets. A sense of despair runs through the daily account of Andy’s life at high school, with occasional glimpses of kindness from friends or teachers. He is not alone, but his inner world hides the truth of his desire to burn everything down, a terrible addiction to the smell of smoke and sound of hissing fire. Saward is outstanding in evoking the young Aboriginal protagonist’s needs. She takes us inside his head and heart. The touch of the lighters has a palpable sensation. This is impressive writing, where our consciousness merges with the young Andy and his pathetic life with neglectful parents. ‘I’ll see my dad soon and that’s all I care about. I reach into my pocket and run my finger over the purple Bic lighter.’ Redemption comes with Andy’s extended family, and a clarifying essence of the pain of intergenerational trauma. Burn ends stunningly, leaving us certain of hope.
A
nother Young Adult novel by a gifted First Nations Yuin novelist is We Didn’t Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough (Allen and Unwin, $19.99 pb, 300 pp). What a revelation this young writer is. He is doing something no other male First Nations novelist has attempted: the YA Blak queer genre that is a glimpse into another world view, at once confronting yet heartwarming. Lonesborough’s grasp of Koori vernacular and of the close-
Jamie Langton’s time in detention is poignant, with the recounting of how a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal saved him. The description of the Koori Christmas in juvie made me cry. Homophobia, racism, decolonisation, poetry to save yourself: all are examined through the prism of the novel. There are references to identity, sexuality, emotional men, and a celebratory emergence of Black homonormality within Australia’s post referendum reality. Psychological and Indigenous social nakedness is explored by the author’s extraordinary ability to tap into our national psyches at a primal level. All of us are touched by the everyday evil of our prison systems against children and by the hatred meted out to the race that suffered colonial slaughter. Reading on, I cry again at the flashback of Jamie’s mum hugging him while Family Services officers supervise parental visits. There are cinematic scenes as the boys are taken from their parents by authorities. Yet one social worker says: ‘You’ve got a voice inside you, Jamie … I think poetry might be the way for you to let that voice speak louder.’ Jamie and his brother go to live with Aunty Dawn. I cry again when Jamie is home from ‘juvie’ and his schoolteacher reads aloud his poem ‘The Dark Place’. The class cheers. It is the moment when a writer is born. ‘They’re not making fun of me they’re cheering for me.’ We Didn’t Think It Through is further evidence of Lonesborough’s immense talent. We look forward to his future in adult fiction.
T
he third Young Adult novel is Borderland by Graham Akhurst (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 236 pp). Akhurst, the first Indigenous Australian recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, lives on Gadigal country and is from the Kokomini of Northern Queensland. Borderland, an eco-horror-gothic speculative novel written in a visceral first-person voice, leads us into unfamiliar territory. It’s a crazy ride into the realm of Indigenous identity, the impact of colonisation, and mind-bending imagination. Jono, a seventeen-year-old city-born Murri, lives with his loving Aboriginal mother and has had a private school education at St Lucia in Brisbane. Life is sometimes challenging – he is beaten up by some jealous young Blackfellas. As a college student, he accepts an acting job in the outback, but this becomes strange and complicated as he is driven to find out about a sacred land and its mining challenges. Jono is ashamed that he didn’t even ‘know who my mob or where my County was’. He arrives in the desert Queensland outback town of Gambari, accompanied by his A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 43
Fiction best friend, Jenny. Jono is haunted by panic attacks not eased by medication. He experiences death omens and fearful apparitions. Alongside the frightening encounters, we see the protagonist’s inner struggles, his sexual and romantic longings and disappointments. Jono and Jenny find employment with a mining gas fracking venture, and their role is to create a documentary to promote the benefits of the mine to Aboriginal landowners. This concept is fraught with disaster both spiritual and real. A malevolent Dreaming spirit attacks Jono as the mining venture tramples on sacred sites. The beast follows Jono with its ‘long teeth, pale skin. Long claws and black eyes.’ His magpie totem manifests as a warning, and he becomes the spirit, half-man, halfbird. Jono arms himself with a nulla nulla to confront the evil spirit Wudan and Jono incants: ‘from the earth, blood, portent of
death’. This a gripping read, a horror story strongly resonant of speculative fictional First Nations stories. ‘The beast was howling at a large full moon and the light cast a bright sheen on its pale body. It focused its black eyes on me, raised its muzzle and sent a piercing howl towards the stars.’ The story is too brief in its coverage of the consequences of fracking; a tougher political edge would have enhanced the impact. Nonetheless, the novel sweeps the reader along with family secrets about heritage emerging from the interactions between the city characters and the older First Nations people on their traditional Queensland homelands. It is a terrific read. g
Strange communion
tercet from ‘rain as narrative’: ‘in our private apocalypse / angels drain the lees / via a bung beneath the eyeball’. Unpunctuated; lowercase; lines of similar length broken at normative turns in the syntax, often ending in nouns; elaborate sonic patterning; dense, mixed, and inventive metaphors: such features inhere, with minimal exception, throughout the book. The result is a hypnotic, sure-voiced flatness, which allows Shepherdson to parse complex constructions that, in bolder arrangements, could resist interpretation altogether: ‘now they expect us / to have our corneas stacked / at either end of this sentence / to calmly patent our veins / as a new form of writing.’ In the collection, language, like art, belongs to the body – is itself a body. Returning to this insight forces Shepherdson into figurative acrobatics: ‘fermenting yeast from the mouth / of a dead pronoun’; ‘you simmer commas until they’re ready to eat’; ‘swimming with the verbs in your new language / you marinate the vowels in a rich brandy / to warm the blood in your handshake.’ Midway through ‘poems before i knew you now i know you’, the speaker approaches a lover from behind, lifts their hair from their neck in perhaps the book’s most literal image, and ‘put[s] my right hand / inside the marsupial pouch / at the back of your / head // to check that new words / are attached to lactating / thoughts’. Reviving language, renewing it, and thereby feeding the body – ‘recalibrat[ing] this thing / once thought to be a soul’ – preoccupies Shepherdson, underpins his innovations in phrasing and trope and his jettisoning of narrative. What poet has not wished to ‘nurse words like tired babies / until they explode’? Explode and become what? Hidden in the book’s bulk are lines that suggest a transcendent unity, which poetry might glance. In the ‘orbit’, the speaker tells an addressee who has died that ‘your body follows a small channel / in the giant fingerprint / on the water’s surface’. Elsewhere, we find aphoristic statements such as ‘this is the light / before light existed’; ‘even without one there is one’; and ‘all gates fly open in the act of being closed’. Against absence, against closure, something persists. Shepherdson won the 2005 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize for Sweeping the Light Back Into the Mirror (2006), an elegy for his mother. In the final poem in parallel equators, dedicated to his father, he writes: ‘when i am again one atom / he will again be the one / to split me as a private sun / unskilled in every blindness.’
Questions of poetic resistance Anders Villani
parallel equators
by Nathan Shepherdson Recent Work Press $19.95 pb, 186 pp
camping underground
‘P
by Greg McLaren Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 189 pp
oems reawaken in us,’ writes James Longenbach, ‘the pleasure of the unintelligibility of the world.’ They do so via ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’: disjunctive strategies that work, for Longenbach, to ‘resist our intelligence almost successfully’. What ‘almost’ means here is, of course, a matter of taste – and style. Nonetheless, this Romantic mandate – that poems achieve clarity by integrating opacity – invites a question fundamental to poetics: how much resistance is too much, or not enough? ‘welcome the dark angle that cannot be measured’: this exhortation early in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection betrays an interest in absence and negativity, as well as an aversion to literal sense that another poem calls ‘a terror attack / on the noun’. Tellingly, a line in the next poem asserts that ‘angles are never alone until they’re measured’. In a book addressed to Shepherdson’s recently deceased father and abounding in dedications to others both living and dead, poetry becomes an open field that undermines language’s differentiating – and isolating – impulse, and such openness entails a drawing together, a strange communion. parallel equators is a long, disorienting work. Its five sections, named for the five vowels, carry surrealist subtitles: ‘we take our seats and wait for the cave to auction its echoes’. Whether Shepherdson’s structural design owes more to randomisation than deliberate sequencing feels irrelevant. What lends the collection global coherence is its formal consistency. Consider this 44 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
Julie Janson is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal nation. She is a novelist, playwright, and poet.
Poetry
F
rom Luke Best’s Cadaver Dog to Joan Fleming’s Song of Less, in recent years numerous Australian poets have published dystopian verse novels. Greg McLaren’s camping underground sits well alongside these contemporaries. It surpasses them for its intricate storytelling and flights of lyricism. It is the near future. Climate change and nuclear war have ravaged the world: ‘Kiribati became a reef.’ In Australia, far-right terror groups have unleashed attacks using ‘dirty bombs’ made from stolen radiology materials and, worse, biological weapons. A deadly virus – ‘its virulence – a spatter / of data, a kid’s picture // of what the stars / might look like’ – plagues the country, which has devolved into blackouts, quarantine zones, paramilitary groups, brutal killings, and armed resistance. In the old coal-mining regions around Newcastle in New South Wales, the narrator, Kel, battles hostiles, illness, and a dark history to search for her missing niece, whom she loves like a daughter. McLaren’s premise has a grab-bag quality, which the author acknowledges in wry references to The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and The Hunger Games. Yet the world-building is sufficiently rich and rooted in current events to remain compelling. And chilling: ‘Exactly when did asking Christian / religious leaders to address the radicalisation / and extremism in their communities // begin to sound like satire?’ The book’s chronology intersperses sections titled Before and After in irregular sequence. Sections range in length from a word – ‘Cholera’ – to several pages. Plot-driven stanzas abut atmospheric, reflective turns, or sardonic humour: ‘No more deadshits / dawdling on their phones – / that has to be a plus.’ As fragments accrete, Kel emerges as a flawed protagonist primed by a traumatic upbringing for both survival
and aloneness. McLaren has written a believable queer, female voice and psyche. In an age with few epics, verse novels must implicitly answer two questions. Why tell a story in poetry? By extension, can poetry tasked with narration retain the sonic and rhythmic attunement, and Longenbach’s ‘mechanisms of self-resistance’, which distinguish it? McLaren takes care never to forsake story for song, or vice versa. For example, Kel recounts her home life as a child: ‘But I never / especially liked drugs or the drinking / my sister did, my brother. I just / broke off into small portions and / let them slowly heal, or not.’ The diction is prosaic. Notice, however, the slant rhyme of ‘drugs or’, ‘brother’, and ‘broke off ’; the consonance of ‘small’ and ‘heal’. Notice how, by enjambing the first line after ‘drinking’, McLaren attributes that vice to both Kel and her siblings. Notice the lovely metaphor woven into the syntax through the alliteration of ‘broke’ and ‘brother’. This is not prose chopped into lines. McLaren’s phrasing remains precise and original, from a cockatoo’s ‘grinning eye’ to the narrator’s bemoaning that ‘[i]t’s been / a long day / all morning’. Elsewhere, language grows more lyrical, slowing time, and inviting reflection: ‘your whole skin still – / an early morning river’; ‘Here in the half-shade, / the mellow light lanced / by the red-green of dangling gum tips’; ‘Voices dangle from the moving.’ It is possible to imagine reading camping underground and forget that it is verse. The book’s achievement is that it is also possible to imagine the opposite. g Anders Villani is the author of Avril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022).
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Poetry
Wilder plenty
A poet of scrupulous seeing David Mason
Prickly Moses: Poems by Simon West
T
Princeton University Press US$19.95 pb, 57 pp
oo often poetry is valued as if it were prose, exclusively by virtue of its subject matter. Such discussions miss the poetry itself, which my wife calls ‘the speech that brings us to silence’, a kind of accuracy beggaring what we say about it. Simon West is a poet who understands this distinction. His essays collected in Dear Muses? (2019) explore ‘the uneasy way my allegiances lie with my language as much as they do with the places in which I dwell’. He knows how complicated such terms as language and place must be, so his landscapes – particularly riverine Victoria and Italy – never seem limitations. ‘The task of the poet is to scrutinize the actual world.’ I read him for the pleasures of both world and word. West is by any measure an important poet. His third collection, The Ladder (2015), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His fourth, Carol and Ahoy (2018), signalled a change of emphasis in his writing, more openly acknowledging that poetry, as he put it in an interview, helps us ‘to make sense of ourselves and the world’. Without seeming the least bit confessional, his new book, published in the United States, confirms and deepens this ambition by its scrupulous seeing as well as by the accuracy and grace of its lines. If West is a nature poet, he is an unsentimental one. ‘Nature is that which does not flatter man or heed his self-importance,’ he has written, and Prickly Moses is as much about noticing, paying attention, as anything else. It is a poetics of patience. Stay with it, as the poet stays with his apparently common subjects, and you will be rewarded. Refreshingly, the personal pronoun never dominates these poems. ‘Sometimes language lags / in the wake of body’s ken,’ he writes in the book’s second poem. The poems that follow invite us, one by one, into dawning awareness. As he puts it in the title poem, about a kind of Acacia: You grow regardless. You obtain, lopsided, the enlightenment of well-pitched things, your equilibrium a wry smile beaming in an old bloke’s bristly face, as I pass you on the pathway at the bottom of the stair. Your first commandment: start out from acknowledgement.
If that word ‘commandment’ discomforts with its religious overtones, it also asks us to consider what in the world is other 46 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
and more than us. Because West is classically educated, a teacher of Italian and translator of Guido Cavalcanti, he knows mere presentism will not do. His essays acknowledge the difficulty of a traditional term like ‘Muse’ in modern Australia, but also find it useful ‘as an embodiment of the idea that poetry does not exist in a vacuum, and does not arise exclusively from the genius or angst of the individual’. In fact, there is little angst on hand in Prickly Moses, which could lead one to wonder about the place of passion in poetry. A few of the poems here feel beautiful but inert. West has written with admiration of poets, from W.B. Yeats to Czesław Miłosz, who forged a more dynamic relation between personal and public utterance, including the dilemma of politics. One wonders what a poet of his skill could bring to such subjects. Yet I also find it charming when, in ‘The Collar Piece’, he finds himself ‘tired of the glories of Rome’, and instead observes a street scene and an ordinary pigeon: ‘And now it was / water wended to wine: / those wings clapped air / like barefoot kids racing / to the top of a travertine stair.’ It’s not just the individual body that kens, but also something out of the body, the ascension alluded to in that rhyme of ‘air’ and ‘stair’, working through observation to a kind of immanence. West’s diction, his ability to resurrect a forgotten word and put it to new use, is a moral stance as well as a poetic one. He concludes a brief, observational poem, ‘Roadside Shaws’, with these lovely lines: ‘Shaws like a shrine that ushers the mind round boundaries / and down paths of once and what if, / into the lands of wilder plenty.’ There is also a quiet thread of the personal running through the book, beginning with its first poem, ‘Notes on Clouds’: I used to watch that mirrored ocean foam float in slow motion over plains vast and rambling as a pelagic vista, the crickets’ metronome set largo fortissimo, the Goulburn untangling north to the Murray – the valley’s one clear border. The clouds moved east and drew your eye on their flanged wake like a lure in whose shine you saw Dookie, Benalla, and a sweep of land to the Dividing Range.
This is strong technique, the rhymes unforced and enlarging. One begins to see how West’s poetry practises his poetics, from ‘Writing Sounds’ with its ‘Psalms / to mark small victories’ to ‘Exeat’, a sequence about the poet’s school days. School, it would seem, was where the poetry began, partly in the classroom, partly in the rituals and traditions education fostered: ‘And it seems now the narrative was identity. It’s always / the same hidden campaign led by fear // to forge distinctiveness. To trust / both rage and sober thought, / to heft the gifts // of home like a totem …’ Trying to see that which is through the ghosts of memory, West is still forging his distinctiveness. g David Mason’s most recent books are Pacific Light (2022) and a book of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us? (2023).
Poetry
Drambuies of poetry A well-turned selection Geoff Page
Near the Border: New and selected poems by Andrew Sant
A
Puncher & Wattmann $29.95 pb, 368 pp
ndrew Sant is a substantial yet somewhat elusive figure in contemporary Australian poetry. Born in London, he arrived in Melbourne with his parents at age twelve in 1962. Over the years, he has published at least eleven collections, co-founded the literary magazine Island, and been, for a time, a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. More recently, Sant has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, but he clearly retains links with Australia, particularly Tasmania, where he first became known as a poet. Near the Border: New and selected poems is a generous selection from his work since 1980. At 368 pages, it feels more like a Collected. (Such books by living poets are rare these days.) This reviewer began with the book’s ten new poems and then worked his way back to the beginning. Such a reading revealed a poet of remarkable consistency, not only in overall quality, but in tone and concerns. Mostly (but not always) set in the United Kingdom or Australia, the poems are typically formal (though hardly ever with structural rhyme) and wryly observant. There is a continuing interest in scale, particularly in the differences between geological and human time. We encounter a sense of distance in many of them, almost as if the twelve-year-old migrant has preserved his memory of the new land’s strangeness and chosen not to become too involved. This can mean that, compared to the work of, say, a Seamus Heaney or a Les Murray, Sant’s poems can seem muted, not unlike a traveller’s poem which expresses interest and/or bemusement rather than involvement or concern. Paradoxically, Sant’s unerring craftsmanship can reinforce this effect. There are, however, some remarkable exceptions to this – often in the longer narrative poems where Sant seems to go more deeply (and more widely) into his material. The most memorable of them is probably ‘Crime Fiction’, where the poet seems persistently to revisit the extent to which the poet and/or his father can be blamed for his mother’s suicide. Running to eight-and-a-half pages, using the narrative structures and ‘hard-boiled’ manner of the eponymous crime fiction, the poem is distinctly memorable and affecting. Something of its atmosphere can be felt in the following stanza: ‘Now the cop had ammo for the inquest, / complete with suicide note and empty brown / bottle of barbiturates. He vamoosed. / There was, I puzzled, more to this case.’ Comparably autobiographical is Sant’s ‘Stories of My Father’, a sequence of eight poems, in which the poet looks
back and tries to understand what enabled his father to survive his long widowerhood – and, inevitably, the nature of their father-son relationship. In ‘Personal Pronouns’, for instance, the poet evokes ‘Father and son at the crossroads, / in a classic round of words, / pronouns circling undeclared verbs ... Fixed in binary opposition, / they proved he could / never grow old nor I grow up. // I just wanted to get him off my back. / Now it’s the certain weight I lack.’
Andrew Sant is a substantial yet somewhat elusive figure in contemporary Australian poetry Another, comparable achievement is Sant’s long poem ‘The Bicycle Thief ’, this time more an extended exercise in ironic empathy. Its beginning is indicative of the slightly ‘Martian’ and playful tone maintained throughout. ‘The absence, next to the wall, / was exactly the size / of my bike. So let me fill you in. / It’s a ten-speed Wanderer, blue, / no guards, some rust / on the handlebars, fairly useless / brakes, in a crisis.’ The poet then goes on to imagine exactly where, and why, the thief has ridden the bike – including, along the way, a small encounter with the police who reprimand him for not wearing a helmet but are not concerned with issues of ownership. It is not insignificant, however, that Sant’s biographical note observes that ‘his poems have been widely anthologised’. It may well be better to encounter his poems scattered through anthologies or in separate collections than to attempt them jammed together in an extensive selected where their relative similarities seem more pronounced. Alec Hope used to say that poetry ‘is more a liqueur than a beer’. If that is so, 368 pages are a lot of Drambuies. To get a true sense of how this works, one should probably go directly back to Sant’s early, much-anthologised ‘Homage to the Canal People’, where the poet begins with ‘Steered straight into this century I see narrowboats / loaded with coal, cheese, vats of vinegar trailing / a hard century along behind them …’ but is soon recreating the distinctive and now-threatened community of the canal people on their ‘three-miles-an-hour journeys’ and their ‘Long damp days scattering moorhens’. The poem culminates in a vividly memorable pub scene ‘with gossip flying so fast it was prophetic / the boats outside moored with the children / like all relevant history; in the shadow / of the Swan or the Bird in Hand’. Eventually, however, it is more than clear why the poet and his publishers were reluctant to omit any of these well-turned, well-made, often-incisive poems. One hopes that the book’s size will not be a deterrent. In the present climate, to issue such a comprehensive selection by a poet who doesn’t have an ‘angle’ or some extra-literary ‘identity’ is even riskier than poetry publishing normally is. It’s good therefore to see Puncher & Wattmann maintaining the diversity of their list by insisting on recognisable quality rather than novelty or ‘relevance’. Taken slowly, poem by poem, over weeks, Andrew Sant’s Near the Border will more than repay the reader’s investment. g Geoff Page’s most recent books are 101 Poems: 2011 –2021 and Penultima (both from Pitt Street Poetry). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 47
Biography
La grande nubiade
A padded and hyperbolic biography Theodore Ell
Empress of the Nile: The daredevil archaeologist who saved Egypt’s ancient temples from destruction by Lynne Olson
I
Scribe $36.99 pb, 448 pp
n the 1960s, as Egypt built the second Aswan Dam, the monuments of ancient Nubia, including the colossi at Abu Simbel, risked vanishing beneath a lake. Backed by UNESCO, an international coalition of archaeologists, celebrities, politicians, and engineers succeeded in moving them. Whole temples were cut off their rock bases and lifted with hydraulics, or removed in segments from cliff-faces and sinking islands, for reassembly on higher ground. The struggles involved, American author Lynne Olson’s book Empress of the Nile makes clear, were fiendish. The engineering problems were considered insoluble, the politics foolhardy. For the sake of flood regulation and hydroelectricity, ancient buildings seemed an acceptable loss. Rousing the political will to save them took scholarship, conviction, charm, and sheer nerve. In short, it took French Egyptologist Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt. In a long career divided between Egypt and the Louvre, Desroches-Noblecourt fused scholarly rigour with a passion – which Olson persuasively characterises as near-religious – for presenting ancient heritage as a public good. Crucially, she was taught by archaeologists who sought artefacts other than kingly treasures. She dug at sites that were considered marginal, such as the Valley of the Queens, where her discoveries shed light on lives beneath or around the pharaohs. This sympathy for the disregarded extended to Egyptian dig labourers, to whom DesrochesNoblecourt gave medical care while learning their dialects and involving them in choosing sites and interpreting finds. In a field run by foreigners, she supported Egyptians to become Egyptologists. By the time the Aswan flood loomed, Desroches-Noblecourt could seek aid from more locals than any other foreign archaeologist. Desroches-Noblecourt was used to personal crusades. A female pioneer in a field obsessed with male status, she defied gross sexism all her life. In an early indignity, she was moved to a poor spot on a dig at Edfu to make way for a male student. Even after Nubia, male colleagues played down her instrumental activism. Desroches-Noblecourt rose above fury by believing in intellectual attainment as a supreme moral good, to which her formidable gifts led her by merit. She could overplay that hand. Once, she promised French government support for the Nubian campaign, without authority. Yet she could look an enraged Charles de Gaulle in the face and equate the campaign to the civilisational ideals that had liberated France from the Nazis. De Gaulle was disarmed and arranged funds. Paradoxically for someone who blazed such a progressive trail, Desroches-Noblecourt baulked at calling herself 48 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
a feminist. The greatest compliment she ever received was being called a humanist. Empress of the Nile offers many such remarkable facts and stories, but it is an exasperating read. For a book that prizes historical detail, there are glaring errors. Olson has Caesar Augustus conquering Egypt, but he was known as Octavian then and took the ‘Augustus’ sobriquet later. Carrara, the home of the masons who disassembled Abu Simbel, is not in the Italian Alps but in Tuscany. And it is imprecise to name ‘ancient Egyptian and Greek’ as the languages on the Rosetta Stone; Olson omits that these two tongues were written in three scripts, which is what makes the Stone so vital for translation. More seriously, Empress of the Nile is structurally unsound. Olson’s historical sections are rambling tangents that obscure Desroches-Noblecourt’s story. The politics of the Suez Crisis are recited over fourteen pages, but it takes less than one for Desroches-Noblecourt’s conservation work to ‘morph into a massive international effort’. Desroches-Noblecourt is absent for several chapters while Olson concentrates on Jacqueline Kennedy, another vital Nubian campaigner, but of whose efforts DesrochesNoblecourt was unaware for decades. The most ludicrous detour is a love triangle involving Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and UNESCO official René Maheu, of which Olson remarks that if Desroches-Noblecourt knew of Maheu’s ‘colourful private life’ she never mentioned it. As a history of the race to save the Nubian monuments, of the boom of interest in Egyptology, and of the politics of owning and borrowing antiquities, Empress of the Nile would work better; as the personal story of Desroches-Noblecourt, with history more sharply narrated, better still. Trying to be both, the book loses focus and overcompensates with exaggeration, I suspect because of commercial pressure. That Desroches-Noblecourt ‘owned her power’ there is no doubt, but to claim she was ‘a real-life female version of Indiana Jones’ is cheap. It was her intellect and eloquence that won arguments. She knew that moral commitment would get Egypt’s heritage nowhere unless someone did the political slog of causing attitudes to act on interests. Amplifying a belief among educated citizens that heritage was a matter of responsibility as well as enjoyment, she persuaded a powerful few that it was in their interests to be seen preserving it. We today face an even greater struggle to save heritage, and life, from a warming climate and rising seas. Desroches-Noblecourt shows us ways of inducing action as well as inspiring it. Empress of the Nile deserves credit for summarising DesrochesNoblecourt’s career in English and for its descriptions of the Nubian campaign. Olson is a superb scene-setter and narrator of action. I share her astonishment that no biography of DesrochesNoblecourt existed previously, in French or English. That said, Desroches-Noblecourt’s own memoir, La grande nubiade (1992), was popular in France and supplies much of Olson’s material. The question arises, might it have been more effective to translate La grande nubiade into English – Olson would be the ideal translator – and accompany it with a pithier historical essay, marrying Desroches-Noblecourt’s own story with Olson’s abilities in research and scene-setting? Desroches-Noblecourt’s was a great life and there are the foundations of a great book about it here, but they are buried in padding and hype. g
Critic of the Month with Catriona Menzies-Pike
Catriona Menzies-Pike is a writer and editor based in Vancouver. In 2023, she won the Walkley-Pascall Prize for arts criticism. Between 2015 and 2023, she was Editor of the Sydney Review of Books.
When did you first write for ABR?
I began writing for ABR in 2008. I reviewed a collection of essays by Meaghan Morris, a welcome diversion from the abyss of my graduate studies. I was very pleased by the title my review was given: ‘Gadfly Critic’.
What makes a fine critic?
I am first and last compelled by the presence of the critic in their work, by their willingness to conduct a reader through a reading of a book, that could not, or so it must seem, be written by any other hand. Not for me arm’s length epistles that purport to a timeless, peerless objectivity; I want to hear voices that carry tonalities, affects, lived experience, proclivities, expertise, intelligence. The critics whose company I prefer are distinguished by their style and by their intrepid independence, though I may not agree with them. They are close readers and close writers, in that they pay attention to the syntax and use of language of the writers that they review, and also to their own. ‘Fearless’ is an abused adjective, but I admire critics who are willing to court contempt in their prosecution of their arguments rather than remain in step with the ever-blander consensuses that the market has formed around value, morality, style, identity, and so on.
Which critics most impress you?
This depends on what I am reading right now, and right now I am reading Elizabeth Hardwick’s Collected Essays and finding myself captivated once more by her syntax and her conviction. I will also drop most tasks to read new writing by Terry Castle.
Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?
I am selective. It takes me a long time to write even a short review, and I am reluctant to do so if I have nothing to say.
( Jonno Revanche)
Interview
What do you look for from an editor?
Close attention, which is to say, an eye for error, pieties, exaggeration, cliché, and all related follies.
Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors? Yes.
What do you think of negative reviews?
Critics need to be prepared to deliver negative evaluations of books. Otherwise, their enthusiastic endorsements are worthless.
How do you feel about reviewing people you know? Australia’s literary world is very small indeed, not so small that everyone knows everyone, but certainly small enough for conflicts of interest to arise frequently. I am old enough to know better, but I am startled still to see Australian critics reviewing work by writers who are their friends or colleagues, or to witness critics heaping praise upon an author with whom they share a publisher. That is what blurbs are for! Of course, proximity to an author can equip a critic to deliver useful insights into their work. The issue is whether these conflicts of interest are disclosed. Not to do so is to break an ethical compact with the reader. I think readers deserve to know whether a critic has a bond of friendship – or enmity, for that matter – with the author under review. If a critic cannot figure out how to tell them so in a review, they should turn down the job. That is the standard I hold other critics to, and it is one I strive to meet as well.
What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?
I am not sure I can isolate just one. To read well and widely. To preserve her independence. To keep her ethical obligations to the reader and to the writer in view. To file on deadline. g
A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 49
Science
The eye of the deep The importance of wonderment Killian Quigley
The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the luminous ocean depths
I
by Brad Fox Pushkin Press £22 hb, 384 pp
n 2019, Smithsonian magazine published a profile of an American inventor, entrepreneur, and undersea explorer named Stockton Rush. Rush and his company, OceanGate, had recently celebrated the successful descent of their experimental manned submersible Titan to the extraordinary depth of 4,000 metres. Titan’s design was innovative in two important ways: its body was composed centrally of carbon fibre, which made it light and comparatively inexpensive to operate, and it was a cylinder. A spherical sub might have had ‘the best geometry for pressure’, observed Rush, ‘but not for occupation’ – and this represented an unpalatable check on OceanGate’s plans to deliver groups of high-paying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic. ‘I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,’ Rush reflected: ‘If threequarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?’ Early coverage of OceanGate’s ambitions, in Smithsonian and elsewhere, framed Titan as an extension of, as well as a departure from, a tradition of modern subsea exploration dating to 1930. In June that year, the zoologist William Beebe and the engineer Otis Barton squeezed into a steel orb called the ‘bathysphere’ before being submerged nearly 250 metres beneath the surface of the western Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda. ‘Ever since the beginnings of human history,’ Beebe later wrote, ‘thousands upon thousands of human beings had reached the depth at which we were now suspended, and had passed on to lower levels. But all of these were dead.’ Undaunted, Beebe and Barton followed them down: a second dive, conducted just five days later, attained about 400 metres. In 1934, the bathysphere completed a plunge to the very end of its more than 900-metre-long tether. If this was supposed to represent a kind of triumph, Beebe himself seemed ambivalent. ‘I’ll tell the world,’ ran a quote in Newsweek, ‘that this is the last time I’ll attempt record-breaking dives which really have no scientific value.’ Uncertainty is the predominant attitude of Brad Fox’s learned, formally provocative The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the luminous ocean depths. Beebe was a prolific writer, and Fox has pursued his oeuvre, including some startlingly compelling unpublished papers, in archives at Princeton University, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Fox has consulted the testimonies of several of Beebe’s colleagues and intimates, most notably Gloria Hollister, his colleague at the New York Zoological Society’s Department of Tropical Research and sometime lover. But like Beebe’s Atlantic dives, Fox’s pursuit does not exactly produce a clearer sense of its subject as it goes deeper. Instead, The Bathysphere Book
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arranges for its reader something akin to what Beebe reported encountering en route to the twilight zone of the sea: a tangle of lively impressions ‘too different to be classified in usual terms’. Consisting by turns of history, narrative non-fiction, visual imagery, and found poetry, Fox’s text enacts on its pages the sort of interpretative disorientation that defined Beebe’s ‘discoveries’ in the deep. The point is not that Beebe learned nothing while below. In a memoir called, fittingly, Half-Mile Down (1934), he offered unprecedented first-hand descriptions of the effects of submergence on light and colour, as well as of the abundant – and literally brilliant – life of the ocean’s depths. But what haunts those accounts, and most preoccupies Fox, is Beebe’s realisation that he always lacks the language he needs to successfully share what he sees. Gazing out the little quartz windows of the bathysphere at 210 metres down, Beebe found himself confronted by ‘an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world’. Good scientist that he was, he strove to marshal all his ‘logic’, suppress every bit of his ‘excitement’, and ‘think sanely of comparative color’. The result? ‘I failed utterly.’ Underwater, what Beebe was managing to gather were nothing less or more than raw impressions, ‘untransferable’ sensations he seemed doomed never to fully express. Fox’s book places the unknowable and untransmissible at the heart of Beebe’s story. So doing, it sets out not to undermine the zoologist’s scientific esteem but to announce him as an unheralded philosopher-poet of the ‘unthought’. Immersed in realms of paradoxically luminescent darkness, Beebe registered nothing so much as the abyss of his own ignorance. The Bathysphere Book asks what it could mean to produce knowledge of – or better, from – zones that will not answer to conventional observation or explanation. One answer pertains to ‘wonder’, a term that, for Beebe (as for his friend Rachel Carson), refers not only to an emotional response but to an overarching sensibility. If losing faith in inherited practices of seeing and understanding can be unsettling, it might also conduce to forms of aesthetic, intellectual, and even subjective refreshment. The ‘blueness’ Beebe witnessed ‘seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings’. In Fox’s hands, an experience of this kind marks a thrilling and comprehensive reconfiguration of the gaze, as the seer becomes seen by the ‘eye of the deep’. Wonder works, for Fox as for Beebe, through careful attention to oblique and unanticipated forms of connection. At its best, it achieves a type of ecological orientation towards the world, one The Bathysphere Book models in its own variegated structure. Fox’s many short chapters carry out experiments in method, from paraphrase to chronology, vignette to direct extract. Some words describing and taxonomising a fish called the smooth dreamer (Chaenophryne draco), first reported by Beebe in 1932, take shape here as sensuous, enigmatic verse: a surface which looks like the nap of black velvet lips which are smooth and dark brown low and inconspicuous and probably not at all the anterior profile of the elbow
Passages like this one intermingle with a marvellous array of reproduced paintings and illustrations, most notably those of
Law Beebe’s collaborators Else Bostelmann, Helen Damrosch TeeVan, George Alan Swanson, and Isabel Cooper. The fundamental mode is juxtaposition, not explication, and while Fox’s assembling style can feel digressive, its general effect is a rich and startling mixture of fascination and alienation. ‘We’re going to colonize the ocean,’ Stockton Rush once mused, ‘long before we colonize space.’ It would be cruel to disparage the memory of those lost in the Titan tragedy. It is important, nevertheless, to mark the distances between a
quasi-imperial spirit of marine ‘access’ and Beebe’s much more doubtful sense of submersion. Just what are the ethical stakes of these differences is a question The Bathysphere Book does not quite venture to answer. It is a question that looms up largely, all the same, from the pages of Fox’s text – and it is one with which we have a collective responsibility, now more than ever, to reckon. g
Lacerated feelings
an impenetrable barrier to their marriage, revealing the influence of class and convictism on romance in a settler colony. Our encounter with James Lucas (formerly Jamsetjee Sorabjee), in 1892 – the first Australian interracial breach of promise and a rare case with a male plaintiff – exposes how race was constructed through romance and the tensions between the two. The 1916 case brought by Verona Rodriguez divulges the influence of consumer culture and women’s growing financial autonomy on romantic love during the early twentieth century, as they begin to claim both lost wages and compensation for their trousseaus in the wake of their abandonment by men. The case studies also reveal the diverse damages plaintiffs claimed from their former lovers, seeking remuneration for rent unpaid by their partners’ families, for their domestic labour and care, for the money spent on a ring, for a damaged reputation, and for the loss of a potential home and secure future – telling us much about the historical valuation and economics of love. Interwoven throughout these cases is Simmonds’s astute examination of the patriarchal legal system and women’s navigation of it. As Simmonds highlights, breach of promise of marriage was the only civil suit that demanded women’s evidence be corroborated, legally codifying a patriarchal mistrust of women’s evidence in a suit predominantly filed by lower-middle-class women. In a shocking example of this, Ilma Vaughan’s case reveals how coverture extended into courtship. Coverture was a legal doctrine that denied married women an independent legal identity and which gave husbands a legal immunity to beat, rape, or economically abuse their wives. Ilma used her 1891 breach of promise suit against popular politician Myles MacRae to protest his rape of her, only months after his wife, Clara, had successfully divorced him for considerable domestic violence and adultery. Yet the court argued that Miles’s rape of Ilma was ‘justified’ due to their engagement – her engagement ring signified his total ownership of her. The long shadow of coverture, even following changes to married women’s legal status via shifting property ownership and divorce laws, reveals itself again in the 1938 case of Robina Allan and Frederick Growden. Frederick’s physical abuse of Robina was deliberately twisted to mark her as the aggressor in a legal arena presided over entirely by men, which increasingly punished angry women and affirmed male violence and entitlement. With women’s economic and social dependence upon marriage the raison d’être of breach of promise, the suit affirmed and relied upon female fragility and passivity. The final three case studies of the book particularly demonstrate how women’s
A feminist history of love and the law Zoe Smith
Courting: An intimate history of love and the law by Alecia Simmonds
I
La Trobe University Press $45 pb, 440 pp
n 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage. Alecia Simmonds’s Courting: An intimate history of love and the law uses court records and newspaper reports to tell the history of nearly one thousand cases of breach of promise. She unpacks the ‘lacerated feelings’, the gifts, the gossip, the letters and poems of the couples whose relationship led them not to the altar but to the courtroom. There, to a captive audience, they told their tales of love and loss, seduction and betrayal, deception and desperation. In more than 400 pages, Simmonds offers a provocative and compelling history of the ‘texture, language and politics of romance’. Courting offers readers a history of emotions, romantic material culture, courtship, and dating, as well as insight into the historical pathologisation of love, the rise of the counsellor, and the patriarchal hue of the Australian legal system. It does so through ten case studies from colonial Sydney to early-nineteenthcentury Jamaica, Paris in 1848, 1850s Bathurst, late-nineteenthcentury Hong Kong, the ‘Syrian Colony’ in Redfern in the 1890s, the pearling towns of Broome in the early 1900s, and depressionera Perth. Simmonds lingers upon the twists and turns of each case, and offers nuanced arguments about the role of location, race, class, and gender in love, especially when subject to the law. Simmonds first introduces us to Harriet Sutton, who, in 1806, fled her domestic-service role dressed as a man to meet her fiancé, Adolarius Humphrey, the government mineralogist for New South Wales. He would then declare her convict parentage
Killian Quigley is a research fellow at Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences.
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Law growing political and economic freedoms were increasingly subjected to the discipline of judges. Female plaintiffs, the vast majority of whom had won their cases in the nineteenth century, began to lose. With twentieth-century women suffering less in a material sense than their Victorian predecessors, due to their ability to work and find another partner without a permanently ruined reputation, the court demanded they prove emotional turmoil sufficient to warrant medical, and legal, intervention. As a result of this shift towards medicalising and pathologising heartbreak, Simmonds identifies a decline in breach of promise suits. She explains how the rise of psychology following World War I influenced discourses surrounding heartbreak as ‘returned soldiers and jilted plaintiffs began to report remarkably similar symptoms’. While the medicalisation of heartbreak assisted some women in their cases, psychological developments and the rise of the counsellor meant that by the 1950s not only were heartbroken women bearing the burden of a relationship’s failure, but legal options for courting couples were broadly frowned upon and women charting this path risked being labelled ‘abnormal’. By the time breach of promise was formally abolished in 1976, many had already moved away from the courtroom and into the offices of counsellors and psychologists to air their wounded
Breaking loose Pioneering rock journalism Des Cowley
Full Coverage: A history of rock journalism in Australia by Samuel J. Fell
I
Monash University Press $36.99 pb, 310 pp
n the film Almost Famous (2000), director Cameron Crowe’s alter ego, fifteen-year-old William Miller, doggedly pursues his dream of breaking into rock journalism. He cold-calls legendary music journalist Lester Bangs (marvellously played by a dishevelled Philip Seymour Hoffman). Next thing we know, he is commissioned by Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres to head out on the road with fictitious band Stillwater to write a story that ends up on the cover of Rolling Stone. If only it were that easy. Rock journalism, in its infancy, was fuelled more by passion than good sense. With few literary models, and virtually zero financial return, it was mostly a case of making it up as you went along, while endeavouring to stay abreast of a fast-evolving field. Music journalist Samuel J. Fell’s Full Coverage: A history of rock journalism in Australia fills a welcome gap in the history of journalism, charting as it does the rise and fall of the local music magazines, along with their founders and contributors, that
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feelings and broken hearts. It was not entirely abandoned – then Labor MP Paul Keating was sued for breach of promise in the early 1970s, with the case later weaponised against him in parliamentary debate – but by 1976, the action’s economic foundations and cultural acceptability had eroded. So, what is it that we can draw from the nearly one thousand cases of breach of promise of marriage over almost two centuries? Simmonds argues that women’s pursuit of such suits produced ‘feminist political subjects’. ‘The women who sued their lovers wielded the suit in profoundly feminist ways,’ she maintains, ‘refusing their victim-status by aggressively prosecuting for economic and emotional injuries suffered, advancing feminist arguments around the labour of care, protesting sexual violence, and demanding an ethics of relationship.’ In Simmond’s masterful management of these women’s poems, scraps of lace, nightgowns, letters, and tears, we find a feminist history of love and the law exposed from within a Victorian relic of female legal victimhood. g Zoe Smith is a PhD candidate in the School of History at ANU. Her research explores cultural and social understandings of domestic violence in Australia’s eastern colonies between 1880 and 1914. ❖
helped shape our perceptions of rock music, and associated genres, in this country. Any history of Australian rock music journalism, by necessity, begins with Go-Set, whose first issue appeared on 2 February 1966. It was a watershed moment, arriving less than two years after the Beatles took Melbourne (and the rest of the world) by storm. Fell’s book highlights the importance of student presses as a breeding ground for new music writing. Both Tony Schauble and Phillip Frazer, two of Go-Set’s founders, were co-editors of Monash University’s student paper Lot’s Wife when they first hatched the idea of a music magazine out of their share house in Malvern. Schauble’s opening editorial set the tone for generational change: ‘Every one of you cats has felt the lash of the Oldies … Now’s the time to really break loose.’ Cringe-inducing, decidedly, but for once Australia got the jump on America: Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason’s Rolling Stone would not appear until a year later, though RS would brandish a counter-cultural maturity to which Go-Set never really aspired. Frazer, who was just nineteen when Go-Set was founded, admits to aiming the magazine at thirteento-nineteen-year-olds, hardly a revolutionary endeavour. Go-Set launched several high-profile careers, including those of writer Lily Brett and Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. What was called for, above all, was enthusiasm, and a talent for hustling. Brett landed her job by offering to work for free, while Meldrum just turned up and began sweeping the office floors. Soon after, Brett and photographer Colin Beard found themselves jetting to London, on a free round-the-world ticket, courtesy of British Airways. They landed in San Francisco in time for the Monterey Pop Festival, and sent back regular bulletins – interviews with musicians, updates on the latest hippie fashions – throughout their seven-month adventure. Australian readers, instead of
Music waiting months for postal deliveries of UK magazines like Melody Maker, suddenly found themselves ahead of the curve. Many of the stories surrounding Go-Set have since assumed mythical proportions, and Fell’s account by and large recycles the bare bones of this corpus. Once he arrives at the 1970s, however, he is, for the most part, in uncharted territory. The decade was kick-started by Michael Gudinski and Michael Browning’s Daily Planet (later Planet), launched in 1971. Though it proved to be short-lived, the magazine’s increased focus on rock music over pop, more aligned with Wenner’s Rolling Stone, helped sow the seeds of a genuine alternative music press. In the lead-up to Gough Whitlam’s grand cultural shake-up, the lines between underground and music press were distinctly blurred, with magazines such as Revolution and Digger – featuring as much social commentary as music – briefly flourishing. They would provide much needed outlets for a crop of new writers, including Helen Garner. The period also spawned the Australian edition of Rolling Stone, which began life as a four-page insert in Phillip Frazer’s short-lived Revolution, before morphing, in January 1972, into a stand-alone magazine. Hard to credit, but by the dawn of 1975, following Go-Set’s demise, Australia found itself, for the first time in a decade, without a dedicated music magazine (the sole survivor, Rolling Stone, was predominantly recycling pieces from its American counterpart). From these ill-fated ventures would emerge what Fell christens ‘the golden era’ of the rock press, beginning with Anthony O’Grady’s Rock Australia Magazine (RAM), launched in Sydney in March 1975. The magazine nurtured a pool of talented writers, emboldened by the new journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, and UK music journalists like Nick Kent. While advertising revenue was, at first, in short supply, O’Grady’s policy of commissioning long-form pieces paid off, breeding a generation of committed music journalists – many still with us – such as Stuart Coupe, Clinton Walker, Annie Burton, Glenn A. Baker, Jen Jewel Brown, Mark Mordue, and Andrew McMillan. What is more, they were paid – and handsomely – for their efforts. Not content to be left behind, Melbourne hit back with Juke, founded by Ed Nimmervoll, appearing barely two months after RAM. After a few fumbles, it was taken over by Fairfax, ensuring both national circulation and long-term financial survival, but at the same time hastening the corporatisation of the music press. While arguments still rage as to which magazine had more
cultural cachet, many writers took advantage of the good times, moonlighting for both. Fell’s story of the rapid rise of the street press in the late 1980s and 1990s goes some way to mapping a field long mired in bibliographic turmoil, unsurprising given that most issues were destined for the recycling bin within days of publication. No one saw it coming: the idea of music magazines that were free to the public, funded by numerous cheap ads. Instead of requiring readers to visit their newsagent, street presses went to where readers already were: record stores, cafés, pubs, cinemas. As advertising money poured in, new titles sprang up, specialising in localised content, and exploiting mostly novice writers, who were paid little, if anything. The spectacular success of street magazines like Offbeat and Inpress spelt the end of the golden age of music journalism. Both RAM and Juke were gone by the early 1990s, though Tony Creswell’s Juice bucked the trend, appearing until 2003. The good times, of course, could never last. The advertising dollars that street presses thrived on – particularly from the burgeoning dance scene – were slowly whittled away by the onset of digital media. Venues and bands simply took to Facebook and Instagram, targeting their own communities, cutting out the intermediary. As Fell notes, those few print music magazines that have survived, such as Rhythms and Guitar Australia, have done so by tailoring content to niche audiences, generally selling via subscription. As for the rest? The bulk of Australian music coverage now exists online, decentralised, driven by algorithms, a counterpart to today’s consumer-driven network of music streaming platforms. Samuel J. Fell, ever the journalist, has largely drawn his account from interviews with editors, publishers, and writers. If archives exist for these publications, they are not mentioned. His book, pitched at a popular rather than an academic readership, would have been aided by an index and a separate checklist of key magazines, and dates. Despite these blemishes, Fell’s history of the Australian rock music press makes for riveting reading, a tale in which raw passion and financial imperatives are fractiously intertwined, yet out of which flourished a thriving, independent culture of music journalism. g Des Cowley writes about music for Australian Book Review, Rhythms, Dingo, and other journals.
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www.australianbookreview.com.au A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 53
Commentary
Warts and all
New forms of political interference in official histories
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by Peter Edwards
ell-informed debate on national security, never more important than now, depends on reliable accounts of historical episodes, ones not distorted by latter-day political or diplomatic sensitivities. For more than a century, Australians have benefited from a tradition of official histories of the nation’s involvement in conflicts and peacekeeping operations, for which governments of all persuasions have given independent historians access to all relevant official records, publishing their works without political or diplomatic censorship. Since C.E.W. Bean was commissioned to create the twelvevolume official history of Australia’s involvement in World War I (1920–42) Australians have generally accepted that official historians present as full and fair an account as possible, without being obliged to a follow a partisan or governmental line. For their part, governments have usually accepted that independent ‘warts and all’ accounts are not only more credible but also more useful than those constrained by an official line. Two recent episodes have called this tradition into question. Publication of an official history of Australian operations in the East Timor crisis of 1999, Born of Fire and Ash, was delayed for three years by the clearance process conducted by government agencies, principally the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). When the volume was finally published in late 2022, those agencies pointedly declined to give it an official launch or to promote it in the way that governments had previous official history volumes. Secondly, after decades of clothing its signals intelligence (sigint) activities in secrecy, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has been the subject of the almost simultaneous publication of both a volume of ‘official history’ and another which pointedly declares itself an ‘unofficial history’. These matters, and their backstories, may seem relatively minor, but warrant attention to prevent them from becoming harbingers of more serious infractions. The first two official war history series, Bean’s on World War I and Gavin Long’s on World War II (1952–77), covered military operations in considerable detail, as well as Australian domestic politics and medical aspects, but included only limited coverage of higher strategic decisions. In the 1980s, Robert O’Neill, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the Korean War of 1950–53, realised that the strategic and diplomatic aspects of Australia’s commitment were at least as important as the military operations. With governmental approval, he divided the history into two volumes, one on strategy and diplomacy (including the origins of the ANZUS Treaty) and the other on operations. O’Neill, who died in April, was the author of both volumes, whereas the earlier and subsequent official war historians wrote some but not all the volumes in their 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
respective series. Notwithstanding this expansion into sensitive international relations, governments continued to respect the principles of unrestricted access to all relevant sources and publication without official or political censorship. The texts of each volume were submitted to the relevant departments – Prime Minister and Cabinet, Defence and Foreign Affairs – but the only material that official agencies could withhold was information not yet released by a foreign government or anything that might reveal intelligence ‘sources and methods’. Shortly after the strategic-diplomatic volume of O’Neill’s history was published, I was appointed Australia’s fourth official war historian. The series was originally designated to cover Australia’s involvement in the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) and the Vietnam War, but for some years governments refused to include Konfrontasi, the IndonesianMalaysian Confrontation of 1963–66. This commitment, too often overlooked, was important both in its own right and as a significant part of Australia’s Vietnam story. The exclusion of Confrontation was not to cover up a failure. On the contrary, the commitment was handled with greater political, diplomatic, and military skill than the Vietnam War and had a more successful outcome. As a hint of what was to come, some agencies seemed to regard anything to do with Australian-Indonesian relations as too sensitive to discuss publicly, but at least governments consistently maintained an ‘all or nothing’ approach. At first, Confrontation was completely excluded from the Malaya-Vietnam history, rather than allowing only an incomplete or censored account. When the decision was reversed and Confrontation included, the principles governing access and censorship were faithfully applied. The Cabinet minute appointing David Horner as official historian of a fifth series, covering peacekeeping and postCold War operations, indicated that the same conditions of unrestricted access and absence of censorship would apply. DFAT, however, objected to Horner’s reference in one volume to the political and military struggle in Cambodia in 1997, which led to Hun Sen’s complete dominance, as a ‘coup’. This was the term used by United Nations and other authorities but, in what appears to have been a ‘pre-emptive buckle’, DFAT tried to prevent its publication. Horner’s vigorous insistence on his independence led to DFAT’s being reminded that, under the Cabinet authority, diplomatic sensitivity was not a valid reason for such censorship. The reference to a coup survived. From his appointment in 2015 as the official historian of a sixth series, on military and peacekeeping operations in Timor, Iraq, and Afghanistan, Craig Stockings was determined to maintain the traditions established by his predecessors, ensuring that the strategic and diplomatic context of Australian operations was described and that the volumes were
Commentary published without official or political censorship, withholding only matters of genuine national security. Accordingly, the first half of Born of Fire and Ash, the first volume in the series, recounts in comprehensive detail how the longstanding policy of Australian politicians and officials, to maintain the closest possible relations with the authorities in Indonesia, came into conflict with Australian public opinion, which reacted to evidence of Indonesian atrocities by turning with unexpected speed and strength towards support for the Timorese independence movement. Much of this has long been known and recounted in Australian as well as other international accounts. Nevertheless, DFAT for three years sought to withhold from publication all or most of that section. According to Stockings, the objection was based not on genuine national security grounds, but on the possibility of diplomatic or political embarrassment. When the book was finally published in a form acceptable to Stockings, DFAT neither launched nor promoted it. It is disappointing that DFAT, which for fifty years has done much to encourage well-informed discussion on past and contemporary Australian foreign policy, has appeared in recent years to see its primary role as to protect current ministerial interests and to implement the policies that emerge from the Prime Minister’s Office and other agencies. For many observers, the nadir of this process was the appointment as departmental head of Kathryn Campbell, the public servant heavily criticised in the Robodebt royal commission, but that appointment followed years of gradual erosion of the department’s stature and policymaking role, which the current minister, Penny Wong, is clearly seeking to redress. On the other hand, it is pleasing to note that the Australian War Memorial, the subject of much criticism in recent years over its costly expansion, its coverage of the Frontier Wars, and its representation of alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, was on the side of the angels in this controversy. In his foreword to Born of Fire and Ash and in his public presentations, Stockings has consistently expressed gratitude for the unwavering support he received from successive Directors and Councils of the AWM. This culminated in an event in March 2023, a substitute for the launch that DFAT had declined to present. Since then, Stockings has discussed the book, and the attempt to censor it, on prominent platforms, ranging from Phillip Adams’s Late Night Live on Radio National to Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute, and his ‘fiery history’ has received a long, glowing review in a leading foreign policy journal. The attempt to censor the history has succeeded only in drawing more attention to the subject. At the function in March, the AWM Director, Matt Anderson, affirmed that the post of official historian is an important national position, appointed by Cabinet. This marks a significant difference from another category of books about national security agencies which are sometimes designated as official histories, but more appropriately as authorised histories. These authorised histories are not initiated by a Cabinet decision but by a single agency, which retains much greater rights over what does and does not get published.
Historians (including this writer) engaged by departments or agencies to write historical accounts invariably urge their sponsors to recognise that granting the greatest possible access to records and freedom of publication is in the agencies’ own best interests: a balanced and candid account carries more credibility than ‘an inside job’. In most cases, the historians are pushing on an open door, but if there is any dispute they cannot cite a Cabinet minute as a defence against departmental constraints. In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, several intelligence agencies have commissioned histories as part of a concerted effort to restore and maintain public trust, especially after the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. In 2019, the head of the Australian Signals Directorate, Mike Burgess, commissioned John Blaxland to prepare a two-volume official history. When Burgess moved to ASIO in 2020, his successor, Rachel Noble, terminated Blaxland’s contract and commissioned a former ‘siginter’, John Fahey, to prepare a two-volume history. Noble later told a parliamentary committee that she had cancelled Blaxland’s appointment not for national security reasons but because the draft chapters of his first volume devoted too much space to the early history of cryptography rather than to Australian signals intelligence. Blaxland and his co-author, Clare Birgin, were given permission to retain and publish what they had researched and written on the period to 1945, but could only complete the work from public sources. The result is the ‘unofficial history’ Revealing Secrets (NewSouth, 2023), which has received glowing endorsements from respected figures, positive reviews, and prominent articles and presentations by the co-authors. By contrast, The Factory (Allen & Unwin, 2023), the first volume of the official history, has the air of an ‘inside job’ and has received little public attention. Commentators on political scandals have often observed that the attempted cover-up does more damage than the original wrongdoing. Something similar is the case with official or authorised histories. Attempts to control the narrative for political or diplomatic reasons not only contravene established and valuable principles; they are more likely than not to be counter-productive, attracting more attention to the subject of controversy. Whether DFAT and other agencies have learned those lessons will be tested by later volumes in Stockings’ series, on Australian operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially in their coverage of the political and diplomatic context of those controversial commitments. g Peter Edwards is the official historian of Australia’s involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–75 and author of the volumes on political, strategic, and diplomatic aspects, Crises and Commitments (1992) and A Nation at War (1997). He has also worked as author, co-author, editor, or co-editor on publications authorised or supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs/Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Defence, and the Office of National Assessments. This article is one of a series of ABR commentaries on cultural and political subjects being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Endnotes appear in the online version of this article. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 55
Music
Music’s solar plexus A guide for the Schoenberg-curious Malcolm Gillies
Schoenberg: Why he matters by Harvey Sachs
A
Liveright US$29.95 hb, 268 pp
rnold Schoenberg rarely missed a punch. Whether in music theory, composition, or the fraught polemics of his age, he communicated with a clarity of purpose verging on the tyrannical. Visiting Schoenberg in California during his last years, the conductor Robert Craft commented on ‘the danger of crossing the circle of his pride, for though his humility is fathomless it is also plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel’. Harvey Sachs is worried that music lovers of the twenty-first century are failing to appreciate the continuing significance of the composer despite,or perhaps because of,this armour-plating.Addressed to the musical ‘layman’, Sachs’s ‘interpretive study’ is a passionate, occasionally self-doubting essay intended to demonstrate why Schoenberg still matters. Schoenberg’s five chapters follow a chronological track, attempting to account for most of the fifty-odd opuses of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, within a rich context of his life’s turbulent course. His chapter titles dramatically reflect the struggle – battle lines, war, breakthrough, and breakaway – of both his life and his works. Sachs popularises, refreshes, and sometimes refutes the stainless-steel images passed down in the sanctioned texts of musicology, many written by Schoenberg’s acolytes. His account of the music naturally pays particular attention to two stylistic turns for which Schoenberg is renowned: his move around 1907–8 from the ultra-chromatic tonality of late Romanticism to ‘beyond tonality’, where, as the composer stated, ‘the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key’; and in the early 1920s when he moved to regulate this new atonality through orderly ‘composing with twelve tones’, often known as serialism. These are difficult concepts for Sachs’s layman to understand, let alone musically to enjoy, and Sachs tries to find the simplest possible explanations. His commentaries on the First Chamber Symphony (Op. 9, 1906) and Pierrot Lunaire (Op. 21, 1912), for instance, portray innovative compositional techniques as well as their aural and social reception. This helps the reader to understand why Igor Stravinsky, then companionable enough to Schoenberg, heralded Pierrot as ‘the solar plexus as well as the mind of early twentieth-century music’. Unfortunately, many other work commentaries read as hurried program notes, and some swaths of the output are largely overflown: Opp. 25-29 (1921–26) and the final Opp. 47–50c (1949–51). But he frequently lightens the reader’s burden with asides outlining his own struggles in comprehension or why he favours some recordings 56 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
over others. Sachs also gives good coverage to several substantial but incomplete works, such as the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter ( Jacob’s Ladder) and the opera Moses und Aaron. But he wisely warns that he is ‘Schoenberg-curious’ and a storyteller, rather than an analytical expert. Sachs’s account of Schoenberg’s life, sandwiched between these many work commentaries, draws particular attention to his Jewish to Lutheran conversion, then, in 1933, his Jewish reconversion and its effect upon his compositions, libretti, essays, and public stances. It also nicely sketches the different types of lives he was forced to live, across two marriages and different friendship groups, in Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. A recurring theme in all venues is his career’s dedication to teaching, resulting in half a dozen stunningly perceptive music theory books (‘I have learned this book from my pupils,’ Schoenberg once confessed) and an unparalleled list of famous alumni: composers (including Alban Berg, Anton Webern, John Cage), performers (violinist Rudolf Kolisch, pianists Rudolf Serkin and Eduard Steuermann), musicologists (Paul Pisk, Josef Rufer), and even baseball legend Jackie Robinson. Indeed, it was Sibelius who cheekily suggested that Schoenberg’s greatest works were his students. It is a pity that Sachs makes scant reference to the compendium Style and Idea (1950), where Schoenberg’s conceptual brilliance and verbal acuity speak volumes. So, having read Sachs’s five works-amid-life chapters, why does Schoenberg matter? In his short Prologue, Sachs expresses dismay at the dwindling performances of Schoenberg’s works, and asserts his belief that despite Schoenberg’s ‘thorny’ character and works, he ‘must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, the present, and the future of Western art music’. When reaching his seventeen-page Epilogue, ‘What Now?’, any reader will be unsure exactly where Sachs’s proposition stands. The book’s overwhelming message has been that most listeners, including professional musicians, did not, do not, and probably never will appreciate Schoenberg’s music, especially his atonal and serial works. The barrier lies in connecting understanding of music’s inner workings to what listeners are hearing. ‘This is perfectly reasonable,’ comments Sachs. The final pages of his Epilogue climb down from his Prologue’s bold assertion. Sachs acknowledges that many of Schoenberg’s works ‘require repeated hearings and a great deal of focus, which most listeners haven’t the time or the desire to dedicate to them’. At most, he concludes, the gems of Schoenberg’s various periods ‘deserve the attention of any serious music lover’. My problem with Sachs’s proposition, both in the Prologue’s assertive form and the Epilogue’s deserving form, starts with his opening observation that Schoenberg’s works are not much programmed these days. This is made on the basis of a ‘random glance’ (Sachs’s words) at one recent season’s programming across six major orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic. It needed much more investigation, and a much broader sample space, to elicit any conviction. His own difficulties in appreciating much of Schoenberg’s later output, and anecdotes about problems of memorising his music, are not necessarily shared by a younger, often more proficient community of musicians and music lovers, now spread virtually across the world. His opening pessimism is, I feel, misplaced. Schoenberg’s music lives. His theoretical ideas flourish. Sachs’s book can only encourage the zeal of many, who will still opt to be ‘confronted’ by Schoenberg’s many challenges, and disprove his ‘random glance’. g
Category
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Survey
Arts Highlights of 2023
Ian Dickson
Belvoir is ending the year on a roll. In Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, Zahra Newman – directed by Mitchell Butel and ably backed by Kym Purling, Victor Rounds, and Calvin Welch – gave us a disintegrating Billie Holiday and turned Lanie Robertson’s mediocre play into a poignant tragedy (Lady Day was reviewed in ABR Arts, September 2023). This was followed by Eamon Flack’s rollicking, genre-busting version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (ABR Arts, 11/23). Flack cleverly juxtaposed the events in the novel with the terrifying background against which it was written. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s season also closed with a bang. Simone Young conducted an in-form band and a uniformly strong cast in a concert version of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, which had its audience avid for the next three operas in her Ring Cycle. Earlier in the year, Musica Viva’s Paul Kildea took John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, enlisted the composer and sound artist Matthias Schack-Arnott to create and light a sculpture that rotated as Cédric Tiberghien played, and provided an experience that had an extraordinary, almost spiritual effect on the audience.
Robyn Archer
In the wake of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s untimely death in March 2023, Shiro Takatani (member of the company Dumb Type, which has graced a number of Australian festivals) created a new version, async – immersion 2023, of his collaboration with Sakamoto. Specifically designed for the vast dark industrial basement of the Shinbun Kyoto building in this year’s Ambient Kyoto, and blending Sakamoto’s music in exquisite three-dimensional sound with Takatani’s seemingly endless sequence of images (including landscape, library, seascape, Sakamoto’s work tools and a piano wrecked by the 2011 tsunami, which reignited Sakamoto’s anti-nuclear activism) and their digital manipulation, this work exemplifies everything that a massive screen-based immersion can achieve: 58 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
meditative, reflective, technically faultless. In the ninety minutes I spent there, only one image was repeated and then in different format: I could have stayed there all day.
Diane Stubbings
Trophy Boys (fortyfivedownstairs), a play about male toxicity in a high-school debating team, was independent theatre at its best. Written by Emmanuelle Mattana and directed by Marni Mount, the play’s sexual politics may have been simplistic, but it had a vitality that few of Melbourne’s mainstage productions could muster. Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre, a video installation at the National Gallery of Victoria which juxtaposed the extraordinary beauty of the Amazon rainforest with its seemingly inexorable destruction, was transformative. So too Jonathan Glazer’s unflinching perspective on the enablers of the Holocaust in his film The Zone of Interest (ABR Arts, 11/23). For the duration of its four short minutes, The Beatles’ ‘Now and Then’ moves you through a kaleidoscope of long-lost emotions. The cadences of Lennon’s vocals, the supporting strains of McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, are both immediate and hauntingly remote. While some might question the song’s musical qualities, there are few who won’t remember it as a watershed moment in the synthesis of AI and the arts.
Peter Rose
For consistency of singing, for dramatic cohesion, for nononsense directorial vision, and for sheer chutzpah, Melbourne Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle (ABR Arts, 3/23), performed in Bendigo (without state government support, shamingly), was a clear highlight – pound for pound the finest Ring I have seen in Australia. Meanwhile, the national company remained on mute in Melbourne. In Sydney, Opera Australia presented La Gioconda in concert, a welcome reminder of the riches in Ponchielli’s oftenmaligned opera (ABR Arts, 8/23). Ludovic Tézier stole
Survey the show – a masterclass for baritones. October took us to Europe for ABR’s Vienna tour, the highlight of which was Strauss’s magnificent, preposterous opera Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Vienna State Opera, superbly conducted by Christian Thielemann (ABR Arts, 10/23). Simone Lamsma was an inspired soloist in Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Wiener Symphoniker, under Jaap van Zweden (ABR Arts, 10/23). Earlier, the great Maxim Vengerov tore down the Concertgebuow with a mighty rendition of Brahms’s Violin Concerto (ABR Arts, 10/23).
played Mozart to David Suchet’s Salieri was now the older jealous composer, burning with resentment at the youngster’s genius. The costumes, by Romance Was Born, were garishly Sydney while still being quite eighteenth century. But the highlight was that the production contained musicians from the Metropolitan Orchestra. Most productions of Amadeus have relied on recorded music. It was a rare treat indeed to test the new acoustics of the renovated Concert Hall, with snippets of Mozart as part of a big and joyfully bombastic theatrical production.
Julie Ewington
Andrew Ford
Notes from a year when Australia’s increasingly complex social and cultural dialogues were manifested in generous projects exploring difference and community. Among the best: Between Waves, the third Yalingwa exhibition of First Nations artists at ACCA, Melbourne, ‘shining a light on our times’: beautiful, limpid, intelligent. Wonderful solo outings include the (overdue) institutional exhibition for Newell Harry, subtitled Esperanto, at MAMA, Albury; Iranian-Australian Hoda Afshar’s exceptional photographs and videos at AGNSW (until 21 January 2024); and Camille Laddawan, at Sydney’s Australian Design Centre, currently showing exquisite small weavings with glass beads that chart the diverse inheritances of her unborn child. Further afield, a first visit to M+, Hong Kong’s brilliant global museum of contemporary art, film, design, and popular culture. M+ is engaging, expansive, a conduit between peoples and cultures; half the visitors are from mainland China, and clearly they are captivated. Finally, a lifetime wish fulfilled: Matisse’s luminous Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, near Nice. Wonderful in any year.
I heard both the Alma Moody Quartet and the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra live for the first time (ABR Arts, 8/23). The former played Ligeti, the latter Mendelssohn, and both delivered revelations. Mendelssohn’s Scottish symphony seemed more a masterpiece than ever. Hoda Afshar’s photographs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (A Curve is a Broken Line) took my breath away. I walked into the room of giant black-and-white photographs
Malcolm Gillies
The Vision String Quartet, which toured in September– October for Musica Viva, was just fantastic. This young ensemble from Berlin directly fronted its audience. How? By playing its programs entirely from memory. Gone were rickety music stands, or even sleek iPads. Their Fourth Quartet of Bartók was technically brilliant, appropriately stylish, and gripping. Another showcase of youthful talent was the Sydney International Piano Competition’s romp, from opening gala to grand-final culmination (ABR Arts, 7/23). This was the first fully staged Competition in seven years; the reincarnation was broadcast online under the management of Piano-Plus. In fact, 2023 was the year of growing market penetration of digital concert halls, purveying specialist, regional, community, and youth arts like never before. No longer, it appears, does quality music need to be geared to high-paying ‘urban élites’. As university students have deserted draughty lecture halls, are our concert highlights also now best found in the cloud?
Clare Monagle
In January 2023, I saw the Red Line production of Amadeus at the Sydney Opera House and I’m still pinching myself that I experienced its sheer Sydney splendidness (ABR Arts, 12/22). Every element was exciting. Michael Sheen was the iconic star of the stage I had hoped for. The actor who had once
Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss in The Zone of Interest (A24)
of hair-braiding and doves, and felt utterly elated. Turn Every Page, a film about biographer writer Robert Caro (The Power Broker, The Years of Lyndon Johnson) and editor Robert Gottlieb, ought to be impossibly dry, but, lovingly directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, it’s my film of the year. I watched it flying to England, then flying back, and twice more since. I have told everyone I know they should watch it, too; I’m not sure they always believe me.
Felicity Chaplin
Watching Alice Rohrwacher’s mesmerising The Wonders under the stars on a balmy July night in Florence at the open-air Apriti Cinema in the Piazzale degli Uffizi. Greatly anticipating and then seeing her next film, La Chimera (ABR Arts, 9/23), which completed her trilogy including The Wonders and Lazzaro Felice, all set in her homeland of central Italy and A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 59
Survey all shot with poetic febrility and technical imperfection by Hélène Louvart. MIFF’s impressive program also included the following outstanding films by women: Marie Amachoukeli’s tender, delicate, and inventive Àma Gloria; Justine Triet’s suspenseful courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall, an enthralling dissection of marital intimacy with the masterful Sandra Hüller in the lead role; and Alice Englert’s feature film début, the astutely observed black comedy Bad Behaviour, starring Ben Whishaw and the brilliant (and underrated) Jennifer Connelly, followed by an engrossing late-night Q&A with the director.
from her choreographic back-catalogue (‘21 works, 21 dancers, 21 years in the making’) – had dancers tumbling gracefully across ACCA’s cavernous interior. The most compelling bodies, however, were the brooding figures set in post-apocalyptic environments envisioned by Peter Booth. A spectacular survey at TarraWarra Museum of Art assembled paintings and drawings produced over four decades, collectively creating a mood of nightmarishness and angst. Icy landscapes set aflame against leaden nocturnal skies were the harsh backdrops for despondent, often grotesque, figures trudging through a sepulchral world.
Des Cowley
Michael Shmith
Saxophonist Adam Simmons and Italian pianist Alessandra Garosi delivered an outstanding recital – brimming with masterful improvisation – at Tempo Rubato, freely interpreting Italian composer Damiano Santini’s extended suite Zodiac. The evening felt bittersweet, as Simmons announced his retirement from professional playing. Trumpeter Reuben Lewis’s solo performance at the Primrose Potter Salon proved thoroughly hypnotic, his ambient soundscapes elevated by the presence of dancer Tony Yap. And on a balmy Cup Eve, Nick Tsiavos entered the intimate confines of the La Mama Courthouse, in Carlton, to play his extended piece for solo bass Maps for Losing Oneself, at once austere, timeless, and searingly beautiful. Lastly, the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative’s fortieth-anniversary concert at the Melbourne Recital Centre in May – featuring performances by Mike Nock, Vanessa Perica, Sandy Evans, Paul Grabowsky, Andrea Keller, and dozens more – marked a genuine milestone, celebrating contemporary Australian jazz, along with the indefatigable efforts of its founder Martin Jackson (ABR Arts, 5/23).
Tim Byrne
Post-Covid, the performing arts are struggling to fully recover – with the greatest devastation wrought on the independent sector. Perhaps this is why the best shows this year came from our larger companies, and one small company that went large. Nikki Shiels brought the flinty, firebrand arts patron Sunday Reed to glimmering life in Anthony Weigh’s thoughtful, incisive three-hander, Sunday, for MTC. David Hallberg put his mark on the Australian Ballet with a glorious Swan Lake, sumptuous and deeply symbolic. His pairing of Benedicte Bemet with Joseph Caley is a triumphant one for the ages. And Melbourne Opera delivered Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bendigo, epic and intimate. Suzanne Chaundy’s direction was clarion and her singers, led by Warwick Fyfe and Antoinette Halloran, superb. It made the heart swell with pride.
Sophie Knezic
Bare bodies – animated by choreographic contortions or the more understated gestures of intimacy and repose – characterised several contemporary exhibitions this year. Paul Knight’s ongoing photographic series Chamber Music (exhibited in L’ombre de ton ombre at MUMA), documenting intimate life with his long-term partner, exuded a post-coital tenderness, while Lucy Guerin’s NEWRETRO – excerpts 60 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
For a few weeks in March and April, Bendigo became the Bayreuth of the Great Southern Land. To all those who made the pilgrimage to the Ulumbarra Theatre, Melbourne Opera’s first complete production of Der Ring des Nibelungen was a worthy and engrossing experience. Through Anthony Negus’s superbly controlled and paced conducting and Suzanne Chaundy’s straightforward and vividly telling production, Wagner’s tetralogy did not seem a second too long; rather, it emerged as a true festival piece in which the days between the operas were, like the silences in music, periods of reflection and anticipation. I was at the second of the three cycles. Especially distinguished performances were Warwick Fyfe’s lyrical and bellicose Wotan, and Bradley Daley’s untiring Siegfried, whose sweetness and strength of tone reminded me uncannily of the great Heldentenor Siegfried Jerusalem, who happened to be sitting next to me. What next for Melbourne Opera and Bendigo? Maybe Die Meistersinger?
Jordan Prosser
In a year beset by grim omens for the entertainment industry, including not one but two Hollywood strikes, the Melbourne International Film Festival once again proved an oasis in a desert of shifting release schedules and lacklustre streaming content. Two films stood out. In Anatomy of a Fall, the Palme d’Or-winning French courtroom drama from director Justine Triet, a steely Sandra Hüller plays an author accused of murdering her husband, leading to a gruelling forensic examination of her marriage. And in May December, Todd Haynes’s gleefully murky melodrama, Natalie Portman plays a ruthless actress studying every move and mannerism of Julianne Moore’s soft-spoken matriarch, who became infamous twenty years earlier for her tabloid romance with a thirteenyear-old boy. Portman and Moore are in career-best form, but the real revelation here is Riverdale’s Charles Melton as the now-grown husband, sending his own children off to college when he himself was robbed of a normal adolescence.
John Allison
Problematic at the best of times, Prokofiev’s War and Peace (ABR Arts, 7/23) is a powerful if ramshackle opera with roots in Stalin’s propaganda ministry. Now, in far from the best of times, the Bayerische Staatsoper must have wondered whether its long-standing plan to stage it was wise, but the company
Survey and the work itself were vindicated when the conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Dmitri Tcherniakov – both Russians living abroad, both critics of Putin’s regime – teamed up and, with a large cast drawn across the states of the former USSR, delivered the most blazingly brilliant operatic performance of the year. Not far behind it in terms of epic power was Lydia Steier’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Grand Théâtre de Genève – set in a modern totalitarian state, sung in French (of course), and the fullest text I’ve encountered in the theatre. With an outstanding cast and conducted by Marc Minkowski, every minute blazed with musico-dramatic intensity.
Ben Brooker
Two extraordinary women, one young, one old, were behind the work which most uplifted my sprits in a year that too often confirmed the worst of humanity. On the one hand were three productions written by Caryl Churchill – Patalog Theatre’s Far Away at fortyfivedownstairs (ABR Arts, 7/23) and the double-bill of Escaped Alone and What If If Only at MTC (ABR Arts, 8/23). All three affirmed the now eightyfive-year-old British playwright as perhaps the most vital of her generation, an experimentalist but a humanist at heart, raking through darkness in search of light. On the other hand, the mixed bag that was this year’s Rising Festival at least delivered my musical highlight of 2023 in the form of a breathtaking show by American singersongwriter Weyes Blood at the Forum. Touring her superb new album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, Blood stunned the packed house with her sublime chamber pop and Linda Ronstadt-esque vocal prowess.
Michael Halliwell
The Tales of Hoffmann (ABR Arts, 7/23) was a brilliantly quirky staging by an Italian creative team, the vocal highlight being soprano Jessica Pratt. Rounding out the year was polymath William Kentridge’s heartwarming contemporary take on the Cumaean Sibyl myth with an energetic cast of South African singers and dancers: Waiting for the Sibyl (ABR Arts, 11/23).
Peter Tregear
My two highlights were encounters with the very small and the very large. The latter was Melbourne Opera’s presentation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Bendigo, a mammoth logistical and artistic challenge admirably and successfully undertaken by a company that operates without government subsidy. An effective, narrative-driven staging from director Suzanne Chaundy and designer Andrew Bailey, was well supported by conductors Anthony Negus and David Kram, and by an excellent all-Australian cast. Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre also proved to be a superb venue for this imposing festival of music drama. The former was the NGV’s Rembrandt: True to Life exhibition (ABR Arts, 7/23). Nothing immediately grandiose about the works on display here, many of which were also very small – but they packed a punch. Kudos to curator Petra Kayser for allowing them to bear witness to the artist’s technical and aesthetic brilliance, and his history and humanity.
Man in oriental clothing, 1635 by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Gift of Mr and Mrs Kessler-Hülsmann, Kapelle op den Bosch, photograph credit Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
My highlight was the outstanding production by the Bavarian State Opera of Sergei Prokofiev’s large-scale opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It is a troubling work, particularly with the war in Ukraine not far away, but the Russian team of conductor Vladimir Jurowski and director Dimitri Tcherniakov unflinchingly confronted the Zeitgeist with a setting comprising refugees who ‘play act’ the events of the opera, thus distancing the most offensive Stalinist elements in the opera. A brilliant young cast, led by a Ukrainian soprano and Russian baritone as Natasha and Andrei, did full justice to the work. Opera Australia’s co-production of Offenbach’s
Graham Strahle
Simon Trpčeski’s piano recital in November was for me the year’s most exhilarating concert in Adelaide. This Macedonian pianist played at the level of freeflowing inspiration and daring one felt lucky to witness. His Mozart was wickedly effervescent and cheeky, his Tchaikovsky almost unbearably passionate (the ‘Pas de Deux’ from Nutcracker brought tears to many an eye), and his Prokofiev frankly held one in disbelief by its stupendous roar of virtuosity. This makes it two in a row for Guy Barrett’s Harris International Piano Series, following Robyn Archer’s praise for Jean-Efflam Bavouzet last year, in the same series. Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI similarly exceeded themselves at Ukaria in February. Despite a string breaking on Jordi’s treble viol, this esteemed Spanish group turned in its most rapturous consortplaying one could remember, highlighted by gorgeous solo dancing from one of its players, Lixsania Fernández. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4 61
Interview
Backstage with Cameron Lukey
Cameron Lukey is an Australian producer whose credits include acclaimed productions of 33 Variations at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2019 (starring Ellen Burstyn) and Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017. He began his career as an opera singer and joined the team at fortyfivedownstairs in 2016. He was appointed Artistic Director of the theatre in 2023.
What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?
Seeing Maggie Smith in Bed Among the Lentils by Alan Bennett in my teens (this was in Sydney). It was the first time I had experienced that kind of star stage presence.
When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself ?
My third-grade teacher, Mr Elliot, got the class to perform Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat for a local eisteddfod. I desperately wanted to play Potiphar, so I campaigned for the role during lunch breaks when he was on playground duty. He caved, and I can’t really remember wanting to do anything outside of the arts since.
What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?
Audra McDonald singing with the Sydney Symphony. I sat in the middle of the front row at the Opera House concert hall, and her voice just blew me away. Angela Lansbury in Driving Miss Daisy and Robyn Nevin in August: Osage County also stand out in my mind.
Name three performers you would like to work with?
Name a grande dame and chances are I’d kill to work with her.
Do you have a favourite song?
I don’t really have a favourite song to listen to, but my favourite song to sing during my brief stint as a performer was ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ by Gerald Finzi.
And your favourite play or opera?
Turandot. I was lucky enough to catch a general rehearsal of Franco Zefferelli’s production at the Metropolitan Opera in 2012. The finale was complete sensory overload – Puccini’s incredible score, the Met’s massive chorus joined on stage by dozens of dancers twirling ribbons, gold confetti raining down. My favourite play would be Angels in America.
Who is your favourite writer and favourite composer? I think the writer who had the biggest influence on me was Roald Dahl. I was obsessed as a kid, and my copies of his books were all in tatters. My favourite composer would be a toss-up between Gustav Mahler, Samuel Barber, and Stephen Sondheim. I also love the film scores of Philip Glass and Thomas Newman.
How do you regard the audience?
They’re like a drug. The high – when they’re buying tickets and loving the show. The comedown – when they’re not. 62 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
What’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia? Bias aside, I really do think fortyfivedownstairs is the most beautiful venue I’ve ever produced in. I’m also a fan of the Fairfax Studio at Arts Centre Melbourne.
What do you look for in arts critics?
I appreciate it when a critic takes the response of the audience around them into account, especially if it differs from their own. I remember one instance where a critic was the only person who didn’t take part in a full standing ovation and then wrote a review that made it sound like no one could enjoy the show. That irked me.
Do you read your own reviews?
I think as a producer, you have to! I’m certainly guilty of clicking refresh a few too many times until certain reviews come up online.
Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult or wonderful in Australia?
Difficult? That the ceiling is lower here than in many parts of the world in terms of audience size and overall respect for the arts. Wonderful? That despite this, we still produce so many committed, persistent, talented artists.
What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists? I’m not sure about the single biggest action, but the biggest aim should be to encourage a higher regard for the arts, because I think the most valuable thing would be for a larger percentage of the population to not just engage with the arts but to regard them as vital.
What advice would you give an aspiring artist?
Find people whose opinions you trust and give them your focus. Don’t seek the opinions of those you don’t really rate just for validation. It’ll backfire.
What’s the best advice you have ever received?
An established producer told me that when you are trying to get a project off the ground, you should let it go as soon as you face resistance. That seemed so counter-intuitive to me. I’ve always believed you need to push and fight to make things happen. Now I understand where they are coming from.
What’s your next project or performance?
I am producing the Australian première of the multi-awardwinning two-part epic The Inheritance by Matthew Lopez, based on E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. It’s a beautiful play that I devoured in one sitting, and it felt like it’d be a lovely bookend to the 2017 production of Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs. g
Theatre
An uncertain relocation
Andrew Upton Australianises Chekhov’s classic Clare Monagle
Markus Hamilton and Megan Wilding in Sydney Theatre Company’s The Seagull (photograph by Prudence Upton)
T
he setting is a country property somewhere in parched wheatbelt Australia. It is a four-hour drive from the city, with patchy phone reception. In Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull for the Sydney Theatre Company (closing 16 December), the character’s names remain the same, but we find Irina, Constantin, and Boris et al. in twentyfirst-century Australia, dealing with mozzies and moaning about the internet, or lack thereof. The contemporary Australianness, however, never really moves beyond justifying the accents of the actors. For the most part, the dialogue and performances implied that we were still in nineteenth-century Russia. The adaptation makes little attempt to contextualise the characters’ joy and angst within their revised temporal and geographical setting. It was as if they had all time-travelled from 1897 to modern Australia without noticing. The revised setting was distracting, as I waited attentively for the payoff throughout the play, optimistic that the dramatic logic of the move would become apparent. Unfortunately, the rationale for the setting never landed, and this failure constitutes the production’s major flaw. Otherwise, this Seagull has much going for it. The performers move adeptly between comic and dramatic registers as the script necessitates. Upton’s treatment ranges from broad humour to moments of heartbreak, and the actors match the words by toggling between expansive physical movement and occasional moments of lapidary precision and poignancy. Harry Greenwood, as Constantine, uses his lankiness to great effect, conveying his character’s self-consciousness and thwarted desire, as if the young writer hasn’t quite grown into his body. Sean O’Shea plays Constantine’s uncle, Peter, on whose property the story unfolds, with an excellent sense of ruefulness and frustration, funnily grumpy and often wise. Constantine and Peter reside at the property, and the drama pivots on a visit from the former’s mother and the latter’s sister:
the glamorous diva Irina Arkadina. She is accompanied by her younger writer-boyfriend, Boris Trigorin, a literary celebrity whom Constantine both envies and despises. As this stylish couple, Sigrid Thornton and Toby Schmitz are excellent when parodying the pretensions of the self-styled creative. The play exposes the couple’s feckless narcissism, as they use and abuse those who desire them. Constantine longs for his mother’s love and approval, and is repudiated with casual indifference at best, with mockery at worst. Boris ruthlessly captures the affection of Nina, Constantine’s beloved and muse, with little care for the fallout. Thornton and Schmitz’s comedic bravado offers laughs a minute, but they do not quite deliver the menace of their characters’ cruelty. Perhaps that absence is the point: it is their shallowness that does damage rather than their darkness. In contrast, Mabel Li, as Nina, conveys and sustains the plays weightiness. As the young woman at the heart of the play’s action – part heroine, part sacrificial victim – Li is light on her feet and heavy of heart. Dexterous and mature in this role, she holds the whole thing together. The supporting cast of Arka Das, Michael Denkha, Markus Hamilton, Megan Wilding, and Brigid Zengeni play neighbours or employees of the property. In their interactions with Peter’s household, and in confessing to their own thwarted desires, they produce a feedback loop testifying to the sense of disappointment that pervades the play. Special mention must be made of Megan Wilding as Masha, a mordant goth stuck in her small town who takes grim pleasure in her griping. Wilding’s character may feel stuck, but Wilding elevates the production with her rigorous sense of comic timing, as she did in STC’s recent The Importance of Being Earnest. Imara Savage’s direction gives us a Seagull which is expert in its conveyance of frustrated and claustrophobic mood, hilarious as a satire of artists and sometimes devastating in its portrayal of rejection and loss. The sets, designed by David Fleischer, move us from the expanse of a wheatfield in high summer inexorably towards the dark interior of the play’s conclusion. I was thoroughly entertained, and often very moved, by this production. But I still have no idea what we were doing in modern Australia rather than in nineteenth-century Russia. Ideally, this type of updating offers not only a meditation on the classic original by recontextualising its themes, while also casting new light on the substituted time and place through the prism of the venerable text. In this instance, The Seagull’s relocation achieved neither, and functioned to distract rather than illuminate. g Clare Monagle is a Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University.
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From the Archive
In her review of Thea Astley’s Drylands for the September 1999 issue, former ABR editor Kerryn Goldsworthy confessed that she loved the author’s ‘demented metaphors’. Astley wrote human frailty without pretending that the writer didn’t also share it. For Goldsworthy, Astley’s writerly subject was how ‘full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment’. Drylands was joint winner of the 2000 Miles Franklin Award, and when she died in 2004 Astley had won more of that prestigious award than any other. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.
D
o not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s one-word title: Drylands. I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity, and greed. I love the way that, even at its most savage and despairing, it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmanoeuvred, or comprehensively beaten down. Her new book has all these qualities except, alas, the last. Drylands is Astley’s Waste Land, with a cast of exhausted and alienated characters wandering through it in the deathgrip of entropy, pursued by fin de siècle furies and other personifications of failure and defeat. In the small town of Drylands, there are no fragments shored against anybody’s ruin (well, there are, but even the fragments get vandalised and tossed), and there is certainly none of the peace that passeth understanding. In one of these Eliot-like character/narrative strands, Benny Shoforth, unacknowledged son of a violent white-boss rapist father and a twelve-year-old Aboriginal housegirl mother, has been driven out of his home and has taken up residence in a cave in the bush, accompanied by his late mother’s threepiece Genoa velvet lounge suite. Eventually, his malevolent white half-brother Howie Briceland, town councillor, drives him out of there as well. Benny confronts Briceland in a public meeting – ‘I’m your brother!’ – and is hushed up and hustled out by a couple of selfappointed bouncers. On one level, as is clear from this sequence of events, Drylands can be read as a dystopian millennial fable and national allegory, a grim encapsulation of Australian history in general and race relations history in particular on the eve of its Federation centenary. Astley’s body of work over the past forty years adds up to a protracted study in the way that full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment, and this book is no exception. The perpetrators are all her usual suspects: racists, developers, hypocritical gung-ho civic dogooders, and assorted unreconstructed male-suprema64 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 4
cist swine. This time, though, a new kind of offender has been added to the mix: computers. It’s difficult for a reviewer when a novel by a writer she likes is largely based on three premises with which she disagrees: that kids can’t read and don’t care that they can’t read; that the world is going to hell in a handbasket; and that computers are the invention of the devil. One would conclude from this book, moreover, that these three things are closely linked. The first of the classic Astley drifters to whom we are introduced, the widowed Janet Deakin, is ‘writing a book for the world’s last reader’. Janet spends much of her time in mournful meditation on the odium of screen culture in general, and on the passing, as she sees it, of the pleasures of reading and writing: Out there, yes, out there all over the wide brown land, was a new generation of kids with telly niblets shoved into their mental gobs from the moment they could sit up in a playpen and gawk at a screen, starved of those tactile experiences with paper, the smell of printer’s ink, the magic discovery that black symbols on white spelled out pleasures of other distances.
Print literacy is figured in this book as the thing that could have saved us but is being destroyed; the page and the screen are presented as mutually exclusive and morally opposed. If you simply don’t believe this, it makes Drylands hard to read because you want to keep arguing with it. Some people like to read and others don’t; this has always been true and will go on being true. Literacy isn’t vanishing, and neither are the tactile pleasures of reading. After all, Astley wrote this book; it got published; it smells lovely, like all new books; and now I’m sitting here writing about it and soon you will be reading what I write. In front of me there are 294 pages and two screens (one of which, while it has no smell, is a beautiful golden colour) and they all appear to be co-existing quite harmoniously. I am reminded by this book of a non-literary friend who often claims that words are cheap. If she really thought that, surely she wouldn’t bother to say it; but they are words in whose power and value she clearly believes. Astley’s case seems to me to be much the same. If she really believed that the screen had horribly taken over from the page, would she have written a book about it? g
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