Australian Book Review

Timothy J. Lynch America – death by suicide?

Joan Beaumont Ambon and postmemory

Anwen Crawford From Brexit to Bazball

Stephen Regan Seamus Heaney

Anders Villani Judith Bishop

Bloodstone

The day they blew up Mount Tom Price

by Nicole Hasham

Celebrating twenty-one years of great world poetry!

Entries are now open for the twenty-first Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).

This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane and Peter Rose.

For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs

First place

$6,000

Four shortlisted poets

$1,000 each

Entries close 7 October 2024

Advances

The season of giving

Last month, in more confessional mode than usual (needs must!), we wrote about ABR’s funding predicament in 2024: without federal funds and with only one state arts grant. Readers seemed shocked by the stark comparison between 2019 (when ABR received a total of $245,000 from six governments around the country) and 2024 (a total of $12,000, all from Arts South Australia).

Since then the response from supporters – regular donors and a pleasing number of new ABR Patrons (all listed on page 4) – has been extraordinary. Pace sceptics who always said that Australians will never support literature in the same way they support other sectors and related charities, ABR continues to receive sterling support from those who believe that Australia deserves a sophisticated literary magazine culture of its own, not just an imported one.

We thank everyone who has contributed to the magazine. Your generosity is stirring and enabling.

Our new Rising Star

We’re delighted to name the sixth ABR Rising Star: Sam Ryan. An emerging critic and early career researcher, Sam is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, where he is working on a thesis on the poetry in Overland and Quadrant. More broadly, he is interested in the genre of the literary journal and its place in literary cultures. He has worked in publishing – in various functions – for more than a decade. He is Overland ’s digital archivist and has a firm belief in the importance of digital preservation of literary journals. He has contributed to several periodicals, including ABR

Sam Ryan had this to say about his appointment:

Australian Book Review is such an important part of Australia’s literary culture. Not only in terms of its critical input, which is undeniable, but also for the ways in which it encourages and nurtures new writing. Since working with the magazine, I have been taken aback by the care applied to all its endeavours. Peter Rose has in the past described the journal as ‘entrepreneurial’. I can’t think of a better description, nor can I imagine a more useful attribute in contemporary publishing. To be a part of the magazine – first as a contributor and now as a Rising Star – is truly an honour. I have such a passion for the written word, and I know the positive effect keen criticism has. I look forward to sharpening my writing with ABR’s guidance.

The Rising Star program – generously funded by the ABR Patrons – is intended to advance the careers of young writers and critics whose early contributions have impressed readers and editors alike.

Our Editor first became aware of Sam in January 2023 when he interviewed Peter Rose for a survey of literary journals and organisations funded by Creative Australia and undertaken by the Sydney Review of Books. ‘I was struck by his incisiveness and his digital savvy,’ Rose told Advances. ‘Happily and cannily, Sam finds time for freelance reviewing around his PhD studies. Sam’s interest in ABR – and its digital ambitions – has impressed us all.’

We look forward to publishing Sam Ryan often in coming years.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Where has the time gone!

It is twenty-one years since ABR created its own poetry prize, to highlight its commitment to the broader appreciation of poetry and to the cultivation of brilliant new work. Back in 2005, it was known as the ABR Poetry Prize. (Stephen Edgar, our first winner, received $2,000.) Six years later, it was renamed the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (possibly the most alliterative competition in the world), following the death of the great Australian poet, who was such a constant in our poetic conversation, as in these pages.

The twenty-first Porter Prize is now underway, with total prize money of $10,000, thanks to the munificence of the ABR Patrons. The winner will receive $6,000, and the four other shortlisted poets will each receive $1,000, plus publication in the magazine (in the January-February 2025 issue).

[Advances continues on page 7]

ANIMAL ACTIVISM

ON AND OFF SCREEN

Edited by Claire Parkinson and

Lara Herring

JULY 2024

Sam Ryan (Bonnie Lavelle)

July 2024, no. 466

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

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Image credits and information

Front cover: Tom Price Iron Ore Mines, Western Australia, 2008 (Ursula Gahwiler/robertharding/Alamy)

Page 23: Lace curtains and a lace-trimmed roller blind in typical window in Ennistymon (Ennistimon), County Clare, West of Ireland, 2010 (Tim Graham/Alamy)

Page 35: Pat Cummins reacts during day three of the LV= Insurance Ashes Series test match at Headingley, Leeds, 8 July 2023 (Danny Lawson/PA Images/Alamy)

ABR July 2024

Judith Masters, Dennis Altman, Marilyn Lake

Nicole

Timothy J. Lynch

Ben Wellings

Jessica Lake

Julie Manning

Andrew Sant

John Kinsella

Joan Beaumont

Nick Hordern

Melanie Nolan and Michelle Staff

Heather Neilson

Peter Rose

Patrick Allington

Rose Lucas

Paul Genoni

Yves Rees

Alex Cothren

A. Frances Johnson

JOURNALISM

ABR

FROM

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The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822. In recognition of our Patrons’ continuing generosity, ABR records multiple donations cumulatively. (ABR Patrons listing as at 20 June 2024)

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ABR Podcast

Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.

America’s Forever War

Timothy J. Lynch

Ambon and postmemory

Joan Beaumont

Matthew Lamb

‘Bloodstone’ - Calibre essay

Nicole Hasham

Hazzard and Harrower letters

Peter Rose

‘Hold your nerve’ – Calibre essay

Natasha Sholl Tony Birch on Kim Scott Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Bruce Pascoe’s vision Seumas Spark

Our partners

Australian Book Review 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), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

Poets have until 7 October to enter the prize. Full details appear on our website, including Frequently Asked Questions. Anyone writing in English is eligible (regardless of where they live), as long as the poems have not been published before.

Please note that this year we have reduced the maximum length from seventy to sixty lines. It’s surprising how many prize entrants submit works that are too short or overlong.

This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt (ABR Chair, Professor of Creative Writing at QUT, and author of the award-winning poetry collection The Jaguar), Paul Kane (Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, co-founder of the Mildura Writers Festival, and author of ten volumes of poetry), and Peter Rose (ABR Editor and CEO, and author of seven poetry collections, including the coming Attention, Please!).

Changes at ABR

The extended ABR community knows Amy Baillieu well. She became a volunteer after completing her postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne and joined us parttime as an assistant editor. She has been Deputy Editor since 2012 – momentous and transformative years for the magazine, to which she has made such an estimable contribution. Throughout those years, hundreds, probably thousands, of contributors, donors, subscribers, prize entrants, and stakeholders have worked or liaised with Amy, an immensely popular member of the ABR team.

At the end of June, Amy went on extended maternity

AUKUS anyone?

Dear Editor,

leave. We all wish her and her partner, Ira, well in the weeks and months ahead.

Earlier in June, Will Hunt joined us as Assistant Editor. Will stood out in last year’s intake of students from Monash University’s Faculty of Arts, and subsequently joined us on a casual basis. The new appointment is a great development for the magazine, and a fine opportunity for Will, who told Advances:

I am thrilled to be joining ABR and its bustling community of arts enthusiasts, academics, and booklovers. It is an honour to be joining Peter Rose and the staff at ABR. I look forward to supporting the highest standard of Australian writing and contributing to excellent long-form commentary and robust criticism of Australian arts, literature, and culture. I wish Amy Baillieu all the best with her future endeavours – her stamp on ABR is ineffaceable; she is the crux of this small team.

ABR in Vienna

Zu spät! ABR’s Vienna tour in October – led by Christopher Menz and conducted in association with Academy Travel –has filled up promptly. There’s always next year!

Don’t write them off!

It’s always good to hear about a new literary magazine. The Sydney-based Vitagraph Publishing has launched Written Off, which will feature ‘formally or soulfully inventive’ works by emerging and established writers. We wish the organisers luck. g

Letters

Further to James Curran’s article ‘AUKUS in the Dock’ (ABR, June 2024), there are many problems with this program - from the enormous cost to the nation to the fundamental question of the recruitment of submariners, which will only become more challenging in the future.

AUKUS is too ambitious for Australia on many fronts. It raises our nation’s profile in a way I would rather not have it raised. Aren’t our greatest security issues likely to be the potential for failed states in our immediate neighbourhood? What role would a nuclear-powered submarine play in those scenarios?

Was this just a male ego trip gone too far? And how will the investment required rob more essential parts of the ADF of the funding it needs? The decision raises too many questions without adequate answers. I for one hope it unravels.

Judith Masters

Foucault and homosexuality

Dear Editor,

Miles Pattenden begins his review of Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by asserting that historians have grappled with the concept of gay history since

Michel Foucault published his History of Sexuality (ABR, May 2024). In fact, by the time Foucault published the first volume in 1976 (translated into English two years later), there was, in a number of countries, a considerable historical literature that asked exactly this question. I recall a meeting with American gay and lesbian historians in the late 1970s who were discussing how far Foucault’s work might lead them to reconsider their own.

Foucault was undoubtedly a major philosophical figure, but he was neither as original nor as ground-breaking in his discussion of homosexuality as is sometimes assumed. Ironically, Pattenden implicitly acknowledges this in his second paragraph.

Dennis Altman

Whither Waitangi?

Dear Editor

Thank you, Miranda Johnson, for your excellent article ‘Whither Waitangi?’ (ABR, June 2024). The historical coincidence of the triumph of neo-liberalism and support for biculturalism in New Zealand and multiculturalism in Australia in the 1980s is a key development in both countries. Marilyn Lake

Bloodstone

The day they

blew up Mount Tom Price

by Nicole Hasham

To obliterate a mountain, one must first drill a series of holes 2.4 metres deep – in either a square or diagonal pattern, depending on the rock type and face condition. A crew moves in to load the holes with blasting agent, typically a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Detonators and boosters are laid and an explosive cord is run over the mountain face. A fuse is lit. It explodes the detonator, which explodes the cord, which explodes the boosters, which explodes the blast mix, which in turn explodes the mountain.

The third of February in 1974, the day the top of Mount Tom Price was blown off, was a merry affair. The blast took place on a Sunday afternoon. Some 173,520 kilograms of explosives had been loaded, to break up thousands of tonnes of iron ore which had lain in the mountain since the time Earth was young and hot and still composing itself. Residents of the nearby town drove to vantage points to witness the milestone; the local newspaper later declared the colossal blast ‘worthy of their efforts’.

Fifty years after that explosion, I am on a bus tour of an iron ore mine listening to a young, bearded man in hi-vis gear describe how the mountain once here – Mount Tom Price –was snuffed out. The mine is located about 1,500 kilometres north-east of Perth in Western Australia’s Pilbara region. Owned and operated by global mining giant Rio Tinto, the operation lies at the edge of the Hamersley Range, a swirl of Viennetta-like rock folds containing some of the thickest and purest iron deposits in the world. Most of the ore is composed of an iron compound known as ‘hematite’; the name is derived from the Greek word for ‘blood’.

We alight to inspect a mining pit from above. The tourists press their noses against a wire fence, peering into the sheercut expanse. It is 250 metres deep and long exhausted, now half-filled with toxic blue-green waste water. ‘We can get to the vein without using explosives, but it creates so much wear and tear on the buckets and metal that it’s more convenient to blow it up,’ our guide explains. Mount Tom Price is not the only peak to be expunged, he says. ‘That mountain on the corner, you see half its face has been cut off? It used to extend all the way across here – that’s all gone. The rest is going to disappear as well.’ He falls silent to allow us to ponder the splendid efficiency of it all.

The discovery of Tom Price’s high-grade iron ore in the early 1960s triggered a rash of mines across the Pilbara. Some thirty-four iron ore mines now operate in the region, most run by Rio Tinto, BHP, or Fortescue Metals Group. A further eight have been decommissioned and eleven more are proposed. Tom Price was the first but is by no means the

largest. The scale of the incursion is hard to grasp from the ground but can be observed when flying into the Pilbara: long maroon welts on old reptilian hide, scored all the way to the horizon.

The story of Mount Tom Price, and indeed of much of Australia’s economic wealth, began 2.5 billion years ago during an auspicious communion in an ancient sea. It was a time of great planetary upheaval, when enterprising microbes began churning out the gas that would activate life on Earth. In a sea where the Pilbara now lies, iron met oxygen. The chemistry was instant. Together the two became a compound – iron oxide – and fell gently to the seafloor; today, the sea is gone but the sediment remains as alternating stripes of iron and quartz, a geological barcode encrypted with the story of Earth’s adolescence.

Iron ore is the main raw material in steel, and some ninety-eight per cent of iron ore mined in the world is used for that purpose. Steel is everywhere: in cars and teaspoons, hip implants and building beams. The world uses twenty times more iron than all other metals combined. Iron ore is Australia’s most lucrative export, worth an expected $131 billion this financial year. Mining began at Mount Tom Price in 1965 and is still going strong; unsurprisingly, the mountain no longer exists in any meaningful form. It has been ground to a stump pocked with thirteen pits, each appearing as a giant open tomb awaiting some poor soul’s internment.

Back on the bus, we scoot over smooth gravel roads and pass the occasional mining vehicle, the driver a shadow in the darkened cabin. Children wave and grin from their window seats.

Before visiting the Pilbara, I found myself binge-watching videos of mountains being exploded. At first I was aghast, but then transfixed by the unfathomable profusion of pattern and form: writhing columns of vaporised rock in scarlet and chestnut, ochre and silver, like a crowd suddenly risen to its feet – arms flailing, backs arching, nerves enlivened. For a split second, an entire mountain ridge would seem to rise then hang suspended in the air: a final act of profundity before thudding down to earth.

Once a mountain has been exploded, waste rock is set aside and the stuff containing iron ore is trucked to the processing plant. The tourist bus rolls past the facility: a maze of conveyor belts leading into super-sized sheds, all of it coated with tangerine grime. There, the erstwhile mountain is crushed, sorted, spun, and loaded onto train carriages, taken to the port of Dampier and shipped to hungry steel mills, mostly in China.

Behind me on the bus, a young boy has been peppering his father with questions all morning. Dad, how much does that digger weigh? How fast does that train go? Is that just a puddle, or a toxic puddle? Now comes another: ‘Dad, what happens if they find a diamond?’ His father is growing weary of his son’s bottomless curiosity. ‘They wouldn’t find a diamond,’ he replies flatly, gazing out at giant pyramids of stockpiled ore. The boy is insistent. He asks again, this time urgently: ‘But dad, what if they did find a diamond?’

In 1962, Thomas Moore Price, vice-president at American company Kaiser Steel and a raw minerals expert, travelled to the Pilbara to appraise its iron ore potential. Promising deposits had been discovered in the region, and Price had been asked to evaluate sites in the Hamersley Range. For two days, Price and his party flew low over the mountains and landed at known deposits. The American was enthused by what he saw. He later described the size of the Pilbara’s ore body as ‘just staggering. It is like trying to calculate how much air there is.’

Soon after, geologists discovered an enormous iron ore reserve in a mountain not far from where Price had flown. Price was informed of the thrilling find. Two hours later, at the Kaiser Steel headquarters in California, the executive suffered a heart attack and died at his desk. The mountain was named Mount Tom Price in memoriam.

The mountain, of course, already had a name: Wakathuni. But even as late as the 1960s, much of the Pilbara was considered by Europeans to be terra incognita – unnamed, unstoried, a vacuum to be filled by their own grand narrative.

As lore has it, pastoralist and prospector Lang Hancock discovered iron ore in the Pilbara in 1952. He claimed to have been flying his small plane low over the Hamersley Range to avoid bad weather when he noticed a tell-tale dark hue along the wall of a gorge. ‘That’s iron,’ he reportedly said to his wife, Hope, who was sitting beside him – and so it was.

Hancock later staked a claim and cut a deal with Rio Tinto which delivered him and his business partner royalties of 2.5 per cent of the value of all ore mined within it. The money was to be paid in perpetuity. Hancock’s daughter, Gina Rinehart, inherited her father’s royalty stream when he died in 1992; Rinehart is now worth about $50 billion. A recent report by Oxfam found the fortunes of both Rinehart and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest, founder of Fortescue Metals Group, were increasing at a rate of $1.5 million per hour.

A few days after the Tom Price mine tour, I wake early to climb a mountain overlooking the site. As I ascend, the sky thrums an impossible sherbet pink above the domes of the Hamersley Range. For thousands of years the land’s traditional owners, the Eastern Guruma people, have called this mountain Jarndunmunha. In the 1960s, an iron survey team gave the landmark a new identifier: Mount Nameless.

A steep ascent heralds the final leg of the climb. By the time I step onto Jarndunmunha’s summit, the sun is a white flare. In the hardened light, the skin of the range seems to sag over its geriatric bones. Directly below is what now comprises Mount Tom Price: a cluster of administration buildings, then beyond, descending out of sight, a string of open-cut chasms:

North Deposit, West Pit, Southern Ridge, South East Prong, Section Six, Section Seven.

Later, a long-time mine worker would tell me how the night-time view from the top of Jarndunmunha had changed since he arrived in Tom Price. ‘Eighteen years ago, you could see a bit of light. Now there are mines everywhere,’ he said. ‘You can see them, all these little things glowing.’ I imagine that sight now, the old Earth pricked with light from machines that never stop, the stars vying for the dark against the mechanical constellation. From this distance, nothing at the mine appears to move. But from the void there comes a lowpitched drone; a perpetual, whirring meta-silence.

Brendon Cook stands on the porch of his home, arm outstretched, his hand clutching a raw chicken drumstick. The white meat glistens in the gloaming. A hawk circles above; Cook whistles, waving his fleshy offering. The bird perches on a telegraph pole, regards us for a moment then, with barely a wingbeat, rises into the sky and disappears. Did my unfamiliar presence deter the bird, I ask? ‘Nah,’ Cook says. ‘It’s just getting too dark.’

Cook lives at a small Aboriginal community about twenty kilometres from Mount Tom Price. The former mountain and the community share the same Aboriginal name – Wakathuni. Cook’s white ute, the clutch gone, rests on blocks in the yard before us; two muscular dogs gnaw a branch at our feet. Cook identifies as an Innawonga, Bunjima, and Guruma man. As we chat on his porch, he tells a story of a Guruma elder known as Old Wagon, who lived decades before mining began in the Hamersley Range. Old Wagon was an important spiritual man who derived his powers from Mount Tom Price. One day he had a fateful vision. ‘He saw the lights, he saw the hill getting blown up,’ Cook says. ‘And they loaded it onto a snake. There were no words then for “train”. The snake was taking it away from Country.’

Prior to the two-century blip of European occupation in Australia, there lies a history of Aboriginal habitation in the Pilbara spanning millennia. In those tiers of time, and still now, the land formed the foundation of Aboriginal people’s spiritual and cultural lives. The arrival of pastoralism in the late nineteenth century dispossessed thousands of Aboriginal people of their traditional homelands. Mining soon followed. For the first four decades of iron ore mining, the socioeconomic status of Indigenous people in the Pilbara improved little. Between 2001 and 2014 – coinciding with a boom in iron ore prices – the situation picked up somewhat. A report found about one-third of Aboriginal people, mostly those employed by mining companies, became better off. Yet not much changed for the remaining two-thirds, and many fell deeper into disadvantage. Death rates were almost four times greater for Indigenous males, compared with non-Indigenous, and more than five times for females.

In May 2020, Rio Tinto committed an act of cultural violence against Pilbara traditional owners that was so shameful the company’s reputation may never be remediated. At Juukan Gorge, about sixty kilometres north-west of Tom Price, the company blew up two Indigenous rock shelters –

and with them, evidence of human occupancy dating back more than 46,000 years. The shelters were located on the land of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people. In a video released after the blast, traditional owner Harold Ashburton stands at the former entrance to one of the shelters, now a pile of scree, and recalls bringing his two sons there. ‘[I] show them their great-grandfather’s country, their grandfather’s country. And you feel happy, bringing them,’ he says, his voice quivering. ‘Now all we’ve got is a mess.’ I think back to Tom Price and the young boy’s anxious probing. What if they did find a diamond?

Back at Wakathuni, the dark has descended and the dogs need feeding. But I have one last question for Cook. Traditional owners believe spirits inhabit the rivers, gorges, and mountains that give the land its form. So what happens, I ask Cook, when humans cleave open the mountains where those spirits dwell? Cook doesn’t hesitate to answer. Deaths and injuries still occur in Australia’s mining industry, and mental health problems are common. The accidents and illnesses, he says, are payback wrought by dislocated spirits. ‘It’s a retaliation. They’re coming in and destroying the country,’ he says. ‘We can’t just go in and do a smoking ceremony or Welcome to Country, and everything’s going to be all right. But you need to be thinking like an old-time blackfella, to understand.’

In August 1970, Ron Olsson, his wife and their three young sons drove into the town of Tom Price, the family’s possessions strapped to the roof of the car. They had set out from Victoria three weeks earlier; it had been a slow trip. Somewhere across the Nullarbor, the brakes on their caravan failed. On the final stretch, their vehicles blew five tyres and their pet cat died. The family arrived in Tom Price in the dark, with $20 in the bank.

Olsson had heard of Lang Hancock’s discovery of iron ore and his efforts to open the region to mining. In Melbourne, he interviewed for and scored a job at the Tom Price mine. The family bought a caravan and off to the Pilbara they went.

Upon first seeing Tom Price in daylight, Olsson later recalled in an oral history interview, he was impressed by ‘nice green lawns and the good houses ... It was sort of what we expected, [like] the pamphlets they showed us.’ The family was thrilled to secure a near-new rental home: three bedrooms, brick veneer, fully furnished – all for $10 a week. Hamersley Iron, a Rio Tinto subsidiary, owned the house. In fact, the company built and owned everything. Back then Tom Price was a ‘closed town’; only mine workers, their families, and those who serviced them were permitted to live there.

Olsson drove a truck at the mine, hauling rock from the pit to the processing plant. The money was good, but the hours were long; Olsson averaged two double shifts a week, sometimes three. ‘There was plenty of overtime … if you didn’t do your sixteen-hour shifts, they didn’t want you,’ he said. Olsson recalls becoming so tired he ‘didn’t remember travelling the road. You’d get your load … you’d pull out from the shovel and you’d remember backing into the crusher or wherever you was, but the road in between was just a blank. Did I travel over it, or didn’t I?’

The Tom Price township sits just north of the mine in a valley at the base of Mount Nameless-Jarndunmunha (the joint name was adopted in 2007). Rio Tinto handed over the town to the Shire of Ashburton in the 1980s and it’s now open to all who want to live there. It has a permanent population of about 3,000 people – most of them still mine workers and their families – plus a fluctuating population of fly-in, fly-out workers.

Over the years, Hamersley Iron and Rio Tinto have gone to great lengths to keep workers and their families happy. Olsson, a keen Scoutmaster, recalled the company paying $70,000 – a lot of money in the 1970s – to help build a scout hall that would become the envy of much larger towns. Other recreational offerings in the town include three sports ovals; an Olympic swimming pool; netball, basketball, and squash courts; a lawn bowls green; an indoor cricket centre; an eighteen-hole golf course; a tennis club (with air-conditioned spectator rooms); and a go-kart track. When I visited Tom Price, the skate park was being refurbished; the resulting broken bones will be treated in a new $32.8 million hospital promised to the town, mostly paid for by Rio Tinto.

Life in Tom Price is not without challenges. The summers are long and blisteringly hot. Tom Price is one of the most expensive places to live in Australia: one of those threebedroom houses the Olssons rented for $10 a week today costs around $2,000 a week. And despite all the efforts to insulate the town’s inhabitants from its surrounds, the Pilbara’s red dust infiltrates everything. It arrives on the wind, on the soles of boots and on car tyres. It permanently begrimes bed linen and shower grout, and embeds itself in food and nostrils. White corellas strut the town’s footpaths, their feathers stained a scummy peach.

Eagle Felix, a New Zealander, came to town fifteen years ago to work for the mining industry, but has since found other work. Felix tells me how the physical isolation, long shifts, and unsociable work hours can fracture families. ‘You hear a lot of sad stories. A lot of families break up,’ he says. On more than one occasion, Felix says, he’s visited Kings Lake, just out of town, and found ‘someone down there by himself, he’s come home from night shift and his family’s gone. Good fellas, I’ve worked with a lot of them.’

Felix tells me a story that struck him the hardest. ‘One fella was a boilermaker in the mine. He got cancer, and his wife left him. He was really heartbroken,’ Felix says. Tragically, the man died. Felix was working as a cleaner and went to prepare the man’s home for the next tenant. ‘I saw all these little things he’d made for his kids. Little swings, little toy things, all out of steel.’ In the months after I left Tom Price, I often thought of that man. I wondered what drove his wife and kids to quit town. I imagined those steel toys – perhaps made with ore dug from the Pilbara – forged into shiny gifts that would one day lie spurned and idle.

Despite its genial vibe and tidy streetscapes, Tom Price beats to a peculiar pulse. Rio Tinto’s logo is omnipresent, emblazoned on almost every public sign and community flyer. One in two shoppers in town wear the Rio Tinto uniform: navy-and-yellow workwear and tan boots. In almost two weeks

at Tom Price, I saw not a single elderly person. The streets are scrupulously free of litter. Parked outside the pub each night are utes, four-wheel drives, and trucks. To the visitor it has the feel of walking through a timber plantation – pleasant enough but entirely mediated, a single-species town that exists only for one purpose: to remove a mountain and sell it off, piece by piece.

For all the human capital to flow in and out of the Pilbara, there are those who came and died here. In his 1991 interview, Ron Olsson told of a string of fatalities during his years at the mine. One man was in a vehicle pushing a rock; it ‘rolled under his blade and pulled the machine with him’. The vehicle tumbled down a steep slope; the worker was ejected through the windscreen and ‘straight into some big rocks’. Olsson continued with his grim list of fatalities: three truck accidents, a man thrown from a loader, and a ‘young fellow got killed out on the road. He was one of the Scouts.’

The Tom Price cemetery is located west of town off a dirt road. I visit late one afternoon; it’s deserted. A brown teddy bear hangs over the rusted perimeter fence. Headstones sit askew, their inscriptions lamenting those taken too soon, those dearly beloved, those forever in our hearts. I count the graves – perhaps forty. It seems so few for a town established more than half a century ago. The land around here is filled with the burial sites of Indigenous custodians past, but for many new inhabitants, their bones will sleep in the dirt of elsewhere.

Ron Olsson’s Pilbara gamble paid off. He clocked up decades at the mine and his three sons would also join the payroll. But mining employment can be precarious. In 2016, Rio Tinto cut about 170 jobs from its Pilbara operations after global iron ore prices fell. Workers who had given the company their best working years were suddenly unemployed. Families left Tom Price and houses lay empty. Now, the iron ore boom is back on. But a move towards autonomous mining operations means that human workers become ever more dispensable. More than 130 trucks in Rio Tinto’s Pilbara fleet are now driverless; so too are its mine-to-port trains. The company spruiks the 1,700-kilometre train network as ‘one of the world’s largest robots’. Having erased mountains and sought to annihilate the world’s oldest living culture, the final step, it seems, is to eliminate ourselves.

of the machine. But against all the heft their flesh could summon, the vehicle will not yield; they pull and strain and roar, but it barely rolls a goddamn inch.

All iron in the universe – in the sun, in Mount Tom Price, in our blood – was created by exploding stars. The mineral makes up about five per cent of the Earth’s crust, but much of it is uneconomic to extract. This reveals the conundrum at the core of our economy: on a finite planet, resources eventually run out.

Unless global demand for steel falls, the world will need another source of iron. A new breed of prospector has identified the next celestial body to be flogged: the moon. The moon, of course, is Earth’s natural satellite. It guides bird migration and coral spawning, dictates our rhythms and tides, and steadies the planet on its axis. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it also ‘holds hundreds of billions of dollars of untapped resource’, including iron.

The most anticipated event on the Tom Price social calendar is the Nameless Jarndunmunha Festival (principal sponsor: Rio Tinto). A grainy video of the festival’s twentyfifth anniversary year, in 1995, shows a parade of locals marching through town: gymnasts and karate enthusiasts, jugglers, the fire brigade, a child mermaid. The day culminates in a tug-of-war between the town’s residents and a mining vehicle. It’s yellow and big as a bungalow. First go the men, then the women, and finally the children, bodies heaving on the rope in unison: feet planted, legs braced against the might

I consider all this as I sit on a beach at the small town of Exmouth on the Pilbara coast, and watch the moon devour the sun. I have joined 25,000 other people to witness what’s been billed as a once-in-a-lifetime event: a total solar eclipse. Such an event occurs somewhere on Earth only about once every eighteen months, and this one will only lightly touch Australia – here on the Pilbara coast.

The previous day, I had driven seven hours west from Tom Price to Exmouth. I left behind the Hamersley Range – those old mountains so patiently imbibing our dreams and follies – and descended to the moist, liminal sash of the coast. Late in the day, I turn onto the North West Cape, a pinkie-shaped peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean. The road is bumper-

The township of Mount Tom Price, 1970 (image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A1200, L87807)

to-bumper with eclipse-goers. As we roll along, the dense blue of the ocean flashes from between the dunes; after the dry of the uplands, the mere sight of water delivers to my brain a shimmery dopamine rush.

In the Pilbara, the relationships between Country and coast are deep and stratified. A Dreamtime sea serpent, the warlu, is said to have traversed north-west Australia searching for two naughty boys, emerging from the ocean and creating waterways as it travelled inland. Rivers run the reverse course, flowing coastward in fast red torrents after monsoonal rains; the Hardey River rises just below Mount Tom Price then runs into the Ashburton River, tipping into the ocean not far from Exmouth. Between it all glide mining trains, their loads of ore hauled to the coast to be conveyed onto ships, then transmuted into a staple of the global economy, somewhere else and far away.

On a grassy strip adjacent to Exmouth’s Town Beach, the eclipse is well underway. Wearing solar observation glasses, I tilt my head skywards. The sun is a mere sickle behind the flat disc of the moon. Light has begun to fall in odd slants; two men in baseball caps wave their arms about, playing with the trippy shadows. Earlier, a Greek tourist named Leon, here for his ninth eclipse, explained to me the physics of the spectacle. The moon is four hundred times smaller than the sun but four hundred times closer to Earth; that cosmic quirk is what allows the moon to block the sun’s light. ‘It’s a science but it’s also very beautiful,’ Leon says. ‘At the time the eclipse happens it’s like you are not on Earth. The shapes, the colours – everything is different.’

All around, a milky twilight has usurped the day. The temperature drops and a breeze picks up. Now, the shadow of the moon sweeps in: it’s happening! The crowd looks to the sky and takes a single, collective breath as the moon locks into place. Shards of white light splinter in all directions: the sun’s corona, the hidden outer layers of its atmosphere now rendered visible to the human eye for one sublime moment. We stare back, slack-jawed.

The moon slips. An arc of silvery beads peeks from behind its dark edge as sunlight streams through the valleys of the moon. Scientists call it the ‘diamond ring’ effect. What happens if they find a diamond? My thoughts fly to the Tom Price mine, the machines that never stop churning. Who there might be looking to the sky, as the moon silences the star that holds our planetary system together?

Now the eclipse is over. The entire spectacle lasts sixty-two seconds; the moon slides on to finish its journey across the sky. Everyone around me looks a little dumbfounded. A woman is dabbing away tears. ‘Oh my god,’ she says, turning to her friend. ‘What the hell just happened?’ A man nearby wearing a rumpled Hawaiian shirt looks a little shell-shocked. I ask what he thought of the sky show. ‘I don’t know if I could put it into words,’ he says in an exalted daze. ‘It was just so goddamn beautiful … the whole thing looks like a giant pupil, a big eye. Like the universe is looking back at you.’

Idrive back to Tom Price the day after the eclipse, skirting up the cape and inland across the glinting Ashburton River. Giant insects hover at the roadside and birds arc

overhead: raptors and swallows, birds with dark crests and notched tails, and everywhere, wild budgerigars flitting across the sky, a green and yellow rapture.

It’s late afternoon. As I drive, I am transfixed by a writhing lime cloud above the road ahead – a flock of budgerigars. All at once, the birds tilt and descend towards my car; before I can brake the whole lot strike the windscreen, bellies and wings pressed into the glass and then a clatter as their bodies ping-pong over the roof. I gasp. In the rear-view mirror, green clumps are strewn across the road. Should I pull over? The roadside is dangerously narrow. But what if some birds are still alive? I think of the long solo drive ahead, the car loaded with bloodied budgerigars. Where will I take them once I reach Tom Price? And it will be dark soon. I drive on, safe in my shiny steel contraption, prickling with shame.

Mining, by its nature, must damage the body it penetrates. The purported payback is tax revenue for governments and the materials we need to conduct our lives. Steel forged from the Pilbara’s ore built our cities and towns, and the vehicles to travel between them. It built our homes and objects to fill them. But as we fill some voids we leave new ones: pockmarked land, emptied of the spirits and histories it harboured.

In the town of Tom Price, life appears to hum along with a composed indifference to the nature of its enterprise – until I happen upon a counterculture of thought, a trace of regret that the town’s mountain namesake has not been permitted its presence. I am browsing a souvenir shop; I choose a plush crocodile for my son and take it to a young, kindly woman behind the counter. As we chat, I tell her that I am writing about Mount Tom Price. The woman pauses, then leans towards me furtively. ‘It’s not there anymore. It breaks my heart,’ she says in a hushed voice. ‘They mined things that have been there for billions of years. It would have been so beautiful out there. I know they need mining but …’ Her voice trails off. With a wan smile, she hands me the crocodile and my receipt.

I leave the shop and step into the midday heat. Tourists are standing in the shade of a tree, waiting for the bus to take them to the Tom Price mine, to see how humans dig up things that have been there for billions of years.

Yes, it really would have been so beautiful out there. g

Nicole Hasham is a writer, journalist, and editor based in Canberra. In 2010, she won a Walkley Award for journalism. Nicole was shortlisted for the UNSW Press Bragg Prize for Science Writing in 2021 and was awarded the Mick Dark Fellowship for Environmental Writing at Varuna, the national writers’ house, in 2023. Her first book, a work of narrative non-fiction, will be published by Black Inc. in 2025. ❖

‘Bloodstone’ was placed third in the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. ABR gratefully acknowledges the long-standing support of Patrons Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey.

This essay was supported by artsACT (the ACT government’s arts agency) and Creative Australia (the Australian government’s principal arts investment and advisory body).

Death by suicide?

Division as a default setting in America

Timothy J. Lynch

IThe Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself

by Nick Bryant Viking

$36.99 pb, 416 pp

t was a young Abraham Lincoln’s prediction that the United States ‘must live through all time, or die by suicide’. Nick Bryant wants us to believe the latter is coming true. America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable. This time, we are reaching an ‘extreme polarization … 250 years in the making … a second civil war’. Rather than the hysteria for and against Donald Trump being an aberration, ‘the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today,’ Bryant argues, ‘are in fact a core part of America’s story’. It has been on this path since 1776; Trump is less a waypoint than a destination.

In making this claim, Bryant, the former BBC Washington correspondent, is joining a long list of pro-American foreign realists. He wants the experiment to work; he fears it no longer can. ‘Goodbye America’ is the title of his afterword. American prospects, long examined critically by European élites, have consumed the hopes and fears of foreigners from Alexis de Tocqueville to Lord Bryce, from Gunnar Myrdal to Bernard-Henri Lévy. This book deserves to be bracketed with them.

Has Bryant offered the best recent book by a foreign observer (who now watches the conflict from Sydney) of where America is at? Possibly. The quality of his writing (high), his long experience of the United States (varied), and his moral investment in its success (reassuring), certainly place him in the top ten. Paired with his When America Stopped Being Great (2020), Bryant has offered us two books of sustained arguments about US failure.

Bryant’s declinism was honed during the Abbott Terror: The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a great nation lost its way (2014). Being perennially disappointed with Britain’s imperial children has earned Bryant a loyal fan base. I’m in it – with some caveats.

He gets a lot right. The concept of America as the ‘forever war’ is a welcome departure from the ‘why-can’t-we-all-justget-along?’ approach of so much progressive history. The United States was born in turmoil – and without turmoil there can be no liberty. Its politics, as Samuel Huntington, the great Harvard historian, argued, is ‘the promise of disharmony’. Bryant gets this. America does not exist to win the approval of foreigners. Rather, its experiment in unalienable rights protected by (and from) limited government, means endless conflict – sometimes kinetic, often politico-legal – over its testing.

The war correspondence Bryant sends from the front deals

with the presidency (a mixture of the authoritarian, demagogic, and populist), race (‘America’s constant curse’), guns (‘where America is a prisoner of its history’), abortion (too subject to the ‘creed of originalism’), and ‘toxic exceptionalism’ (grounded in American supremacy). These modern maladies, he argues, have long incubation periods.

America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable

The book’s strongest chapters help fit Trump into the history of the American presidency. Trump’s alleged crimes pale against the misuse of executive power by Andrew Jackson (‘the first brazen authoritarian’), Abraham Lincoln (‘the Great Suspender’ of the Constitution), and Franklin Roosevelt (who interned 125,000 Japanese Americans in what the author calls ‘concentration camps’). And, of course, Trump does not have blotting his copybook a 9/11 attack, an Iraq war, a skedaddle from Afghanistan, or a Global Financial Crisis. This is not enough to exculpate Trump, Bryant argues. But he provides some compelling revisionism of the kind likely to be practised by historians yet unborn.

Only occasionally does Bryant fall into a Laura-Tinglesque disdain. I paraphrase: ‘If only the US could adopt a less polarised and more technocratic politics, there would be universal healthcare, racial justice and abortion on demand. The nation would then resemble the more sensible technocracies of the Anglosphere.’ His chapters on guns (he wants harder access to them) and abortion (he wants easier access to it) follow a predictable script. Using the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade as an indictment of constitutional originalism is to draw a long bow.

Bryant’s account is an endogenous one. The forever war is grown from deep tissue. He does a terrific job laying out the enduring binaries of American political development. In the beginning, it was Federalists vs Antifederalists, then it was North vs South. Now it is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs Marjorie Taylor Greene. ‘Division is a default setting.’ Worse, Bryant tells us, ‘the more history becomes a driver of politics the more historically unlettered America seems to get’.

Should exogenous factors make us less gloomy about all this? America, after all, retains the friendship of the most successful nations on earth. The European Union is a club made viable by US support. The great fear in Paris and Berlin (and especially in Kyiv) is not the extension of American economic and military power, but its withdrawal. The market for US power is belied by the internal conflict that has long plagued the Republic. The world wants Americans to get along. If Bryant’s thesis is correct, this will make no difference to US prospects.

While America could not retain the residency of the author and his young family (gun violence was too ever-present), it remains the premier pole of attraction for immigrants. China, India, and Russia, let alone Iran, North Korea, and South Africa, do not offer exportable systems. These nations have a politics of exit, of people trying to escape. The United States? It is riven, in part, by the politics of entry, of people desperate to get in (see the southern border). The potential of this demand to foster renewal

is significant. Reading Bryant’s account, we would not think so. Religious freedom, so beloved by many of those new immigrants, is elided. The forever war has ideological, sectional, racial, identitarian, and even reproductive fronts. It does not have a religious one. Faith wars are absent in American history. If it were a nation of secular atheists, this would not matter. But the United States is the most religious of liberal democracies. As Robert Putnam has argued convincingly, in American Grace (2010), this has a positive impact on social relations. It teaches an empathy which transcends the binaries that are Bryant’s focus. Bryant has written an excellent account of how American history informs its present and why history wars, fought by the

Safe, just

Internal threats to the United Kingdom

Ben Wellings

BFractured Union:

Politics, sovereignty and the fight to save the United Kingdom by Michael Kenny

Hurst

£20 hb, 336 pp

ritish politics is back in the limelight, after a brief hiatus of relative sanity. The current election campaign will divert attention onto the main parties and key personalities. However, this shouldn’t mask important challenges to the very integrity of the United Kingdom that have occurred since David Cameron took the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2010.

In fact, the United Kingdom has been through a rough trot in the past fourteen years. The independence referendum in Scotland, the different outcomes of the Brexit referendum in England and Wales when compared to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the contrasting approaches to containing the Covid-19 pandemic coming from London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff all highlighted the pluri-national nature of the United Kingdom in a way that was often masked by habitual invocations of Britain and Britishness. During the past decade, it could not be taken for granted that the United Kingdom would survive in its current form.

Michael Kenny’s Fractured Union provides a comprehensive narrative analysis of the strains of these years and the threats to the United Kingdom that remain. Drawing on extensive interviews with public servants and politicians, Kenny suggests a way that those piloting the ship of state can avoid the shoals of nationalist fragmentation. These risks may appear to be reduced now that Brexit is done and the push for Scottish independence is receding. But low probability does not mean low risk. Experience elsewhere has shown that mismanagement of such discord could come back to haunt those who underestimate the risks of the nationalist challenges to the state.

mobilised ignorant, might mar its future. He brings a journalist’s clarity (without the usual left-of-centre baggage) into alignment with some skilful historiographical excavation (without getting stuck in minutiae). I don’t share his gloom. But I made a similar escape to Australia and now, like him, watch America from here. If Lincoln’s warning of death ‘by suicide’ is too morbid, and Bryant’s ‘forever war’ too bleak, how about Andy Rooney’s corrective: ‘It’s amazing how long this country has been going to hell without ever having got there.’ g

Timothy J. Lynch is Professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.

This is the main argument that Kenny is keen to advance. For Kenny, the chief malefactor is complacency. As the political pressures on the UK’s unity ebb, Kenny’s book is a warning against returning to attitudes that dominated the status quo ante in which the ‘centre’ of British politics – whether this means Westminster, Whitehall, and/or England – tends to adopt a ‘devolve-and-forget’ approach to the non-English parts of the United Kingdom .

Of course, ‘fractured’ does not mean entirely broken. While the threat to the United Kingdom’s unity posed by the Scottish National Party is waning, the possibility of pro-unification Sinn Féin-led governments in Belfast and Dublin in 2025 is real enough. Although opinion polling shows that some in England contemplate the end of the United Kingdom with equanimity, Kenny feels that it is worth preserving. To help ‘future-proof’ the United Kingdom, Kenny makes a series of instructive comparisons to take the reader beyond the standard exceptionalism and insularity that, he argues, shape understandings of what is happening to the British state.

The United Kingdom is one of only about ten states in the world that rest on the consent of their constituent parts. Catalonia and Scotland are often compared, because Catalonia voted to secede from Spain in 2017. However, until a political amnesty in May 2024, the government in Madrid fiercely resisted this unilateral declaration of independence. This is in notable contrast to the permissive, consent-based attitude that governed the possibility of Scottish independence in 2014 and that underpins the status of Northern Ireland to this day. Similarly, the ‘Velvet Divorce’ that saw Slovakia and the Czech Republic separate in 1993 was not brought about via a referendum, which any change to the integrity of the UK would involve.

In response to the threat of Scottish secession, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss returned to a form of integrative politics, often dubbed ‘muscular Unionism’ due to the Conservatives’ strong commitment to an Anglocentric version of the political unions that form the bedrock of the pluri-national United Kingdom. Kenny fears that this assertive politics could well be counterproductive to the United Kingdom’s long-term unity, because it is likely to boost resentment towards the ‘centre’ in the ‘peripheral’ nations. For Kenny, the response of Canada’s federal government to Québecois nationalism in the mid-1990s is the most instructive comparison for the United Kingdom because the ‘centre’ took seriously the critique of the status quo mounted by

the secessionists and modified its policy behaviour accordingly. Canada is still a unified state.

Thus, for all the political focus on Scotland, Northern Ireland, and, to a lesser but growing extent, Wales, a crucial unanswered question remains about England. Kenny asks how the political class imagines England as a political – and politicised – community given its centrality to Brexit and is met with a studied silence. In contrast to the Conservatives’ ‘muscular Unionism’, the Labour Party has an answer to the ‘English question’: don’t ask it and hope it goes away.

If we assume that there will be a change of government at the general election on 4 July, we might look to the former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s plans for reforming the United Kingdom, released in 2022. Under these plans, the House of Lords would be reformed into a second chamber not unlike Australia’s, representing the regions and nations of the United Kingdom. But Labour can only conceive of England as an administrative impossibility, too big to fit into any confederal structure, and which, therefore needs to be broken down into towns, cities, and regions.

Kenny is one of the most perceptive analysts of the politics of English nationhood. He is alive to the diversity of political traditions informing Englishness. This may not come through as strongly in this book as in some of his previous works. Progressives, as he notes elsewhere, tend to fear and resent politicised Englishness as the thing that brought them Brexit. But this politicised identity needs to be recaptured by those who fear it the most. Otherwise, it is picked up by the reactionaries and aligned with their own political projects.

Kenny’s contemporary analysis of the possible break-up of Britain complements Stuart Ward’s 2023 global history of the end of the idea of ‘greater Britain’. His focus on public policy complements Ailsa Henderson’s and Richard Wyn Jones’s 2021 research on public opinion and Englishness. Perhaps this analysis of England’s role in the ‘fractured union’ could have been pushed further. Other historical comparisons show that states collapse not when national minorities secede but when élites among the national majority cease investing their political aspirations in the extant state. The Soviet Union did not collapse when Estonia broke away but when Russian élites gave up on the USSR. However, the political class at the centre of British politics remains loath to engage fully with the new politics of nationhood bequeathed by fourteen years of Conservative rule and seems reluctant to devise contingency plans for any loss of popular faith in the United Kingdom.

Kenny is right to warn against complacency among the political and policy communities. Indifference in England will set the political context for any further fracturing of the United Kingdom. Suggested reforms such as Gordon Brown’s may plaster over the fissures and contain calls for further autonomy, secession, or dissolution. However, Labour’s plans to kill off nationalism in the 1990s by devolving power eventually had the opposite effect. Yet until the élites give up on the idea of Britain, something they show no signs of doing, Kenny’s United Kingdom is safe – just. g

Ben Wellings is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University.

14 JUN – 20 JUL THE NEILSON NUTSHELL PIER 2/3 SYDNEY

25 JUL – 11 AUG

Silence breakers

A feminist critique of defamation law

Jessica Lake

ISuing for Silence: Sexual violence and defamation law

by Mandi Gray

University of British Columbia Press

Can$32.95 pb, 174 pp

began Mandi Gray’s book while waiting for the judgment to be handed down in Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case against Network Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson. I had tuned into the live-streamed trial months earlier, along with 124,444 others, to hear Brittany Higgins being interrogated about her recollections of that fateful night in Parliament House. Gray’s argument – that some men were using defamation law to inflict further abuse and punishment on their victims, to cow them into silence, to chill public discussion of sexual violence – seemed apt indeed.

‘I had no idea it was possible to be sued for making a formal report of sexual violence.’ Suing for Silence opens with this common assumption. Gray’s incredulity illustrates how recently the gendered implications of defamation law have become clear. Other areas of law – criminal law, family law, and property law – have long been subject to feminist critique, but defamation law has largely escaped scrutiny. Suddenly it has become central to understanding whose stories are told, and how.

Gray is a sociologist and criminologist, not a defamation law expert, but this adds strength to her account. Chronicling individual cases, the book documents her discovery of defamation law and civil procedure, sharing the journey with the reader. Her interest was piqued by personal circumstances – she was sued for supporting a friend, who disclosed sexual violence at the hands of a fellow faculty member. Her prose is direct and matter of fact, and she notes that the biggest constraint on her study was, ironically, a fear of being sued again. Gray thus chooses her words carefully, and so too must I.

Suing for Silence examines the experience of being sued for defamation or threatened with proceedings after ‘reporting’ sexual violence (via formal avenues), ‘disclosing’ it (via informal channels), or supporting those who have done so. It focuses predominantly on the post #MeToo landscape and on the backlash of defamation lawsuits brought by men accused of sexual violence. Gray terms those entangled in legal action after speaking out –victim/survivors and advocates – ‘silence breakers’. This is a book about the ways in which men – yes, I know, #NotAllMen – are using the legal system to suppress the voices of silence breakers and to ‘reprivatize’ the problem of violence against women.

The geographic scope is tight – confined to Canada – but Gray recognises that the weaponisation of defamation law is a global problem. It is happening in Australia (as in the United States,

South Korea, England, Sweden, France, etc.). The rules and mechanisms for bringing, prosecuting, and defending civil actions differ between jurisdictions. But Gray is primarily intent on identifying and describing a social and cultural phenomenon – a gendered one – that is playing out in legal language and via our courts.

Other areas of law have long been subject to feminist critique, but defamation law has largely escaped scrutiny

Drawing on interviews with silence breakers, as well as lawyers and anti-violence advocates, she investigates the consequences – individual and societal – of such defamation lawsuits. How do they push discourse about sexual violence back into the private sphere? Are they Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (known as SLAPPs in Canada and the United States)? In other words, do they seek to silence speech on matters of public interest more than to protect an individual’s reputation?

Employing Jennifer Freyd’s concept of DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) to understand men’s motivations, Gray argues that some abusive men use the legal system to continue their abuse and frame themselves as the ‘true victim’. She concedes that some innocent men also defend themselves against untrue allegations, but posits that it is mostly abusive men who engage in numerous forms of retaliation, who pursue women on multiple fronts, for sustained periods.

Take the case of Lynn, a tattoo artist, who reported her boss to the police for rape. He was charged, tried, and acquitted and then sued her for defamation. It took years for Lynn to successfully defend his defamation suit. Then there is Morgan, who was in a long-term relationship with a man who was sexually, physically, and emotionally abusive. She told others and received a legal letter asking her to publicly apologise. Another woman, Catherine, was served with a lawsuit at her work by a man who had sexually violated her, after she posted about it on social media.

Nearly all silence breakers experienced anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Lawsuits made it harder to heal from sexual violence. In the words of one: ‘It’s like trying to heal burns when you are standing in the fire.’ They also suffered somatic symptoms. Laura, subject to a ‘gag order’ (confidentiality agreement), commented: ‘I actually developed symptoms where my face would go numb, and I was having all these throat issues. I was having physical symptoms of being gagged.’

The most profound consequence, Gray argues, is the effect of these lawsuits on public discussion of sexual violence. They work – by intimidating individual women and chilling media reporting – to push stories of sexual violence into ‘obscurity’. Courts condemn silence breakers for not reporting sexual crimes the ‘right way’, with little recognition that the systems fail more victims than they assist, and that even reporting to police or an employer does not protect you from defamation litigation.

Gray proposes several recommendations to prevent or counter men’s weaponisation of defamation law. Education for the anti-violence sector, and for those considering reporting or disclosing sexual violence, is key: ‘These people require knowl-

edge of defamation law.’ As a media lawyer, I often participated in meetings set up to educate journalists, but as social media has turned us all into authors and publishers, a broader knowledge of the legal perils attending speech has become essential.

Gray supports conferring ‘absolute privilege’ (defamation immunity) on the formal reporting of sexual violence. In recent weeks, the Victorian government has done just that – protecting reports made to the police from defamation litigation. Unfortunately, Victoria stopped short of extending such protections to reports made to employers and other institutions.

Gray’s book reads like a warning. Survivors, be careful what you say. Advocates, call out these lawsuits as abusive before

sexual violence is pushed back into the realm of private shame. But perhaps Gray should also have warned abusive men against using these tactics. As I finished her book, the Federal Court gave judgement on Lehrmann v Network Ten, declaring that on the balance of probabilities Bruce Lehrmann raped Brittany Higgins. That ‘omnishambles’, as Justice Lee termed the case, should also serve as a cautionary tale. g

Jessica Lake is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School. She is currently writing a book on the gendered history of defamation law for Stanford University Press.

Evening on the River

after Caspar David Friedrich, Evening on the River (1820-25)

Everything seemed a catastrophe then but I had things to prove.

The place was for rent and I’d accepted its raddled timbers once the colour of living things, but with its veins now sapped of blood and paint. No electricity or running water, just a shallow river

and old plastic bucket. I ate only raw and sat on the step watching the sun rise and set. Each time a car slowed on the distant road, my heart would rise into my mouth and beat so loud I couldn’t hear. Whenever I tried hitchhiking to town I froze, walking the whole way. When I think of that time I burn for shame at what I believed living meant.

Those nights, though, looking up at the dark blue dome of heaven until the moon rose, I’d catch its light in my hands.

Julie Manning

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‘I never knew my uncle’

The phenomenon of pilgrimages and postmemory

by Joan Beaumont

Pilgrimages to war cemeteries have long been part of the rituals of Australian remembrance. It is easy to understand why veterans and the parents and siblings of the men who died in war make these journeys. But why do younger generations do so today, more than a century after World War I and eight decades after World War II? These were not their battles, nor their wars. Why do they seek out the semi-sacred spaces of Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemeteries? And why do they weep over the grave of someone whom they have never met?

The American scholar Marianne Hirsch has coined the term ‘postmemory’ to describe the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before. As she sees it, the experiences of one generation are transmitted so deeply and affectively, through stories, images, and behaviours, as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.

I have never lost a family member in war. But I joined a pilgrimage to Ambon by the Gull Force 2/21st Battalion Association on Anzac Day to understand why children and grandchildren still make this journey, after all the veterans have died.

Gull Force was a group of about 1,100 Australians sent in December 1941 to help the Dutch colonial military forces defend the island of Ambon, in the east of the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). The force was too small. It had little fire power and no air or naval support when a Japanese onslaught came on 31 January 1942. Most of Gull Force was soon taken prisoners of war. Some 229 were then massacred by the Japanese in the vicinity of the strategic Laha airport. The rest of Gull Force spent the war in captivity, either on Ambon or on Hainan Island, off China.

The death toll on Ambon, where prisoners were starved and worked to death, was seventy-seven per cent: it was one of the highest tolls of any group of Australian prisoners of the Japanese. Only the death marches at Sandakan were worse. The death toll on Hainan, where a third of Gull Force was sent in October 1942, was thirty-one per cent, comparable to the worst figures from the Thai-Burma railway.

For all the horror, some of Gull Force’s survivors yearned to return to Ambon after the war. This site of memory not only spoke to their own life-changing personal trauma; it was

also where they fought (if only briefly) and where hundreds of Australians who died on Ambon were buried in the CWGC cemetery built on the site of the wartime camp, Tan Tui.

The dead of Hainan, in contrast, had been buried in Yokohama, Japan. Although civil war and the communist victory in 1949 precluded the creation of a CWGC cemetery in China after 1945, Gull Force survivors were enraged at the choice of Yokohama, in the land of the enemy. For all its beauty, this would never become a regular destination for pilgrimages, individual or collective.

Gull Force could not return to Ambon until 1967, given recurrent unrest in the Moluccas and tensions, including ‘Confrontation’ over the creation of Malaysia, between Australia and Indonesia. When the veterans were finally allowed in, they maintained regular pilgrimages, with breaks during the communal violence in the Moluccas from 1999 to 2002 (more of this later), and during the Covid pandemic.

From the start, the veterans had two objectives: to conduct rituals of remembrance for the dead, and to show their gratitude to the Ambonese who had helped them during their captivity, either by assisting escape attempts or by supplying food. Both activities risked Japanese retribution, even execution. The Gull Force Association thus developed significant local aid programs: developing the Ambon hospital, providing professional development, sponsoring orphan children, and so on. These two elements of pilgrimage – remembrance and aid – have continued, as subsequent generations have taken over from the veterans.

The 2024 pilgrims whom I joined almost all had a family connection with the original Gull Force. I had somehow expected that they would be children of those who died in Ambon, but they were not, for the simple reason that threequarters of Gull Force were unmarried when they enlisted. Four of our party remembered uncles or great-uncles who had been executed at Laha. One married couple were still searching for the burial site of the wife’s uncle, who had been killed in the fighting in February 1942 on Mount Nona, which towers above the town of Ambon. But more than half of the group were remembering men who survived the war. Four had a father, father-in-law, or uncle who had been interned on Hainan. Two family groups – a father and two sons, and a mother, daughter, and niece – were descendants of men who

escaped Ambon soon after the surrender and made their way back to Australia by island-hopping in borrowed boats. As these families said, they owed their very existence to these escapes.

Ambon is not easy to get to. It is only a thousand kilometres from Darwin – hence, more than fifty Australians made successful escapes in 1942 – but there are no direct flights. We had to travel through Jakarta with long transit stops in a nearby airport hotel. This, then, is not an easy pilgrimage option. It is not Pozières on the Somme, less than two hours from that tourist mecca, Paris; or Ypres, in Belgium, now only a morning’s drive through the Chunnel from London, and an attractive tourist destination in itself, replete with its reconstructed medieval Cloth Hall.

We met at Melbourne Airport, with a punctuality worthy of the army. An immediate hierarchy was evident, between the first-timers and the repeat pilgrims who had made the journey to Ambon on eight, nine, ten, even fourteen previous occasions. The latter greeted the renovation of Ambon Airport (a Covid employment project, I was told) with approval. But those looking for signs of the airfield that hundreds of Gull Force had died defending in 1942 were disappointed.

Our first stop was Tawiri, a small village which houses two memorials to the Australians who were beheaded and bayoneted at Laha. The site of one of the mass graves is marked by a modest pillar on a plinth, engraved with a Christian cross. When we arrived, the site was drenched by recent rain, and the clouds threatened to burst again, so our service was brief, almost improvised: a few comments about 1942, a Christian prayer with references to duty, peace, sacrifice, and loyalty; and a poem written by one nephew in honour of a Laha victim, and here read by another: ‘I never knew my uncle. He was killed in the Second World War / He was executed on the Ambon shore … / The year was 1942 and he was 26 years old / It left the family grieving for his life could not unfold / Reginald Wade Monk was the uncle that I did not meet / I never got to shake his hand or with his children greet / No I never knew my uncle …’

Was this postmemory? Uncle Reg’s family rarely talked about his loss, but his nephew, whom I will call A, knew that his mother grieved for her brother. Uncle Reg, though dead, was a lasting presence in his extended family. Coming to Ambon, A said, brought ‘closure’ to this part of his family history, even though, he noted, he did not have an emotional response to the service comparable to that of the older B, who also remembered an uncle killed at Laha. C, too, who lost an uncle, had moist eyes as she laid a wreath of red poppies.

With a recitation of Binyon’s Ode, it was all over. We gathered up the wreath and poppies that C had helpfully supplied. They would be recycled on Anzac Day and, anyway, might be souvenired by the locals if we left them. We devoured cakes supplied by the family of our Ambonese guide and distributed gifts to the local children who were draped over the fence of the memorial space. With frisbees, sweets, soft kangaroos, koala key rings, and diverse Australian kitsch sailing through the air into the outstretched hands of children and adults, the mood became decidedly festive, even irreverent.

In the midst of death, we were in life.

At a second memorial marking another mass grave a short distance down the road, it was easier to imagine the spirits of the dead restive in the dank setting. The locals speak of a giant soldier emerging from the jungle at night. We bought more cakes from roadside vendors – a contribution to the local economy, we thought, and a chance to interact with local people.

The drive to our hotel through Ambon town, with chaotic traffic, tangled overhead wires, broken footpaths, rubbish-filled canals, and multiple KFCs, confirmed that here, too, the landscape bears no echoes of World War II. Ambon town is not Hellfire Pass or the cliffs of Gallipoli, where the topography tells its own story, with little heritage interpretation.

But then, I was soon told that the Ambon pilgrimage is ‘not about the war, it is about the people’. Inheriting the local connections and the tradition of aid projects established by their forebears, some pilgrims have maintained, over many visits, deep friendships and loyalty. They greeted their Ambonese contacts with shouts of joy and warm embraces.

It seems, then, that the pilgrimage has itself become a site of memory. We might think this term applies only to physical sites and material objects – battlefields, buildings, cemeteries, and memorials – but, as the French scholar Pierre Nora, who coined the influential term lieu de mémoire, has argued, ‘sites of memory’ can include events, commemorative dates, ritual practices; even ‘the products of reflection, such as the concept of a historical generation’. These non-physical sites become invested over the years with their own meanings, symbolism, and metaphorical representation of values. Take the concept of the returned soldier that is so powerful in Australian discourse about war. It means much more than the individual veteran. It conveys the notion of a consolidated and unified collective, and a figurative and metaphorical representation of loyalty, service, citizenship, and nationhood.

‘Pilgrimage as a site of memory’ helps explain a lot. First, the choice of hotel. I was warned it would be ‘basic’. My window looked onto a wall of pipes next door. The shower never offered hot water. It flooded the bathroom when left running for the recommended ten minutes. The occasional cockroach wandered across the floor. Why were we there? Because Hotel M. is part of the pilgrimage memory. The original veterans stayed here from the 1970s on. The current owner is the son of the manager who hosted them. The banner welcoming Gull Force was draped across the hotel exterior, while Australian flags bedecked the bar (which, alas, sometimes struggled to provide enough cold beer). Comfort mattered little when memories were so rich.

Second, the pilgrimage as a site of memory explains the odd absence of interest in World War II. It was not really Fawlty Towers, but few mentioned the war, or sought to know the details of Gull Force’s history of battle and captivity. That said, the war cemetery at Tan Tui was high on our list. This houses more than 2,000 graves, including many of the 2/21st Battalion which formed much of Gull Force. It is a tranquil garden paradise, with towering moss-covered trees and graves

immaculately laid out in terraced lawns between beds of tropical flowers and bushes. A memorial shelter on the first terrace provides sobering lists of the 450 Australian soldiers and airmen who died in the region and have no known grave.

On our first visit, we wandered in small groups or alone, seeking out the grave of a family member or trying to make sense of the rows upon rows of headstones. It was hard to imagine that this was the place where so many Australians starved to death, or succumbed to beriberi, malaria, or dysentery in abject squalor. Busy urban development now hems in the site. A large mosque fills the space that the prisoners of war walked across to the bay, where their latrine, which they called the Bridge of Sighs, stretched out over the water. Two of our group, whose grandfather had escaped in 1942, found the cemetery ‘significant’, but doubted that their children would make the effort to come.

We visited Tan Tui again on Anzac Day. It was a dawn service, and at 5 am several mosques in the vicinity issued amplified calls to prayer. The tsunami of sound washed over the graves of the long-dead Christians triggering at least one set of pursed lips – although another member of the group said, ‘We must all live together … they won’t last long.’ Indeed, the call to prayer soon gave way to triumphant roosters and a magical bird chorus.

Gull Force Association had pride of place at the ceremony, on seats drenched with overnight rain. Several pilgrims wore their relatives’ medals. I muttered gratuitously that in Canada this is prohibited while in Australia it is permissible, so long as the medals are worn on the right side. Perhaps another ten to fifteen Australians were present, as well as the pilgrimage twenty.

The service, led by Australian officials flown in from Jakarta and Makassar, followed a World War I template: Binyon’s Ode, the Last Post, Reveille, John Macrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s exhortation to the mothers of Australia to ‘wipe away your tears; your sons … have become our sons as well’. The humidity aside, no one would have guessed that we were at the site of one of the great tragedies of the Pacific war. Some words were delivered in Indonesian, for the benefit of the Indonesian officials present, but the rituals were another language culturally, and heavily Christian.

The discourse, as ever, was one of sacrifice. Certainly, Gull Force had been sacrificed when it was dispatched to Ambon in December 1941 with absolutely no chance of stopping the Japanese attack. But ‘sacrifice’ was employed in a reflexive sense. The soldiers made a sacrifice, of themselves, it seems. They were not sacrificed by Australia’s military leaders and their flawed strategic planning.

On Anzac Days in the past, Gull Force moved at the conclusion of its Tan Tui rituals to the nearby Indonesian Heroes cemetery. There, they paid tribute to the soldiers of the Indonesian army, many of whom had died when suppressing the Moluccan secessionist movement in the early 1950s. But this reciprocal honouring of each other’s dead no longer occurs – though no one seems to know why, or even knows that it ever happened. So, gathering up our recycled wreaths

and poppies (including the spares provided by the optimistic Australian consulate), and pausing for the obligatory cheerful group photo, we returned, with guests in tow, to our hotel for the gunfire breakfast. The familiar fried eggs, fried rice, toast, and omelettes were supplemented by pastries and the traditional rum.

Fortified, we visited Kudamati, the place where an Australian soldier, Bill Doolan, made a suicidal last stand in a banyan tree on 1 February 1942. The banyan tree is long gone, but Doolan lives on in Ambon folklore. A first memorial was unveiled here in 1968, but in 2013 it was joined by a larger memorial. Conceived by the Gull Force Association and funded by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (as so many of the memorials of the recent memory boom have been), this installation is notable in that it commemorates the living, not the dead. Like many Great War memorials in Australia itself, it honours those who volunteered to fight, and survived. ‘Somewhere,’ the group leader told me, ‘we wanted our fathers’ names to be seen – a place where we could commemorate those who returned home.’

Here again, we might see postmemory: not crossgenerational trauma but pride in a family’s record of military service and affirmation of its place in the national memory of war. Children and grandchildren paused to have their photo taken, sticking a poppy onto a name with blue tack and pointing to it. ‘Is not the poppy for the dead?’ I asked. ‘No,’ D said, ‘it is more than that. It is for remembrance.’

This was the extent of such rituals, at least in the formal program. One day we stopped on a cliff top with a panoramic view of the southern coastline from which more than twenty Australians set sail for Darwin in the immediate aftermath of Gull Force’s defeat. But as we all posed for photos with the Gull Force banner fluttering in the breeze, the view that invested the site with wartime significance became the backdrop.

Only the family of one man who escaped made the journey down to the small fishing village of Seri below. The son and grandsons had struggled to articulate their reasons for coming to Ambon (they were all first-timers), but here, at Seri, the story handed down to them became real. The hills above were so rugged, the village so small, even today, that it must have been very difficult to find in 1942. And Darwin seemed a long way away across the glittering sea. How could you not be in awe of young men who took the gamble of eluding the Japanese?

Yet the spell was soon broken. ‘I bet this rubbish wasn’t cluttering the beach in 1942,’ son E said. Neither, I thought, was the beachfront chapel boasting a more than lifesized image of Jesus’s face and blasting what seemed to be Ambonese Hillsong at the foreign intruders. Grandson F thought he might be stabbed. We did not linger long.

The rest of our five days in Ambon were spent in sightseeing or in local philanthropy. One day we stopped at a tired resort for lunch and a swim. I peered out at the bay that Australians had sailed across, masquerading as Ambonese fishermen, under the nose of patrolling Japanese naval vessels. Down the coast was Paso, the strategic junction of the two peninsulas and the headquarters of the Dutch army in 1942,

which collapsed almost immediately, leaving the Australian forces hopelessly exposed. For most of the group, however, the locality was probably memorable for the local dessert: tropical fruit smothered in crushed peanuts, chilli, and cane sugar –a delicacy, we assume, that the POWs never sampled.

As for philanthropy: we visited a privately run orphanage that the Gull Force Association and Rotary now support with donations and in-kind assistance. We brought bags of food and gifts for the children who sat patiently lining the walls of the hall opposite us. They soon erupted into life when given a variety of treasure including balls. One of our group, an octogenarian, played ball with a visually impaired girl. I pondered funding a basketball ring. Others articulated a sense of obligation to ensure this aid program continued.

form the CWGC might ultimately choose to privilege those cemeteries that have a high level of usage by visitors.

Beyond that, we do not know how long the communities of the Asia-Pacific region will tolerate these obviously imperial footprints upon their soil. In many places, these have become part of the local landscape, aesthetically appealing green spaces invested with new local meanings over the years. But many are now on prime real estate, as the surrounding cities expand and encroach upon them. Will they all last ‘in perpetuity’, as the CGWC agreements with host governments prescribe?

In the case of Ambon, the cemetery has already endured a sectarian attack. In 1999, Ambon erupted into communal violence, caused by a complex mix of religious tensions and economic and political competition between Christians and Muslims. The violence spread throughout the Moluccas and, by mid-2001, an estimated 4,000 people had died and more than 500,000 had been displaced. The Cross of Sacrifice in the Tan Tui cemetery was another casualty, smashed by Muslim activists. Some years later the CWGC replaced it, but with a less overtly Christian Stone of Remembrance. Few know that this stone was originally designed by that quintessential imperial architect, Edwin Lutyens, and that its inscription, ‘Their name liveth for evermore’, comes from Ecclesiastes. It was recommended by another great imperialist, Rudyard Kipling.

The following day we visited a village close to where many Australians had been trapped and relentlessly shelled in the last days of their hopeless battle (as I told anyone who cared to listen). It was all very jolly: welcome dances, a communal meal which Gull Force served to the villagers, and the group leader delighting all by playing the ukulele. ‘These are the good days,’ G said to me, ‘when you’re welcomed to their villages.’

This history of cross-cultural connections and friendships, refreshed year on year, is what invests the pilgrimage with its rich layers of memory. These might well be the reason that Ambon pilgrimages continue in the future. The fate of some pilgrimages – and, indeed, of the 23,000 cemeteries and memorials that the CWGC maintains around the world – must surely be in doubt as the decades pass. Even now, something of a hierarchy exists in the CWGC cemeteries. Some are visited by hordes of tourists, others rarely so. A demand-driven model of economics would sit uneasily with remembrance, but the Commonwealth governments that

As for the pilgrimages to Ambon: the children of Gull Force veterans are now in their seventies or eighties. Soon they will be unable to cope with the rigours of the long journey, Ambon’s hazardous footpaths, and the enervating humidity. For the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the crossgenerational memory of the war will become attenuated and devoid of emotional power. Who really cares, after all, about the men who fought in the Boer War, let alone Waterloo?

However, the pilgrimage to Ambon might well continue, given that it has become its own site of memory. The philanthropic activities and personal friendships with Ambonese – and the values of cross-cultural understanding and generosity that they represent – do not yet eclipse the rituals of remembrance, but they are a powerful parallel legacy that the descendants of Gull Force will inherit. They might well perpetuate it, even when they know little about why or how the war cemetery at Tan Tui and the Ambon pilgrimage came into being. g

Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. Her 1988 history of Gull Force in captivity is being revised for republication in 2025. The poem cited was written by Rob Monk and published by courtesy of Ian Swan. Members of the delegation have been identified with alphabetical letters, in the interest of privacy.

This article is one of a series supported by Peter McMullin AM via the Good Business Foundation.

The author with members of the 2024 Gull Force Association pilgrimage, above Seri, Ambon.

Writing his own life

Mark Twain’s Jim reclaims his story

Heather Neilson

PJames

by Percival Everett Pan Macmillan

$34.99 pb, 320 pp

ercival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, and the author of numerous works of fiction published over the past forty years. Throughout his oeuvre, he has explored the ways in which texts engage with other texts, and has vigorously critiqued the persistent stereotyping of African Americans in the cultural history of the United States. His best-known novel is probably Erasure (2001), a complex satire directed at the publishing and media industries. Cord Jefferson’s recent adaptation of that novel, American Fiction, which won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2023, has drawn further attention to Everett’s whole career. However, James, Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), from the perspective of the escaped slave Jim, may prove to be his most critically and commercially successful work thus far. Everett is clearly aware of the academic scholarship on Huckleberry Finn, including Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s ground-breaking work published in 1993, with the deliberately tantalising title Was Huck Black? Fishkin did not propose that Huck was literally African American but, rather, that the impact of African American language and culture upon Twain’s work, and mainstream American culture in general, had been underestimated. Jon Clinch’s novel Finn (2007) – another retelling of Huckleberry Finn, focused on ‘Pap’ – portrayed Huck as the result of his father’s liaison with a black woman. In Everett’s novel, a different hypothesis concerning Huck’s origins is proposed. But James is the story of Jim, not of Huck.

In his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Huckleberry Finn, the late Emory Elliott commented on the tendency of readers to underestimate Jim’s shrewdness and stoicism. He cites the Phelps farm section late in the novel, after Jim has been abducted and sold behind Huckleberry’s back. When Huck goes in search of Jim, he is mistaken for Tom Sawyer, who turns out to be the Phelpses’ nephew. When Tom himself arrives shortly afterwards, he assumes the identity of his younger brother. He then subjects both Jim and his own relatives to a series of gratuitously unpleasant pranks in order to entertain himself. As Elliott remarks:

Were [Jim] to give in to his emotions and cry out to Huck to stop Tom’s idiotic games, Jim and his family could be lost forever […]

Although we may have wished that freedom could have come to Jim more as the obvious result of his own agency, he does participate in his own liberation. His keen perceptions and judgments about whom to trust, when to act, and when to exercise caution are key reasons

for his survival. Had Jim been less intelligent and calculating and less dedicated to his family, he would not have survived.

In his own depiction of Jim, Everett vividly conveys the fugitive slave’s astuteness and ingenuity, especially in the perilous company of a good-hearted but ignorant white boy.

Everett moves forward the action of Twain’s novel by about twenty years, so that in James the outbreak of the Civil War is imminent. Although key figures and events from Huckleberry Finn recur in James, Everett departs strategically from the source text, introducing the protagonist to a variety of new characters and tribulations. At one point, Jim becomes entangled with the composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, historically the manager of one of the first minstrel shows in the United States. With a fine tenor voice, Jim is even coerced into performing with Emmett’s troupe – a black man ludicrously disguised as a white man wearing blackface – until he escapes with the aid of another fugitive. Everett’s postmodern humour is punctuated with recognisably realistic episodes of brutality, the fate of a young slave who assists Jim a stark example.

The novel’s best joke is unveiled at the start. As narrator, Jim employs the vocabulary, syntax, and cultural knowledge of a formally educated man. His fellow slaves also speak this way. Self-preservation requires their pandering to the white masters’ presumptions of superiority by performing ‘in character’. Jim teaches his own and his neighbours’ children how to use their ‘slave filter’ in the vicinity of whitefolk: he rehearses them in the translation of their thoughts into the expected idioms of self-abasement.

‘Let them work to understand you. Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble. They enjoy the correction and thinking you’re stupid. Remember, the more they choose to not want to listen, the more we can say to one another around them.’ […] The children said together, ‘And the better they feel, the safer we are.’

The most unsafe secret that Jim keeps is the fact that he is literate. He has largely taught himself during clandestine visits to Judge Thatcher’s library, during the judge’s regular absences. In his dreams, he converses with Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke. Throughout the periods of the journey when Jim is separated from Huck, he encounters various groups of slaves. Those to whom he reveals his ability to read and write urge him to record his story, sensing that his testimony could empower future generations even though it can do nothing for them.

While on the run, Jim reads one of the earliest known slave narratives – A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, first published in 1798. Jim finds Venture Smith’s ‘so-called self-related’ autobiography infuriating, surmising that Smith’s words had been embellished, or worse, by white editors. It is at this point that he forms the intention of writing his own life, as:

a man who is cognizant of his world, a man who has a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written

Everett makes it clear that his ‘answer’ to Huckleberry Finn has emerged from a place of respect for Mark Twain, whose ‘humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer’. James confirms Everett himself as one of the most accomplished and intriguing writers in the United States right now. g

Cul-de-sac

Colm Tóibín returns to Enniscorthy

Peter Rose

ELong

Island by Colm Tóibín Picador

$34.99 pb, 292 pp

nniscorthy, a town in County Wexford, was Colm Tóibín’s birthplace in 1955. His father was a schoolteacher and local historian. Martin Tóibín died young, when Colm was twelve, an early loss explored in Tóibín’s novel Nora Webster (2014), in which the eponymous widow’s son Donal is likewise twelve and a stammerer. In 2009, Tóibín published Brooklyn, which moves between Enniscorthy and New York City. The very modesty of Tóibín’s middle-class settings and characters – their constrained lives, village absorptions, small defeats – could not obscure Tóibín’s subtle artistry or his forensic interest in psychology, especially that of his women, many of whom are so complex, so contradictory, as to make the male characters seem extraneous, unimaginative, stolid.

Now Tóibín returns to Enniscorthy with the sequel to Brooklyn. Any sequel is hard to pull off, especially when the original novel has been filmed to wide acclaim, as Brooklyn was in 2015 (John Crowley the director), with the excellent Saoirse Ronan as Eilis Lacey and some exceptional cameos, including Brid Brennan’s chilling turn as the malevolent shopkeeper Miss Kelly.

It was Miss Kelly’s mischievous gossip that upheaved the first novel and denied Eilis an alternative happiness with Jim Farrell. Eilis had gone back to Enniscorthy to console her widowed mother following the sudden death of her sister. Eilis’s renewed acquaintance with Farrell, whom she knew as a girl, leads to romance and talk of marriage – until Miss Kelly learns that Eilis was recently married to an Italian boy in Brooklyn. To avert scandal and the indignation of the Fiorello family, Eilis must hurry back to America and resume her first conjugal destiny, with its fond, ominous talk of a dream house on a new estate on Long Island. She flees Enniscorthy with the precipitateness that often overtakes Tóibín’s main characters at crucial moments. Sitting on the train to Wexford, Eilis imagines her mother’s words: ‘She has gone back to Brooklyn.’

Eilis imagined the years ahead, when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who had heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.

Closing her eyes, her mind perhaps – trying to conjure a nullity – has served Eilis passably well during the twenty years that have elapsed since those convulsive events. The marriage to

Tony Fiorello was quietly resumed, without incident. They now have two grown children, brilliantly drawn (Tóibín is good at children). Reasonably prosperous, they live in a cul-de-sac with four houses, all occupied by the Fiorellos (Eilis thinks of it as an ‘enclosure’). If one of her daughters-in-law goes for a walk, Francesca, the matriarch who lives opposite, asks them where they went, and why. The weekly Sunday lunches en famille are an ordeal for Eilis. She knows she is intelligent, better-read, good-looking. ‘It struck Eilis as strange how little they all knew about her, but she told them nothing.’

She is also a Democrat (she begins to feel American when she votes against Richard Nixon). One day she argues with Tony’s father about Vietnam and the nobility of military service. This, of course, is infra dig. The father-in-law has never quite learned how to pronounce her name. Eilis has put so much behind her she seems at an odd angle to herself.

Tóibín often resorts to domestic breaches or cataclysms, as if to illustrate the brittleness of our social arrangements. The new novel opens with a visit almost Verdian in its brutality and vengefulness. A local Irishman tells Eilis that Tony, who is a plumber, has impregnated his wife and that when the brat is born he will having nothing to with it and will deposit it right there on the Fiorellos’ doorstep. All this is conveyed in a first chapter of impressive concision and intensity.

How Eilis responds to this unexpected news (this is Tony’s first infidelity, or so he assures her) – what she chooses to do, or not to do – lies at the heart of this sinuous, quietly excruciating novel. Having determined from the outset that she will have nothing to do with Tony’s child (‘It’s your business, not mine’), and having endured the intrigues of the Fiorellos (who are much more forgiving and accommodating, and rather pleased to have a new baby in the cul-de-sac), she elects to return to Ireland for the first time in twenty years – for how long she cannot say.

What an interestingly unhappy protagonist Eilis becomes in the process. How much she has left behind, occluded. We are reminded of psychological clues in Brooklyn: her acute homesickness and desolation when she is persuaded to leave Ireland soon after her sister’s death. Her way of coping with the estrangement from everything she has known, loved – ‘the life she had lost and would never have again’ – is to put it out of her mind.

Following the Irishman’s visit, Eilis is strangely affectless, almost paralysed. As she absorbs the news, ‘[f]or a second she wished there was somewhere she could go, a place where she would not have to contemplate what had happened.’ She wishes she could undo the visit. But then, undoing or reversing the inconvenient past is a habit of hers.

This lack of affect seems contagious. When Eilis tells her daughter about Tony’s affair, Rosella says: ‘I wish I hadn’t heard this. I know that sounds stupid but that’s what I wish.’ Even Tony, the culprit, is oddly blithe, pretending nothing has happened, which may be taking Italian braggadocio too far.

There is a pattern here: throughout her adult life Eilis has craved solitude, namelessness:

In all her years with Tony, it was something she had often dreamed about, especially at the beginning of her marriage – slipping

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away, getting a train or even driving to some town and finding an anonymous hotel to spend two nights away from everyone.

Would it be going too far to suggest that there is a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder at work here – the polite, stoic grief of any diaspora? Tóibín may have planted a clue early in Long Island, when Eilis recalls a conversation with a Mr Dakessian, who tells her about the Armenian genocide. ‘“You’re Irish,” he said. “You’ll recognise it.”’

Tóibín often resorts to domestic cataclysms to illustrate the brittleness of our social arrangements

Only once is there a hint of rage or murderous potential in Eilis. As she spars with Tony in the kitchen, ‘[t]he idea that she was standing beside a drawer of knives gave Eilis pause for thought.’ And that’s all. It feels slightly gratuitous in this otherwise perfectly poised novel.

Once in Ireland after the domestic rupture, Eilis renews her association with family and old friends. She stays with her mother, May Lacey, such a formidable character, so moving at the end of Brooklyn when – heartbroken by Eilis’s sudden and unexplained flight from Ireland and the cessation of her romance with Jim Farrell – she refuses to farewell her daughter and stays in her room. Old age, loneliness, Enniscorthy perhaps, have not improved Mrs Lacey. She welcomes her daughter with churlishness and ingratitude. Mrs Lacey is stronger now, more determined, Eilis realises. She too has been cauterised, almost irritated by life. She is a kind of monster – just another disappointed snob in a village.

In Enniscorthy, Eilis stands out because of her poise, her tan, her wardrobe – the sheen of Americanness. She spends time with her old friend Nancy Sheridan, now widowed, and resumes her friendship with Jim Farrell, not knowing that he is conducting a secret affair with Nancy, who is desperate to escape from the revolting chip shop she is running. The intricacies of what follows – as Eilis and Jim contemplate a future together, and Nancy decides what to do – unfold with a kind of classic inevitability, demonstrating Tóibín’s narrative powers and his ability to balance satire and pathos.

The humour throughout is choice. When Eilis discovers the extent of the Fiorellos’ machinations, she asks Tony’s lawyer brother Frank, ‘Did you learn to talk like this at Fordham, or does it come naturally to you?’ Nancy, at a wedding, dances with a man who directs her ‘like a man driving a tractor’. Another woman is said to be ‘the only woman in Ireland who can wear grey’.

At the end, to secure her future Nancy acts brutally, in a spirit of ruthless realism. She asserts herself in ways Jim Farrell – oddly passive for a publican – has never been able to do. All he can do is put a question to Eilis about some notional future in America. He waits and waits for an answer, counting the seconds ‘until he got to a hundred and then two hundred’. Unexpectedly, the novel ends with this hurt, baffled, newly stubborn man.

Now we too must await the answer to Farrell’s question in the third novel that will surely follow – like the remorseless old widows in their laced attic bedrooms in Enniscorthy. g

Hope and despair

Amanda Creely’s

Patrick Allington

‘Bfurious new novel

Nameless by Amanda Creely

UWA Publishing

$34.99 pb, 314 pp

ut I think there’s sometimes more emotion in a whisper. It doesn’t cause a fuss.’ So says Teller, the narrator of Bendigo writer Amanda Creely’s novel Nameless Her story, Teller tells readers more than once, is not nice. She is right: set in an unnamed and unrecognisable country and in a world that seems not to have sophisticated technologies for war or peace, Nameless is the story of everyday citizens facing an invasion by a hostile, brutal, and powerful neighbouring army.

In the post-invasion world, everyone, not just Teller, has a new name to match their circumstances. As Teller puts it, ‘Now we were just the nameless lost to war.’ And so, Teller’s surviving daughter is named Daughter; her dead husband is Husband, her other daughter is Eldest, and her sons are Son and Youngest; the man who helps Teller and Daughter is Rescuer; and so on. Oddly, given that he is the wager of the war rather than a victim, the leader of the invading forces also earns a descriptive name: Teller calls him Invader.

Creely takes an allegorical approach to her storytelling, a choice hard to sustain for more than 300 pages. The plot is simple: one country invades another, many innocent people die in horrible ways, while others are imprisoned or forced into labour. Teller and Daughter find refuge on an island in a lake in a forest, among a small community of survivors. They become part of a resistance; they tend, to whatever extent possible, their broken hearts; they remember their dead or missing family. And they plan counter-attacks, though their numbers and resources are few.

Creely uses the bare facts of the invasion to invite the reader to dwell upon dichotomous choices, including despair versus hope, good versus evil, defeatism versus retribution, love versus hate, and love versus loyalty. While the plot nods only briefly to the machinations of geopolitics, it depicts wanton violence and cruelty unsparingly. In particular, Creely maintains a sustained and graphic focus – without allowing it to become gratuitous – on the sexual violence the invading soldiers inflict upon local girls and women, including Eldest.

Teller’s narratorial voice, matching the plot’s simplicity, is minimal, clear, claustrophobic, and raw. While her occasional deployment of metaphorical flourishes can be misplaced or jarring, there is something moving, for example, about the way she strains to describe generations of families as resembling trees: ‘and those trees like ladders that you ascend throughout the days of your life’. As the invasion becomes occupation, as the resisters

do what they can, and as Teller’s account of all this builds towards its climax, the essence of the novel seems to metastasise from its focus on Teller’s inner world to a faster-paced plot that recounts various acts of survival and resistance. I found the novel’s first half more absorbing and original, but some readers will favour the accelerated momentum and the building of tension.

Creely juxtaposes the simple plot and prose with an excruciating, compassionate examination of Teller’s complex inner world. Teller sometimes whispers, sometimes wails. She has terrible dreams. She overthinks with painful exactitude and repetition, mixing grief, rage, bewilderment, and mental exhaustion as she endures her days. Mostly, she is reserved and careful, so much so that it is odd to hear her utter a rare profanity. But she is also prone to impulsive and dangerous acts. Most especially, she bears profound self-disgust that she has failed to do the impossible and save her family: ‘You know I’m not strong. You know I failed as a mother. You know I fall to pieces when adversity cuts at me.’ On the island, she fights her romantic feelings towards Rescuer, tempered by her commitment to her dead husband: ‘As good as Husband but not Husband’.

While a range of other characters are prominent in the story – especially Eldest, Daughter, Rescuer, a mysterious girl called Crow, a young man called Solder, and other survivors – readers come to know them mostly from Teller’s perspective, what she sees, thinks, wants, and remembers about them. The invading force never comes into focus, except through their actions and Teller’s fear and fury. The reader comes to know Invader as a man who enjoys leading by example, demonstrating to his men how to inflict pain and suffering. His deepest motivation, beyond conquest for conquest’s sake, is a mystery: what you see is what you get. He is present at key moments in the story, appearing with the convenience of a magic trick.

Perhaps Teller is speaking for Creely when she says, ‘I keep talking about hope, don’t I? Vacillating back and forth: hope gone for good, returning with a hip, hip hooray.’ Of all the dichotomies in Nameless, the most prominent, the most imbued with uncertain meaning and unanswerable questions, is that of hope and despair. Although this is a common theme in contemporary fiction, especially in the context of climate catastrophe and geopolitical uncertainty, Creely’s distinctive contribution is to intermingle, in sometimes discomforting ways, Teller’s personal mix of hope and hopelessness with the wider realities facing the people of her conquered nation.

Nameless was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett award, one of a bunch of publisher-run competitions for unpublished manuscripts in Australia. In setting the story in an unnamed and unrecognisable country, Creely universalises her furious antiwar, anti-violence, and anti-violence-against-women message. The war-related themes that underpin Nameless reinforce what history already tells us, despite our collective capacity to forget or want to forget: that leaders from different eras and political systems are capable of perpetrating mass violence and crimes against humanity; and that many nations and citizens are willing to ignore atrocities for reasons of expediency or self-interest. g

Patrick Allington’s most recent novel is Rise & Shine (Scribe, 2020).

Republics of salt

A haunting new novel of the sea

Rose Lucas

‘TSaltblood

by Francesca de Tores Bloomsbury

$32.99 pb, 344 pp

ell me your crow name. Tell me the name you will wear to the bottom of the sea,’ begins the narrating voice of Francesca de Tores’s new novel, Saltblood. These opening words, spoken by the central character at what we come to realise is the end of her life, highlight the novel’s key themes and imagery: the play of names and identities, sometimes given and sometimes taken, but always something to be worn or cast off; the call of the sea and its persistent presence of sparkle and depth throughout this chronicle of an unusual life; and the blue-black image of the crow itself, the speaker’s constant familiar, an intimate figure who lurks, ominous and comforting, in the sway of rigging. Unfolding her story in the shadow of imminent death, the reflective, determined voice of de Tores’s narrator is as deep and unpredictable as the ocean itself, thereby setting the stage for a story of introspection and observation, resilience and desire, swashbuckling action, and quotidian seaboard life.

Saltblood is historical fiction which achieves that rare combination of being both a gripping read and intellectually and emotionally nuanced. Through the observing lens of its narrator, the novel evokes the often chaotic and violent world of early 1700s seafaring, war, and the so-called ‘golden age of pirating’, from the Mediterranean to Nassau in the Bahamas, the mythical heart of a ‘Republic of Pirates’. It is an exotic but often desperate world, which, for many of its inhabitants, generates fantasies of living beyond the pale, outside the class and gender conventions of the time. De Tores’s perspective in this world-building is distinctly modern, particularly in the construction of the narrator, Mary, whose gender motility speaks to contemporary notions of performativity and even drag/trans identifications. What does it mean to have a biologically female body and to dress and act as a boy and also to marry and give birth, to desire where love arises rather than where convention dictates?

Mary – sometimes Mark – Read was, as the author tells us, a documented figure in the annals of piracy, although these records are thin and require the imagination of the novelist to animate them. Raised as a boy in order to secure a grandparent’s legacy to her dead brother, de Tores’s Mary/Mark inhabits a shifting world, where appearance and biology are not always aligned, and where ‘Mary’ is forever stalked by the ghost of Mark, by the need to maintain the disguise of another’s identity. As Mark emerges from Ma’s strategic machinations, he enters service as a footman, hiding his menstrual rags, before leaving to join the

navy. It is here, working hard as an apparently pre-pubescent ‘powder monkey’ and climbing the masts, that Mark discovers a great love of the sea – its beauty and mutability, danger and indifference, providing opportunities for certain kinds of freedom. A strong and agile body, quick learning of the skills of seafaring, and a head for heights protect Mark from most discerning gazes before he is eventually ‘outed’ and forced to leave the ship and head for the army. It is during this period, which he describes as ‘coming into the season of my longings’, that passions are stirred with his tent companion; in a manner reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Mark becomes/emerges as Mary and for a brief time lives as a Flanders wife.

Unshackled from the masquerade of pretending to be only Mark, Mary Read returns to the seafaring life, hoisting her skirts around her so that she can still climb the masts and work as hard as any man within the organism of a ship’s crew. It is in this indeterminate space between expectations that Mary spends her adult life, inhabiting the paradoxical opportunities which her unfixed self and names allow her: she is recognised as ‘not man’, yet she is not constrained by any traditional idea of ‘woman’ either, neither Captain’s wife nor the provider of sexual services to the male crew. When her heart and body yearn for the wild Anne Bonney, another paradigm of identity and desire is unstitched and re-woven into something that is beautiful, a compelling experience of body and emotion. Perhaps the great progression in the novel, and what makes it ultimately a Bildungsroman, is that, despite the traumas she experiences, Mary grows to be comfortable in the varying roles given to her. The ‘self’ she comes to inhabit is both Mark and Mary and yet it is also more complex than any simple binary might suggest. Like the tale that Mark hears as a lad of the selkie who encompasses both woman and seal, sea and land, human and creature, Read revels in diversity, evolving and adapting to the variabilities of circumstance, like a sail in the wind.

De Tores is a poet as well as the author of four previous novels (publishing as Francesca Haig). The richness of language in Saltblood, the almost Turneresque suggestions of water, sky, the roiling and the ‘singing’ of the wooden boats, as well as the ability to voice Read’s interiority – all demonstrate the skill of a poetic sensibility and craft. Saltblood is a rollicking read, a compelling picaresque of journey and challenge and change. Through this narrative of Mary/Mark Read, it also offers intelligent and moving insights into the always complex business of life, examining how we might find or make ourselves – or indeed be made by others – and yet still build hopeful ‘republics of salt’, as Mary puts it, with the surprising material of our own particular. g

Rose Lucas’s most recent poetry collection is Remarkable as Breathing (Liquid Amber Press, 2024).

Tired of words, words, words?

‘Listen, deeply now’

Sounds of the Wimmera Paul Genoni

IThe Desert Knows Her Name

by Lia Hills

Affirm Press

$34.99 pb, 288 pp

n scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir ecofiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

While outback-noir often relies on unspecified locations that derive menace from being both anywhere and nowhere, The Desert Knows Her Name is precise in its setting. The novel’s action revolves around the fictional town of Gatyekarr. ‘Gachie’, as the locals know it, sits on the edge of the Wimmera’s Little Desert, a liminal space between the plains of Australia Felix and the real desert. It is a town perfectly located for exposing the damaged reality of native environments and persistent colonial-settler anxieties.

The tale unfolds through alternating first-person accounts by Beth and Nate. Beth, a middle-aged woman living alone and scraping a meagre income by collecting, planting, and selling native seeds, provides the plot with its ecological conscience. Beth’s parents having died in unexplained circumstances, her motivation is to restore the plains damaged by her own family’s farming practices. Nate is the Gachie-born pub owner and barman, battling a shattered past that includes the drowning death of his five-year-old daughter. After living away he has returned to his hometown in search of recovery. United by loss and loneliness, Beth and Nate are supportive friends.

The third main character is a young girl of ‘twelve, thirteen maybe’ who wanders out of the desert into Beth’s farmhouse. She is shoeless, dehydrated, scared, and scarred. And she doesn’t speak, apparently rendered mute by some trauma that is beyond her to express, or Beth to discern. Suspicion grows that she has been the victim of abuse or crime.

Beth draws Nate into a conspiracy to shelter the child (whom they call Freya) while trying to unravel her origins and story. Their efforts prove futile. Word of her arrival quickly spreads through

a town that is already on edge about an impending celebration of its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, which threatens to inflame contested histories and settlement-era rivalries. Rumours spread, fears mount, and fingers are pointed.

In addition to the narratives of Beth and Nate, the text also includes a third, omniscient narrator. In Gachie, where motivations are often transparently short-term and self-interested, it is this voice that constantly calls attention to a longer view of the Wimmera’s natural and human histories. While the land might appear to be as mute and untouchable as the found child, this third voice expresses a lyrical plea on behalf of the place and its many sounds. The reader is regularly invited to ‘listen, deeply now’, because ‘nothing goes unheard out here, and everything’.

It is this insistent reiteration of the sounds of the Wimmera that foregrounds the tale’s moral underpinning, with its respect for deep time – insect rustle, a sighing bough, the wind on grass, and particularly birdsong in its endless variety. The reader is asked to consider the place of the human voice as part of the Wimmera ecology, voices that also risk being silenced by time, neglect, or wilful forgetting. These include explorers Thomas Mitchell and Granville Stapylton, poet John Shaw Neilson, Aboriginal boy William Wimmera, and singer-songwriter Nick Cave.

It is with these contemplative narrative segments, with their passionate and melancholic rendering of place and time, that Hills’s writing finds its authentic groove. She builds the allegorical weight of both the natural and human sounds of the Wimmera and establishes how ‘when humans quarrel, the land always pays’.

Hills, however, seems less comfortable with the novel’s noir aspect. As the ‘thriller’ components mount, a gap emerges between the rich allegorical framework and the need to sustain an engrossing mystery. Partly this results from a familiar cast of supporting characters – a fifth-generation farmer, an Indigenous elder, a policeman, a journalist, a university researcher, a runaway from a local cult – who have insufficient space to emerge as little more than predictable types.

Aspects of the plot also suffer from being familiar from other ‘outback’ novels. These include speech loss as a portent of other silences (Billy and Perdita in Gail Jones’s Sorry [2008]; Oblivia in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book [2013]), and the use of grassland fire as a weapon (Jane Harper’s The Dry [2016]). A town reunion creating a flashpoint for colonial grievances recalls Thea Astley’s A Kindness Cup (1974), a novel which, half a century after its publication, increasingly feels like a transformative moment in Australian fiction.

Also familiar are tropes such as the constant re-inscription of land(scape) (‘The land is written and overwritten’); the prevalence of diseased and traumatised bodies as an index of environmental ills; and the use of an archive to resolve modern mysteries.

Many readers will justifiably welcome The Desert Knows Her Name and future novels by Lia Hills. She is a skilled writer and her attention to the long game of evolving national configurations will remain important. But the results may have more impact if she homes in on the less that lies among the more; and pushes against what might be thought to be the reader’s zone of expectations. There is about The Desert Knows Her Name a seeming separation between the author’s real ambitions and the desire (or need) to grow an audience. g

‘Dancing

on my tongue’

A sapphic-heavy cultural moment

Yves Rees

IA Language of Limbs: A novel

by Dylin Hardcastle Picador

$34.99 pb, 290 pp

n early 1971, two Newcastle teenagers are overcome with sapphic appetites. Each is inflamed with lust for her childhood best friend, the literal girl next door. What to do about this forbidden desire? The first – Limb One – acts on her hunger. She enjoys a golden summer of covert fucking, before being discovered by her parents in flagrante delicto. After being beaten and kicked out of home, she hitches a ride to Sydney. True to herself, she is homeless and alone at sixteen. The second – Limb Two – follows the more well-worn path of repression. She buries her desires, acquires a boyfriend, studies hard. The good girl, beloved by her parents. One conundrum, two choices. How will the dice fall?

This sliding doors moment is the premise of Dylin Hardcastle’s new novel, A Language of Limbs. After beachside opening scenes that conjure a queer Puberty Blues, the novel follows the two women (or ‘limbs’) for the next two decades, tracing their parallel lives via alternating chapters. Limb One washes up in the queer underworld of inner Sydney, finding her métier as a poet amid the convulsions of gay liberation and the AIDS epidemic. Limb Two clings tight to respectability, winning scholarships at the University of Sydney and marrying a nice young man. They are worlds apart, yet their stories keep colliding: at a university protest against gay discrimination, at the deathbeds of AIDS victims, at a gallery opening marked by violence. They are beguiled by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and queer surrealist Claude Cahun. Each is blessed by murmurations and felled by inconceivable loss. Their lives mirror and echo each other, separate yet entwined. Again and again, the two limbs almost touch, uncanny doppelgängers unknowingly reaching out across the chasm that divided queer and straight worlds. Are they divided twins or star-crossed lovers?

A Language of Limbs is the latest contribution to what Rebecca Shaw, writing in the Guardian, has dubbed a ‘sapphic-heavy cultural moment’, a point of unprecedented ‘saturation (the collective noun) of queer women in pop culture’. Think the lesbian-dense Matildas, the sapphic romps Love Lies Bleeding and Drive-Away Dolls, pop star Billie Eilish declaring, ‘I realised I wanted my face in a vagina.’ As it happened, I read Hardcastle’s novel the same week Eilish’s ‘Lunch’ brought queer cunnilingus to the pop charts. ‘I want to eat that girl for lunch / Yeah, she’s dancing on my tongue,’ Eilish crooned as I read the lines ‘With her hand – inside me. With our mouths – ravenous.’ How things have changed since the 1970s, when, as Hardcastle depicts, the first Mardi Gras was hijacked by violent police and the arrested

marchers were deliberately outed by the Sydney Morning Herald

My own teenage self, ashamed to be lusting after girls in early 2000s Newcastle, could hardly imagine the defiant joy of such a cultural tipping point. Looking back, it’s tempting to imagine my own sliding doors moment. Had I had access to Hardcastle and Eilish in 2001, how might my life have unfolded differently?

While A Language of Limbs is a novel of the Zeitgeist, it would be a disservice to Hardcastle’s literary craft to suggest that its merit chiefly lies in ‘good queer representation’. Hardcastle, already an accomplished writer, has attained a new confidence and fluency in their fourth book. The storytelling is minimalist yet deeply poetic, a hypnotic assemblage of sentences that trust the reader to fill in the blanks – a more fully realised version of the lyricism that distinguished the critically acclaimed Below Deck (2020). The prose is textured, viscous almost, an ooze of sweet honey shot through with golden light. It is the literary equivalent of a day abed with a new lover, every moment gilded and momentous.

Sex is more than metaphor here. Hardcastle writes sex (both queer and straight) with unusual precision, eschewing clichés of thrust and grind to get at deeper psychic truths of erotic yearning and connection. Indeed, this is where their truest talent lies: Hardcastle is a millennial poet of queer interiority and embodiment. A Language of Limbs is a novel of (impeccable) vibes and mood, a gay hymnal written from inside the guts of the two protagonists. We are privy to every flutter of their senses, every lick of limerence, while having little sense of their appearance or external identities or the broader social context. We don’t even know their names. (Until the final pages, Limb One goes by the gender-queer pseudonym ‘Little Dave’, while Limb Two remains unnamed.)

This is not a panoramic queer historical novel in the vein of Fiona Kelly McGregor’s Iris (2022), a meticulously researched recreation of Depression-era Surry Hills. A Language of Limbs is not (and does not pretend to be) a cinematic portrait of gay liberation and the AIDS epidemic. Although the novel incorporates key milestones such as the first Mardi Gras in 1978, the two protagonists (born, by my calculations, in 1955) are to some extent timeless archetypes rather than identifiable members of the postwar boomer generation. The novel is more concerned with their inner life than the larger world they inhabit. Yet this determined interiority is its own form of radical literary queering. To narrate sapphic embodiment from within, to write the erotic female body as subject, not object, without any sense of titillation or external gaze – that is still (alas) a rare and remarkable feat. Here are two women loving and fucking and creating, rendered as high art.

‘Look at our joy, our glorious, glorious joy,’ says the gay character Johnny in a pivotal scene. ‘It’s fucking radiating and all I want is for the world to see that I am bursting in love.’ There is still not enough queer joy in art – see, for instance, the trauma-porn excesses of over-hyped recent film All of Us Strangers. But Hardcastle is helping carve out a new lexicon of queer experience, one that can hold the glory alongside the pain. ‘my dead friends were so much fun / let me tell you,’ Limb One declares in a performance poem. ‘we had so much fun / let me tell you, / God, / it was worth it.’ g

Yves Rees is a Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University and the author of All About Yves (Allen & Unwin, 2021).

Cognitive discotheque

Escape from real-world insanity

Alex Cothren

Lately, my bus route home has been taking me past a motley protest. Come rain or shine, a handful of ragged individuals can be found marching up and down a traffic median strip near Flinders Medical Centre, wearing sandwich boards and hoisting neon placards with phrases like STOP VACCINE GENOCIDE or W.H.O. CHILD DEFILEMENT, etc. Contrails feature somewhere in the mix, too, but the bus always zips by before I can parse the finer details.

On the one hand, I sympathise with these people. The world is terrifying in its opacity. To live one day is to end up with countless more questions than answers. Linking these frayed threads of our understanding into a satisfying knot is as instinctually human as killing something with a stick and sitting by the fire to eat it. But on the other hand, have these people never heard of a freaking library card? Go borrow a stack of mystery novels and scratch your fathoming itch in a way that doesn’t do real damage in the real (and round) world. Try these three recent Australian mystery novels for a start.

The protagonist of Imbi Neeme’s second novel, Kind of, Sort of, Maybe, But Probably Not (Viking, $34.99 pb, 317 pp), is just as isolated and misunderstood as my protester friends. Here, the reason for this anti-sociality is genuine. Phoebe Cotton suffers from misophonia, a neurological disorder marked by a decreased tolerance for specific sounds. An early scene drops us right into the pain of inhabiting this ‘brain … like a mixing desk where some of the controls were a little bit broken’, with colleagues’ apple crunching and tea slurping driving Phoebe into a ‘red mist’. While close to her understanding parents – who mask their mastication at mealtime by blasting Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus – Phoebe otherwise lives a ‘loveless, friendless, impermanent life’. She works at the library, then returns to her grandmother’s former home in Footscray, guiltily ignoring the dying garden in favour of reading old Regency romance novels. This sad equilibrium is disturbed when mysterious postcards hinting at a hidden love affair start arriving in the mail. To find their true recipient, Phoebe is pushed beyond her comfort zone and forced to expose her own secrets in the name of friendship and love.

That the central intrigue of the postcards is slowly and skilfully doled out will be no surprise to those familiar with the drip-fed revelations of Neeme’s Penguin Literary Prize-winning début, Swell (2018). But that novel also had an unfortunate tendency to force clunky epiphanies from its characters’ mouths, a trait that

persists here. At one point, Phoebe comes to an understanding that ‘people were like sandwiches – everyone could see the bread, the outer layer, but the stuff in between wasn’t always visible’. I suppose that is biologically spot-on, but as an abstract concept it is undermined by how open and instantly ready to talk about their feelings everyone is here. There is a running gag that Phoebe’s quirky parents are straight out of Family Ties, and indeed the whole book feels like a 1980s sitcom. It is earnest, well-meaning, and careful to iron out every wrinkle of conflict with a heartfelt monologue. And while it is comforting to imagine a book this sweet and cosy circulating through the literary bloodstream –a yang to the latest Jo Nesbø bloodbath yin – I have to agree with my protester friends this time: the world is not so simple.

Aquick skim of Bruce Nash’s third novel, All the Words We Know (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 321 pp), might also place it in the ‘cosy mystery’ basket. In a word cloud of the text, ‘Tea’ and ‘Bingo’ would loom large, and its elderly protagonist, Rose, has a love of bad puns. Rose also has late-stage dementia, her insular retirement home life reduced to two vague activities: ‘Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I wander.’ When her only friend falls to her death in suspicious circumstances, Rose must battle her own brain to reveal a scheme that exploits the most vulnerable.

In telling the entire story from Rose’s perspective, Nash commits to the linguistic challenge of representing a disease for which loss of language is a tragic feature. Rose’s grasp of words is greasy; they slide and collide into one another, producing wild, Lewis Carroll-like neologisms. ‘Elevator’ becomes ‘relevator’, ‘Individual Care Plan’ becomes ‘Invidious Scare Plan’ and (my personal favourite) ‘Cognitive Dissonance’ becomes ‘Cognitive Discotheque’. Time is equally unfettered. It stretches – ‘at night, in this place, you live forever’ – then snaps forward with a ferocity that leaves Rose, and the reader, unsure whether a new chapter is ‘the next day, or the next month or year or something’. Nash’s prose is as convincing as any I have encountered in fiction representing dementia, including the text that is often held up as the gold-standard of this endeavour: Lisa Genova’s Still Alice (2007).

In lesser hands, the noir mystery that propels the story forward might have felt like a cheap trick, making hay out of a protagonist who forgets vital clues moments after discovering them. But in peeling back the layers of managerial rot at Rose’s aged care home, Nash makes an astute point about how deficiencies in care cause more suffering than the disease itself. The end result is a rare beast: a page-turner that demands slow reading and ongoing contemplation.

Sulari Gentill’s sixteenth novel, The Mystery Writer: A novel (Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 304 pp), also tackles serious issues, one of which is the danger of online conspiracy theories. After quitting law school in Australia, Theo arrives on her brother’s doorstep in Kansas hoping to write a successful novel in three months. The first plot twist is that she does just that, bolstered by a chance meeting with bestselling author Dan Murdoch, who becomes her mentor and then her lover. After discovering Murdoch murdered in his home, Theo becomes both a suspect of investigation and a target for a fringe online com-

munity whose paranoia Murdoch appears to have been stoking. Gentill, a past Ned Kelly Award winner, is ten books deep into her Rowland Sinclair series of detective novels set during World War II. She flexes her mystery-writing muscles here. From the startling first line – ‘He awoke early on the day he died’ –the plot moves at a rollercoaster pace, while also using the brake runs to delve with nuance into Theo’s experiences as victim of sexual assault. For this particular thrill ride, Gentill could not have picked a better theme park than the American Midwest. Theo has escaped a backwaters childhood in a Tasmanian cult but this is nothing compared to the dangers of a region where every third stranger owns a gun: ‘Knowing people might be armed was a little like knowing there had been a spider on the wall just a minute ago.’

Time out of mind

The art of the past in the present

A. Frances Johnson

In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play:

I believe that the best historical novelists make the past new again by reigniting its past struggles and presenting it as a place of competing interests and voices whose story has not ended but continues in the present […] never assume that the past is quaint and safe, that its struggles are over and done with, that its facts are merely facts.

This thought has antecedents in predominantly Western historiographies by Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, and others. Notwithstanding problems of nostalgic or factual excess and traps of historical revisionism, effective throughlines between temporal constructs and a careful chronicling of the differences therein may be the foundation on which the moral and emotional force of Western historical novels depends.

McIlvaine’s metafictional intervention exhibits postmodern technique. There is still a bit of it about, say in Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010). However, the singular realist historical novel,

Anton Chekhov’s constitutionally supported AR-15 does indeed go off in the story’s denouement, a hail of bullets leaving holes in the characters and only occasionally the plot. Gentill pulls the rug on us by first hinging the action on a fairly ho-hum conspiracy theory about world leaders being brought back from the dead, before topping it with a wild twist that plays on cancel culture and the cult of the writer. Those last hundred pages lifted off the tarmac of credibility for me, but enjoyably so, providing a cartoon vacation from real-world insanity. Then the book ended, and I was left looking out the bus window once more. g

as the late, great Hilary Mantel has shown, exists alongside. And, as John Frow and others have noted, literary genres are mutable, conventions never fixed. Thus literary and popular historical fiction may meld fairytale, romance, adventure, science fiction, steam punk, and true crime, often in subversive ways.

To that end, three new Australian (art) historical novels fall under a broad label of historical romance. All three feature histories of art and artist protagonists.

History and art history departments get a bad rap in Lisa Medved’s début novel, The Engraver’s Secret (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 421 pp). Canadian Rubens scholar Charlotte Hubert, grieving the loss of her mother, finds herself on a short-term contract (that old bugbear) at the University of Antwerp. Here, intellectual property theft, attacks on women, and thefts of sundry antiquities provide an almost grand guignol setting for Charlotte’s archival discoveries. Letters obtained indicate a troubled relationship between Peter Paul Rubens and his master engraver, Lucas Vorsterman, and point to the existence of a cache of lost drawings by the Master himself. The hunt for this treasure provides dramatic impetus. Period scenes, variously set in the Spanish Netherlands and London in the 1620s and in 1675, counterpoint the hunt. Engraver’s daughter Antonia has cartographic gifts, predictably unsung. Her father offers encouragement, though this, alas, is spiced with unfortunate neologisms: ‘Despite your gender, you are just as capable as your brothers …’

Medved’s research is meticulous. The novel builds a dynamic montage between past and present without sentimentalising sisterhood across time. Studio practice in baroque Amsterdam fascinates. I appreciated the notes provided. But overblown campus intrigues weaken the denouement. The villain ultimately revealed is given minimal registration across this hefty novel but is responsible for nearly every bad event on the beleaguered Antwerp campus. Alongside, we learn early on that the head of history is Charlotte’s estranged father – an improbable backstory. This is a novel about cultural theft after all. Art is the thing and it was all that was needed. A little more Possession

Georgette Heyer’s heyday is long gone, but the market is saturated with historical romances with readymade book-club

Alex Cothren is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Flinders University.

questions at the back. It is a bonanza for commercial publishers, but less so for those publishing literary fiction. Romanticised female characters are uniformly feisty, spirited, liberated, or aiming to become liberated and destined to be, even secretly, an artist of some description. That ‘Anonymous’ was a woman is something this reviewer takes seriously. But the sassy heroines of these novels transcend unbelievable odds, embracing perfect heteronormative relationships while renouncing ye olde oppressions of class and gender on a penny purse.

Australian audiences may be particularly interested in Katrina Kell’s début novel, Chloé (Echo, $32.99 pb, 314 pp) which imagines the life of Marie Peregrine, model for the nymph Chloé, painted by French genre painter Jules Lefebvre in 1875. The iconic nude arrived in the colonies in 1879 and has hung in Young and Jackson’s Hotel since 1909. During the Great War, patriotic recruits toasted Chloé’s erotic profile before embarking for European slaughterhouses. The painting’s status is not entirely bound to salacious legend; Lefebvre, though no Manet, won the Gold Medal of Honour at the 1875 Paris Salon for this work.

Kell’s research is exhaustive. Commendably, there is no forced happy ending. Sketches of Marie come down to us from Anglo-Irish writer-artist George Moore’s memories of the artist-model at the Académie Julian. An autofiction short story fatalistically titled ‘The End of Marie Peregrine’ appears in Moore’s Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906).

In 1871, between 21 and 28 May, central Paris was incinerated and approximately 25,000 people massacred when French soldiers annihilated the short-lived Commune government, an event still commemorated as la semaine sanglante. When Marie and her Communard mother, Noemi, throw homemade paraffin bombs as citizen-soldiers, Noemi meets her maker, propelling Marie to find work as an artist’s model and to take art classes. The novel then moves between post-Communard Paris in 1875 and Port Fairy in the first year of the Great War, and thence to theatres of war and back to Paris, Melbourne, and Port Fairy again. Even Vincent van Gogh gets a look-in, taking a stroll through Montmartre with the homeless Marie. The painted nymph holds these settings together, but only just.

Marie is an affecting character, and snapshots of nineteenth-century artistic production compel. The brutal repression of the Commune is deftly conveyed. But the historical context becomes thin at times, to accommodate myriad shifts in place and time and excess characters. The Australian scenes, in solid vernacular, depict a poor fishmonger’s family implausibly obsessed with Chloé and her model. Disappointing, too, is the straight, school-marmish portrayal of legendary educationalist, communard, and anarchist-feminist Louise Michel, who runs a school and refugee asylum in the novel. Kell’s next novel? That might be interesting.

Lauren Chater’s fourth novel, The Beauties (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 375 pp), evokes the commissioning of the so-called Windsor Beauties, the models for which were aristocratic mistresses of Charles II. The portraits were executed by Dutch-born portraitist Peter Lely and his London-based

studio colleagues, including formidable portraitist Mary Beale. They still hang at Hampton Court Palace. Lely, Beale, and Lely’s principal assistant Henry Greenhill (possibly based on artist John Greenhill – notes aren’t provided) are interesting secondary characters. Scenes reveal the gendered hierarchies, economies, and technical process of a bustling studio. Beale was the breadwinner for her family and she and Henry, differently struggling to emerge from their master’s shadow, give the novel flesh.

The novel’s press release states in caps that this novel has STRONG WOMEN AT ITS HEART. The especially strong woman is Emilia Lennox, whose husband’s lands and titles have been confiscated during the English Civil War. Reprisals and executions have followed since the restoration. A lonely young wife, Emilia spends secret hours in the dilapidated estate folly tower, communing with shelved artworks from the family collection as a kind of ersatz art training, subduing her ‘inner critic’ all the while. Descriptions of creative process often sound Instagrammable; this mars historical world-building, a sense of voices from the past made strange. Emilia soon puts art aside and travels to London to petition the king, who singles her out from a clamouring, ungroomed hoi polloi. A pardon for her husband will only come if she agrees to become the king’s mistress. Feisty Emilia stalls until her portrait is finished, failing to turn up for sittings and finding solace as a scene painter at the Fortune Theatre in a new company run entirely by women. No, this is not Carlton 1972. This is London 1660. While this was the year that the real Margaret Hyde was celebrated as the first woman to take to the English stage, playing Desdemona, a fully-fledged women’s company, replete with female carpenters, was too great a leap for this reviewer.

Of concern here is that subtle, complicating dialogue between past and present falls away when #MeCanDoAnything templates overly impose. When court Beauties commissioner Lady Anne Hyde nabs her duke, and Emilia reaches for her lover and ‘paints the first brushstroke on the canvas of her new life’, revisionism marries clichéd resolution. #MeUnconvinced. g

A. Frances Johnson is a writer, artist, and Associate Professor (Honorary) in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Personalities

Stories that need to be told

Theodore Ell

SStories That Want To Be Told: The Long Lede anthology

by Arlie Alizzi et al.

Vintage

$29.99 pb, 249 pp

tories That Want To Be Told is an oddly flat title for this stimulating anthology. Most of its contents are stories that need to be told. Even those that do not quite succeed in becoming more than their authors’ ‘passion projects’ are likely to leave readers better informed and more curious about littleknown facets of today’s world.

This is testament to the technical success of an initiative by the Judith Neilson Institute, in partnership with Copyright Agency and Penguin Random House, to sponsor early or mid-career journalists to report in depth on topics of their choice while being mentored by veteran colleagues.

The merit of these essays lies not (or not only) in the range of arresting subjects the writers have investigated or the urgent truths many have uncovered, but above all in the personalities they display as investigators, observers, and reporters. They achieve intimacy while managing not to let their presence interfere with the exposition and exploration of their subjects, which is the major risk in personal storytelling.

That collective feat is admirable, for each topic here is personally significant to its author and, in several cases, it is a deeply personal experience that keeps the reporting perspective direct and brings a theme home. Claire Keenan’s wry reflection on the presence and absence of religion in different stages of life, Penny Craswell’s tender and poetic vignettes on the cultural history of the humble cup, Hessom Razavi’s suite of recommendations for compassionate refugee policy (building on his ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship), and Arlie Alizzi and Sam Elkin’s examinations of trans lives on the margins (in the worlds of competitive powerlifting and the Victorian goldfields, respectively) derive their special understanding from the writers’ innermost lives and memories. Alizzi, particularly, lets the reader into his confidence with rare subtlety.

The other essays are just as involving, guiding the reader through the difficulties of research, interviewing hesitant speakers, and pondering gaps or contradictions in evidence. It is a great pleasure to watch these journalists at work. Each typifies the profession’s capacity to create sympathetic connections between dissimilar people. Razavi’s refugee policy recommendations appeal to a reader’s better nature and public spirit. Liz Gooch achieves a candid closeness to her essay’s central figures, female Afghani athletes outlawed by the Taliban, despite video-interviewing them from thousands of miles away. And Wing Kuang’s

essay is a sharp reminder that community is always larger than we habitually think, not because Kuang says so, but because she creates such distinctive pen-portraits of a variety of people.

Clarity never lapses from one essay to the next, but not all are consistently fresh and lively in style. Even when the importance of the stories is clear, some of the authors tend to load their pieces with summary and explanation at the expense of action and demonstration. Esther Linder takes on the large-scale subject of supply chain resilience, which risks overloading the reader with statistics and descriptions of transport systems, leaving the human element – conversations on remote farms – somewhat dwarfed. Yet Linder compensates with thrilling depictions of outback driving, with all the sweep and thrumming rhythms that entails. Here, Linder’s prose finds a longer cadence than is typical for this book, and it suits the topic well.

The stand-out essay is Dan Jervis-Bardy’s account of investigating the mysterious unsolved death of a Sudanese refugee girl in Canberra. Jervis-Bardy’s achievement is as technically exceptional as it is gripping and poignant. He manages to extract eloquent detail from a police investigation with practically no leads, in which officials and witnesses are unwilling to talk or have vanished overseas, and whose chief subject, tragically dead, is without a voice. Jervis-Bardy’s salient point is that circumstances will not speak when prejudice will not hear. His frustration leads him to write tautly and intensely, evoking the tension in every silence. More than a reporter, he is a narrator.

The initiative that gave rise to these essays is to be applauded, but the book itself, as the caretaker of its contents, wants fire and focus. The introduction – questionably for a book of journalism, unattributed – celebrates the sponsors’ initiative and the commercial value of long-form journalism rather than explaining why and how these nine writers were selected, or why, if long-form work is valued, this initiative was necessary. It is necessary, but the reason is passed over in one bland understatement: ‘Australian newsrooms lack the bandwidth to foster new talent in this field and cultivate the craft of contemporary long-form journalism.’ Bandwidth? Lack of opportunity to develop specialised craft is a worsening cultural problem not confined to journalism. It deserves more searching and sophisticated discussion than that. This faint gesture underserves the anthology’s contents. There are stories here about unappreciated matters of life and death, but you would not know it from the sponsors, who say nothing about the stories’ social or moral imperatives. Each mentor provides a short introduction to their colleague’s essay, and here there is reflection on practice, if tinged with over-excitement. Celebrating talent is fair, but editorially the book behaves as though it is presenting credentials to recruiters rather than publishing reportage in the public interest.

I emphasise these editorial shortcomings because the nine featured writers and their mentors have worked harder, and on harder matters, than the book credits. If there are to be more books like this – and there should be – then discussion of the reasons why Australian journalism needs more opportunities for cultivating long-form reportage would serve the writers’ work and the sponsors’ aims more valuably. All nine writers here surely have important work ahead of them. Let us hope the editorial commitment to its purpose endures. g

Fulfilment centre

A muted performance from Back to Back Theatre

Andrew Fuhrmann

The setting is described in the program as a workplace at the end of the world – but what kind of workplace? Well, imagine that a multinational technology company has bought up Valhalla for warehouse space and a new fulfilment centre. Above and behind the stage is a kind of elongated portal through which we see billowing clouds, purple and pink, shot through with lightning. At centre stage, on a shimmering mat the same size and shape as the portal, there sits a great pile of gold scaffolding, which might be shelving or the frame for a rack of servers – or who knows what. Off to one side is a small desk with a computer, lamp, some papers and a small menagerie of plastic animal figurines.

The quartet of workers who run this corporate outpost on the other side of the abyss wander about in a desultory way, piecing the scaffold together or not, as they see fit. With their motley hi-vis uniforms, all pink and orange and peach, they look as if they have rolled across the burning rainbow bridge. Meanwhile, ominous noises echo through the great hall: thuds and hums and hollow reverberations.

This is Multiple Bad Things, a new work by Geelong’s Back to Back Theatre, a company of neurodivergent performers with an enormous international reputation. It remains a permanent fixture on the global festival circuit, while also maintaining a busy domestic program.

Much of Back to Back’s work over the past two decades, the work for which the company is now fêted by international critics and curators, was made with company artistic director Bruce Gladwin working with the ensemble. Gladwin, however, is not part of the creative team for this new project. Instead, this short but decidedly multivocal piece was devised by ensemble veterans Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, and Scott Price, artistic associates Tamara Searle and Ingrid Voorendt, junior company members Breanna Deleo and Ben Oakes, performance artist Natasha Jynel and performer Bron Batten. That is a lot of contributors, especially when you consider that Multiple Bad Things also features a

detailed soundscape created by Zoë Barry, elaborate visual designs by Anna Cordingley, and extensive audio-visual effects created by Rhian Hinkley. The story of this sprawling collaboration, which remains partly obscured by the silences and ambiguities of the performance, is the most intriguing thing about this production.

In any case, while there are plenty of similarities and continuities with earlier Back to Back productions, the tone of Multiple Bad Things is noticeably different from, say, the great trilogy of festival shows from the mid-2000s: small metal objects (2005), Food Court (2008) and Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (2011). This is a more muted performance. It doesn’t rely on those grand, turbulent, emotional scenes, full of complex, moody feeling, that made the earlier work so memorable. Instead, the depicted conflicts – the shouting and the taunting – are like so many distant murmurs, barely disturbing the otherworldly calm.

Laherty begins proceedings, addressing the audience directly, warning that bad things will be said and done in the course of the show but that we should remember that it is, after all, only theatre. Having delivered this Puck-like reminder, he withdraws to the desk at the side of the stage. He sits with his back to the audience, headphones on, playing solitaire on the computer and watching animal videos. Twice he interrupts the action: he gets to his feet, walks across the stage and retrieves a snack or drink. The scene breaks off as he traverses the space, a cautious figure in mien and movement, a unifying presence, a constant against which the struggles of the rest of the ensemble can be referenced.

Laherty’s role is comparable to that of the attendant played for many years by company member Mark Deans. It is characteristic of this production that our attention is constantly pulled to the periphery, where Laherty sits in front of his screen.

Throughout the middle parts of the show, Batten, Mainwaring, and Price squabble and skirmish. Bron Batten comes on like a nightmare Valkyrie of progressiveness and inclusiveness, reminding Price of his male privilege, offering unsolicited advice to Mainwaring, and announcing to everyone that she, too, has diverse abilities. Price roars and stomps and flourishes a large inflatable flamingo. It all ends in direct parody, with Price tearing off his shirt and Batten transforming into an image of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, one breast exposed and a weapon brandished over her head. Mainwaring remains aloof, inviting a historical perspective, noting for example that there are now more fake flamingos in the world than real ones.

The sculpture at centre stage is eventually completed. Once lifted off the floor, it reveals the outline of a suburban house. Laherty and Mainwaring move behind the sculpture, where they dwell for a long moment, allowing new resonances to emerge: the gilded cage of the family home, the desire for order and convention in a world of chaos. They embrace. Like many of the stage effects used in this production – including the computer animation – it is a striking image, but not necessarily moving.

And yet what follows, the epilogue, does offer something more poignant. Once again, Laherty addresses the audience, reminding us that suffering is real but that theatre is only theatre. He then raises his arms to the side, a slow and delicate gesture, then joins them in front, forming what we can now, after the encounter behind the sculpture, recognise as the outline of an embrace – this time directed towards the audience. g

Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price (photograph by Ferne Millen)

Mitty Lee-Brown: artist in exile

From a boarding house in Woollahra to Sri Lanka

by Nick Hordern

Nilaveli, on the north-east coast of Sri Lanka, is a long way from Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery, but when in 2017 I visited the exhibition Margaret Olley: painter, peer, mentor, muse, which traced the links between Olley and her circle, the name of one of her fellow artists took me straight back to the white sands of Nilaveli Beach.

Juanita ‘Mitty’ Lee-Brown (1922-2012) and Margaret Olley were almost exactly contemporaries. They met when they were studying art at the East Sydney Technical College in 1944 and 1945. In 1949, they shared a cabin on a ship to England. Over the decades their paths continued to cross, but the end of their days found them far apart. Olley had become a Sydney fixture, the doyenne of Australian art, whereas Lee-Brown was a recluse, living at Nilaveli, as she had done throughout Sri Lanka’s civil war, which began in 1983 and ran for twenty-six bloody years.

In years gone by Australians tended to look askance at their fellow countrymen and women who chose to live abroad; there was a sense of ‘aren’t we good enough for you?’ Against this background, art critic John McDonald judged LeeBrown’s decision to live abroad a bad career move. Speaking of her work in the Ervin exhibition, McDonald commented in his Sydney Morning Herald review that Lee-Brown ‘could have been a force in Australian art had she not left the country so early in her career’. Perhaps.

Lee-Brown is now remembered, if at all, as a minor figure in the ‘Merioola’ group, the 1940s artistic circle associated with the Woollahra boarding house of that name. But even though Sydney was Lee-Brown’s home town, she didn’t spend much time there. In 1945 and 1946, on leaving art school, she lived with her first husband, the journalist Peter Russo, in Melbourne and Hong Kong. In 1947 and 1948, and again from 1949 until 1962, she was in Europe, including Italy, the home of her second husband, the poet and filmmaker Nelo Risi. She then moved back to Sydney, where in 1964 she and Donald Friend, who had also lived at Merioola, mounted a joint exhibition at Sydney’s Terry Clune Galleries. So at this point she did have a footing in the Australian art world. But when her third marriage, to a Monaro grazier, ended in 1968, she went into a self-imposed exile that lasted forty-four years.

Why did she remove herself from the milieu that proved so fertile for her peer Margaret Olley?

I got an inkling as to why soon after I met Lee-Brown. This was shortly after my arrival in Sri Lanka in 1989 on a diplomatic posting. As it happened, this wasn’t my first visit. These days, Sri Lanka is off the beaten track, but in the century between the opening of the Suez Canal and the advent of mass cheap air travel, Ceylon, which gained independence from the British in 1948 and was renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, was usually the first point of call for Australians travelling by ship to Europe. So Colombo had been my own first taste of Asia, as an enthralled seven-year old stepping off a P&O liner.

Over lunch, Lee-Brown told me that she had been pilloried by Patrick White, who, she said, had used her as the model for the manipulative socialite Olivia Davenport in his novel The Vivisector (1970). This was not implausible: like Davenport, Lee-Brown was an Eastern Suburbs personality who had returned to Sydney after two marriages and a period spent abroad – and incidentally, she had returned just at the time The Vivisector was in gestation. On the other hand, White’s biographer, David Marr, identifies White’s cousin Eleanor Arrighi as the model for Davenport.

One way or another, Lee-Brown’s sense that she had been ridiculed by White was part of her rationale as to why she preferred war-torn Sri Lanka; she detested what she regarded as the claustrophobic world of Sydney. To become ‘a force in Australian art’, she would have had to live there, and this was a greater price than she was prepared to pay.

I first met Lee-Brown and her partner Les Barwick at their Nilaveli home, Monkey Beach Estate. It was 1989 and Sri Lanka’s civil war was in full flood. The main protagonists were the Sri Lankan security forces and the Tamil Tiger insurgents, but during its course the war drew in other actors, such as the Indian Army, and other Tamil militias opposed to the Tigers. At one point or another, all of these combatants fought around Nilaveli, and a less adventurous pair than LeeBrown and Barwick would have left long before. But they were staying on, and once one had seen the beauties of Monkey Beach Estate, it was easy to understand why.

Nilaveli had provided the couple with the space and the

labour force to create an exquisite garden, with paths winding through the palm trees down to the water’s edge. At night, one could sit on the patio and look through the trees at the lights of the fishing boats out at sea, like jewels winking in an ebony setting. The place had a timeless music to it: wind in the palm trees, surf on the beach. After dark, the frogs started up to the accompaniment of the booming rattle made by the giant squirrels. Then, in the hour before dawn, came the call to prayer from the mosque.

This paradise was threatened on all sides. Nilaveli was a cluster of hamlets: like Sri Lanka itself, a mosaic of communities living cheek by jowl. To the south of Monkey Beach Estate – on a treeless, sandy stretch of the peninsula – lived the Muslim fisherfolk of Iqbal Nagar. To the west, straggling along the main road, was the hamlet of Gopalapuram, home to Hindu Tamil

Estate; and finally, there was the Sinhalese government. It was a delicate balance, but Lee-Brown and Barwick kept it up for decades. They had a gift for connecting with Sri Lankans, and as employers they were an economic asset to Nilaveli.

The crowning glory of Monkey Beach Estate was LeeBrown’s art collection: astonishing to see in the middle of a war zone. There were works by Rupert Bunny, Girolamo Nerli, Roy de Maistre, Robert Hughes, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, William Dobell, and Thea Proctor. And then there were Mitty’s own paintings. There was a wonderful study in grey, brown, and dark blue of ‘Our Papas’, a Greek Orthodox priest riding a donkey side saddle along a street in Kos, where Mitty and Les had lived before settling in Nilaveli. Another of my favourites was Sea Things, a view of a tidal rock pool with the seaweed and shells represented more by bursts of colour than by delineated shapes. This was her mature style: one can see it in her painting Spring in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

farmers. There was a separate Tamil community, refugees driven from their homes further north. And right next to Monkey Beach Estate was the thing which made it such a dangerous place: a military post, home to whichever armed force – Indian or Sri Lankan or Tamil militia – happened to be ‘in control’ of Nilaveli at the time.

So Mitty and Les were literally right on the front line. Les – a superb builder and gardener, a Kokoda veteran, a cousin of Australia’s longest-serving chief justice, Garfield Barwick, and a great source of historical gossip – told me that, over two decades, sixty people had been killed by landmines on the road between Trincomalee and Nilaveli. He and Mitty travelled that road every week.

To stay afloat in this maelstrom they had to remain on good terms simultaneously with three groups, all potentially lethal. First were the Tamil inhabitants of Gopalapuram –where the Tigers had a presence; second were whichever antiTiger force occupied the military base next to Monkey Beach

A few years later, I returned to Australia. In 2007, hearing that Les was gravely ill, I went back to see them. Monkey Beach Estate had survived the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami (Les: ‘not a wave, a wall of fucking water ten feet high’), but it was a sad visit. Many of their possessions, many of the paintings, had been destroyed. Although they were now in their eighties and the civil war was still raging, they had determined to stay and revive the garden: ‘Where else are we going to go?’ Then came Les’s cancer diagnosis.

Mitty kept painting for some years after arriving at Nilaveli, but then she stopped. One day, with some temerity, I asked her why. She replied, ‘I can’t paint in the tropics’, before turning away to supervise a gardener. It was not a subject she wanted to discuss.

My guess is that Mitty Lee-Brown knew that for all her manifest talent as a painter, her real genius – and her abiding passion – was for landscape gardening, and that Monkey Beach Estate was Mitty’s masterpiece. She had stopped painting for the audience that was ‘Australian art’ and started gardening for herself. Even in a war, even after a tsunami, Nilaveli was a good place to do that. g

Nick Hordern was Australian Deputy High Commissioner in Sri Lanka from 1989 to 1991. His most recent book is Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books, 2023).

Spring (1964) by Mitty Lee-Brown (© Art Gallery of New South Wales)

From Brexit to Bazball

The human comedy of Ashes cricket

Anwen Crawford

The cricket lover knows that a Test match – let alone a Test series – lasts long enough for the full sweep of human comedy to be on show. Ambition; petulance; perfection all too fleeting; horrible failure; hilarious pratfalls; selflessness and honour: it’s all in a day’s or in five days’ play. Test cricket has so many inbuilt dramatic elements – a recurring cast of twentytwo characters, a series of acts-slash-matches, scene-stealing stars, bit parts, bitter rivalries, and long-held grudges – that the real mystery is why no one thought to lavish the full documentary treatment upon it until The Test, Amazon Prime’s high-profile series about the Australian men’s Test team, now in its third season.

The Test first aired in 2020. If you have ever wondered what Test cricket would look like if edited to the conventions of a Hollywood thriller, with liberal use of slow motion, cutaway shots, tense music cues and all the slow hours dispensed with, The Test will show you. It is mildly ridiculous, yet entertaining: who knew that cricket could look cool? The Test’s first season began with the appointment of Justin Langer and Tim Paine as head coach and captain, respectively, of the Australian men’s Test team, in the wake of the 2018 ball-tampering scandal in South Africa that marked the nadir of Australian cricket’s international reputation. The second season also dealt in upheaval, with the shock resignation of Tim Paine only weeks before the 2021-22 Ashes series began in Brisbane.

Happily for the makers of The Test, Paine’s replacement as captain was Pat Cummins, who combines old-fashioned, matinee-idol charisma with a commitment to progressive values. The Murdoch press loathes him, younger fans love him, and he also happens to be a fiercely talented fast bowler – Australia’s first fast-bowling captain since Ray Lindwall skippered one Test against India in 1956. Cummins led Australia to a 4-0 series win in the 2021-22 Ashes at home, which was covered in The Test’s second season. He has since gone on to greater feats, including winning an unlikely trophy for the men’s one-day team during the 2023 World Cup in India.

The third season of The Test does not include that seven-week

World Cup campaign, unfortunately. Instead, it spends the bulk of its three (hour-long) episodes on last year’s competitive, controversial, and ultimately drawn Ashes series in England. Australia, the standard bearers for fast-paced and aggressive cricket twenty years ago, was last year cast in an unfamiliar role – that of stylistic conservatives. England, meanwhile, revelled in ‘Bazball’, which basically entails scoring at five runs an over. It’s not a new idea in cricket, though England acted as if it were, and the ensuing clash of attitudes, both on and off the field, not to mention a stumping that set prime ministers bickering, meant that the 2023 Ashes was enthralling, even for casual cricket fans. Directors Adrian Brown and Sheldon Wynne can’t have lacked for material, but this season somehow fizzes rather than sparks.

I never thought I would say this, but I miss Justin Langer. His blend of motivational business talk with unblinking patriotism was hard to stomach in real life – season two records his departure as Australia’s coach, which occurred in spite of the team’s successes – but it made for weirdly compulsive viewing. Langer was the perfect figurehead for a documentary series that strives to make cricket look action-packed, yet simultaneously captures the fact that professional sport is now a carefully managed arena of data analysts, team psychologists and PowerPoint presentations. ‘Elite mateship’ was one of Langer’s slideshow mottoes, and it still makes me laugh. Elite mateship! The sheer quackery of it.

The absence of Langer’s inadvertent satire is one problem that Brown and Wynne face as directors. The other, larger problem is that The Test has always had to balance two ultimately irreconcilable goals: one, to be a candid documentary about a high-pressure sporting contest; and two, to provide a quasi-official record of events, complete with after-the-fact interviews, from the Australian team’s perspective. The Test’s makers have close access to the Australian players, tailing them off the field and into pavilions, across hotel lobbies and onto tour buses. But the viewer feels the strings attached to that access. This is especially the case when events during the Second Test at Lord’s – specifically, Australian wicket-keeper Alex Carey stumping England’s Jonny Bairstow – lead to scenes of incredible rancour between the English crowd and the visiting team.

Unless you count the sight of Cummins tucking into a plate of lasagne while chuckling at the outrage he has caused, The Test doesn’t reveal anything more than we already knew about that Lord’s match and its fallout, thanks to endless media coverage. It does emphasise something routinely overlooked at the time: the stumping was Cummins’s idea, not Carey’s. Carey himself proves a reticent interviewee, all nervous smiles and deferrals. That’s understandable: no sports psychologist could prepare you for a mauling by the English tabloid press. By every credible account, Carey is a good-natured man; he must have wondered what ladder he walked under to end up as the folk devil of England. Reluctant to probe the Australian players or to venture wider than their circle, The Test misses an opportunity to consider sporting controversy in the light of our networked era, where some ‘fans’ think nothing of issuing death threats to athletes online, and where a 24/7 news cycle means there is always one more headline, one more specious angle, to be run.

It is also the case that in focusing so loyally on the Australian team, we miss half – or more than half – of last year’s Ashes story,

Australian Cricket Team (Amazon Prime)

which was all about the zeal of England, self-declared twenty-first-century saviours of Test cricket. What I wouldn’t give for a Langer-style scene involving England’s evangelist coach, Brendon (‘Baz’) McCullum, or their captain, Ben Stokes, a superhuman cricketer on his best days but one who is also prone to carrying on as if the current England team were the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Ashes almost always manages to touch the third rail of colonial mistrust between Australia and England. It can and does bring out the worst in both nations. Even so, last year’s hostilities felt unusually livid. My pet theory involves Brexit: this was the first Ashes to take place in England since the United Kingdom finally withdrew from the European Union. So many years of promises preceded Brexit; so little benefit has followed its actualisation. When a visiting Australian cricket team played by the laws but not, according to the English, by the ‘spirit’ of the game, a deep sense of betrayal, displaced from a more deserving target, was unleashed.

Still, they were good. England was really good, and occasionally quite magnificent. The most effective episode of The Test this season is the first one, which begins with Australia winning the

World Test Championship against India on neutral ground at The Oval, in London, and then focuses on the Edgbaston Test, before the Ashes had soured. This was sporting rivalry at its best, and a Test match full of intriguing plot lines. An emboldened Ben Stokes declares on 393/8 in the first innings. An embattled Usman Khawaja, who frankly admits that England is for him a place of ‘bad memories’, counters with his first century on English soil. Needing fifty-four runs to win in the dying hours of the fifth day, and with only two wickets in hand, Cummins and a wretchedly nervous Nathan Lyon form a batting partnership that no one in their team believes can succeed.

Ensuing scenes are proof of sport’s cathartic qualities, as men who otherwise seem to communicate only in tentative pats on the shoulder lift each other off their feet in jubilation. All those hours, all those days, down to the wire, and it finally pays off. Then the next Test match comes along, and the human comedy begins again. g

Anwen Crawford is the author of No Document (Giramondo, 2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize.

Redheads

Strike one and it will flare

as Bryant & May, an unlikely pair of thugs, intended. It’s a match for anyone – branded and named after the brighthaired minority, its stereotypes, hotheaded, quickfisted, treacherous.

Judas Iscariot, in paintings, looks scary. Does the Virgin Queen? Van Gogh? Hopeful rumour once had it, the genetic trait would vanish, like a tribe, but not, I can verify calmly, in my family.

I am the conduit for pheomelanin and slurs, a combination requiring the addition of wit – tests, on junior occasions, to rid the schoolyard of a potential victim. It’s better to be a hit at lunchtime than be punched. Sex, it’s now said in respected academic outlets, is an even better proposition when it’s with a redhead than with those of other stunning hair colours, they must require more rest – clever whoever first made that brave conjecture, it suggests a need for further vital tests.

Andrew Sant

Multitudes

A rare and virtuosic solo recital

Des Cowley

Irecall the first time I saw pianist Paul Grabowsky play. The occasion was the launch of his début album, Six by Three, recorded with his then trio of bassist Gary Costello and drummer Allan Browne. The recital took place in 1989, if memory serves, in a downstairs gallery in Flinders Lane. If I went along knowing little about Grabowsky, I came away a lifelong admirer; though, back then, I suspect few of us could have foreseen the stellar career that lay ahead.

It was something of a coup for the Woodend Winter Arts Festival to snare Grabowsky for a solo concert in St Ambrose Hall on 8 June. Even though I can profess to having seen him countless times over the past decades, this was my first opportunity to hear him play solo. Grabowsky rarely gives solo recitals. Among his extensive discography, there is only one solo recording, issued by ABC Jazz and simply titled Solo (2014).

It was music from that album that Grabowsky featured at his Woodend performance, a program made up mostly of originals, coupled with several standards. He opened with ‘Angel’, a composition dating back to the early 1990s, inspired by his infant daughter Isabella, who routinely took up residence beneath his piano. It is a piece that shows off Grabowsky’s many strengths: sustained melodicism, lyrical flights, a deeply felt affinity for storytelling. Bathed in fragile quietude, its measured tempo seemed spun from isolated notes – played with exceptional clarity – that appeared to hover and float dreamily, redolent with yearning.

It was followed by ‘October’, a piece drawn from a suite of twelve compositions corresponding to the months of the year, recorded for the Hush Music Foundation in 2005. Fashioned from the simplest of motifs, this rendering had a lush romanticism. While originally composed with the intent of inducing calm, it felt as if the pensive melody could double as a noir soundtrack, conjuring shadowy streets, a doomed love affair.

It says much about Thelonious Monk’s distinctive genius that musicians continue to find new ways to interpret his best-known composition, ‘Round Midnight’. Grabowsky’s rendering relaxed the pace of Monk’s original 1947 recording, further adding to it a wafer-thin veneer of melancholy. The resulting mood was closer in alignment to the Miles Davis classic version, with Grabowsky’s

piano assuming the role of Davis’s Harmon mute trumpet. Grabowsky’s reading emphasised silence and stillness, his hands lightly touching the keys, employing solitary notes, sparse sounds to delicately trace the bare bones of Monk’s composition.

The furiously paced ‘Cole for Cook’, which saw Grabowsky shifting gears, was a highlight. Composed in the 1980s and comprising three distinct sections, it was named for American saxophonist Ornette Coleman and trombonist Marty Cook, who first introduced Grabowsky to Coleman’s music. Purposely bold and brash, it was cobbled from tumultuous flurries and rumbling chords, interspersed with delicate interludes. Adopting a devil-may-care approach, Grabowsky mashed scraps of Coleman’s off-kilter melodies, stride piano, and occasional atonality, fusing these disparate elements into a genuine tour de force Lurking there in the mix was the free-wheeling spirit of pianist Lennie Tristano, whose harmonic language could be heard in Grabowsky’s muscular left-handed bass lines, over which he improvised freely.

Contrary to the advertised program – and Grabowsky joked that as an improvising artist he has rarely been asked to provide one – he inserted a recent piece, ‘Ella’, composed for a Gerhard Richter retrospective, held at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in 2017-18. Named for the painter’s daughter and inspired by Richter’s portrait of her, the piece represents part of a larger commissioned suite, The Richter Songs, created in collaboration with singer-songwriter Megan Washington.

Grabowsky finished with a heartfelt take on Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’, demonstrating his capacity to breathe new life into an old chestnut. While Carmichael’s song can teeter toward hokeyness, Grabowsky’s stripped-back rendition teased out the song’s deep well of longing and loneliness. As with ‘Round Midnight’, he demonstrated a striking capacity for getting inside a song’s essence.

James Brown famously quipped, ‘Kill ‘em’ and leave.’ The extended ovation that greeted Grabowsky at the end of this sold-out performance was genuine and wholehearted. He could so easily, at that point, have taken a leaf out of Brown’s book, but instead returned for a brief encore, playing ‘Stars Apart’, a composition first recorded with his trio for the album When Words Fail (1995). With its introspective, drawn-out melody, suggestive of Debussy, it provided a perfect full stop to the evening.

While Grabowsky’s performance leaned heavily on composition, his skill as an improviser was on show throughout, often via extended codas, which saw him departing from the melody line to formulate new patterns and variations.

Given that Grabowsky’s career spans many decades, it is tempting to argue that, like Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes. His career has encompassed jazz, soundtracks, opera, symphony, commissioned works, academic posts. A former Artistic Director of the Queensland Music Festival and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, he founded the Australian Art Orchestra, steering it for nearly two decades. Yet, despite the sheer scale of these accomplishments, it was the simple, unadorned intimacy of this performance that dazzled. Fusing artistry with virtuosity, and graced by an unexpected generosity and humility, it was an experience that few in the audience can have come away from other than uplifted. g

Reimagining the ADB

by Melanie Nolan and Michelle Staff

Unfamiliar readers may assume that the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) is a dusty, dense, traditional encyclopedia, its pages filled with dull entries on those whom posterity has deemed worthy of remembrance. Consisting of twenty heavy tomes (plus addenda), nine million words, and almost 14,000 scholarly biographies, it may seem like an unreadable piece of work that is of little relevance.

This could not be further from the truth. As the preeminent dictionary of Australian national biography, it is a vital historical resource for communities around Australia and abroad, with more than 1.2 million users annually. More than just a book, it is an increasingly vibrant and versatile digital research tool that is opening new avenues of enquiry into the nation’s past and, in so doing, prompting us to think hard about our present moment.

The first volume of the ADB was published in 1966. Since then, a further eighteen have appeared, as well as one of missing persons and other offshoot collections. Currently, editors are busy at work on Volume Twenty. With the aid of the Australian Research Council and other national cultural institutions, in 2006 the ADB went online, which enabled it to develop innovative and creative biographical methodologies. In the world of national dictionaries, the ADB is cutting-edge.

The ADB is now housed in the National Centre of Biography (NCB) at the Australian National University. In fact, it was the seed of this wider initiative; colloquially, the ADB and the NCB are virtually synonymous. It has grown into a meeting place where biographers and biography readers gather to discuss methodological and ethical questions at the heart of the discipline. In many ways, to speak of the ADB as ‘it’ is misleading. The countless people who work tirelessly on it, whether as paid staff or as one of our many volunteers, sustain the longest-running collaborative humanities and social science project in the country. It is a research centre of excellence, a focal point of expertise through which dedicated researchers maintain and develop our critical understanding of the people and their agency that made Australia what is today.

Although the ADB’s title may hold echoes of an antiquated, nationalistic nineteenth-century European impulse to collect, catalogue, and contain, the ADB of the 2020s is doing anything but that. From broadening its scope

to introducing critical revisions, as well as developing its digital capacity, it is constantly reimagining itself to continue providing captivating and useful stories of Australian lives.

The first volume looked very different from the impending twentieth. Of its 575 entries, only ten were on women – a measly 1.8 per cent. Indigenous subjects fared worse still, with only four entries, all men. While this may have been unsurprising at the time, this state of affairs is completely unacceptable today. In a settler-colonial nation founded on dispossession and built through continuous migration, there is an abundance of rich, diverse, fascinating, and sometimes harrowing tales to tell in order to build a picture of the Australian people.

The ADB’s selection criteria have always been, in principle, to include both significant and representative subjects, so that all Australians can recognise themselves in its pages. We are now including a wider range of subjects because we can and should. Influenced by trends in historical thought – the development of feminist, social-historical, and postcolonial perspectives, for instance – and enabled by increasingly sophisticated digital resources such as Trove and genealogical websites, we now have greater capacity to research marginal, sparsely documented, and transnational lives. This means that we can more fully live up to our founding ethos.

With the support of the John T. Reid Charitable Trusts, in 2024 we are commencing the First Nations Biography Australia project. This will build on the ground-breaking work done by the Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography, which brought together authors and editors with Indigenous communities, families, and custodians to publish eighty entries on a wide range of Indigenous subjects to date. Thanks to this team, we now have articles on individuals such as Gubbi Gubbi man Yamurra, a performer in the Wild Australia Show, and Queenie Mingmarriya Nakarra McKenzie, a law woman, leader, and artist who was born at Gawoornben in the Kimberley.

In the realm of gender diversity, the ADB’s Women’s Working Party has ensured that the proportion of women in Volume Twenty approaches thirty per cent. Apart from prominent women such as Lady Kerr, the governor-general’s wife, and Neighbours actor Anne Haddy, a range of lesser-

known women are being added: Chinese businesswoman Selina Hassan, for instance, and Latvian ballerina Agnes Babicheva. Looking forward, the planned Colonial Women’s Project will add up to 1,500 entries on women who were active in the pre-Federation period.

This is all part of the ADB’s larger revisions agenda, which will begin in earnest after the completion of Volume Twenty. In earlier decades, historians often aspired to relate the past ‘as it really happened’. Many believed that with enough work they could figure out what occurred and relate it in a factual way. Most scholars now argue that we cannot avoid presentism; that we necessarily understand the world through the lens of our own cultural norms. Those norms have substantially changed since the 1960s, meaning that, to a reader in 2024, some earlier entries leave much to be desired.

Historians’ methods are mainly empirical rather than theoretical. Except for those studying the recent past, most of us cannot base our work on observation or direct experience and experimentation. Rather, most history writing is based on the select records that have been preserved. Sometimes we revise the stories we tell about the past because we have new sources. Sometimes we revise because we have new questions. And sometimes we revise because of our changing relationship with our audience, our present context, or contemporary challenges. It is no surprise that there are more Indigenous and women subjects in the ADB now given the greater diversity of scholars who are involved in the project, whether as authors, employees, or members of the working parties that nominate subjects for inclusion. At the same time, we recognise that we are working in our own context, and that historians in the future may look back at our work and be asking yet more questions and desiring to fill other gaps that have emerged.

We aim to do more than simply tinker with Geoffrey Chaucer and Alexander Pope’s ‘temple of fame’, rather wanting to push the temporal and conceptual boundaries of biography. Malcolm Allbrook has used landscape biography to write a joint article on Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, two Indigenous inhabitants of the Willandra Lakes region who lived 42,000 years ago. We once had the view that we could not write biographies of people who had died recently. Now we are adding such biographies: Gurindji stockman and storyteller Ronnie Wavehill Wirrpngayarri Jangala, for instance, who died in 2020 and whose granddaughters co-authored his entry. Spatially, too, we are challenging what counts as ‘Australian’, recognising the widespread effects of colonialism in the region. Papua New Guinea was administered by Australia from the post-World War I period until independence in 1975. Readers of the ADB can learn about people who lived and worked there, such as teacher and politician Aisoli Salin.

Biography is a form of storytelling, and the digital space offers new ways of presenting our subjects’ lives. There is now the possibility of providing a multisensory experience. Today, readers want to see the person; our response to this has been to accompany written text with photographs of each subject, wherever possible. They also want to hear the

NEW RELEASE

This sensitive and ground-breaking collection explores the human condition, how we relate to family and partners and the shaping of our identity through the shifting currents of love, friendship and illness. Each poem propels the reader into a sensual, visceral and passionate world. With settings as diverse as the Great Ocean Road, Santiago, Athens and the Greek Islands, Simons draws readers into the intimacies of his life.

SWIMMING IN WORDS brings together seventy of Simon’s poems, some previously published, many revised for this collection as well as completely new works such as the 4,000+ word eponymous prose poem.

person, and so we are adding sound. One can look up Dame Nellie Melba and read a pen portrait of her, admire Walter Barnett’s portrait, and hear a snippet of Melba singing ‘Home Sweet Home’ in 1920. Similarly, readers of actor and singer Jenny Howard’s entry need not imagine her Cockney accent and ‘beautiful blue eyes which twinkled with devilment’: they can hear and see all these attributes (and more) for themselves. We are increasingly putting two or more photographs of a subject illustrating different stages of their lives. The entry on

possibilities of technological change. The backbone of analysis rests on the indexing of articles, which facilitates relational and contextual analysis. Old-fashioned indexing is now being dragged into the digital era. Whereas once indexes were collated in printed books, requiring readers to search through the ADB’s volumes manually, now this data is entered into metadata and automatically computed. While the index was once static, it is now dynamic and manipulable.

This permits users of the ADB to trace networks and connections between subjects. Readers are interested in stories, what people were like, but they are also interested in the role of the individual in history.

children’s writer and naturalist Ella McFadyen is an excellent example of how a rich visual archive has been harnessed to enhance a written piece.

And we want to do so much more, especially when our redesigned website is launched in a year’s time. Kathryn Hughes wrote about experiential biography in Victorians Undone: Tales of the flesh in the age of decorum (2017). This is a ground-breaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body. Experimenting with how to capture embodiment, as well as less tangible qualities such as personality, is on our agenda.

Biography and the ADB both sit between the humanities and the social sciences, and are concerned with individual narratives and relationships between people in Australian society. Biographical practice is not only storytelling; it is also a social science methodology. While we can capture what wellknown figures such as Vida Goldstein, Jessie Street, Alfred Deakin, and Robert Menzies were like, there are many people for whom we cannot find the necessary information.

Increasingly, the ADB is becoming a suite of research tools. In the past two decades we have been quietly developing online research capabilities, gradually waking up to the

Consider the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly. A long list of ‘related entries’ are fielded below his entry, directing readers to learn about Ma (Ellen) Kelly, his complex and lively mother; his criminal associates, such as Joseph Byrne and Stephen Hart; the police investigators; his victims, including Aaron Sherritt; Sidney Nolan, the artist who depicted him many times; Redmond Barry, the judge who sentenced him to death; and his executioner, Elijah Upjohn. Clicking on Kelly’s occupations as listed in his ‘life summary’ allows readers to consider him as part of a wider group of bushrangers or prisoners. Jayne Wilson has written a group biography of ‘Bushrangers in the Australian Dictionary of Biography’, offering further context to illuminate Kelly’s and other bushrangers’ stories.

The possibilities of analysing individuals are exciting, and no doubt we will need to consider how the world of artificial intelligence will shape and help our work.

The ADB is not a telephone book that can list every person of note who has lived on this continent. It observes the discipline of a dictionary and chooses a limited number of significant and representative subjects to reflect the population under study. But in the twenty-first century we need to rethink what ‘significant’ and ‘representative’ really mean, as well as how we can use the stories of Australian lives to learn more about the past and shape our changing world now and into the future. g

Melanie Nolan is the General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Director of the National Centre of Biography. Her most recent book is Biography: A historiography (Routledge, 2023).

Michelle Staff is online and outreach manager at the National Centre of Biography and the Australian Dictionary of Biography. A feminist historian, she is currently writing a biography of Western Australian feminist Bessie Rischbieth.

Dame Nellie Melba with a photograph of her father, businessman David Mitchell, 1925 (George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

River’s flow

A Martuwarra collaboration

Robert Wood

ITossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant by Nandi Chinna and Anne Poelina

Fremantle Press

$29.99 pb, 112 pp

n her fifth full-length poetry collection, Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant, Nandi Chinna continues to write about her engagement with the natural world. Authored in collaboration with Wagaba Nyikina Warrwa Elder, Anne Poelina, this book sees her move north and west into the Kimberley. This is where the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) runs through Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Nyikina, Walmajarri, and Wangkatjungka Country. It is a place that poetry readers will recognise from the geographically proximate classic Reading the Country (1984) by Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Bentarrak, Ngarla Songs (2003) by Alexander Brown and Brian Geytenbeek, and the ethnopoetic George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line (2014), edited by Stuart Cooke. With that in mind, Chinna’s Kimberley is a place that is remote for many readers, but not entirely unknown.

Upon her arrival in the region, Chinna shares a twin sense of recognition and ignorance: ‘When I moved from the southwest of Western Australia up to Fitzroy Crossing in the remote north-west of the state, my first forays ... felt as bewildering as if I had been gagged and blindfolded. I felt as though I had left Australia, and with it lost all of my familiar languages and strategies as an artist and writer.’

For a time, the poet simply walks and reflects, sits still and observes, not quite knowing how to create poetry in a place new to her yet old with storytellers. After a community meeting with Elders where she hears about plans to frack near the Martuwarra, Chinna comes to the conclusion that she ‘somehow wanted to contribute to the campaign to protect [it]’. She reaches out to Poelina to forge a collaboration. Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant is one such result and complements other activist engagements.

In the book there are poems on kayaking (‘At Danggu’), resting (‘Introducing Martuwarra’), cycling (‘Reciprocal Gifts’), wandering (‘Impelled By Orpheus’), running (‘Waramba First Flood’), and simply living by, with, and in the river. Like Chinna’s previous collection, Swamp (2014), which chronicled the wetlands of the Swan Coastal Plain, it is the landscape that becomes the central character, even as the poets inhabit it. This is an activist ecopoetics of observation where self dissolves into the water’s flow and we realise how rich in natural abundance the region is. Although Chinna feels as if she had ‘left Australia’, there are contiguities with the south-west and Adelaide, where she formerly lived. Birds feature often (‘Australia Day Birds’), and there are poems about football (‘Unbearable Weight of the Road II’) and Christmas

(‘12 Days Until Christmas’). These familiar national iconographies are remade aslant, often recognisable because of their remote community touchpoints like Troopies, tinned food, and tents. This remote iconography has also been shared most recently in Australian poetry by Phillip Hall, with Sweetened in Coals (2014). Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant also shares similarities with John Kinsella and Charmaine Papertalk Green’s recent collaborations towards a decolonial understanding of nature, even though we hear relatively little of Poelina’s powerful voice.

The depth of this collaboration is reaffirmed in the Acknowledgments, and the long and generous glossary reminds us of Chinna’s recognition and ignorance of life in the Kimberley signalled at the outset. It is, at the end of the day, Chinna on Poelina’s country. After these addenda, there is an in-depth reference list that shares some of the historical and governmental sources that went into Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant. With support from state funding agencies, including the 2021 Western Australian Premiers’ Writing Fellowship, they demonstrate the depth of lived experience and sustained research that has been necessary for Chinna and Poelina to express the community’s understanding of the Martuwarra as a whole. It is about ‘representation’ in the full meaning of that word.

The book achieves a poetic voice at once ethically engaged and subtly lyrical, with an attentive eye for detail in ecological and social terms. There is more than an innocent romanticism at play, and an awareness of pollution (‘Bread Bag Tag’), trauma (‘Martuwarra Time’), and threat (‘Angry Birds’). This post-pollution anti-pastoralism gives literary charge to each poem; the voices are energised by the wider gaze and by the high local stakes in a climate-changed world. The politics of land are shared with rage, humour, pathos, and genuine care, which is due largely to Chinna’s skill and her expression of the quotidian realities that come with life in the Kimberley. Together, Chinna and Poelina ably communicate what is at risk in the future of the Martuwarra, through fracking, precisely because they are looking at small moments between birds, at the intimacy between swimmers, and how the rain falls on the grass outside. The reader’s attention is directed to an everyday beauty, and its potential rupture and loss, rather than the sublime majesty rather than to the sublime majesty of one of the last wild rivers. This gives Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant a human, maybe even domestic, scale, as well as a mythic frame that reminds us of our responsibilities to the natural world. Thankfully, this poetry, like the river itself, is peopled with guardians among traditional owners, not least Poelina. But it does not mean that violence is ever far away, even today.

Tossed Up by the Beak of a Cormorant represents Chinna’s own desire to contribute to the campaign to protect the Martuwarra. In it she finds a leader in Poelina, but she will also attract her own fellow travellers among readers of this resonant book. Reading the book, I was reminded of my own time in the community of Looma catching barramundi and plucking bush turkeys on the banks of the Martuwarra. Although twenty years ago now, it returned in full flow; all I could do was sit in silence listening to the flow of the memorial river as it came past. The poems in this book, just like the reconciled relationship that led to its collaborative publication, make the same noise, one worth listening to if you are somewhere nearby or on a very distant coast. g

Damen O’Brien

Poet of the Month

Damen O’Brien is a multi-award-winning poet based in Brisbane. His prizes include the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, The Moth Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the Val Vallis Award. His poems have been published in seven countries, nominated for a Pushcart, and highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Damen’s first book of poetry is Animals With Human Voices (Recent Work Press, 2021). His new book of poetry is Walking the Boundary, available from Pitt Street Poetry.

Which poets have influenced you most?

All of the Australian and world pantheon of poets, but in particular: Kenneth Slessor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Les Murray, and W.B. Yeats.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Inspired. But you can’t wait for inspiration – you’ve got to listen to the whisper of the white page and write down what it tells you.

What prompts a new poem?

Reading good poetry – reading anything good, really. Listening to the radio on the drive home from work. I have lost track of the poems that came from me thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that. That can go in a poem!’

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

A good night’s sleep. A nice cup of coffee. A buzzing café. Some inspiring music playing in my earbuds. I have Florence and the Machine on high rotation at the moment.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

One or two. ‘First thought, best thought’, supposedly. In all seriousness, one draft is not enough, but I have never been very interested in editing – it takes away precious time from writing. Like the stopped clock, I rely on being right every now and then. I have promised myself that I will try and edit my poems after each rejection. I am doing a lot of editing lately!

Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

When I was young, I sent Bruce Dawe long letters full of selfabsorbed and naïve comments about poetry and he sent me gracious responses. As an adult, I nearly got to meet him, but he was ill then and died before I had that honour. I would have liked to speak with him as poet to poet.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

There are many I treasure, but I return most to the Black Inc. series The Best Australian Poems. It’s no longer in production, unfortunately. I once picked up the full selection from a Lifeline sale. What was the previous owner thinking! So many hidden gems.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude, to write the poem – and a coterie, to boast to them why they should be published. And be believed.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

Those who are prepared to talk about what they don’t like, not just what they like. Critics who are prepared to risk the wrath of their peers by assaying honest appraisals. There are some critics in Australia who are that brave, but the industry is small.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap. Wow! It’s the best present of a book of poetry I ever received. No wonder it won her a Pulitzer.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

Let’s go with something ecstatic from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. This poem is threaded in the wiring of my brain: ‘And all should cry, Beware! Beware! / His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

I don’t have the prescription, but perhaps we are asking the wrong question. I don’t read books on architecture, yet that genre has its community. I am sure no one is hand-wringing about the lack of regard for books on architecture. Poetry will find its audience, sometimes in strange ways. ABR does it right, providing a place for poetry among other genres –without apology, without a need to justify its inclusion. g

(Isaac O’Brien)

Songs unfolding

The completion of Judith Bishop’s trilogy

Anders Villani

Iby Judith Bishop

University of Queensland Press

$24.99 pb, 78 pp

n Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.

Judith Bishop opens Circadia, her fourth full-length collection, with a preface: ‘this fold / holding off / world from world / will dissolve / love portends / and pretends’ (‘Skin’). That Bishop, who has translated Jaccottet’s poetry, keeps ‘Skin’ separate makes us search for a thesis. In its rhyme and visual/syllabic symmetry, the poem says: no union of self and other can happen. Rather, it declares that the union will happen, then recants. Yet love ‘pretends’, supports a claim it knows is false. We can also read ‘this fold’ as what Arundhati Roy calls ‘the skin on my thought’: language. Since Event (2007), Bishop has been engaged in one of poetry’s more nuanced, elegant, and unearthly studies of human intimacy. Circadia locates these relations in a larger study: of ‘the vital connection’, the poet, linguist, and AI researcher writes in an essay, ‘between language and the real’.

Circadia completes a trilogy that includes Event and Interval (2018). The word is Bishop’s, a combination (as she states in the Notes) of ‘circadian’ (the daily rhythms of life) and Arcadia, the name of an idyllic district described in Virgil’s Eclogues. Its meaning recalls a couplet in Interval: ‘and both of us desiring, / and both of us in time’ (‘Aubade’). Desire is the search for contact. Time is difference and death. In Circadia, Bishop spotlights this clash of forces by opening the first section with ‘Sein und Zeit’. ‘We can walk into a room not knowing’, she writes. Not knowing what? Bishop answers: ‘Only you will know.’ In this neutral space, ‘the talk begins, / like a reckoning of beads’. This is opaque poetry, subject without object. But from the title we can infer mortality, or the knowledge of our death – Heidegger’s ‘uttermost possibility of existence’. Do we accept death with desire? Do we go on ‘not knowing’? Either way, we ‘carry … its moment’, the fallout of our choice (maybe the room is the mind, an attitude) ‘in and out of days’. Throughout the book, Bishop holds death’s gaze, which means confronting the urge to deny it. The speaker watches her daughters ‘listen to an inner song’: ‘To start to see how taking

turns / applies to life is harrowing’ (‘Improvisation’). In ‘Leadbeater’s Possum’, Bishop addresses the critically endangered species: ‘I cannot touch / the night – let alone that night, / the last on earth, that is calling from your face.’ This ‘last night’ is extinction. The speaker scrambles to save a dying animal, and her panic – ‘I was out of my wits I was holding the box’ – evinces the collection’s most overt fear of death. What emerges from this fear is presence: ‘You are on the earth now / Grip the bark of the world’. In the next poem, the addressee ‘search[es] for the Baw Baw frog’ and finds that ‘…[t]he ones for whom you came still exist: they are here: here’ (‘Voices’). The crucial recurrent word in Event is ‘skein’, denoting complexity; in Circadia, we repeatedly meet ‘earth’ and ‘here’.

Bishop has been engaged in one of poetry’s more nuanced, elegant, and unearthly studies of human intimacy

Circadia’s five sections feature several poems titled for their date and time: ‘Evening / 23 June 2022’. This is striking specificity for a poet who uses few proper nouns – who writes, according to critic Oliver Dennis, ‘as if she had been born anywhere’. While the poems withhold particularising details, their temporal markers invite context. ‘Morning / 14 June 2020’ begins: ‘– So I walked away / and broke the glass / in which we listened to each other / were within each other / as rain disappears / into the earth.’ Glass appears elsewhere as a ‘fold’ precluding union: ‘As if / the black window / at the solitary pass / from I to this / (or you or now) / could let a human mind / slip through the glass …’ (‘Harbour’). In ‘Morning’, though, the union has taken place. But intimacy brings erasure. The speaker must ‘br[eak] the glass’. Bishop lives in Melbourne. Couples who lived together in that city on the poem’s date, during the Covid-19 lockdowns, will know this dynamic. Elsewhere, ‘The Forest’ shifts between hesitancy – the repetition of ‘there could be someone’ – and confidence – ‘can you hear it now’ – to depict a landscape where thoughts, bodies, insects, and ‘a steel box’ orbit one another as ‘signals’. The possible ‘someone’ keeps returning to ‘the always-fleeing thought of fleeing / the always-being of their own country’. How near ‘fleeing’ is to ‘being’, in sound and life. Bishop’s fusion of presence and absence reminds me of another French poet she has written about, Yves Bonnefoy. From his ‘Theatre’: ‘What seize but what escapes, / What see but what is darkened, / What desire but what dies, / Speaks and is torn apart?’ The date below ‘The Forest’, 23 February 2022, marks the eve of the invasion of Ukraine.

Doves, a child in a Superman costume, artists from Barbara Hepworth to Rainer Maria Rilke to Zao Wou-Ki; wind: Bishop’s subjects range, but her ear and intelligence carry. These poems, sometimes hermetic, never admit a flat note. Amid their layered rhetoric glow unforgettable lines: ‘Gesture is the / accident of love – / its naked speech’ (‘Recital’); ‘feel the flesh quiver / like a bell at its root’ (‘Portraits of the Future’). In ‘On Leaving’, the simple refrain, ‘Lift and go’, which opens three of five sections, belies the poem’s ecstatic rendering of departure, if any leaving, even thought to thought, is metonymic of time, of death. Enjambment and caesura make this process felt:

Circadia

Lift and go: but there is something so weightless and invisible it parries all lunges and undoes acceleration, sending puzzles to the limbs instead of orders …

As much as Bishop’s trilogy is about time, it is in time. The sixteen-year project records her transition from young adulthood into parenthood and, by Circadia, ‘a middle-aged body, romancing myself’ (‘Portraits of the Future’). Four of the book’s last five poems address her children. In ‘Music Lessons’, Bishop writes: ‘Singing was forbidden me / (in bed or in the car) – / your infant ear was offended / or emotion overrun / when I raised my voice

to give you / not a story / but a song’. But the speaker soon fights this injunction: ‘I would come to you to talk / but it’s late, let me come to you to sing.’ This is a mother singing to her children. It is also a poet, mortal, seeking a key, ‘the strongest antidote to fear, / the songs unfolding in our minds / their fugitive reproof to time’ (‘Improvisation’). ‘The deepest listening, the ear of imagination,’ writes Denise Levertov, ‘rejects all … that fails to sing in some way’. Bishop reserves one of the collection’s, and the trilogy’s, most virtuosic moves for the final poem. She lets time speak. What it says is too moving to quote. g

Anders Villani is the author of Aril Wire (Five Islands Press, 2018) and Totality (Recent Work Press, 2022).

Other Eminent Hands

And as five zones th’ aetherial regions bind, Five, correspondent, are to Earth assign’d: The sun with rays, directly darting down, Fires all beneath, and fries the middle zone: The two beneath the distant poles, complain Of endless winter, and perpetual rain. Betwixt th’ extreams, two happier climates hold The temper that partakes of hot, and cold.

Ovid via John Dryden*

It’s a mantra, isn’t it? Now a gifting of the driest six months here in 150 years –‘since records began’, which the panting wagtail calls a grotesque expression. Change is many of us working hand over hand, making stands or semi-forgetting. We’ve arrived from a wet zone wetter than usual, and this is the drift. Creation swelling or cracking in every realm. Remember the funnels collecting smutty rain, the swaying of tall trees till they split. And now any roots unable to reach below the outer shell withering in the dark, or lit up when those cracks reach down. Either way. Eventually, we’ll rid language of words of change or words of weather, we’ll acclimatise to whatever binds lives from end to end.

Other eminent hands will pretend translation when they are remaking in own images. An Easter Monday and the road toll rises. An Easter Monday and blue trees wilt. A woman asleep or collapsed on the street of a country town stares horizontal towards the railway line and its postflood traffic of intercontinental supplies. In this small town are 26 people homeless ... and counting. Other people are enjoying the holiday –an easy day-trip from the city. It’s hot but not chronically hot as it has been. This new beginning. This continuation. The river cradle forgetting what it can hold, and their eminences searching out a word that incorporates ‘sun’, ‘solipsistic’, ‘profit’, ‘prophet’, ‘business’, ‘rain’, ‘dryness’, and love.

John Kinsella

*From Metamorphoses ‘translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and other eminent hands’ [https://knarf.english.upenn.edu/EtAlia/ovidmeta.html]

Posthumous Paddy

Seamus

Heaney’s

life in letters

Stephen Regan

‘AThe Letters of Seamus Heaney

edited by Christopher Reid Faber

$89.99 hb, 847 pp

ustralia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

One of the peculiar formal characteristics of letters, especially the letters of poets, is that they have a capacity to be intimately confiding and, at the same time, hopeful of a future readership. In Heaney’s case, the keynote is not so much posterity as belatedness. Dozens of letters open with a familiar apology – ‘Forgive me for not writing earlier’ – and he repeatedly derides himself as ‘a man of letters’ who doesn’t deserve the title, not having written any in a long time. He routinely undoes his claims to poetic immortality, at one point depicting himself (not without poetic flair) as ‘a frazzled, frizzled item, a worn-out Triton, a punctured Michelin man, a posthumous Paddy, a waft of aftermath’.

The self-laceration in the letters is a way of prompting poetry. Heaney quotes approvingly the insistence of his great poetic predecessor W.B. Yeats: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ The immense value of these letters is in affording us an intimate understanding of the making of a poet over a period of nearly fifty years. They reveal the personal and cultural pressures that shaped the poems, as well as the musings and imaginings that eventually took shape as books of poems, essays, and translations. The letters are places of self-reflection and self-critique, with Heaney ruefully confessing in 1977 to having ‘rebuked the lyric in myself’. Readers expecting pronouncements on the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland or on Heaney’s Catholicism will find relatively little, though explosions in Belfast occasionally punctuate the letters. There are brief but brilliantly illuminating explorations of Catholic consciousness

in letters to Ted Hughes and Eamon Duffy.

The letters begin in 1964, with Heaney’s happy announcement of his engagement to Marie Devlin, and they close with the two words of Latin, ‘Noli Timere’ (Don’t be afraid), sent to her in a text message shortly before his death on 30 August 2013. They candidly record the personal circumstances surrounding the most significant moments in a long poetic career: the publication of his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966; his exposure to American poetry and culture in Berkeley, California, in 1970; his decision to leave Belfast and move with his family to Glanmore in rural County Wicklow in 1972; his appointment to a lecturing post at Harvard University in 1978 that would lead to a professorship in poetry from 1984 to 1998; his appointment to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University in 1989; and the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. Increasingly, especially after 1995, Heaney finds himself ‘pushed to the side of my own life’ (one of many echoes of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Afternoons’) with an exhausting and unremitting schedule of readings, lectures, interviews, and public engagements – ‘a life of hurry and podiums and senatorial pomps’.

‘I find myself answering letters in the lost hours in airports,’ Heaney writes from the Tara Lounge at Kennedy Airport in New York. Just as likely, the letters are written ‘In the air, with British Air’, and they often give the writer’s address as Aer Lingus Flight E1 117 (Dublin to Boston). A letter written to Bernard O’Donoghue in February 1990 is headed ‘En route by train between Boston and NY’ and offers assurance that ‘the shaky nature of the calligraphy is truly due to the moving train (great symbol of the continent and all that) and not to the can of Budweiser that shimmers to my left’. The poet on the move delights in using ‘fancy writing paper’ purloined from airport lounges and hotels, all the time protesting that there is never enough time to write the ‘real letter’ that is called for.

In Glanmore, Heaney finds repose and imaginative nurturing. Some of his most sustained and inspired letters, as well as some of his finest poems, are written in what was formerly the gatelodge on J.M. Synge’s estate in County Wicklow. In the same month as he composes his ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ (September 1988), he describes the house in a letter to John McGahern: ‘It’s stone, slate, dormers, shutters, tiles, mustiness, tongue-and-groove, latches, bars and bolts, cold water, open hearths.’ He tells Helen Vendler (one of his most trusted confidantes), ‘I love it and get refreshed from it every time.’ Most of the letters in the volume are from handwritten originals, though in the 1990s there is grateful reliance on word processors and electronic notebooks. He never used email.

Christopher Reid, who was Heaney’s editor at Faber in the 1990s, deserves applause for his care and dedication in preparing this volume of letters. His Introduction gently guides the reader towards a full appreciation of both the cultural significance and the artistry of the contents, including their ‘verbal aptness and playfulness’. He presents us with a clean and neatly organised text of the letters, while also providing excellent annotations. The volume includes the texts of poems that Heaney attached to letters, and it hints tantalisingly at poems that we are yet to see, including a poem for Elizabeth Bishop, titled ‘A Hank of Wool’. Some letters, including one to Les Murray, are lost.

Others have recently come to light, including the marvellously rich correspondence between Heaney and Peter Steele, SJ, currently being edited by Gerald O’Collins, SJ and Manfred Cain in Melbourne.

As it stands, however, this book is an enthralling instance of what Wordsworth termed ‘the growth of the poet’s mind’. Heaney liked to draw a distinction between the ‘human letter’ written to friends and other kinds of correspondence, but his stylistic verve and rhetorical command are in abundance throughout. The letters rehearse ideas for poems in dialogue with his closest friends. He tells the artist Barrie Cooke, ‘I need the voices of my best secret life and life-support. I need to hear fellow-anxieties

Inexhaustibly generative

Exploring an efflorescence of Yeatsian activity

Jeremy George

‘WThe Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats edited by Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell

Oxford University Press £135 hb, 752 pp

hat then? sang Plato’s ghost.’ Editors Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell begin their Preface to the massive Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats with the poet’s own injunction to old age. And what a life it was: seventy-three years lived over two world wars; a mammoth literary oeuvre criss-crossing Victorian melancholy, Romantic sublimity, and Modernist apocalypse. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, Yeats was a bohemian raconteur in the Cheshire Cheese pub, a radical nationalist leader of the Irish Revival, a cosmopolitan disciple of the occult, and a waspish senator enraged by the philistinism of the Irish Free State.

In 1939, T.S. Eliot famously declared that Yeats was ‘one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them’. Academics were quick to oblige. Since the pioneering monograph by Belfast poet Louis MacNeice in 1941, followed by volumes from towering mid-twentieth century American critics like Richard Ellman and Hugh Kenner, the academic sub-industry devoted to extending Yeats’s legacy has been busy. This new reference collection, published by Oxford University Press in the Yeats Nobel centenary year and featuring forty-two erudite essays by scholars from across the globe (none of them Australian), comes in at more than seven hundred pages. It is a weighty reminder that the relationship between Yeats and academic literary studies may be inexhaustibly generative.

Lurking in the background of any academic reference collection which claims to bring together new perspectives and establish

and intuitions.’ He is magnanimous in his response to the work of other writers, sending generous plaudits, even in the aftermath of a stroke in 2006. He implores his friends, as he urges himself, to ‘carry on’ and ‘keep going’. His verdict on Brian Friel’s play Molly Sweeney in 1994 is an apt characterisation of this moving but always captivating collection of letters: ‘It breaks the heart and lifts it at the same time.’ g

Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University and a research associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is co-editor (with Andrew Motion) of The Penguin Book of Elegy (2024). ❖

new dialogues, however, are the ghosts of intellectual history. This is especially so in the case of a major (and majorly studied) poet like Yeats. Two episodes of this history seem particularly relevant to understanding the merits and perhaps some of the limitations of this new volume.

First is the fact that Yeats studies arguably reached an emotional and intellectual crescendo in 1980s, when something called Irish Studies emerged. The sectarian violence of the Northern Irish Troubles had encouraged the notion that Ireland was wracked by an unprecedented identity crisis. Into this context strode young and polemical nationalist literary critics steeped in the new disciplines of cultural studies and continental theory to clash in print with historians they pejoratively dubbed ‘revisionist’. At stake in these skirmishes was whether Irish literature, history, and indeed Irish society itself should be analysed through the postcolonial paradigms established in the wake of mass decolonisation movements following World War II, or whether this was a historically inaccurate imposition designed to provoke unnecessary sectarianism. Culturally othered but constitutionally British since the 1800 Act of Union, pre-1922 Ireland could never be placed comfortably. Yeats’s own contradictions as the national poet – an Anglo-Irish nationalist with aristocratic pretensions –were exemplary of the debate, and both sides were keen to claim him to prove their point. Yeats’s resistance to categorisation – the ‘man and his masks’, to quote the title of Ellman’s 1948 study –further allowed him to become an unlikely lightning rod for new poststructuralist currents in comparative literature, which stressed the importance of ideas like hybridity, alterity, and mimicry. Edward Said, Terry Eagleton, and Frederic Jameson produced influential pamphlets on Yeats for the Derry-based Field Day, and Colombia star Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak lectured on his poetry and Derridean deconstruction at the 1963 Yeats Summer School in Sligo. The postcolonial reading of Irish literature, though not monolithic, soon became almost shorthand for Irish Studies itself. The pronouncements of some of its new disciples, lacking the verve and vigour of the previous generation, but full of what Yeats dubbed ‘passionate intensity’, provoked the feeling that a radical intervention had become a critical orthodoxy, particularly after the Good Friday agreement officially ended the Troubles in 1998. At the turn of the millennium, it seemed that Irish Studies might be slowing down.

In 1999, Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters

appeared. It announced the arrival of a new model for literary studies, a revitalisation of Goethe’s concept of ‘World Literature’. If philosophically informed comparativists had burrowed deep into the literary text, those involved in the new World Literature turned to sociology, zoning out from national borders to see a traversable and continuous global, or even planetary, literary ecosystem. Casanova’s pioneering study placed central importance on what she called ‘The Irish Paradigm’. In many ways this reclothed, in the harder language of sociology, that quality of ‘liminality’ in Yeats which was so attractive to Poco theorists in the 1980s. Casanova argued that as a literature always caught between the centre and periphery, Irish literature, and specifically Yeats’s fin-de-siècle Irish Revival, provided a compact history of the transition from nineteenth-century conceptions of local linguistic nationalisms to the global ‘autonomy of literature’ crucial to the consecration of World Literature itself in the twentieth century. Yeats and Irish literature had returned to centre stage, and this time the academic production was even more epic. Providing a relief from the political and identitarian demands of comparative postcolonialism, with a capacious analytical vocabulary drawn from world-systems theory and globalisation studies, World Literature provoked an efflorescence of Yeatsian activity during the first decades of the twenty-first century.

So, Yeats, a central and exemplary figure for the major trends in literary studies for nearly a century, has had a good run. It is as if every critic worth their salt from Derry to Dartmouth has penned something on him. The density of this archive can be a heavy burden. The five-part structure of the Handbook, which, the editors suggest, charts the ‘story of world literature’ but which also seems to be the story of Yeats’s reception in academic literary studies, is impressive for making the outlines of this archive clear without being overwhelmed by the anxiety of influence.

technological manipulations together. Part V (on theatre studies) includes some interesting analysis on movement and performance (particularly Susan Jones on dance), but emblematises one wider problem facing the volume.

Yeats, of course, must be considered alongside contemporary theoretical developments in queer studies, ecocriticism, etc. But in order for this relationship to be productive, presentism must be resisted. It seems an important distinction that there exist terms, problems, and concepts that Yeats can help us think about today, but of which he himself was not explicitly thinking. Zsuzsanna Balázs’s essay on the late plays and transgressive sexuality, for example, has many interesting things to say about the ritualised relations of violence and desire in Yeats’s drama, but because it indexes these observations to an utterly contemporary interpretation of sadomasochism, the argument can at times seem implausible. Part VI considers the expanded scenes in which we read Yeats today, from Anglo-Ireland to the InteLex digital database. Finally, the celebrated poet Vona Groarke provides the collection’s postscript with charming if sometimes-cringey speculative realism, wondering how Yeats would get on in the MFA-dominated literary festival circuit.

William Butler Yeats, c.1903 (Alice Boughton/Whyte’s via Wikimedia Commons)

A schematic overview if one were to read the Handbook cover to cover (which I do not recommend) is as follows. Part I offers essentially biographical accounts of Yeats’s family, friends, and collaborators. Part II gives even-handed historicist perspectives with a focus on the political, a kind of neutral account of some of the Yeatsian themes which preoccupied nationalist critics in the 1980s. These essays cover the influence of Yeatsian predecessors (Dante, Shakespeare, Renaissance Italy) as well as more contemporary figures and forces (the Easter Rising, Italian fascism, Charles Parnell). Part III goes full World Literature, with insightful essays on Yeats’s relations with Africa and Iran, and then rockets into the solar system, reaching for the stars (literally) with speculative takes on Yeats and astrology as well as his visionary occult dalliances. Part IV traces Yeats and the media: a clever editorial decision braids analyses of his poetic and

‘What then?’ Every contribution in this volume offers some response to this question: as Yeats grows more distant from the forces that shape our present, does his writing, worn out from generations of academic explanation and analysis, become blunted equipment for the task of intellectual thinking? The best essays demonstrate beyond doubt that Yeats remains a sharp knife with which to peel and portion the present. But what strikes me is that if Arrington and Campbell begin the collection by claiming that Yeats’s relevance continues to derive from his status as a figure in the story of World Literature, the most persuasive contributions to this volume start from somewhere much smaller and more concrete. They recognise, perhaps, that studying Yeats in a world marked by political individualism and anthropogenic climate change necessitates returning floating academic paradigms to their strong spine of meaning: literature.

These essays – and I would single out those by Jahan Ramazani, Geraldine Higgins, Adam Gills, and Stephanie Burt – master a kind of Yeatsian double-think for literary criticism. They ground theoretical and historical arguments first in the communal and idiosyncratic spaces produced in form. ‘What then?’ This insightful and wide-ranging volume suggests that those who remain committed to Yeats today should return to those polyrhythmic qualities and sonic rhythms which so richly texture his oeuvre. As the poet said himself, it is the arts which lie dreaming of the things to come. g

Jeremy George is writing a PhD in English at the University of Melbourne. ❖

Time’s up?

The prodigality of the super-rich

Adrian Walsh

CLimitarianism:

The case against extreme wealth by Ingrid Robeyns

Allen Lane

$55 hb, 328 pp

an people have too much wealth? Does extreme wealth have negative consequences? Over the past thirty years, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of billionaires whose annual earnings are so large that they are often difficult to comprehend. To take but one example, it was estimated in 2022 by Forbes magazine that Elon Musk’s personal assets were worth $219 billion and that, if he worked for forty-five years, his lifetime hourly rate from these assets was in the order of US$1,871,794.

Further, many of those in the ranks of the super-rich regularly engage in spectacular forms of conspicuous consumption that appear frivolous and wasteful – think of Jeff Bezos’s 2021 flight into space – especially when one considers the extreme forms of poverty and unmet need that exist across the globe. It is unsurprising, when confronted by these forms of extravagance, that many find such extreme forms of wealth to be morally repugnant.

But this raises a question: should we place a limit upon how much any one individual can own? And how would we set such a maximum?

In this highly ambitious book, the Dutch political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns explores and develops an innovative and provocative theory she labels ‘limitarianism’. According to the limitarian, there must be a state-regulated cap on the amount of assets any one person can own, for we do not need, and should not own, goods beyond what is required for us to flourish. Robeyns refers to this point as the ‘riches level’, which is her technical term for the point when additional money cannot increase one’s standard of living, at least in a significant way.

Robeyns provides a numerical figure for the limit which she sets at ten million pounds, euros, or dollars: no one should be allowed to own wealth beyond this level. This figure she regards as a ballpark figure – for those curious about the exchange rates – which is not so much about the actual number as it is about the ‘reasons why a world without extreme wealth concentration would be better for all of us’.

Limitarianism – at least as Robeyns conceives of it – is not only focused on public policy: it is also intended to function as an ethical theory that encourages those of us with excess assets to limit our own wealth. Hence there are two upper limits. The higher one is political and concerns the limit that ‘our social structures and fiscal system should enforce’, while the lower one is personal, and is where individual ethics come into play. The ethical

limit is the maximum amount of money one can own on moral grounds. It is the point at which we cannot in ‘good conscience’ keep excess resources. Robeyns acknowledges that bringing about such a limitarian society would indeed be extremely difficult and, as such, it is best thought of as a regulative ideal towards which we might aim.

The book is aimed at a general readership rather than at political theorists. It contains myriad examples of the prodigality of the super-rich, as well as intriguing tales of members of this class, such as Abigail Disney, who advocate higher levels of taxation for the super-rich. Robeyns has lectured widely in recent years defending limitarianism and has clearly (and unsurprisingly) met much resistance. A significant portion of the book is taken up with responding to objections to her proposal.

Limitarianism is, according to Robeyns, a distinctive political theory that should not be confused with egalitarian theories that focus primarily on differentials between people. Robeyns stresses that, for pragmatic reasons, she is not a strict egalitarian. Nor, curiously, does she defend progressive taxation.

Limitarianism, in one important sense, is not really a new idea. Proto-limitarian sentiments can be found in many popular discussions about the ills of extreme wealth. And Robeyns is not the first political theorist to contemplate limiting wealth. For instance, Plato argues in his dialogue The Laws that, in the ideal society, the assets of the wealthiest should not be more than four times those of the least well-off. His concern here was primarily with the stability of any political community.

But Robeyns’s concerns with extreme wealth are far more extensive than Plato’s. First, she suggests that extreme wealth undermines democracy. The power that the super-rich possess, as a direct consequence of their wealth, allows them to influence democratic processes in ways that make a mockery of the ideals of equal citizenship. Secondly, Robeyns claims that the power of the super-rich is implicated in the rapacious greed of our economic system, which, in turn, is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. Those who cannot be satisfied simply with what is materially sufficient for a prosperous life are likely to have little interest in scaling back the extent of harmful greenhouse-producing practices. Robeyns, then, presents limitarianism as a general panacea for these political and environmental crises.

While the book provides a compelling critique of the excesses of the super-rich, it is less successful in developing a distinctive stand-alone position in political philosophy. One does not need to be a limitarian to believe that the current distribution of wealth holdings across societies such as ours is unacceptable. Moreover, at crucial points in the argument Robeyns relies on bog-standard claims about the importance of political equality. In truth, rather than being regarded as a new philosophical doctrine, limitarianism is probably best thought of as a form of egalitarianism, admittedly one that involves a specific policy prescription concerning the upper limits of wealth. At its core, limitarianism is grounded in concerns about fairness, the distribution of resources, and the impact of excessive wealth on democratic processes and societal well-being, all of which fit within a broadly egalitarian framework. It is also not clear to me that the problems she identifies –such as the climate crisis – can be entirely sheeted home to the lack of limits on extreme wealth.

I found Robeyns’s rejection of progressive taxation perplexing. She writes: ‘This [limitarianism] does not necessarily translate into a 100 per cent tax rate upon income above the political limit. Ideally, a package of different measures should together dilute extreme wealth concentration.’ Surely a more radical theory of progressive taxation, which involves a 100 per cent tax rate at the higher end, is de facto a form of limitarianism?

These critical comments about the status of limitarianism as a stand-alone theory should not be read as a rejection of the

The dry guillotine

A scandal centred on Jewishness

Peter McPhee

JAlfred Dreyfus:

The man at the center of the affair by Maurice Samuels Yale University Press US$26 hb, 225 pp

ews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

The young Alfred Dreyfus, born in 1859, had watched in dismay as German troops occupied his eastern town of Mulhouse in 1870. Like many other Jews from Alsace, he fled to Paris, where he progressed successfully through élite officer training schools. By the 1890s he was a handsome and wealthy officer with a brilliant career and a happy marriage.

At the same time, a series of national economic and political crises and scandals was to make Jews easy targets to explain fin-de-siècle anxieties. Anti-Semitism became a ‘cultural code’ for all those resentful of the rapid changes associated with finance capi-

need for the change that Robeyns so eloquently highlights. Just recently – in fact at the time of writing this review – ministers from Germany, Brazil, South Africa, and Spain have called for a two per cent global tax on the income of billionaires. Ingrid Robeyns’s book provides compelling evidence as to why such redistributive measures are urgently required. g

Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England.

talism, mass democracy, and secularisation, voiced, for example, through the rabid prejudice of Édouard Dumont’s newspaper La Libre parole (Free Speech), which sold 200,000 copies daily by 1894. Jewish officers in the army were a favourite target at a time of international and colonial tensions: as a ‘cosmopolitan’ people, where did their loyalties lie?

Personal jealousies within the officer corps – for Dreyfus’s private income from his family’s textile business was twenty times an officer’s salary – did the rest. In October 1894, written evidence of spying was imputed to him on the flimsiest of evidence. He was found guilty of selling military secrets to Germany and deported to Devil’s Island in French Guyana, popularly known as ‘the dry guillotine’, in the words of Victor Hugo.

Maurice Samuels’s engrossing biography of Dreyfus includes a harrowing chapter on the deliberate cruelty and chronic illnesses of his four years on the island, softened only by access to books and correspondence with his wife, Lucie. It was an excruciating punishment, but Dreyfus’s plight initially aroused little interest or sympathy in many parts of France, even among most Jews.

In August 1896, a diligent officer scrutinised further handwriting to conclude that the real author of the incriminating document was another officer, named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. This was a breakthrough in the campaign of the small, dedicated band of Dreyfus’s defenders led by Lucie and Alfred’s brother Mathieu. Émile Zola’s open letter J’accuse, attacking the array of Dreyfus’s persecutors in January 1898, sold 300,000 copies of the newspaper in which it was published. Zola’s letter provoked anti-Semitic riots and demonstrations across the country, and in the 1898 elections twenty-two openly anti-Semitic deputies were elected. The anti-Semitic rhetoric anticipated Nazism in its vitriolic violence, especially in Paris, which housed sixty per cent of the 80,000 French Jews.

Not until 1899 was Dreyfus repatriated in order to be retried. A military court still refused to declare him innocent. By then, the Dreyfus Affair had become an issue of the reputation of the French officer corps. Ultimately, international outrage

Alfred Dreyfus as a prisoner on Devil’s Island, French Guayana, 1898 (photographer unknown, F. Hame via Wikimedia Commons)

and threatened boycotts of the great Paris Exhibition of 1900 pushed President Émile François Loubet to officially pardon him, but not until 1906 was Dreyfus formally declared innocent and reintegrated into the French army.

The Dreyfus Affair, one of the turning points in modern French history, arrayed anti-clericals and civil libertarians against a powerful coalition of nationalists, practising Catholics, and almost all of the media. But it bitterly divided families, the left, artists, and writers: Marcel Proust followed his mother’s Jewish family in their support for Dreyfus, while his Catholic father backed the army. At the same time as Zola’s letter, a ‘Manifesto of the Intellectuals’ (including Proust, Monet, Pissarro, and Durkheim) marked the moment when ‘intellectual’ came to mean a progressive, engagé figure. But they were opposed by prominent figures on the right: Valéry, Verne, Degas, Cézanne, and Rodin.

The discrediting of the anti-Dreyfusards included the Catholic Church hierarchy, whose newspaper La Croix had reacted to the Dreyfus Affair by insisting (and amply demonstrating) that it was ‘France’s most anti-Jewish newspaper’. It sold as many as 170,000 copies per day. The Dreyfus Affair facilitated the targeting of the Church by successive leftist governments, culminating in the formal separation of Church and State in 1905. Astonishingly, such was Dreyfus’s commitment to the ideals of republican France that, despite his degradation at the hands of its army, and the death of family and friends in World War I, he enlisted and served in the artillery throughout the war. Maurice Samuels contests the common assumption that this reflects the depth of Dreyfus’s ‘assimilation’. Instead, he argues that Dreyfus personified a model of Jewish identity which melded French citizenship and Jewish culture. Fittingly, his funeral was held on Bastille Day, 1935. He was thus spared the horrors of the Nazi occupation after 1940; Lucie, on the other hand, sheltered under a false name in a Catholic convent before her death in 1945.

Importing past enemies

How Australia embraced the fascists it had fought Robin Prior

Tin Exile: Post-war displaced persons in Australia

Jayne Persian

$77.99 pb, 192 pp

his important and arresting book chronicles the way in which Australia, from 1947 to 1952, imported some 170,000 displaced persons from Europe, a reasonable number of whom were fascists. The striking thing that Jayne Persian (a historian at the University of Southern Queensland) lays bare is the insouciance with which this policy was adopted

Dreyfus was not a practising Jew, nor did he speak often of his Jewish identity. He had absorbed the secular nationalism of the French Revolution: that religion was a purely private matter and that all ethnicities were now subsumed into French citizenship. But everyone knew that that his identity was at the heart of the affair. From the outset, he claimed that ‘my only crime is to have been born a Jew’.

Samuels’s biography lacks the substance and contextual breadth of Michael Burns’s Dreyfus: A family affair, from the French Revolution to the Holocaust (1992), which also emphasised the centrality of Jewishness to the scandal. Unlike Burns, however, Samuels uses Jewish newspapers in French, English, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew to demonstrate the profound resonance of the Dreyfus Affair for Jews around the world. Echoing Hannah Arendt, Samuels sees the despair of French Jews as a crucial turning point in support for Zionism, while for others the eventual triumph of the cause reinforced their faith in national integration. This is the most important conclusion of Samuels’s biography.

The book, which is part of the Yale Jewish Lives series, bears the imprint of our times. Samuels is a Professor of French at Yale University and directs the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism. He and others have used the book to make explicit connections between the treatment of Dreyfus and contemporary anti-Semitism. Since its publication, he has commented on what he sees as increasing anti-Semitism on US campuses during the war in Gaza. ‘As antisemitism and right-wing nationalism stage a comeback around the world today,’ he comments, ‘the affair has much to tell us not only about the causes of hatred, but also about the ways it can be resisted.’ So the affair matters, in his words, ‘now more than ever’. g

Peter McPhee is Chair of the History Council of Victoria and holds a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne.

and the way in which all political parties fell over themselves with enthusiasm for it, though all the main actors were well aware of the influence of fascism among this cohort.

Persian notes that at the end of the war in Europe there were about twelve million ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Many were displaced because they had fled westwards ahead of the advancing Russian armies, and a considerable number of these persons did so because they had fought with or for the armies of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Australia was adopting a ‘populate or perish’ immigration policy, and the DPs were an immediate and cheap source of immigrants.

Supposedly, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which later morphed into the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), screened applicants who wished to resettle in Australia for undesirable attributes such as involvement in war crimes and an association with fascist or Nazi groups. In fact, these agencies did no such thing, partly because of the immense numbers to be dealt with. What is startling in this account is that the various Australian governments who implemented DP immigration were aware of this lack of screening and didn’t much care.

Fascists

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Matheson Library atrium, Monash University, Clayton (photograph by Dianna Snape)

It needs to be emphasised at this point that Australia had just spent six years fighting fascism in various forms around the globe and that 30,000 Australians had died in the process of freeing the world from this scourge. Yet, as Persian demonstrates, governments of all stripes were prepared to import as many of these past enemies as could be loaded onto ships. One of the reasons for this is starkly brought out in this book. Despite the fact that we were importing war criminals and murderers, these people had one overwhelming attribute – they were white. Thus we have Arthur Calwell waxing lyrical about Latvians. He had seen some ‘nice blond Latvians’ in a visit to Europe and he was aware that the prime minister, Ben Chifley, ‘liked them blond’. When it was pointed out that some of these men served in the German armed forces (that is, they had fought to further the policies of Adolf Hitler) Calwell stated that nevertheless he preferred the ‘Balts’ over other nationalities, no doubt because they were blond ‘ubermenschen’.

Later, when the Menzies government came to power and it had been revealed that we were harbouring war criminals, the attorney-general (none other than Garfield Barwick) noted that ‘men’ must be able to turn their backs on ‘past bitternesses’. The bitterness he was referring to was of course that produced by the slaughter of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ on the Russian Front. In effect, he declared the chapter on war crimes closed. But as Persian notes, the chapter had never been opened.

had similar set-ups, as did many others of the so-called ‘captive nations’ of Eastern Europe. It is startling to consider that, as Persian reveals, ASIO was watching these groups but took no action against them. In fact, ASIO recruited Hungarists to inform on suspected communist agents.

This theme runs through the book. In the context of the Cold War, it was not the extreme right that was thought to represent a threat to Australian security, but the communists. The overwhelming concern of the organisations set up by the DPs was that they were mainly violently anti-communist. This chimed well with government priorities, William McMahon (as federal treasurer) describing some Ustasha as ‘a good bunch’ with ‘a good cause’ – this cause in part involving Australian citizens of Croatian origin travelling to Yugoslavia to commit acts of sabotage against its government.

Persian also notes that, while the ‘ubermenschen’ arrived in large numbers, one group was excluded. Although some of the DPs were Jews and it was the Jews who had suffered most terribly from the Hitler regime, they were not wanted here. Jews were stated to be ‘not assimilable’, an official of the Immigration Department succinctly summing up government policy by saying ‘we have never wanted these people and we still don’t want them’. At the same time, Calwell was assuring the IRO that ‘we are not anti-Semitic’.

Persian also details what happened to many of these groups when they settled in Australia – in short, they went right on being fascists. The Hungarists (a group of Hungarian exiles) formed associations in most states and greeted each other with the Nazi salute. Their leader in Queensland had in fact worked closely with Adolph Eichmann in deporting Jews to the camps. Notwithstanding this, the group denied the reality of the Holocaust, a fact that did not deter them from running for a Senate seat as late as 1970. This grouping was not alone. Croatian fascists

These facts were hardly hidden. Persian reveals that details of the activities of various groups were well publicised. Jewish lobby groups pointed out that Australia had become a safe haven where they continued their fascist activities and regrouped in the hope of better things to come in their real homes in Eastern Europe. It is lamentable, though hardly surprising, that calls for action against fascist groups were ignored by governments of all persuasions.

The tide turned in the 1980s. Bob Hawke, as a friend of Israel, was moved to action when various reports of war criminals came to his attention. A special Investigations Unit was set up and three criminal prosecutions undertaken. In some ways, it was too late. Eyewitness testimony, on which most prosecutions relied, was by then thought too precarious after forty or fifty years to use as a basis for conviction. Nevertheless, the trials did something to publicise what had happened and thus at least performed some educative function.

Jayne Persian’s book is of major importance. It brings to light the little-known story of how, after spending six years fighting fascists, we spent almost as long welcoming those same fascists to our shores. That all governments cared more about race than social cohesion is a lesson that we would do well to remember. The book should be read by all those engaged in immigration policy, especially politicians, both those in power and those who aspire to power. It is a shocking story, well chronicled. g

Robin Prior is Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide.

Arthur Calwell in 1940 (National Library of Australia via Wikimedia Commons)

‘Unafraid

to Be’

1888 Exhibition to Expo 88

Susan Sheridan

IA Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia

by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

Melbourne University Press

$35 pb, 330 pp

n 1888, Melbourne hosted a grand Centennial International Exhibition to mark a century of British occupation of the continent. There, a six-year-old girl called Ethel Punshon was excited to see that she had won a prize of two guineas for her needle-work – an embroidered red felt newspaper holder. Almost one hundred years later, as Brisbane prepared to mark the bicentennial with a modern ‘Expo 88’, Ethel – now known as Monte Punshon – was invited to become Expo’s roving ambassador, as perhaps the only person alive who remembered its predecessor.

Punshon was famous for her longevity and for her many decades of nurturing connections with Japan, as a teacher and host to visiting students – an ideal choice, it seemed to Premier Joh BjelkePetersen and his advisers. When they learnt, some months later, that she was also being fêted as ‘the world’s oldest lesbian’ – she had come out in an interview with the Melbourne gay community paper, City Rhythm – they contacted her, questioning whether she was a suitable person to take on this role. Monte was offended. ‘It’s none of their blessed business,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Joh is trying to make out that women are criminals if they love one another.’

As it turned out, by the time Expo 88 opened, widespread corruption in Queensland had been exposed and Bjelke-Petersen, discredited, had retired from politics. Monte continued with her ambassadorial duties. But she took exception to being labelled: ‘I’m just me myself. I hate that name.’ That, and the public nature of press stories about her private self, distressed her. She could understand but not entirely share the gay liberation commitments of her younger friends – for her, the personal should never be political. Her lifelong attraction to women was central to her sense of self, but not something to be shared with people she had no connection with.

Throughout her long and adventurous life, it seems, a strong sense of herself as an individual guided Monte in following her own interests and desires, choosing her own loyalties. She grew up, in Ballarat and then St Kilda, in a stable middle-class family of modest means; her parents admired their clever daughter, and her younger sister, Hazel, remained her best friend. Always needing to earn her living, teaching was her main occupation; but she also pursued her scientific interests in electricity (which she had studied at the Ballarat School of Mines as a schoolgirl), photography, and radio (she took on jobs in both areas). She loved the theatre, and participated in both amateur and professional

companies (in the latter usually as a teacher).

Theatre was a passion shared with the woman she called ‘the love of my life’, Debbie Sutton, with whom she lived (along with Hazel) for about a decade, when she was in her thirties. It was during this period of her life that she began to collect in a scrapbook images of women dressing in the modern ‘masculine’ styles of the 1920s, and of others who rejected conventional feminine roles – aviators, sailors, sportswomen, adventurers. As well, there were accounts of women living together as friends or ‘business partners’. She was perhaps constructing an identity for herself as an unconventional woman, one who crossed boundaries and was interested in women’s relationships and achievements.

Monte’s fascination with China and Japan prompted her to take classes in both Mandarin and Japanese, in Melbourne, and to travel. Her first overseas trip, in 1929, when she was forty-seven, was won in a raffle. She went to Japan, Manila, Hong Kong, and Shanghai; she also spent some time in Korea before returning home. Her last visit to Japan, almost sixty years later, was to celebrate the publication in Kobe of her memoir, Monte-San, in 1987.

The Japanese connection, which involved close friendships with several Japanese people living in Melbourne, led to her becoming a person of interest to the security services in the period leading up to the entry of Japan into World War II. Her friend and teacher, Moshi Inagaki, was, bizarrely, accused of ‘sabotaging the proper study’ of Japanese language and culture; but Monte and other women students were not regarded as dangerous. Indeed, Monte was employed as a warden at the Tatura detention camp to teach interned Japanese children.

After the war, Monte encountered many of the newly arrived migrants from Europe when she undertook the teaching of English at the Bonegilla camp in Victoria. Later still, she had a stint teaching at Port Vila, in what was then the New Hebrides. Back in Australia, she frequently billeted visiting Asian and Pacific students at her flat in St Kilda. In her final decade, a whole new generation of younger gay and lesbian friends interviewed and filmed her, published her stories, helped her write her memoir –and took her to their bars and theatre.

When she died at the age of 106, Monte had lived through a century of huge change. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, the renowned Asian historian, skilfully links her biography to local and global events, as well as taking on the usual biographer’s task of narrating her subject’s life. As she puts it, ‘following Monte’s idiosyncratic footsteps, we find windows opening onto many aspects of Australian society that were long concealed’, such as baby farms, children’s theatrical troupes, private drag parties of 1930s queer society, wartime internment camps, and so on. There are times when this social and political history, however engagingly narrated, tends to obscure Monte’s life trajectory – and with such an extraordinary life, it seems a shame to lose sight of Monte.

Morris-Suzuki entitles her final chapter ‘Unafraid to Be’, and it is exactly this quality in Monte Punshon that the biography brings out so well – a woman who said of herself, ‘I have struggled very often not to be afraid, constantly’, and who chose to ‘treat fear as the spur to go beyond, to explore’. g

Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide.

Trans melancholy

An unapologetic bricolage

Jack Nicholls

‘ITrans Figured:

On being a transgender person in a cisgender world by Sophie Grace Chappell Polity

$51.95 hb, 239 pp

am an advocate of transgender people because we’re people [who] deserve to have a voice ... and by and large we don’t have a voice. By and large, our experience is squeezed out – by trans-exclusionary ideology.’ On the face of it, this justification by Sophie Grace Chappell for her new book, Trans Figured, is rather puzzling. In recent years, publishers have been falling over themselves to publish transgender memoir, with Chappell’s own publisher, Polity, mining this genre with books supporting both sides of the gender ‘debate’. Far from being squeezed out, transgender voices have become profitable commodities in the literary world.

Chappell’s defensive position makes sense once we realise that she is Professor of Philosophy at Britain’s Open University. If the counter-revolution against transgender liberation has succeeded anywhere, it is in the United Kingdom, especially in the academy. ‘A bombardment of public transphobia’ is how Chappell characterises the current poisonous atmosphere in the United Kingdom, and anybody glancing at the tabloids would be hard pressed to disagree with this assessment.

In that context, Chappell’s book is best understood not as monologue but as a Socratic debate with an absent voice – the voice of her accusers. As such, it culminates in an open letter to the world’s most famous trans-exclusionary feminist: J.K. Rowling.

Trans Figured sets itself apart from other transgender memoirs by taking a broader philosophical perspective on a very personal subject. Chappell is a devoutly Christian British academic with six books of ethical philosophy under her belt. She quotes Goethe and includes her own translations of Homer. Her highbrow style is delightfully distilled in lines such as, ‘understood a certain way, [detransition] seems to challenge the Hegelian narrative of irreversible enlightenment’. Structurally, Trans Figured is an unapologetic bricolage, combining pieces written over several years. The book encompasses autobiography, ethical treatise, speech, and science fiction.

Chappell’s memoir, which takes up three-quarters of the book, is of a repressed trans woman coming to terms with her identity in later life (she transitioned in 2014 at the age of fortynine). These vignettes, though touching, offer little novelty to the connoisseur of trans melancholy, except for their examination of Chappell’s Christian faith, which Chappell parallels with gender dysphoria as something a child just knows in their heart, before they have words to express it.

The book hits its stride in the relatively brief philosophical argument that Chappell builds in the final chapters. Here, gender identity slots into a classic epistemological theme – how can we ever know what it is to be somebody else? We can’t. But Chappell argues that since ‘to be’ is ‘to be embodied’, so we can draw distinctions between male- and female-bodied perceptions, just as we can between tall and short, old and young.

Any binary breaks down at the margins, and Chappell, who describes herself as a gender reformist, not an abolitionist, draws a distinction between the female and the feminine. She sidesteps the ‘not a real woman’ debate by analysing the myriad scientific and cultural categories that can define ‘womanhood’, some of which are permeable, some not. This leads Chappell to an interesting wider analysis of how all our social categories, not just gender, are subject to a continual churn of being made more or less inclusive, so that what it is to be a child, a criminal, or a citizen varies as culture demands.

In Part 4, Chappell draws out an extended analogy, that ‘trans women/men are to women/men as adoptive parents are to parents’. Everybody understands that adoption is a cultural practice that differs from biological birth. But adoptive parents are celebrated, and it would be an extreme position to dismiss them as not being ‘real parents’. Chappell writes: ‘Nobody sensible thinks that the existence of adoptive parents undermines our understanding of what it is to be a parent. On the contrary, it extends it.’ Chappell is a parent herself and writes well on childhood. She rejects the calumny that a transgender identity is inherently sexual, arguing that it develops well before puberty. ‘If you’re transgender, being trans is your childhood, and it is the exclusion of your trans side from your childhood that constitutes the interference.’ Well said, and yet here the book sidesteps controversy, as nowadays we have plenty of people who discover a trans identity only in adulthood. It is an interesting conundrum into which Chappell, perhaps disappointingly, chooses not to delve.

Trans Figured is tinged throughout with the warm comfort of British children’s fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Alan Garner are cited). Given this evident love, there is real sadness evident in Chappell’s open letter to Rowling – Britain’s bestselling author turned pitiless culture warrior. It is four years since Chappell first attempted to find common ground with Rowling, but Rowling and her detractors have only become more entrenched in their positions. This piece may have served better as an introduction rather than the somewhat depressing capstone it is presented as here.

As an epilogue, Chappell offers a short piece of speculative fiction about a matriarchal society in which boys are permitted to live as honorary women. While philosophical utopias have a proud pedigree, Chappell’s vision of the matriarchal island of Lissounes is an Ursula K. Le Guin pastiche that could perhaps have been left on the cutting-room floor.

If Trans Figured ultimately comes across as a jumble, this may be by design. Identity is inherently subjective, and so the author tries multiple genres in pursuit of empathy. When it comes to the old conflict between rationalism and empiricism, Chappell isn’t one for the binary. For her, philosophy should not confine itself to straightforward theory or argument from experience. ‘It never has to be one or the other; it always can, in the end, be both.’ g

Francesca de Tores

Open Page

Francesca de Tores is a novelist, poet, and academic. Saltblood is her first historical novel. Writing as Francesca Haig, she is the author of four previous novels, published in more than twenty languages. In addition to a collection of poems, her poetry is widely published in journals and anthologies. She grew up in lutruwita/Tasmania and, after fifteen years in England, is now living in Naarm/Melbourne.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Ithaka, the most perfect Greek island, to float in the turquoise water. At least Ithaka has literary links, so I could pretend that I was going there as a Homeric pilgrimage and not to drink wine in the sun.

What’s your idea of hell?

While the burning refugee tents of Rafah are an all-too-literal hell on earth, I can’t summon a jocular answer about shopping malls or a Young Liberals meeting.

What do you consider the most specious virtue? Civility. I’m tired of people who do real harm, but do it politely, judging those who suffer for daring to be angry. Anger is the very least that they’re entitled to.

What’s your favourite film?

I adored Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Kindergarten Teacher (2018).

And your favourite book?

Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Another I’ve returned to repeatedly since I started writing historical fiction: Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End

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

Mary Read, the eighteenth-century pirate whose extraordinary life is the subject of Saltblood. I’d love to hear her tell me all the ways I got it wrong. Toni Morrison, for her incisive and expansive mind, and her sense of humour. Katherine Rundell, a magician of words, who seems to manage that rare feat: being principled without being boring.

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

I do mourn the conflation of ‘disinterested’ with ‘uninterested’, because it seems to have meant the death of the useful concept of ‘disinterest’.

Who is your favourite author?

I think John Glenday is less well known than he deserves. There are lines by Czesław Miłosz and Victoria Chang that I will carry forever. I suspect that loving Mary Oliver might make me what young people would call ‘basic’, but when she says, ‘You do not have to be good’, my heart still answers: Yes!

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Crow, from Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

Merricat, from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Stephen Maturin, from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander novels.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Boldness. Writing that makes you think: ‘I didn’t realise we were allowed to do that!’

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Fugitive Pieces. I’d previously only been interested in writing poetry, but this novel blew the doors of prose right off their hinges for me. I’d never realised that prose could be so lyrical.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

If Books Could Kill, which dissects popular non-fiction bestsellers (usually self-help, or right-wing political tomes) with a delicious balance of research and sheer, joyous snark.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The pathetic truth: dog videos on the internet.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

I love critics who meet the work on its own ground and can admire risks being taken, even when they don’t necessarily work. I’m also drawn to critics who situate themselves (their own preferences; their own political beliefs) in their writing, shattering the facile illusion of objectivity. And I love a sense of humour. On film, I enjoy Caspar Salmon; on philosophy, Amia Srinivasan; on popular culture, Rebecca Shaw.

How do you find working with editors?

A joy. A good editor is a bridge between reader and writer. And when an editor points out something wrong with my work, it’s rarely a revelation – almost without exception it’s been something that I knew I wasn’t nailing, but which I was trying to get away with. The best editors force you to admit these failings to yourself. I’m grateful for it.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love them, of course. But because I love them, I also want them to be more than just a nice day out for middle-class people, so I welcome recent moves towards inclusivity, affordability, and transparency about sponsorship. Are artists valued in our society?

I think they’re both over- and under-valued. We cling to a romanticised view of artists as mystical, inspired creatures, which also allows us to continue to underfund them – as though the muse pays the bills. g

(Andrew North)

HFrom the Archive

‘Nothing is more à la mode in contemporary letters than retelling old stories.’ So wrote Robert Dessaix in his review of House of Names by Colm Tóibín for the August 2017 issue. On page 25, Peter Rose reviews Long Island, the Irish novelist’s sequel to his 2009 bestseller Brooklyn. The interest in retelling old stories from a new perspective has only intensified since Dessaix reviewed House of Names and worried about framing the past with a ‘modern sensibility’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

ouse of Names is a grim book, as any retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia is bound to be. It is a tale to harrow up your soul, to make your two eyes start from their spheres – or at least, it is until ten pages before the end, when Elektra cracks the book’s first joke and the tone becomes a touch mellower.

Nothing is more à la mode in contemporary letters than retelling old stories: from first-time novelists to literary luminaries such as Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, writers across the globe are busy plundering the classics in search of great plots to refashion and breathe new life into. Why do we do it? Whether resetting the story closer to home or just hanging a reworded version of it on the original skeleton, what are we hoping to do? Rescue an archetypal story from oblivion? View contemporary society or recent history afresh through a classic prism? Are we losing faith in our ability to invent meaningful fictions? For instance, in House of Names, has Tóibín got his eye on the Irish Troubles? Or is he casting light on a much broader theme, central to the Oresteia: how to establish a civilised society once the old gods have begun to fall silent? The myriad answers to this question furnish our newspapers with their headlines every day.

Tóibín goes about the task of reworking Aeschylus with his accustomed flair. In the dazzling opening chapter, Clytemnestra recounts her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis to secure fair winds for his departure with his troops to Troy. The prose is not just ornate, but at times positively ambrosial. As a rule, only playwrights permit themselves this kind of departure from the way people actually speak and write, and, indeed, this work often reads more like a performance piece than a novel. It is not quite Racine or Corneille, although it’s arguably more affecting. As in Greek theatre, not only the setting but also the faces and costumes of the participants in the drama are left to our imagination.

Even at this early point in the narrative, there are hints that some of the characters are beginning to wonder why the virgin goddess would demand an innocent young girl’s life in return for agreeing to change the direction of the winds. Is making the wind blow from the south instead of the north so very much to ask? Once you question sacrifice, you’re staring into the abyss.

The traditional gods are not exactly dead in Argos (or our world), but nowhere in evidence, except in set expressions. ‘I live alone,’ Clytemnestra confides in us, ‘in the shivering, solitary knowledge that the time of the gods has passed.’ All she has left,

like so many of us, is ‘the leftover language of prayer ... What had once been powerful and added meaning to everything was now desolate, strange ... Now our words are trapped in time, they are filled with limits, they are mere distractions, they are as fleeting and monotonous as breath.’

The fading of divine lawmakers who care leaves the Greeks (and us) with a problem: what are we to do about the tyrants who will pop up to replace them? What is there now to break the chain of sin and vengeance? In the Greek trilogy, on his return from Troy, King Agamemnon’s wife and her lover in turn kill him (and, for good measure, his concubine), thereby outraging their son Orestes, who, with his sister’s connivance and after a lot of dithering, kills his mother. What can be done to bring light into the darkness enveloping not just the House of Atreus, but the whole city and even lands beyond?

For Aeschylus, the answer lies in just laws: not gods, but democracy. From his vantage point in the mid-fifth century bce, only in a state governed justly can the trail of vengeance be halted. In Tóibín’s novel, this advance towards reason and justice (for men) in the later pages is simply not theatrical enough to keep us riveted to our seats after the operatic opening. Orestes and his sister Elektra now come across as too ordinary to be swept up by it, too like us. To be plausible they need to grow in Argive soil. Once their ancient Greek identity starts to wear thin, so does our engagement with their fate.

For example, on a less dramatic level, while the totally invented episodes where the boy Orestes is kidnapped and then escapes with two other boys to live for some years in an isolated farmhouse are grippingly told, his growing sexual bond with one of these boys, Leander, seems rooted in a sexuality alien to the Greeks, if not to Tóibín. So do the ambisexual night excursions of Clytemnestra’s lover around the sleeping palace. These sorts of homosexual couplings between equals no doubt happened, but not typically, and not in Greek tragedy. Ancient Greeks weren’t gay. If this sort of modern sensibility is inserted into an ancient story, there will be consequences: some things are just not going to make sense. Orestes turns into someone it’s hard to recognise as either Greek, neoclassical, Shakespearean, or, for that matter, truly modern. It’s like Clytemnestra calling a middle-aged man ‘hysterical’ (which she does).

However, the delight in reading a great master of the English language remains. There is no doubt that Colm Tóibín has brought something disturbingly, intoxicatingly to life. Exactly what, though, is not easy to put your finger on. g