Australian Book Review - June-July 2017, no. 392

Salt blood

An essay on freediving and loss by Michael Adams Winner of the Calibre Essay Prize

Travel with ABR

Munich to Berlin: art, music & literature

June 2-15, 2018

From $8,890 pp, plus airfares

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• Major ABR public literary event in Berlin

• Janácek’s From the House of the Dead in Munich, Verdi’s Rigoletto in Dresden, Offenbach’s Bluebeard in Berlin

• Kandinsky and the Blue Rider artists of the early 20th century in Munich

• Dresden’s outstanding museums, including the Green Vault and the Old Masters Picture Gallery

• Weimar, Goethe’s city and Germany’s capital during the Weimar Republic, also home of the Nietzsche Archive

Explore some of the great German cities with like-minded ABR readers and supporters, enjoying outstanding performances of opera and orchestral music, visiting a selection of superb art galleries and exploring Germany’s literary heritage from Goethe to Nietzsche and beyond. The tour – led by ABR’s Editor Peter Rose and seasoned tour leader Christopher Menz – builds on ABR’s successful tours to the USA and the UK in 2016 and 2017.

• Bayreuth, home of Wagner’s Festspielhaus

• Private receptions and lectures by the ABR tour leaders

For more information contact ABR’s official agents Academy Travel on 02 9235 0023, or visit academytravel.com.au

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Calibre essay Prize

The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its eleventh year, has played a major role in the resurgence of the literary essay. This year we received almost 200 essays from fourteen countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose – who judged the Prize with Sheila Fitzpatrick (awardwinning historian and ABR and LRB regular) and Geordie Williamson (Picador Publisher and editor of The Best Australian Essays 2015 and 2016) – rated this year’s Calibre shortlist the finest he has considered.

Michael Adams is the winner of the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize. His essay is entitled ‘Salt Blood’. It starts on page 27. Dr Adams receives $5,000 from ABR. Readers will have an early opportunity to hear Michael Adams talk about, and read from, his essay at the Calibre ceremony, which will take place on Thursday, 1 June at the University of Wollongong, where he teaches.

Michael Adams told Advances: ‘Winning the Calibre Prize is an incredible honour. I have followed Calibre for many years, and drawn much inspiration and insight from previous winners. I hope my essay highlights some hard issues: I take Rebecca Solnit’s position that we write the stories that we can’t tell anyone.’

This year we have added a second prize, worth $2,500. Darius Sepehri, a PhD student at the University of Sydney, is the recipient. His essay, titled

‘To Speak of Sorrow’, will appear in the August issue. He told Advances: ‘Together the Calibre essays constitute a spirited conversation in Australian writing. With other readers, I’ve followed the golden threads of themes running through them: memory, landscape, belonging, kin, loss, and presence. I am delighted to join essayists that have given us playful and provocative reflections, commanding arguments, and defences of the nobility of art and the inner life.’

ABR is grateful to Colin Golvan QC and the ABR Patrons, who make these two prizes possible.

The judges have also commended essays by Sara Dowse (‘Making Things’) and Meng Jin (‘Change, We, Art’). These essays will appear in coming issues of ABR.

FellowshiPs galore

We’re delighted to announce two more ABR Fellowships, each worth $7,500.

Marguerite Johnson is the ABR Gender Fellow. Her project is titled ‘Mapping Gender, Sexuality and the Environment: Picnic at Hanging Rock Fifty Years On.’ This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Joan Lindsay’s novel, which was subsequently filmed by Peter Weir and recently dramatised by Tom Wright. Dr Johnson was chosen by Andrea Goldsmith, Peter Rose, and Ilana Snyder. We are grateful to Emeritus

WRITTEN WORD

Professor Anne Edwards AO for enabling us to offer this Fellowship.

Philip Jones is the 2017 ABR Patrons’ Fellow. Such was the quality of the field for the second ABR RAFT Fellowship – recently awarded to Elisabeth Holdsworth – that we have decided to fund two additional Fellowships, including this one. Philip Jones’s project is titled ‘Beyond Songlines’. He will ‘probe European attempts at defining terms such as “dreaming” and “songlines”’. This Fellowship is funded by ABR’s many Patrons.

straight at the hood

What’s the first feature you read in The New Yorker? (Tweet us, as they automatically say on Radio National.) For Advances, ‘Bar Tab’ notwithstanding, it’s Anthony Lane’s fortnightly film review. Lane, who has been writing for the magazine since 1993, is wise, witty, and often withering. (Remember his line about one forgettability starring Rain Phoenix: ‘Rain, Rain, go away.’) In the April 24 issue Lane reviewed Terence Davies’ new film, A Quiet Passion, with Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. Lane applied Dickinson’s technique in his facing review of F. Gary Gray’s film

The Fate of the Furious. Here’s the first stanza: ‘Because I could not stop for Vin – / He would not stop for me – / But drove his Dodge straight at the hood / Of my – Infiniti –’.

Advances saw A Quiet Passion last

year, during the British Film Festival, just before the ABR US tour, which took us to Amherst, Massachusetts. We thought of Cynthia Nixon’s remarkable performance as we stepped, a little abashedly, into the upstairs bedroom where Dickinson wrote all of those invincible poems.

Apropos of which, Dickinsonians should not be without Cristanne Miller’s fine new edition Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As she preserved them (Belknap Press [Footprint]), $99.99 hb, 855 pp, 9780674737969). This is the first edition of Dickinson’s work to distinguish the 1,000 or so poems that she chose to copy onto folded sheets from the many that survive only on envelopes or scraps of paper.

Anwen Crawford will review A Quiet Passion for ABR Arts. (The film is released here on June 15.)

arts journalism

Much dismay has been expressed at the contraction of resources devoted to arts criticism by Fairfax Media. Overseas, we know, many newspapers

Raging élites

Dear Editor,

Until the May 2017 issue, ABR had managed to keep its anti-Trump animus relatively subdued, but with James McNamara’s review of two satirical books on Trump, the levée has broken and the magazine has fed its tributary into the liberal élite’s torrent of rage and resentment at American voters for electing a bozo and/or fascist.

When, after a flurry of ad hominem anti-Trump jabs, McNamara’s invective finally abates and he gets around to asking how such a cruel buffoon could win, he ticks off all the obligatory, but largely innocent, suspects: the Russians, misogyny, Fake News, James Coney [sic], and the ‘hideous racism, sexism, and xenophobia that has always run through

have dropped arts reviews altogether. Elsewhere, reviews have shrunk to a paltry 100 or 200 words. It’s one reason why ABR has opted to expand its repertoire to include reviews of film, theatre, music, dance, art exhibitions, and more. We now import more of these reviews from the website, where they appear open-access thanks to support from The Ian Potter Foundation. These critiques (with related book reviews) appear in our back pages, from page 57.

ABR Arts is now a core part of this enterprise, and we are actively looking for arts journalists around Australia. Our contributors are all paid properly and closely edited. We also give them due space to mount intelligent arguments, not just breathless précis.

reader survey

Our annual reader survey helps us to monitor people’s enjoyment – or not – of different aspects of the magazine and to identify ways in which we can improve it. Please take five or

Letters

American society’. Absent, however, is any mention of Trump’s major policy theme of the malignity of neo-liberal globalisation. Unmentioned by McNamara are the factory-shuttering effects of ‘free trade’ and the off-shoring of manufacturing industries to lowwage countries; the job-displacement arising from the import of cheap immigrant labour; and the communityeroding effects of open borders.

ten minutes to complete our current survey. Those willing to give us their email addresses will be in the running for some great prizes. Visit our website for more details.

jolley at the ewF ABR is pleased to be taking part in the Emerging Writers’ Festival (14 to 23 June). Two of the 2017 Jolley Prize judges will appear in panels on 20 June. Ellen van Neerven will appear on a panel about editing short fiction, and ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu will discuss short story competitions with 2014 Jolley Prize winner and author Jennifer Down, among others. Visit the Emerging Writers Festival website for more information and ticketing details.

Meanwhile, our three judges (Chris Flynn is the third) are deciding this year’s Jolley Prize (worth a total of $12,500). The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August Fiction issue, and the winner will be revealed at a special ceremony in Sydney later that month.

divisive adjunct of identity politics. Trump’s triumph is neither surprising nor shocking.

The liberal élite (and the socialist left, my left of four decades), however, missed the boat on candidate Trump. As exemplified by McNamara, the progressive self-elect errs by its schoolyard personalising of politics, its retreat from class to the political ghettos of identity, its disdain for the demos (especially its non-coloured bit), and its disrespect for democracy when the plebs’ electoral verdict is at odds with élite values. This may be consoling therapy (‘we are right, the people aren’t’), but all it does is wrap another layer of protective bubblewrap around the élite’s insular world.

Whilst Hillary Clinton dreamt of a global free market of ‘open trade and open borders’, extolled the wonders of multiculturalism, and stigmatised sixty-two million Trump voters as ‘a basket of deplorables, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it’, it was Trump who appealed to a largely white working class which had had a gutful of being screwed over by global capital and its [Letters continue on page 5]

McNamara concludes by hoping that the ‘just fury’ at Trump’s election

June–July 2017

Robin Gerster

Varun Ghosh

Phoebe Weston-Evans

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Anna MacDonald

Kevin Rabalais

Michael Adams

Delys Bird

Melinda Smith et al.

Letters

Phil Shannon, James McNamara

History

Jürgen Tampke: A Perfidious Distortion of History

Miriam Cosic

Marcelino Truong: Such a Lovely Little War

Dilan Gunawardana

Craig Collie: Code Breakers Simon Caterson

Poems

Michael Farrell

Shari Kocher

Fiction

Daniel Findlay: Year of the Orphan Andrew Nette

Eva Hornung: The Last Garden Bernadette Brennan

Stephen Orr: Datsunland Catherine Noske

Felicity Castagna: No More Boats Donata Carrazza

Melanie Joosten: Gravity Well Naama Grey-Smith

Sara Dowse: As the Lonely Fly Tali Lavi

Sally Abbott: Closing Down Piri Eddy

Literary Studies

Lyn McCredden: The Fiction of Tim Winton

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Society & Politics

John Safran: Depends What You Mean By Extremist

Johanna Leggatt

Race Mathews: Of Labour and Liberty John Rickard

Robert Manne: The Mind of the Islamic State

Michael Winkler

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Peter Hill

Alastair Jackson

David McInnis

Anwen Crawford

Andrew Fuhrmann

Christopher Menz

Michael Morley

David Latham

Sophie Knezic

Ben Brooker

Carol Middleton

A broader history of Vietnam

Early panegyrics about the Obama presidency

Letter from Paris

Arundhati Roy’s second novel

Beverley Farmer’s final book

Richard Ford’s memoir of his parents

The 2017 Calibre Essay Prize

Literary witnesses on the wheatbelt States of Poetry – ACT

Natural History

Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffen: Wild Man from Borneo Danielle Clode

Poetry

Bill Manhire: Some Things to Place in a Coffin

Paul Hetherington

Amanda Joy: Snake Like Charms

Michelle Cahill: The Herring Lass

Rose Lucas

Antigone Kefala: Fragments

Diane Fahey: A House by the River

Gig Ryan

Interviews

Publisher of the Month Henry Rosenbloom Critic of the Month Morag Fraser

Memoir

Nevo Zisin: Finding Nevo

Crusader Hillis

Biography

R.J.B. Bosworth: Claretta

Diana Glenn

Economics

Ann Pettifor: The Production of Money

Adrian Walsh

Journal

Julianne Schultz and Patrick Allington (eds): Griffith Review 55 Robert Crocker

Whiteley

Van Gogh and the Seasons

Cav-and-Pag

Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love

Things to Come

Three Little Words

Angela Hewitt

The Political Orchestra

A Pure Drop

Biennials, Triennials and Documenta

1984

Minnie and Liraz

THANKING OUR PARTNERS

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

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

Sydney Ideas

‘is already redefining American politics’ for the better. This is delusional. Until liberal progressives, including ABR, learn to re-engage with the legitimate concerns of the working class through a left-wing economic nationalist policy, a recognition that it is possible to have non-racist objections to immigration, and that ‘diversity’ is not all that it’s cracked up to be, more Trumps will be the future – for the environment-trashing, corporate-taxcutting, military-loving worse.

Phil Shannon, Pasadena, SA

James McNamara replies: I enjoyed Phil Shannon’s caricature of me – most inventive. But his letter mischaracterises my positions.

Shannon argues that by criticising Trump, I join a ‘torrent of rage and resentment’ towards ‘American voters’. That might fit Shannon’s straw man of the braying ‘liberal élite’, but it is not my view. I don’t accept that strong disagreement with a politician necessitates personal animus toward their voters.

Still, according to Shannon, I represent a ‘progressive self-elect’ that shows ‘disdain for the demos’ and ‘disrespect for democracy when the plebs’ electoral verdict is at odds with élite values’. Leaving aside Trump’s loss of the popular vote and his thirty-eight per cent approval rating: respecting democracy after an election means ensuring a smooth transfer of power. It does not mean that pluralist, dissenting views become invalid or disrespectful. The ‘we won, shut up’ argument, in vogue in the United States and post-Brexit Britain, is a pernicious, authoritarian piece of rhetoric. I reject it.

Shannon admonishes me for making ‘ad hominem anti-Trump jabs’ and exemplifying liberals’ ‘schoolyard personalising of politics’. That’s rich, given that Trump has slagged off everyone from Kristen Stewart to the pope. It’s also wrong. An ‘ad hominem’ attack ignores an argument’s substance in favour of irrelevant personal slurs – for example, if I wrote that Trump’s hair looks like a fox discovering a hair-dryer. But to criticise a politi-

cian’s character and temperament is valid because the just exercise of power depends on it. Where this is lacking, political writers should comment.

To substance: Shannon claims that I fail to mention ‘Trump’s major policy theme of the malignity of neoliberal globalisation’. This mischaracterises my brief. I am not writing an analytic feature on the causes of Trump’s win, but reviewing two books of other writers’ campaign journalism. I raise Taibbi’s argument about the ‘laissez-faire capitalist policies that hurt … constituents’. But, given how scathing Taibbi is of the insular ‘élites’, I wonder if Shannon read the book before critiquing a review of it?

I can’t agree with Shannon’s simple explanation for Trump’s win: ‘a largely white working class which had had a gutful’. It was surely a factor, but the electoral data shows Trump’s support defined more by race than income. And I raise an eyebrow (into my hairline) at his claim that ‘the Russians, misogyny, Fake News, James Coney [sic]’, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are ‘largely innocent…suspects’. This was a complex election that commentators and Congress are still investigating.

Finally, Shannon says I’m ‘delusional’ to claim that ‘the ‘just fury’ at Trump’s election ‘is already redefining American politics’. Maybe the view is clearer from South Australia, but in Los Angeles our streets are full of protests. Across the country, we see an historic re-engagement with grassroots political activism: the Women’s and Scientists’ Marches, angry town halls, floods of calls that partly stymied the repeal of Obamacare, and huge swings left in bellwether congressional elections for traditionally Republican seats.

Ultimately, I agree that progressives must re-engage with the working class. But I don’t accept that I must ‘learn’ Shannon’s solution, or that to disagree with Trump counts me out as an ‘élitist’. We should cultivate a political discourse where we can differ vehemently without shoving each other into dismissive little boxes. James McNamara, Los Angeles, USA

ABR Gender Fellowship

Australian Book Review is pleased to announce the recipient of the ABR Gender Fellowship.

Marguerite Johnson

The title of Dr Johnson’s project is ‘Mapping Gender, Sexuality and the Environment: Picnic at Hanging Rock Fifty Years On’. ABR will publish her Fellowship article later in 2017.

Marguerite Johnson is Associate Professor of Ancient History and Classical Languages in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle. The author of four books and countless articles and chapters, she is an interdisciplinary cultural historian and comparative cultural analyst.

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

We thank ABR Patron Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO for her support.

For more details visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au

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June–July 2017, no. 392

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘Damn it, what a fate!’

A fuller history of Vietnam

Robin Gerster

VI ÊT NAM:

A HISTORY FROM EARLIEST TIMES TO THE PRESENT

by Ben Kiernan

‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.’ The American reporter Michael Herr thus concluded his celebrated work Dispatches (1977), confident that his readers understood what he meant, even if most of them had never set foot in the country. The very word possessed an almost incantatory power. In the United States, as in Australia, opposition to the military intervention and its cross-fertilisation with other forms of dissent dominated the historical period. ‘Vietnam’ became an all-consuming cause célèbre as much as an actual geographical entity, ‘a war not a country’, in the revealing phrase used by Herr himself. Indicatively, Dispatches said plenty about the war’s traumatic effect on Americans, but very little about the Vietnamese themselves.

Oxford University Press, $41.95 hb, 637 pp, 9780195160765 .

and landscape a central focus of Viêt Nam by identifying the many ecological and environmental challenges that have confronted the country over thousands of years of human habitation. These challenges are less sensational than the ‘American War’, but just as testing and, in their own way, equally ruinous. Significantly the war attracts fewer than sixty pages in a book of more than six hundred. Admittedly, there is no shortage of other conflicts to discuss. Vietnamese history has been regularly punctuated by revolts and rebellions, sieges and coups, atrocities and massacres, fractures and unifications, vicious internecine struggles, and several waves of conquest and colonisation, of which the American incursion was the most reckless and least enduring.

The vicariousness of ‘Vietnam’ is directly addressed by the Yale-based Australian scholar of Southeast Asia, Ben Kiernan, in the opening chapter of this major new history of the country. The use of diacritics in work’s title, Viêt Nam, signals that Kiernan intends his work to be an act of precision and of reclamation. Multiregional and polyethnic, Vietnam ‘has always been much more than a war’, he writes. A long, slender land of rivers framed by the Red River Delta in the north and that of the Mekong to the south, and bordered by the South China Sea, it is apprehended as a real landscape populated by real, if diverse, people. The place we now call Vietnam is ‘a land shared and contested by many peoples and cultures’ over three millennia, ‘a series of homelands that have become a shared territory’. Just as the country cannot be reduced to a single twentiethcentury war, nor can its history be simply distilled into one national narrative.

Kiernan makes the actualities of Vietnamese life

Wars and conflicts are stock-in-trade for writers of national histories. Where Kiernan excels is in his engagement with the complex cultural and environmental factors that make the country so distinctive. In particular, he highlights the country’s ‘aquatic culture’ from prehistoric times right up to this day, the travails of linked but ethnically disparate agrarian societies mutually beset by catastrophic deluges and flash floods as well as by crippling drought and consequent famine. In the mid-1940s, a million people perished from hunger in Tonkin. Kiernan quotes a poem penned by an eyewitness: ‘At dawn you’d gingerly push your door ajar / To check if there was someone dead outside.’ Then, after huge rains, the Red River dike system breached and the region was flooded, devastating the summer rice crop. This was but one episode in a recurring cycle of ‘natural’ calamity that continues today. Kiernan notes how climate change is presently leading to the salinisation of the Mekong Delta, destroying species of fish and also threatening the rice-growing livelihood of the twenty million people

who inhabit the area.

Kiernan stresses the crucial importance of the elements – water, in particular – to understanding the Vietnamese. ‘Water motifs’, he suggests at one point, possess a ‘cultural power as distinguishing features of the Vietnamese landscape’. He is specifically describing an early thirteen-century folktale, but it is an observation that can be applied to what we know of the Vietnamese people today. After all, as Kiernan notes in a rare but pointed reference to his home country, the Vietnamese were Australia’s ‘first boat people’. In their perilous sea journey southward in the late 1970s, the refugees ‘demonstrated their Vietnameseness’.

Kiernan intends his work to be an act of precision and reclamation

Mobility and migration constitute one of the great themes of Vietnamese history. The postwar Vietnamese diaspora has enriched Australia and numerous other countries as well, from Canada to France. As Kiernan notes: ‘The country’s long experience of regional diversity, polyethnic populations, and a multireligious heritage that ranges from local spirit cults to the influences of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianiam, and Catholicism makes for a vividly pluralistic culture, which in turn overseas Vietnamese are recreating across the globe.’ Through burgeoning trade and tourism and through the flow of its people backward and forward to their adopted countries, Vietnam is helping to shape the contemporary world. ‘Long a crossroads of civilizations’, today the country is on ‘the cutting edge of globalization’. No longer is it a blank map upon which foreign powers (notably China) seek to inscribe their will, though Kiernan draws the sobering conclusion that its regional security is doubtful. Domestically, he adds, Vietnam’s

‘environmental integrity’ and its ‘prospects for democracy’ remain ‘unresolved’.

A further strength of Kiernan’s textured approach to historical accounting is his treatment of the changing status of Vietnamese women. Stopping off in Tonkin in 1688 during one of his circumnavigatory voyages, including to the north-west coast of Australia, the English buccaneer William Dampier commented on the unbridled licentiousness of the local women, ‘who offer themselves of their own accord to any strangers, who will go to their price’. As a result, Dampier wrote, ‘Most of our men had women aboard all the time of our abode here.’

The GIs and the Diggers who fought in Vietnam were rather more honest in admitting the sexual plunder that went hand-in-hand with combat during their tour of duty. Kiernan makes sure that Vietnamese women themselves are heard in his narrative and are not simply defined by men, showcasing (for example) the work of the late eighteenth-century poet Hồ Xuân Hương, known for her iconoclastic barbs at institutionalised Confucian patriarchy. In ‘On Being a Concubine’, she quips: ‘One gal lies under quilts, the other chills. / To share a husband – damn it, what a fate!’ She was speaking from experience, for she was once a concubine herself. While the picture is far from perfect in the Vietnam of today, women now enjoy one of the world’s highest labour force participation rates, high access to education, and low maternal mortality.

Kieran’s readiness to detect and define the significant details lurking in the sweeping historical panorama, make Viêt Nam a major contribution to contemporary Southeast Asian scholarship. He is a fastidious researcher, but unafraid to express an essentially personal viewpoint or response. I note that his Preface was written from ‘the Sailor’s Bar’, a seaside pub in Ireland’s County Kerry. This lends an appropriately nautical touch to a sympathetic study of a tenacious and capable people, whose exodus across the vast ocean from their troubled homeland has ending up contributing so much to contemporary Australia. g

.

Robin Gerster is Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His major publications include Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008), Legless in Ginza (1999), and Hotel Asia (1995).

Mekong River, 2007 (photograph by flydime via Wikimedia Commons)

Brutal peace

Miriam Cosic

A PERFIDIOUS DISTORTION OF HISTORY: THE VERSAILLES PEACE TREATY AND THE SUCCESS OF THE NAZIS by

Jürgen Tampke Scribe

$45 hb, 325 pp, 978192521944

It has been widely accepted that the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles led directly to the rise of National Socialism in Germany and to the horrors of World War II. The punitive effects on the German economy, the affront to German honour, and the unleashing of decadence and nihilism in its wake led to the appeal of extreme nationalism and the call for revenge.

From the end of World War I, powerful voices in the British establishment reinforced this view. Maynard Keynes and Harold Nicolson, junior delegates at the Paris Peace Conference, were among them. Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which he later recanted, was a polemic against the injustice of the settlement. He condemned the ‘web of Jesuit exegesis’ spun by the most ‘hypocritical draughtsmen’, and referred to ‘imbecile greed’. Most famously, he called it a ‘Carthaginian peace’, a reference to the brutal peace Rome exacted from Carthage, including mass executions, sale into slavery, and wholesale destruction of property, at the end of the Punic Wars in the second century bce Keynes hopped into the efforts of Billy Hughes, too, the Australian prime minister whose influence at Versailles is rarely grasped here, and who furiously opposed the Americans and argued forcefully for the interests of the British dominions.

French economist Étienne Mantoux’s World War II monograph, The Carthaginian Peace: Or, the economic consequences of Mr. Keynes (1946), was far less widely read, but contained a step-by-step rebuttal of the supposed effects of the Versailles Treaty. In it, he compared the expected and reported effects on, for example, German industrial output through the 1920s and 1930s and demonstrated

how quickly the country recovered enough to power the terrible revanchism that ensued.

Jürgen Tampke’s compelling new book, A Perfidious Distortion of History, revisits Mantoux’s territory, aided by the later release of documents and late twentieth-century scholarship that endorsed much of the Frenchman’s claims and added even more ammunition. Tampke carefully steps through the articles of the Versailles Treaty, before going on to show how, while they fuelled popular anger in Germany, they remained largely unmet. He canvases territorial and population losses in the postwar settlement, for example, coming to the conclusion, with historian Robert Boyce, that they were a fraction of early claims. What’s more, once adjustments are made for the resettlement of German and nonGerman peoples in the aftermath of the war, the German population loss comes to a fifth of the ten per cent claimed.

Tampke tracks the fortunes of the German armaments industry even more exhaustively, showing how they were able to transfer production to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden, even while the Allies were satisfied that disarmament protocols were being met. Even within Germany, manufacturers managed to evade control, and the evasion seemed well enough known to everyone but the treaty supervisors. ‘Rheinmetall, for example, produced artillery under the guise of railway carriages. Factories that had previously manufactured tanks now fabricated inordinately large tractors,’ Tampke writes.‘The joke was told in Berlin cabarets of the worker who smuggled parts out of his pram factory for his newborn, only to find when he put them together that he had assembled a machine gun.’

Tampke’s book is not just about economics. In it, he traces the postwar political manoeuverings, not only of Germany but also of the Allies, who were more ineffectual than they, or history, believed. Not only did they not see the machinations of the Germans – including engineering the hyperinflation that heavily discounted their reparation payments, which they had already negotiated down from an initial minimal offer of 100 billion goldmarks and the reconstruction of France and Belgium,

to a more modest, and even then unfulfilled, fifty billion goldmarks – but they negotiated with one eye on their own domestic audience.

On the political side, the Allies’ attempt to drag Germany kicking into twentieth-century democracy was undone by powerful conservative forces.The German judiciary and the military, Tampke points out, were hotbeds of the old class system. The judiciary routinely handed out fearful punishments to poor and leftwing defendants, and light or non-existent sentences to right-wing and highclass defendants, including the rash of assassins who eliminated Weimar political figures such as the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. The military, led by aristocrats, smarted from a sense of unearned defeat.‘On the 30 January 1933,’ Tampke writes, ‘the reactionary German political establishment brought Hitler into power. This was not the fault of the Versailles Peace Treaty.’

Tampke’s point of view is not a new one. Margaret MacMillan’s gripping book Paris 1919 (2002), makes a similar argument; Tampke acknowledges her influence, and that of others, on his work. Since then, more material has come to light,with continuing work on the archives of the former Warsaw Pact countries and a shift in biases and pieties as the two world wars recede into history.

Though born in Brandenburg himself, Tampke came to Australia as a young man. He completed his PhD in history at the Australian National University, before becoming an associate professor at the University of New South Wales, so this is a rare examination of the period from an Australian perspective.

A Perfidious Distortion of History, like its title, is polemical and blunt. Tampke doesn’t shy away from calling descriptions and interpretations ‘untrue’ and ‘unconvincing’, which is a breath of fresh air in the often excruciatingly diplomatic world of scholarship. He is also an engaging writer who manages to unravel and enliven the most detailed exploration of facts and figures. Caveat emptor, however. Tampke is a seductive advocate for his point of view, but not everyone will agree with it. g

Miriam Cosic is a journalist and critic.

Rose-coloured glasses

Early panegyrics about the Obama presidency

Varun Ghosh

AUDACITY: HOW BARACK OBAMA DEFIED HIS CRITICS AND CREATED A LEGACY THAT WILL PREVAIL by Jonathan Chait

Custom House, $32.99 pb, 262 pp, 9780062674425

WE ARE THE CHANGE WE SEEK: THE SPEECHES OF BARACK OBAMA edited by E.J. Dionne Jr and Joy-Ann Reid

Bloomsbury, $29.99 hb, 365 pp, 978163286946

What is Barack Obama’s legacy? That deceptively simple question forms the subject of Jonathan Chait’s new book, Audacity. Across seven disparate chapters, the book ‘makes the case that Obama succeeded’ – that he ‘accomplished nearly everything he set out to do, and he set out to do an enormous amount’.

Alhough Audacity ‘is not a history of the Obama administration’, the book makes an implicit claim about the way history will treat Barack Obama. Given time and proper analysis, Chait argues: ‘The Obama presidency will be seen as a careful, patient application of the powers of office that paid off in ways that were not often evident on the surface – a long game with audacious goals, and a bold willingness to endure short-term costs in order to achieve them.’

Two problems with this approach emerge immediately. First, Chait has selected a poor test by which to judge the Obama presidency. Even a cursory review of Barack Obama’s campaign speeches (here, E.J. Dionne Jr and JoyAnn Reid’s We Are the Change We Seek provides an excellent reference point) reveals that Barack Obama, objectively, did not accomplish ‘nearly everything’ he set out to do. Yet, it was precisely because Obama set such ambitious goals that even partial success may mark him out as a great president. Second, published just over a month after Obama left office, the book’s claims about how history will treat Obama are necessarily speculative.

Audacity’s opening chapter – entitled ‘America’s Primal Sin’ – begins with the issue of race during Obama era. Chait meanders through descriptions of growing racially loaded rhetoric, hypersensitivity to both racism and accusations of racism in the political realm, and the backlash to Obama’s own tentative forays into the subject while in office. Untethered from the main argument of the book and largely inconclusive, it is unclear what purpose this chapter serves.

Despite this faltering start, Audacity finds its footing by the second chapter, which deals with the Obama administration’s response to the global financial crisis. The new administration’s immediate priority became stabilising financial institutions and limiting the damage to a structurally weak US economy. President Obama and the Democrats in Congress intervened, passing a stimulus bill worth US$787 billion. Further interventions to save the American automotive industry and improve financial sector regulation followed. Though derided as inadequate by liberals and as ‘economic fascism’ by conservatives, Chait persuasively marshals evidence to demonstrate that Obama’s economic policies worked and probably prevented a second Great Depression. Yet, as The New Yorker’s editorial observed, ‘harm averted is benefit unseen’, and the administration received scant credit for its efforts.

When Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

into law on 23 March 2010, he fulfilled a central campaign promise and achieved a goal that had eluded Democratic presidents since Harry Truman. As Chait ably recounts, the passage of the law was not easy. Along the way, the public insurance and single payer options preferred by the Democratic left were jettisoned. Ted Kennedy, a champion of universal healthcare, died and the special election for his seat cost the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. All the while, public opposition to Obamacare grew, stoked by Republican fearmongering. As the political cost mounted, key presidential personnel and members of Congress advised the president to abandon the bill. According to Chait, it was Obama’s ‘decision to push forward … that most clearly displayed the role played by his personal qualities in his presidency’s historic success’.

Yet throughout the Obama administration, significant policy successes were often accompanied by poor or ineffective communication. Obama, speaking to Charlie Rose in 2012, said ‘the mistake of my first term … was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right’ An irony, Chait observes, given Obama’s vaunted eloquence.

Chait’s attempt to demonstrate Obama’s ‘success’ on climate change and in foreign policy is far less convincing. Accepting the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, candidate Barack Obama declared, in mighty cadence, this would be ‘the moment when the

WINTER NIGHT ESCAPES

PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE

Opera in the Concert Hall

Charles Dutoit – a supreme interpreter of French music – conducts an opera-in-concert performance of Debussy’s spellbinding opera

Pelléas et Mélisande. You won’t be able to resist this heartbreaking tragedy or the gorgeously sensual atmosphere of Debussy’s music.

DEBUSSY

Pelléas et Mélisande

Sung in French with English surtitles

APT MASTER SERIES FRI 23 JUN 7PM SAT 24 JUN 7PM WED 28 JUN 7PM

MARTHA ARGERICH PLAYS BEETHOVEN Colours of Spain

Martha Argerich, “a genuine living legend of the classical music world” (SMH Feb 2017), will make her Australian debut playing Beethoven in the Sydney Opera House. A truly once in a lifetime experience.

STRAVINSKY Funeral Song Australian Premiere

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No.1

FALLA The Three-Cornered Hat: Suites

RAVEL La Valse

Charles Dutoit conductor

Martha Argerich piano (pictured)

rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal’. However, the administration’s progress – funding clean energy projects and requiring higher emissions standards of vehicles and power plants through executive action – was more incremental and easy to reverse.

Targeted killing programs undermined Obama’s credibility and moral standing at home and abroad

In discussing foreign policy, even the normally effusive Chait concedes that ‘Obama’s foreign policy was not transformative’ and its ‘non-Bushness overshadowed any positive characteristics’. Obama ended US troop deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, but in circumstances that gave no cause for celebration. An unenforced ‘red line’ in Syria, the failure to close the infamous US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the administration’s extensive surveillance and targeted killing programs all undermined Obama’s credibility and moral standing at home and abroad.

Other disappointments of the Obama years are largely ignored. Despite a spate of mass shootings – including the monstrous slaughter of children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012 –meaningful gun control was never implemented. On immigration, a comprehensive reform bill passed the Senate in May 2013 but was not even considered in the House. These must rank as failures during Obama’s term, even if much of the blame lies with the Republican Party.

Audacity is sometimes as concerned with Obama’s critics as with policy outcomes. Chait is clinical in cataloguing examples of policy reversals, intellectual dishonesty, and hypocrisy in the Republican opposition to Obama’s agenda. He also digresses into extended critiques of liberal disappointment in Obama –as if this disappointment, as much as Republican opposition, impeded the president’s progress. This analysis too often remains superficial. There is very

little engagement with the substantive ideological opposition to Obama’s agenda from the left or the right.

Audacity similarly avoids reckoning with the political failures of the Obama administration. If the Republican strategy of total opposition was cynical, it was also remarkably effective. As Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard observed in late 2016: ‘While Obama’s standing with the country has held more or less firm, he has overseen a down-ballot rout during his tenure.’ After eight years of Obama’s presidency, Republicans are now the country’s dominant party, holding thirty-three governorships and controlling both legislative houses in thirty-two states. In the 2016 federal election, Republicans retained majorities in the House and Senate and won the presidency. Chait’s final chapter –Obama’s America – seems particularly oblivious to this reality, arguing that electoral trends have ‘ominous portents’ for the Republican Party.

Audacity sets out to provide a robust defence of Obama’s performance and achievements in office. Yet, by overselling the case and ignoring or dismissing valid criticisms, Chait weakens the credibility of his conclusions. Typographical errors, a confusing structure, and formulaic chapter set up further undermine the book’s persuasiveness. Audacity is an amiable and sympathetic primer on the Obama administration. It may also serve as a liberal palliative in the age of Trump. Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be more.

When I first picked up We Are the Change We Seek: The speeches of Barack Obama, my thoughts went to the future of such collections. Video, audio, and transcripts of presidential speeches are now all freely available on the internet. Why read speeches when you can watch and listen to them? While it is a handsome volume and might make an excellent gift, We Are the Change We Seek, is perhaps more decorative than useful. Yet, reading We Are the Change We Seek from start to finish was a surprisingly rewarding exercise. The rhetorical and literary gifts of the president are evident from first to last. In the introduction, the editors

quote Adlai Stevenson speaking in Los Angeles in 1960: ‘Do you remember, Stevenson said, that in classical times when Cicero finished speaking, the people said, “How well he spoke,” but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, “Let us march.”’

In spite of his unfailing ability to draw crowds, Obama seems more akin to Cicero than Demosthenes. Obama’s speeches read like well-written essays, weaving together narrative and argument in a balanced way while eschewing oversimplification or cliché. Ironically, these may not be attributes in a modern political environment. Although Obama is a gifted wordsmith, his speeches lack certain notable qualities of presidents past: the iconic phrases of Franklin Roosevelt: the ideological certainty of Ronald Reagan; the downhome charm of Bill Clinton. (There are certainly none of the nativist or jingoistic catchphrases of Donald Trump.)

Other insights emerge. Obama’s speeches clearly transition from more strident and partisan rhetoric to the language of national unity as Obama positioned himself to become a national political figure. The same speeches also reveal a naïveté about the depth of ideological, geographic, and cultural division in the United States, and about the persistence of his optimism.

Together, the speeches selected in We Are the Change We Seek lay out a vision of an open, pluralistic, just, and confident America. It is a vision that seems distant today. ‘But,’ as Obama might say, ‘in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.’ g

Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based lawyer.

SLetter from Paris by

Phoebe Weston-Evans

pringtime allows Parisians to indulge their predilection for life en terrasse. Trees and gardens are blooming, neighbourhood markets and squares are coming alive, and the newly pedestrianised right bank of the Seine is busy with walkers and cyclists.

A rollerblading poet stopped to cadge some tobacco from a friend of mine as we were sitting outside a bar on rue de Belleville one afternoon. He asked us, ‘Vous allez voter pour qui, vous?’ – ‘Well, who are you voting for then?’ He proceeded to entertain us for fifteen minutes, often in rhyme, with a half-lucid, half-mad soliloquy about France’s political chaos. Later I met Sandrine, a neighbour on rue Ramponeau. Motorists were leaning on their horns as she slowly guided her dog to the pavement. Together we carried the arthritic creature (called Dog) back to Sandrine’s apartment. An anonymous soul relieved me of my wallet somewhere between the airport and Belleville. Other impressions from my first week back: the sheer filth and grime, the street kids, the contrast between the fifth and twentieth arrondissements, the tenderness, the harshness, the indifference.

Returning to the capital where I lived for two years during my undergraduate studies has brought a sense of fond familiarity and an awareness of some disheartening changes. Poverty and homelessness seem more acute, or at least more visible, exacerbated by the Syrian crisis and the arrival of so many refugees. One consequence is the feeling of powerlessness and apathy that seems to develop in tandem. A Parisian friend asked me what good her pity would do anyone.

While Paris is teeming, as always, with cultural, commercial, and touristic activity, the past few weeks have been almost entirely focused on the elections and the country’s political future. The general elections were the first to be held since the Charlie Hebdo attack on 7 January 2015 and the massacres at the Stade de France, the Bataclan, and other sites later that year. Although Paris seems to have regained its equilibrium, the country is still under the state of emergency that was declared in 2015. After the massacre in Nice and the recent assassination on the Champs Elysées, this is unlikely to be lifted soon. Heavily armed military guards are commonplace. Airport-style security and body scans remain standard procedure in museums, galleries, and universities.

All of this made up the backdrop and general atmosphere in the lead-up to the elections of 23 April and 7 May, a period which felt like a pivotal moment in French history. As well as providing a stage for a series of highprofile scandals, the campaign has been an opportunity for deep reflection about national identity and France’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world.

Emmanuel Macron’s decisive victory was a huge relief for many. Symbolically and practically, the election of Macron represents a vindication of democracy over populism, continuity over rupture, and a predominantly European, rather than nationalist, outlook. Unlike his his opponent, Marine Le Pen, Macron is someone who can be taken seriously at an international level. Although his new party, ‘En Marche!’, has yet to prove itself, it promises measured change rather than the chaos and

turmoil that would have followed victory by Le Pen’s National Front (FN). Macron’s win staunches a tide of populist and nationalist victories by Trump and Brexit, and close shaves in Austria and the Netherlands.

Yet there are many people who, though hostile to Le Pen, feel unrepresented by Macron and his ilk. Macron comes from the world of big banks, business, and freemarket capitalism. There were large numbers of what became known as ‘Ni-ni’ (‘Neither nor’) voters, for whom Macron and Le Pen were completely anathema. Twentyfive per cent of voters abstained, the highest level since 1969. Many others voted informally, or ‘blanc’.

In the tumultuous lead-up to the first round of elections, the far left indulged its short-lived fantasy of radical and systemic political overhaul represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, ‘La France insoumise’, despite the fact that Macron and Le Pen had led in the polls for months; there was no real surprise on the day, but rather a mixture of relief and repugnance. After the first round, Macron’s victory was never seriously in doubt.

tance of the Élysée Palace. Yet, unlike 2002, there were no mass protests across the country. Apart from a few small demonstrations, this second far-right threat did not see the Republic up in arms.

What has changed? In 2002, Chirac won with eightytwo per cent of the vote; Macron’s share was sixty-six per cent. This can be attributed to the banalisation of the FN and the steady rise of belligerent, populist rhetoric in mainstream political discourse. Marine Le Pen put much effort into cleaning up her party’s image and distancing herself from her odious father. There is a widespread appetite for a fundamental change in the political order, an almost hedonistic desire for anarchy – anything but a continuation of a system dominated by traditional political figures, personified by Macron. There was a dismissive and ironic attitude in the air. In a conversation about the possibility of a Le Pen win, someone said, ‘France will get what she deserves.’

There are many people who, though hostile to Le Pen, feel unrepresented by Macron and his ilk

Not that the National Front and other far-right parties – whether openly racist, xenophobic, royalist, or anti-Semitic – can be dismissed offhand. Following Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first-round victory in 2002 against Jacques Chirac, this is the second time in modern times that the far right has come within striking dis-

Having grown up in the United Kingdom and lived in Australia for many years, it was a tonic to hear politics being discussed so openly and seriously in bars and restaurants and on the streets. One friend, who voted for Phillipe Poutou on the radical left in the first round and ‘blanc’ in the second, sardonically observed that the best thing about populism is that the debate becomes popular; Monsieur Tout-le-monde feels included in the conversation. Others remind me that in

Headlines the day before the second round of the 2017 French presidential election (photograph by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons)

France passionate debate is the norm.

Notwithstanding, many Parisians agree that these have been the most romanesque – novelistic and dramatic –elections they have experienced. It started with ‘Penelopegate’, the fake jobs and exorbitant suits scandals that destroyed François Fillon’s campaign. Then Emmanuel Macron breezed in from nowhere with his ‘shockingly’ older wife, followed by the publicity stunts at the Whirlpool factory as both second-round candidates scrambled to seduce condemned workers. On top of that were accusations that Le Pen had plagiarised Fillon’s speech. The FN’s interim leader, Jean-François Jalkh, was forced to step down after reports surfaced of a 2000 interview in which he questioned the use of Zyklon B in the gas chambers.

It is abundantly clear that not everyone who voted for ‘En Marche!’ supports Macron; many of them backed him to defeat Le Pen. The French had voted to say ‘No’ to the far right. France remains deeply divided along more lines than one. One traditional gulf lies be-

tween the big cities and la province. Many provinciaux, much more so than in the capital, regard Europe as the problem. Le Pen’s simplistic rhetoric, lauding patriotism and ‘intelligent protectionism’, is both seductive and naïve.

Despite the disaffection of the ‘ni-ni’s and the forty-four per cent that voted for Le Pen, there is a new sense of optimism. Macron brings an internationalist outlook rather than a Trump-like surrender to jingoism and isolationism. Will his presidency reunite a fragmented France? There are formidable obstacles ahead, but the present mood in the capital reminds me of the emblem of Paris, a ship with wind in its sails, and the motto: fluctuat nec mergitur g

Phoebe Weston-Evans is a translator and doctoral student currently living in Paris. She is researching the works of French novelist Patrick Modiano, one of whose novels, Paris Nocturne, she has translated for Text Publishing. ❖

Liked In Prison

Walking the streets, reading his books in the cafés and bars, this was his overriding question: would he be liked in prison?

He was not particularly bad, or good, or graceful, or skeptical. He reckoned he belonged to the median when it came to the smokers of Lwów: but would he be liked in prison?

Later, he’d go home and write poems barely thinking of the ever-more-likely knock at the door. ‘Writing poems is like body surfing’ he’d say. ‘Do you know this expression? Body surfing? I picked it up by the Baltic Sea. You have to ride the wave’

In the bar, this was even later, drinking –what? Vodka, because it’s transparent? Guinness because its transparency is ironic? The expression, ‘He (or she) can be seen through Guinness’ is one he never knew, would never hear, even in prison

Michael Farrell’s most recent book of poetry is Cocky’s Joy (2015).

You can star in prison and fail in California, but who cares? Failing in California was a fantastic dream, like a bee drowning in Guinness, to hyperbolise. Because the bee would drag themselves out of the pool of whatever alcohol in whatever bar, or kitchen, they were in and buzz home while the buzzing was good

A bee fails in a hive, a sparrow cries in its tree, a poet’s dragged off in the night whether his jailers like him might be good, might be bad. What impression he’ll make on the other inmates is what keeps him awake, how he’ll be or seem

The effect of his voice, harsh or gentle

Michael Farrell

YEAR OF THE ORPHAN

by Daniel Findlay Bantam

$32.99 pb, 282 pp, 9780143782070

Daniel Findlay’s début novel, Year of the Orphan, contains all the elements apparently necessary for a successful contemporary dystopian novel. It is also a complex, challenging read, which creates a believable and alarming post-apocalyptic future in the Australian outback five hundred years in the future.

The key character and main narrator is a young female in peril (so favoured in recent dystopian fiction) known as ‘the Orphan’. Sold into slavery at an early age, she has grown up in a barbaric desert settlement known as ‘the System’. She survives by scavenging in the rapidly disappearing remains of the old world – destroyed by some nameless apocalyptic occurrence – in the process confronting numerous predators, human and animal, creatures that may be ghosts, and a wandering stranger called the Reckoner.

The System could contain the seeds of a new civilisation, but its inhabitants are dying from an unknown disease. The Orphan is given a mission from her dying master to go deep into the underground remains of the old world, known as ‘the Glows’ to find out what is making people sick. Complicating matters considerably, a simmering conflict between two of the System’s alpha males threatens to tear the settlement apart.

Year of the Orphan is written entirely in the blunt pidgin English of its future inhabitants. This allows Findlay to achieve some wonderful effects and turns of phrase, but it leaves the reader with a sparse, bare-bones narrative that is often disorienting, occasionally confusing, and leaves much unexplained. Still, it is a bleak, strangely affecting story, shot through with a sense of impermanence and loss, and made more poignant by the inability of the characters to articulate the exact nature of the absence they are grieving.

Andrew Nette

Exuberance and excess

Arundhati Roy’s second novel

Kerryn Goldsworthy

THE MINISTRY OF UTMOST HAPPINESS

by Arundhati Roy

AHamish

Hamilton,

$32.99 pb, 443 pp, 9780241303986

rundhati Roy’s first and only other novel was The God of Small Things (1997). It attracted an advance of half a million pounds; publishing rights were sold in twenty-one countries; and it won the 1997 Booker Prize, as it was then called. Since then it has sold six million copies and has been translated into forty languages. In the interval, Roy has been prolific in her non-fiction and fearless in her political activism.

When The God of Small Things was first published, not everyone joined in the cheering. One of the Booker judges, Jason Cowley, published an oddly defensive piece late in 1997 entitled ‘Why We Chose Arundhati’, claiming that 1997 was ‘a year of levelling mediocrity … not a good year for the British, or indeed the Commonwealth novel’, which is one small step away from saying it was the best of a bad lot. Critic Peter Kemp was annoyed even by its appearance on the shortlist and was dour about its ‘over-writing’, calling it ‘magic realism as recycled candyfloss’ (which makes one wonder exactly what he thinks magic realism is), and legendary publisher and former Booker judge Carmen Callil went one step further again: ‘vulgar and execrable’, she said.

I mention these facts in so much detail because The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , twenty years on, will more than likely

attract the same kinds of criticism from the same kinds of readers: an irritated rejection of its multivalent exuberance and excess. No adequate summary of plot and characters can be given in the space of a review, not least because there are three or four major characters and hundreds of minor but significant ones, and there are many jumps in time and space, as characters muse and remember, back-stories are told, and the narrator goes off on wild tangents to do with recent Indian politics and history. Given the complexity of these, all but the most well-informed non-Indian reader will be left floundering, and occasionally gasping, in Roy’s wake as she provides

Arundhati Roy (photograph by Mayank Austen Soofi)

brief satirical sketches of politicians, describes riots and massacres in the wake of terrible events, provides awful illustrations of the way the caste system works, and dwells in detail on the history, geography, politics, and people of the Kashmir region – now administered by three different countries – and its relation to India proper.

But most of all this book is about the dissolution of boundaries: between caste and caste, between colour and colour, between gender and gender. Two of the main characters, Anjum and Tilo, embody this idea. The mother of Anjum (born Aftab) gets a nasty shock on close inspection of her newborn: ‘That was when she discovered, nestling under his

This book is about the dissolution of boundaries: between caste and caste, between colour and colour, between gender and gender

boy-parts, a small, unformed, but undoubtedly girl-part.’ Years later, a doctor judges that Aftab ‘was not, medically speaking, a Hijra – a female trapped in a male body … Aftab, he said, was a rare example of a Hermaphrodite’. And the unacceptably dark-skinned Tilo is the illegitimate product of a scandalous small-town love affair between a man from an ‘untouchable’ caste and a woman from a Syrian Christian family, bundled off at birth to an orphanage and later reclaimed by her birth mother.

Anjum and Tilo, like so many of the other characters in this book, are fringedwellers: people who have slipped the moorings of the caste system and the biological family through accidents of birth. Tilo’s prospective family-in-law is horrified by this dark bride, ‘without a past, without a caste’. And the adult Anjum, living as a Hijra and contemplating pairs of legendary lovers, says ‘I’m Romi and Juli, I’m Laila and Majnu … I’m a gathering. Of everybody and nobody, of everything and nothing.’

Both of these characters live vulnerable and eventful adult lives, often fraught with danger in the various

plots and conspiracies and eruptions of violence around them. Roy has a gift for stepping back from her brightly coloured, hyperreal narratives to deliver brief and devastating truth-bombs about the nature of her country; another of the main characters, recalling the massacre of thousands of Sikhs in the riots after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, talks about his own failure to be shocked by it: ‘It was as though the Apparition whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced, snarling, from the deep, and had behaved exactly as we expected it to. Once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it.’

India is by no means the only country to be subjected in this novel to relentless observations; there are some brief, sharp critiques of the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, and even, in a well-informed wisecrack that made me laugh out loud, Australia: ‘Instead, their homes … were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch they were called, the ’dozers.)’ This gift for the vivid image is often enlivened by little whip-flicks in the diction: ‘Naga’s mother was at the centre of a clot of elegant ladies whose perfume I could smell from across the lawn.’

Roy writes the sort of fiction to which critical reaction will always be divided by personal taste more than anything else. She is a political activist, and her colourful, scented, noisy, sweet-natured, micro-detailed stories of human (and, indeed, animal) lives are vertiginously juxtaposed with attacks, both satirical and straight, on Indian politicians and customs and on the shameless, giant crimes against humanity and nature being committed by multinational companies in India and elsewhere. Some readers simply dislike either one or both of those things in fiction. But others will be seduced by the sheer vitality of this novel, the writing powered by an intoxicating combination of intellectual and sensual energy. g

Kerryn Goldsworthy is a former Editor of Australian Book Review

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Australian Book Review is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2017 ABR Patrons’ Fellowship.

Philip Jones

The title of Philip Jones’s project is ‘Beyond Songlines’. ABR will publish the essay in its September 2017 issue.

‘Beyond Songlines’ will probe European attempts at defining Aboriginal cosmology and religious belief. How did English terms such as ‘dreaming’ and ‘songlines’ come to be applied? Have these catch-all terms obscured more than they reveal?

Philip Jones is an historian and museum ethnographer based at the South Australian Museum.

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

We thank the ABR Patrons for their support.

For more details visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au

‘Bonds of silence’

Anna MacDonald

THIS WATER: FIVE TALES

by Beverley Farmer Giramondo

$26.95 pb, 275 pp, 9781925336313

There is a distinct poignancy attached to last things, a sense in which they encapsulate all that has gone before at the same time as they anticipate an end. In the moment of their first manifestation, last things are already haunted by their own absence. This Water: Five tales is the first book by Beverley Farmer to be published since 2005, and has been announced as her last work.

This Water inhabits the haunted –and haunting – regions between presence and absence, life and death, day and night, this world and its mirrored otherworld, the life of the body and the life of the mind. Rich in elemental metaphor, and literary and mythic echoes that will be familiar to readers of Farmer’s work, the book evolves via silken threads of association that link its five tales, weaving an intricate web at the heart of which lie ‘bonds of silence, absence and solitude’.

‘Ring of Gold’ is classic Farmer. It relates the solitary life of a woman who lives by The Rip, walks its tidal zone, and remembers her mother, her lost child, the books that are ‘too small to live in’ but that somehow make a world in the mind. Like all the tales in this book, ‘Ring of Gold’ borrows from myth, in

this case the folktale of the Great Silkie, embodied in the figure of a bull seal who beaches himself and, before returning to the water, gives a silent roar, ‘a mute, a mutual scream of horrified recognition’. Here, Farmer introduces many of the images that are repeated throughout the book, and which gain power and meaning with each iteration: golden wedding bands, red silk, spider webs, pomegranates, ‘God’s curse on Eve’, metamorphosis, the underworld, and the elements of water, fire, stone, and ice.

The second tale, ‘This Water’, is both the story of a princess who refuses her suitor and runs away with another and a meditation upon the mythical powers of water. For Farmer’s princess, water, like love, can only become known through experience: ‘How was I to know what love was, until I had it before my eyes? How was I to know its nature? As with milk, salt, honey, water, we only know what something is like once we touch it, or smell or taste or swallow it, or are swallowed by it.’

In each of the tales, Farmer expresses a wonder about the nature of things that can only be satisfied by sensual interaction with the world. Like Eve, whose curiosity leads her to eat the forbidden fruit, Farmer’s protagonists must touch, smell, taste, swallow the world in order to know it. So immersed in these sensual experiences do they become, they are at risk of being swallowed themselves.

Swimming is one form of immersion, and it is while swimming that the children in the third tale, ‘The Blood Red of her Silks’, come to grief. This is Farmer’s retelling of the legend of the Children of Lir, in which a jealous stepmother transforms her stepdaughter and her three young brothers into swans. Cast out, they live as birds for nine hundred years until ‘freed’ by a king who would capture and present them to his new bride as a wedding gift. Instead, once caught, their ‘swanskins slough away … to leave four flayed bags of bone standing, toothless jaws agape’. Freedom, such as it is, has come too late. But these swans have an afterlife. ‘This water has a long memory’, and they are ‘still there in the glass of the surface, imprinted, breaking up as you burst through,

being made whole again as the surface falls still around you, never within reach or far away’.

The underwater world is never far distant in the tales that make up This Water. In ‘Tongue of Blood’, Clytemnestra, now a shade, laments the murder by

Last things are already haunted by their own absence

Agamemnon of their first-born daughter. Farmer conjures an underworld composed of all the associations that have gone before and presaging those to come:

There is room underground for seams of ice and fire. We shades have a labyrinth, nubbled and veined, their domes and udders and columns of stone, statues of stone, and dust, and grit hissing in a dark breath, water floors, water bodies, this underworld, this great shell, this cast of every snake the tales tell of.

This underworld labyrinth – turned to ice – takes shape in the book’s final tale, ‘The Ice Bride’, a retelling of the Bluebeard fairy tale. In it we discover the ring of gold ‘clamped’ on the bride’s finger and later reflected on the hands of those other brides, now captive in ‘a core of fathomless ice’. Like the princess of Lake Annaghmakerrig, the Ice Bride is curious and seeks to learn the world through her senses. Thus, This Water, which began with God’s curse on Eve, ends with the bride forced to eat from the pomegranate, its blood red juice staining her white silk gown.

The Ice Bride, like Clytemnestra, like the swans, like so many of Farmer’s characters, is ‘caught as in a web between our two worlds of life and death’, between first and last. Farmer’s prose is virtuosic, she is a stylist unlike any other living Australian writer, and it is difficult to read this last work without a haunting sense of loss. g

Anna MacDonald is a Research Associate at Monash University and bookseller at Melbourne’s Paperback Bookshop.

Susan Sontag

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Holy Trinity Church, Kazbegi, Georgia ‘Journey to the Caucasus’ Itinerary

Speaking silence

Bernadette Brennan

THE LAST GARDEN

by Eva Hornung

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 237 pp, 9781925498127

The epigraph to the first chapter of Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden speaks of Nebelung, a time of great prosperity, joy, and hope for new life. Over the page, Hornung shatters any sense of well-being with an extraordinary opening sentence: ‘On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.’ The prose just keeps getting better as Hornung counterpoints the consciousness of a man driven to murder and suicide with the heartbreaking innocence of his unknowing adolescent son, Benedict.

Two storylines are in conversation throughout this impressive novel. One follows Benedict, who withdraws from human contact and speech, seeking refuge among the horses and chickens on his father’s farm. Hornung takes us deep inside Benedict’s mind and heart. In a narrative that has much to say about the inadequacy of words, she uses them powerfully to convey the boy’s tortured grief, confusion, and despair. The second storyline concerns the goings on in Wahrheit, a small religious community to which Benedict and his family once belonged. Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the Messiah, is now under the spiritual guidance of Pastor Helfgott. He is a good man who cares deeply for his flock, but he lacks the authority and charisma of his late father. Pastor

Helfgott continues to preach from his father’s The Book of Seasons, but the ‘passionate certainty of those loved words’ begins to falter; the threads that once held this community together are unravelling.

Some readers may find the epigraphs to each curiously named chapter – Hartung, Hornung, Lenzing, etc, – disconcerting. Written in an elevated register with smatterings of German and exhortations to worship, they offer advice on husbandry, appropriate labour, and domestic order. Eventually, we discover that they are excerpts from The Book of Seasons and that they chart the twelve months of Benedict’s journey of grief and healing. As I puzzled over and sometimes struggled with these epigraphs, they became increasingly compelling. I came to view them as a bell tolling, a bell that marked the passage of time while simultaneously straining to call the failing believers back to a fragile, unsustainable centre.

Hornung gives no clear indication of the time and place in which her narrative is set, though she tells us that ‘blacks’ and ‘drovers’ roam the land. At a crucial moment in Benedict’s self-destructive spiral, he approaches a campfire and is taken in by a group of Aborigines. His instinctive response is to assert ownership of the land, but wordlessly he surrenders himself to their care. They save his life and through them he discovers a new, sustaining means of being on and seeing the land. The Adnyamathanha language identifies these characters as being of the Flinders Ranges. No translation of their dialogue is offered. Nor is it needed. Like the many other forms of language operating in this novel, meaning is generated through sensation, heard emotion, and context.

For nearly two decades Hornung has been learning from, and working with, some of the few remaining Adnyamathanha speakers. Her recent Griffith Review essay (‘Wadu Matyidi: A long time gone’, with Buck McKenzie) gives a brief overview of the ‘potent, inspiring works of literature’ – books, film scripts, and songs – that have been created collaboratively by Uncle Buck McKenzie, Hornung, and students from the Inhaadi Adnyamathanha

Ngawarla class she began with Gillian Bovoro. In using Adnyamathanha Ngawarla in The Last Garden, Hornung celebrates, and contributes to the preservation of, this ancient language. As she explains in her essay: ‘Adnyamathanha Ngawarla is something to be treasured here and now before it is too late.’

Readers of Hornung’s earlier fiction (mostly written under the name of Sallis) will recognise familiar themes and motifs in this latest novel. As in Hiam (1998), the witness to a traumatic death is propelled inexorably through an actual and psychic landscape of grief and must find a way to process the horror of their loss. Resonant with Fire Fire (2004), there is a community removed from the outside world. Like Acantia and Pa’s children before him, Benedict is irrevocably wounded by his parent’s actions. As a necessary step in his recovery, and assertion of his autonomy, he incinerates the family home. In the brilliant Dog Boy (2009), Hornung captured a young boy’s experience of being taken in and raised by a pack of dogs. Here again she probes the profound, sensual, healing connection between the human and animal worlds.

There is a satisfying depth to this novel. Within the two central storylines there are layers and layers of stories and questions to do with exile, expulsion from gardens of innocence to experience, faith, language, fathers, sons, and the burdens of expectation. There is darkness, evil, and destruction, but there is also much beauty, goodness, and, ultimately, hope. Benedict’s pain and perception, Pastor Helfgott’s integrity and doubt, and the birth, death, and companionship of horses are all superbly conveyed in exquisite prose: ‘He had heard the sadness walled inside the pastor’s wife, the helplessness and affection aching away in the pastor. In this current, this voice beneath all voices, he heard everything.’ The Last Garden is by no means a long read but it is a big novel. Hornung’s characters, in all their flawed complexity, will stay with you long after the covers of this powerful book are closed. g

Bernadette Brennan is the author of A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text Publishing, 2017).

Sacred and profane

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

THE FICTION OF TIM WINTON: EARTHED AND SACRED

by Lyn McCredden

Sydney University Press $30 pb, 165 pp, 9781743325032

Tim Winton is embarrassing to Australian literary critics. It is not that it is impossible to form adequate literary judgements about the nature of his work. It is simply that any judgements one might form seem so totally irrelevant. Winton’s work makes plain a certain disconnect between the interests and imperatives of Australian literary criticism and those of the reading public who buy each of his titles in their hundreds of thousands.

Lyn McCredden has bravely decided to broach this impasse in The Fiction of Tim Winton. The book is published by Sydney University Press, which is slowly filling the role once played by UQP in publishing literary studies of Australian authors. McCredden’s book on Winton joins Robert Dixon’s excellent study of Alex Miller, Nicholas Birns’s astute assessment of contemporary Australian literature, and Brigitta Olubas’s edited collection of essays on Shirley Hazzard, all from Sydney.

In terms of book-length studies of Winton, McCredden’s monograph sits alongside Salhia Ben-Messahel’s Mind the Country: Tim Winton’s fiction (2006) and Tim Winton: Critical essays (2014), co-edited by McCredden and Nathanael O’Reilly, both published by UWA Publishing. Ben-Messahel’s book was a little underwhelming, an earnest thematic study that tended to give an account of Winton’s fiction that scarcely ruffled the picture one gets simply from reading the novels themselves. The 2014 edited collection had a bit more to chew on, with fine essays in particular those by Fiona Morrison, Tanya Dalziell, and Nicholas Birns.

So what does McCredden do with Winton in her study? The first clue is

in the subtitle, Earthed and Sacred . McCredden draws on her long critical interest in ‘the sacred’ to situate Winton’s writing. This tends to be a polarising element in Winton’s fiction. Some are moved by the epiphanic or transcendental moments that descend like clockwork at the end of his novels to rescue the lost and broken from a world of empty cynicism and the clutches of their foundational traumas. Others find these moments mawkish blights that can never quite be forgiven. For McCredden, Winton is primarily a religious writer. She writes of the ‘theology of Winton’s fiction’, and sensing a raised eyebrow or two in the crowd, pushes ahead insistently: ‘for this is what [Winton’s fiction] is, a moral and ethical theology’. This is a slightly unusual usage of theology, but I take it to mean that Winton’s fiction offers either an exploration of human conduct in the face of divine imperatives, or, slightly more scandalously, an ethical assessment of the nature of divinity.

Both of these theses do seem operative in Winton’s work, and McCredden deserves credit for forcing them into the centre of its critical evaluation. Winton himself has never made any secret of his Christian faith and has tended to play a fairly straight bat to questions that are addressed to this aspect of his life.

McCredden, for her part, finds that Winton’s faith fundamentally offends certain secular norms in Australian society and that he is often cast in the position of defending the fact that he believes in God. She is probably not too far off the mark when she remarks that the ‘terminology of the sacred, and participation in it, are off-putting to many Australians’. With an air of defiance she declares that ‘this book will argue that to ignore the potency of the sacred as a category in Winton’s fiction … would be seriously to under-read his work’.

I take McCredden’s point, and perhaps this is another element of the embarrassment that Winton provokes in some quarters. But it begs the question: if Australians are so put off by explicit moments of divine experience, why is Winton so popular in Australia? Perhaps the issue is less about Australians

and their supposed faith-aversion, and more to do with a certain cul-de-sac that occurs when a critic tasked with considering culture rationally comes face to face with divine revelation in a text.

The difficulty that McCredden faces in this study is how not to fall into the trap that Ben-Messahel fell into in her book on Winton, which is to give back the concerns of the novels in exactly the terms in which they were offered. If we accept that Winton’s concern with the sacred is loud and proud, why do we need a critic to draw our attention to it?

McCredden’s way out of this dilemma is to introduce a meta-language, a critical apparatus assembled in (post)modern theology which contains bits and pieces of Heidegger, Kristeva, Derrida, and Judith Butler, with nods to David Tacey, Kevin Hart, Charles Taylor, and Michael Taussig.

By and large, this method does add something new and distinct not only to the study of Tim Winton, but also to that of Australian literature. McCredden’s engagement with Winton reminded me a little of my old teacher and colleague Veronica Brady’s tarrying with the novels of Patrick White in the 1970s. McCredden shares something of Brady’s inveterate eclecticism as well as her disinclination to being deterred by something as petty as taste. And like Brady, McCredden seems to hold that the literature of her author isn’t just accidentally sacred, as if it had not quite been paying attention and stepped in a puddle. The intrusion of the divine into Winton’s work is not something we should cravenly mumble through before we get on with the serious work of understanding his (clearly questionable) politics. For McCredden, the sacred in Winton’s fiction is something that deserves to be attended to and grappled with, and her book offers an example of how to do this. g

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is a senior lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and the author of Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (2017) and Paper Nation: The story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, 1886–1888 (2001).

Act of love

Kevin Rabalais

BETWEEN THEM: REMEMBERING MY PARENTS

by Richard Ford Bloomsbury

$18.99 hb, 179 pp, 9781408884690

‘Our parents intimately link us, closeted as we are in our lives, to a thing we’re not, forging a joined separateness and a useful mystery, so that even together with them we are also alone,’ writes Richard Ford early in ‘My Mother, In Memory’, the first of the two memoirs that comprise Between Them, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s bewitching first book-length work of non-fiction.

Born fifteen years into his parents’ marriage, Ford was both a late and an only child. This instilled in him what he deems the ‘luxury’ of being able to ponder what came before, namely, as he writes, ‘the parents’ long life you had no part in’. In these recollections of Edna and Parker Ford’s lives as a couple and as parents, Ford consigns to the page a lifetime of such speculation. Over the years, he writes, ‘I’ve written down memories, disguised salient events into novels, told stories again and again to keep them within my reach.’ Now, Ford writes of his parents’ lives as a seasoned and master storyteller. Here we find a different side of the acclaimed novelist, one who delves into the mysteries of his family’s past.

Author of a dozen works of fiction, including Rock Springs (1987), Wildlife (1990) and Canada (2012), Ford has forged his remarkable career by imagining the inner lives of characters whose fates turn on quiet moments. Readers of this work may think, first and foremost, of Frank Bascombe, narrator of the critically acclaimed quartet that commences with The Sportswriter (1986) and includes Independence Day (1995), the first novel to receive both the PEN/ Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ford begins his latest with a remembrance of his father, Parker, a travelling salesman for the Faultless

Starch Company. Parker’s route consisted of cities and towns in the Deep South. One of the feats of this slim and moving book is Ford’s vivid imagining of the life his parents shared before his birth. Another is the way he captures the rhythms of that ‘far-off and unknowable place’ they inhabited, namely the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In that era, Parker sold a single product, starch, sometimes with Edna and Richard waiting for him in the parked company car. Before his arrival, however, Ford’s parents drove those southern roads alone, with Edna sitting next to Parker on the front seat. He portrays their nomadic lives in hotel rooms and the love that sustained them long after his advent (‘a mixed blessing’, he writes), which kept Edna longing each week for Parker’s return to Jackson, Mississippi, where the family eventually settled and young Richard grew up across the street from the great Southern writer Eudora Welty.

‘To write a memoir and to consider the importance of another human being is to try to credit what might otherwise go unremarked – partly by acknowledging that mysteries lie within us all, and by identifying within those mysteries, virtues,’ Ford writes. ‘Once more, it’s not so different from what we find when we read a story by Chekhov, nor is it probably very different from the problem any son faces when thinking about and estimating his parents. The truest life, of course, is always the life that’s lived.’ Ford renders these two memoirs in tender yet unsentimental prose. He doesn’t omit details of failings or fights. Of Parker, he writes, ‘He was in most ways not a dexterous or skillful man, but in the art of being loved he possessed a talent – which surely is a virtue worth noting, one that confers benefits superior to most.’

Until now, Ford has proven most adept in Chekhov’s art of compression in his short novel Wildlife and the three novellas collected in Women with Men (1997) He fills the slim Between Them with memorable moments, the kind which at once invite readers into the world he experienced as a child in the mid-century American South and also to examine their own lives and the memories that shape us and tell us who

we have become. Early in the section about his mother, Ford remembers a time when he was ‘nine or seven or five’ and a neighbor asked ‘who I was’.

[W]hen I said my name – Richard Ford – she said, ‘Oh, yes. Your mother’s that cute little black-haired woman up the street.’ These were words that immediately affected me, and strongly, since they proposed my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered and not just as my mother.

Parker Ford, failing in health as he set out each week for business on the road, died at home in his teenaged son’s arms. Edna lived on for several

Ford writes of his parents’ lives as a seasoned and master storyteller

decades. Her story, written thirty years before the memoir about his father, closes the book. ‘The act of considering my mother’s life is an act of love,’ Ford writes. ‘In myself I see her, hear her laugh in mine. In her life there was no brilliance, no celebrity. No heroics. no one, crowning achievement to swell the heart.’

In Between Them, Ford finds the dignity and grace in all that goes unnoticed and to which literature holds to the light and gives permanence. It is a deep, rich imagining of the emotional world of Edna and Parker Ford, a hymn to memory and love and the dramas that erupt across what appear, on the surface, to be the most quiet of lives. g

Kevin Rabalais’s most recent book is Conversations with James Salter (2015).

Pot-pourri

Johanna Leggatt

DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY EXTREMIST: GOING ROGUE WITH AUSTRALIAN DEPLORABLES

by John Safran

Hamish Hamilton

$34.99 pb, 287 pp, 9781926428772

David Marr’s Quarterly Essay, The White Queen: One Nation and the politics of race (2017) is a comprehensive and scholarly look at Pauline Hanson’s appeal, and what her revival, tepid as it may be in an international context, says about the way race has been exploited in the bread and circuses of politics. John Safran is equally interested in race, and says he has been following the far right out of the corner of his eye since high school, but his approach to examining racial politics is very different. While Marr’s is one of observation and disquisition through the impeccably researched essay, Safran’s is one of immersion, a Gonzo approach to decoding extremist elements by throwing himself into the heartland of the fringe groups. Safran is a character in his own work, and in Depends What You Mean By Extremist he becomes close, dangerously so at times, to his star radicals. His subjects don’t exactly trust him, but he is tolerated and some clearly see him as a meal ticket to wider recognition; this gives him unparalleled access. The book opens in mid-2015 at the height of the United Patriots Front (UPF) anti-Islam protests in Melbourne and takes the

reader up to the 2016 federal election, and Hanson’s surprise resurgence. A tacked-on final chapter on Trump’s US election win is subtitled ‘Plot Twist II’.

The far right, Safran discovers, is a motley bunch of crusaders and malcontents: Christian evangelicals, national socialists, and white blokes from the burbs. Safran spends time with a farright preacher, Daniel Nalliah, from the Catch the Fire Ministries, who is also a Sri Lankan immigrant. Nalliah supports migrants, he says, as long as they assimilate and he preaches this message to his largely African, Asian, and Indian supporters. Safran is astounded by the ethnic diversity of the far-right movement, and notes wryly that left-leaning arts organisations in Melbourne would kill for such a pot-pourri of ethnicity. The bald contradictions, the gap between the banners, and the outer-suburban lives, shock and delight Safran. He meets the chairman of the anti-immigration Party for Freedom, Nicholas Folkes, and his Asian immigrant wife, and is surprised to discover that one of his interviewees, a far-right patriot called Ralph Cerminara, is the son of an Italian father and an Aboriginal mother. Cerminara’s wife, for the record, is a Vietnamese immigrant. Safran can’t believe his luck.

There is a quixotic absurdity to many of Safran’s characters, which he conveys to great comic effect. Safran spends time with preacher Musa Cerantonio before he is charged over an alleged plot to take a boat to Indonesia and join the Daesh terrorist group. When Safran visits Cerantonio at his home he is a somewhat diminished figure: he lives with his mother, is obsessed with the Monty Python movies, and delights his family by making prank calls. Cerantonio considers his mother’s surfeit of owl figurines to be graven images, but he picks his battles at home.

Safran notes that successful far-right groups must cloak their hard edges in a vanilla version of patriotism. Extremist activists usually struggle to swell their ranks beyond a small coterie of keyboard warriors, but Safran argues that the UPF was able to draw one thousand-plus people to some of their rallies because they put forward leaders who resembled tough-as-nails larrikins, not the socially

maladroit hermits one may associate with internet trolling and hate crimes. It is the odd paradox of attracting large numbers to a niche cause: wider support depends on not appearing too unhinged because ‘Australia doesn’t do radical’.

Safran feels no more solidarity with the extreme left, whose arguments about structural and non-structural violence confound him. The anarchists explain that there is a difference between the structural violence of the far right (the bad kind that is corporate and systemic) and the non-structural violence of the far left. Safran is unconvinced.

Predictably, Safran’s Jewish identity, and the way it brushes up against the activists’ worldview, plays a large role in the book. He is called a Jewish parasite at one of his first rallies, and he is understandably concerned by the potential for neo-Nazis to attach themselves to nativist movements. The UPF leader, Blair Cottrell, says he is not a neo-Nazi, while maintaining that every classroom should display a picture of Adolf Hitler and every child should receive a copy of Mein Kampf. Safran receives an abusive Facebook message warning him that he will feel the wrath of God. He is reading Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The untold story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising (2011) about the 1943 ghetto resistance, and he begins to carry a knife in his pocket. He, too, fears he is being radicalised.

Context and narrative exposition is the Achilles heel of this otherwise assured study. The reader learns of the fringe characters only as Safran messages and tweets them, and there is no sense of him pulling back to reflect, collate, and ruminate; no introductory discourse to set the scene. He moves between farright rallies, anarchists meetings, and chats with rabbis, and we feel the loss of perspective keenly. On the other hand, investigating a movement’s underbelly and trailing his subjects is Safran’s patented style. The credibility of the book, its cultural heft, depends on how much the reader trusts Safran’s ability to draw an accurate rendering from his subjective account and, indeed, how much one enjoys his idiosyncratic company. g

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. ❖

Salt Blood

by Michael Adams

‘There are no words that fit tragedy. Nothing we can say. We do not want to be told everything is all right. It is not.’

Patrick Holland, ‘Silent Plains’ (2014)

‘Its constituents are – everything.’

Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (1866)

It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created. I am ten metres underwater on a breath-hold dive, suspended at the point of neutral buoyancy where the weight of the water above cancels my body’s natural flotation. I turn head down, straighten my body, kick gently, and begin to fall with the unimpeded gravitational pull to the heart of the Earth.

Freediving, or breath-hold diving, forms at once a commonplace and unique relationship between humans and oceans. Commonplace because we can do it from the moment we are born (having already floated in amniotic fluid for nine months), and because many native and local cultures in coastal areas around the world have long practised breath-hold diving. But also unique because ‘extreme sport’ competitive divers are now exceeding depths of two hundred metres on a single breath, and there are divers able to hold their breath underwater for more than eleven minutes. Freediving is both liminal and transgressive, taking place in a zone where few humans venture, and subverting norms about perceived natural

boundaries. The practice of freediving mobilises what has been called the most powerful autonomic reflex known in the human body: the mammalian dive response.

While I have been a casual spearfisher for many years, I have only recently engaged with freediving in its contemporary expression. My first time freediving, I trained with divers from a centre in Bali. A small group of us spent the mornings alternating between dive theory and yoga practice, and the afternoons diving and talking. My instructors were Matt and Patrick, and my diving partner was Yvonne, young, German-born, with degrees in journalism and American Studies, and working locally as a scuba instructor. She had clearly spent a lot of time in the ocean, whereas for me it was never a profession or even an intense hobby.

On the north-east coast of Bali, Jemeluk Bay is wide and peaceful, sheltered from prevailing weather patterns, and lined with small fishing villages. The volcano Gunung Agung, the most sacred mountain in Bali, rises above the bay. The bathymetric chart highlights the continuity of the volcano’s slope deep into the ocean, depth falling away quickly from shore. We dive amongst the moored fishing boats, using a system of buoys and weights to establish guide lines into the depths. In the water, with one hand loosely on the line to keep myself oriented, I ‘breathe-up’, building the oxygen stores in my body. Visibility is about ten metres, then light disappears into milky blue darkness as I turn and dive. The white guide rope drifts past my mask until I reach the depth plate and pause, consciously relaxing my body, emptying my mind. I watch this world, bubbles float slowly upwards,

jellyfish drift past, the sun is a diffuse white ball on the surface. It is distinctly different – thicker, darker, slower, heavier, more silent, and here I do not breathe.

As I fin back up, there is a burst of flickering light as a shoal of tiny blue fish hurtle through sunbeams at the surface. Head above water, there are distant sounds of the ubiquitous Balinese cocks, faint sounds from motor scooters. Diving again, my hearing transitions from airborne sound to waterborne sound. There is an intense crackle of snapping shrimp, fading as I go deeper. Faint sounds of women singing and the thrum of an outboard motor indicate a fishing boat passing nearby. After a few dives I start to close my eyes, removing the usual visual dominance to instead just listen and feel.

Two key aspects in freediving are equalisation, adjusting the pressure inside your ears to compensate for the increased pressure outside the eardrum that the water exerts with increasing depth; and responding to the ‘urge to breathe’, your body telling you insistently that you should breathe again, very soon, followed by involuntary spasms of your diaphragm, trying to make you breathe. Yvonne and I were both good at dealing with the urge to breathe, but we were not successfully equalising, and repeatedly had to turn back at ten metres, unable to eliminate the pain in our ears. I found this incredibly frustrating, and my diving ability declined as I became more tired and tense. Equalising is psychological as well as physical – taking down the walls of protection is difficult.

good for us – to gracefully align ourselves to our environment. Physical grace is coupled with spiritual grace –it regenerates and sanctifies, and gives strength to endure trials. When you stop breathing, it’s good to stop thinking too.

Uncontrolled fear when deep underwater will spike adrenalin, trigger the flight or fight responses, and potentially kill you. You can’t fight and you can’t flee, you have to accept and relinquish all control, you have to trust: the crushing pressure of multiple atmospheres cocoons you in an embrace.

It is distinctly different – thicker, darker, slower, heavier, more silent, and here I do not breathe

In practice, freediving is just holding your breath and diving underwater. It is as old as humans, and humans have long understood various aspects of how it is possible, but the knowledge is uneven. Bajau divers from the Philippines and Malaysia routinely suffer hearing loss through burst eardrums, and Greek sponge divers in the past often had significant hearing loss as well as symptoms of decompression illness. The womenonly diving communities of Ama in Japan and Haenyno in Korea appear to dive deep long into old age with no ill effects, and have done so for thousands of years. Western spearfishers tend to know about equalising, but not so much about oxygen and carbon dioxide processes in the body.

After the second day, I am completely spaced out, floating, serene. I sleep lightly through the tropical nights, dreaming of the dives, the patterns of light, the flicker of fish, the still blue. And I don’t really understand it: why does the mortal uncertainty of deep immersion feel nurturing, reassuring? When you are deep underwater on a breath-hold dive, the margin of safety can be very small, there is very little space between living and not: you are, both metaphorically and actually, quite close to death. I am old enough now that death is not an abstract proposition, I go to more funerals, and my near-adult children remind me of the place of death in my own childhood.

What presents itself to navigate this mortal, radical, uncertainty is grace. Physical grace means ease or suppleness of movement or bearing. It is a by-product of good freediving: the equalising of pressure across your eardrums and between your lungs and the crushing ocean weight, the streamlining of the external position and shape of your body. It is achieved by aligning yourself to the enveloping, immersive environment, the context and emotion of the place and time. Grace is important. We intuitively respond positively to seeing it in others (dancers, gymnasts, athletes) because it is

Contemporary research interprets the physiology of freediving through the concept of the ‘mammalian diving response’. This is a combination of three independent reflexes that counter the normal bodily regulation of breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, and it is described as the strongest unconscious reflex in the body. The diving response occurs in all mammals, and possibly in all vertebrates – it has been observed in every air-breathing vertebrate ever tested. It is obvious and prominent in human infants. Up to about six months an infant immersed in water will open her eyes, hold her breath, slow her heartbeat, and begin to swim breaststroke.

It is currently assumed that there are three triggers for the diving response: facial immersion, rising carbon dioxide levels, and increasing pressure at depth. These triggers result in reduced heart rate, redistribution of blood from bodily extremities to central organs, and contraction of the spleen. All these reflexes increase access to oxygen, either by reducing the rate it is consumed, or by changing its availability in the body. Learning to understand and recruit these processes enables freedivers to routinely reach depths of twenty to fifty metres, and to set records at depths of one hundred to two hundred metres.

From the land or the air, the ocean surface is opaque, mobile, vast, and dark. The World Ocean is animate, active, unstable, ungrounded, unfathomed. It covers seventy per cent of the planet’s surface and encompasses

ninety-nine per cent of its inhabitable area. It is largely unknown. Ocean processes control the weather and continental climates. It defines the Blue Planet.

Once immersed, beneath that surface, the suck and swell of the tides feel like the planet breathing. We are surprised, sometimes anxious and then increasingly comfortable with the complexities of temperature and movement in the ocean. There are layers of warm and cold water; strong but invisible currents that can help or hinder us; be struggled against or relaxed into, rocking the body into peace. Our bodies begin to align with those rhythms: the cycle of the moon and the ebb and flow of tides, the fetch of the wind across the bay.

Mirroring our time in the tiny sea of the amniotic sac, freediving is the most profound engagement between humans and oceans: the unmediated body immersed and uncontrolled in saltwater. It is simultaneously planetary and intensely intimate – the ocean is both all around us and within us. That breadth of scale can be terrifying or reassuring. It is not about discovery, it is about recovery: we can freedive expertly from the minute we are born, but slowly forget. Our cultural preoccupation with growth and exploration washes away our embodied knowledge. Aboriginal people in Australia speak of how, if the Country is there, the knowledge is always there, and remind us to draw on the whole of the evidentiary base: the world, physical sensations, dreams, emotions – not just the ‘bedrock’ of Western reason. Sea Country keeps its knowledge too, waiting for us to find it again.

Ten metres, thirty feet, the point of neutral buoyancy, is five fathoms in the old marine depth measure, as in Ariel’s song:

Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

Fathom comes from the ancient word fæthm meaning an arm span, ‘something that embraces’. It also means ‘to understand’ – to get to the bottom of something. I didn’t start freediving to understand mortality, but that is the direction in which it has led me. Diving is the window that, for Simone Weil, ‘makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment’. Herman Melville puts the same thought into the whaleboat, ‘it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life’.

Although he died when I was fourteen, I saw my father’s death certificate for the first time this year. Single word entries sketched the story: at age forty-five he was living in a caravan in north

Queensland, working menial jobs. He sat down alone one evening on a beach with a handful of pills and a bottle of scotch to kill himself. He asphyxiated on his vomit and was found days later. Four brief entries on a faded government form, with a tsunami of hurt and loss behind them, and a flood of confusion and misunderstanding to come. I knew the basics of that story, but was not prepared for the shock of the typed words: ‘labourer’, ‘caravan park’, ‘suffocation’.

Reading a stranger’s words on my father’s death certificate reminds me how little I know about him. Because of some medical training before dropping out of university, he had good knowledge of pharmaceuticals. This helped him to find work with large pharmaceutical companies and gave him access to prescription drugs from the warehouse. I remember as a boy scavenging through boxes in those warehouses and using surgical tape to construct murderous crossbows with back-toback scalpel blades as arrowheads. We moved around a lot as he and my mother held a number of jobs. My mother left when I was eleven, and I last saw my father when I was thirteen. My brother and I had lived in ten houses in five towns by the time I finished school.

My relationship with my own son through his midteens was fraught. My teenage years had been marked by binge drinking, drugs, and other risk-taking, but I rationalised that I was responding to a dysfunctional childhood, whereas he had two loving and supportive parents present, material security, and we lived in a beautiful place. I felt I had no road map and was just making it up as I went along. I had a stepfather in my own teens who took me into police cells and stood me in front of mangled cars with blood pooled beneath them to show me where I was going to wind up. I now wonder whether suggesting to my son that we go to a freedive school was pushing against, or mirroring, the patterns of my own past.

I have spearfished with him since he was less than ten years old, but in relatively shallow waters. One of the first times, as he stood next to me on the rocks above rolling swells, I asked him if he was ready, to which he said, ‘If being totally terrified is ready, then yes I am’ –and we stepped off into the sea. He is a long way past that now and far outstrips me in his ability and comfort in the water. During our first session in Bali, I watch his grace and skill as he fins down the line and disappears into blue depth past the limit of visibility. Then a long wait until he reappears, relaxed and unhurried. He interned at the freedive school, and has now repeatedly dived thirty and forty metres. On his first attempt at that depth, he paused at the depth marker and looked back to the surface. Freedive teachers tell you to not look up or down, to keep your spine straight, and five atmospheres of pressure ruptured blood vessels in his extended trachea so by the time he was back at the surface he was coughing blood.

Divers like to underplay these injuries, so it is called

a ‘throat squeeze’. You can also have an eye or mask squeeze or lung squeeze. The medical literature defines these as barotraumas, pressure-induced injuries; they can be very common in freediving. You can also ‘samba’ at the surface (a loss of motor control so your body does a little involuntary dance) and finally ‘SWB’, shallow water blackout: both of these are a result of hypoxia or oxygen deficiency in the brain. It is increasingly assumed that shallow water blackout is the explanation for many diving deaths generally attributed to drowning. Shallow water blackout is achieved by either consciously enduring the contractions of your diaphragm (caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels) that are trying to force you to breathe; or artificially lowering those carbon dioxide levels with particular breathing practices, so you don’t get the contractions.

After my first freedive trip, I went back to riding a big motorbike and started yoga. The freediving, yoga, and motorbike are related practices. Yoga is not intrinsically dangerous, but yoga philosophy says ‘when you hold your breath you hold your soul’. Breathing out, expiration, is a little reflection of that last gasp of death; to expire means both to breathe out and also to die. The physical movements and breathing practices of yoga take me to a place of emptiness and peace: when the breath is still, the mind is still. The BMW demands presence: it is really not good to daydream on a motorbike. I ride nearly every day, in all weather, and statistically that will likely eventually lead to an incident. But when that happens, adrenalin and reflexes come to the rescue. Diving and yoga remove adrenalin and bring quiet and stillness; the motorbike and diving bring presence in danger.

One winter I dived off South Bruny Island, Tasmania. Bruny was home to Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini. During my school years we were told Truganini was the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people’, effectively erasing the lives of the many descendants of Aboriginal people and various settler–colonist communities. I harvested from the ancestral waters of Truganini’s Neunone people: cold, deep water, rich and beautiful: abalone, oysters, mussels, edible seaweeds, wild spinach. The abalone industry is worth $100 million a year but excludes many Aboriginal people because of the exorbitant cost of licences, despite a 40,000-year history of sustainable harvest demonstrated by numerous shell middens. Current active divers are arguing that the stock is on the verge of collapse after only four decades of over-intensive harvest.

Walking the tidal edge on Bruny, I kept thinking about Joseph Conrad’s words at the end of Heart of Darkness (1899): ‘the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness’. Tasmania is not so far from the uttermost ends of the earth, and it has a dark history, palpable in the landscape. The idea of ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ is not new, with writers Richard Flanagan,

Rohan Wilson, and others exploring the psyche of the Van Diemonians. Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011) is perhaps the most successful book I have read in presenting how Aboriginal people, in all their diversity, were totally compromised by the violent colonial process: there were no right decisions to be made, especially in Tasmania: all decisions had terrible consequences. (After leaving Bruny I discover, astonishingly, that the rusting hulk of the Otago, the only ship that Joseph Conrad commanded, lies near the shore of the Derwent River in Hobart.)

My first attempt diving at Bruny was short. It was morning, mid-winter, calm, and I had just seen a trio of dolphins cruising slowly along the shore of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. I slipped into deep water from a boat jetty and was immediately shocked by the intense cold, less than ten degrees by my dive watch. I submerged and finned west across the channel towards Satellite Island, but with visibility only two to three metres, an instant cold headache and paranoia about hypothermia, I opted out.

The second try was at Cloudy Bay, also very cold but I dived for forty-five minutes. Visibility was still limited, and big swells rolling unimpeded from Antarctica meant I could not get near to the underwater bull kelp forests, which seem to like high-energy coasts. Black cockatoos and a pair of sea eagles watched while I dressed, shaking with cold, on the rain-soaked beach.

Before Tasmania, I dived at Honaunau Bay on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Like Jemeluk Bay, this coast is dominated by the volcano Mauna Kea – to Native Hawaiians the most sacred mountain in Hawai‘i, and the tallest mountain in the world if measured from the sea floor. The first day I am just testing my gear. This is my first time diving since I scuba-dived with students on a field course. I have heard someone compare scuba diving to driving though a forest in a four wheel drive with the windows up and the air conditioning on – and that was definitely my experience – I kept wanting to stop breathing to cut out all that noise, all those bubbles, to reject the cyborg and hybrid paraphernalia. Diving at Honaunau Bay was the opposite – serenely quiet except for the crackle of shrimp and the slap of waves.

I am diving with Daniel, an instructor from southern California who has relocated to the Big Island. Daniel is very experienced and very, very relaxed in the water. Again like Jemeluk, Honaunau Bay is unique in having great depth close to shore: the bathymetric chart here shows that within a hundred metres of shore you can be in a hundred metres depth of water. I have never been in water that deep; on the first day I have trouble relaxing with all that blue falling away below my fins. Being relaxed is really important in free diving – I wind up with continuous cramps in both legs.

On my third day diving we are joined by Shell, a quietly-spoken instructor and international competitor. A month after we dived together, Shell became the US

Australian Book Review and the judges congratulate the winner of the

2017 Calibre Essay Prize

Michael Adams

Dr Adams’s essay ‘Salt Blood’ appears in this issue. He receives $5,000.

‘Winning the Calibre Prize is an incredible honour, and a total surprise. I have followed ABR and Calibre for many years, and drawn much inspiration and insight from previous winners. I hope my essay highlights some hard issues: I take Rebecca Solnit’s position that we write the stories that we can’t tell anyone.’ Michael Adams

This year ABR has added a second prize, worth $2,500. The winner is Darius Sepehri, a researcher and PhD student at the University of Sydney. His essay – entitled ‘To Speak of Sorrow’, which will appear in the August issue –is about the many kinds of grief and their different expressions in writing and culture, as lament, testimony, or ritual.

The judges – Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Rose, and Geordie Williamson –have commended two other essays, which will appear in coming issues:

‘Change, We, Art’ by Meng Jin (USA/UK)

‘Making Things’ by Sara Dowse’ (Australia)

We gratefully acknowledge the support of ABR Patron and Chair Mr Colin Golvan QC.

www.australianbookreview.com.au

women’s champion in the pool discipline of ‘dynamic no-fins’, swimming 125 metres underwater without breathing in less than three minutes. Diving with Daniel and Shell was calm but rigorous, with detailed safety processes and checks. Shell was quietly experimenting with a nose clip and no mask, and Daniel was safety diver for us both as we alternated dives.

A year later, I dive in a very different way at Honaunau Bay, this time with legendary diver Carlos Eyles. All my diving so far had been within the established structures of modern freediving, with guide ropes, floats, marker plates, and lots of focus on metres of depth, minutes of breath-hold, Boyle’s law, and the physics and physiology of pressure. Of all the people I have dived with, two gave me stark lessons about my own attachment to this linear thinking. Rayanna, a young Brazilian woman I dived with in Indonesia, and an excellent freediver, never used a dive watch, did not measure her depth or breath-hold, and helped me throw away the numbers. In Hawai‘i, Carlos, who is seventy-five, did not talk about technique at all: we sat at the edge of the water and talked about philosophy for an hour before our dives together, then he taught experientially – I copied his movements. He called it ‘catching the rock’, demonstrating the analogy that we cannot teach through linear thinking or communication how to catch a thrown object, our brains can’t compute the distances and movements and decisions, we learn it bodily. We dived for an hour or so, then swam together for about a mile, out to the northern point of Honaunau Bay and back. Next day I went back and repeated it all, but this time alone, breaking the cardinal rule of modern freediving.

The core and obvious lesson for me from Carlos was ‘the ocean is not a linear system’. Non-linear systems are typically described as counter-intuitive, unpredictable, or chaotic. We can think of the ocean like this, as vast, turbulent, shifting, untamed, unknowable – the dark abyss. Floating above one hundred metres of blue depth, that abyss felt very real. As Carlos says, soon sharks will start circling in your pre-frontal lobes: they are just out of sight, but you are sure they are there. Carlos talked about this fear, and how you had to throw away these acculturated imaginings, these death anxieties, and focus on your body’s ancient knowledge. When the fear is there, those monsters of the deep, you lose grace. Finding grace opens you to transformation. Feeling the ocean all the way through your body, seeing it in every direction you can look, experiencing sound and silence and light transformed by the depth and thickness of water – these embodied experiences unground our linear, rational, bounded structures of thought. We can let go of the anchor of imagined and irrational fears, and swim free with humility and attention. Swimming and diving alone on a quiet hot morning in Honaunau Bay, feeling strong and comfortable in my body, I am slowly unmoored, slowly floating away from risk assessments and calculations and into the warm embrace of the peaceful bay.

This ocean, these waters, are full of life and agency. Most of life lives in the sea – fifty to eighty per cent of all species live there. Their agency is palpable – their intention, attention, awareness, and presence in the rock, coral, sand, and saltwater. So while I was alone, I was also not alone, I was surrounded by innumerable other beings, all going on with their lives and deaths in the sea about me.

In the tidal wave of current discussions about extinctions, biodiversity loss, and planetary crisis, a less visible current of knowledge pulls at our attention. Everywhere, there is both abundance and loss, thriving and declining. What we term weeds, or feral species, or invasive species, or common and abundant species, are plants and animals thriving in place, and it happens everywhere. In all the world’s oceans, while many apex predators are depleted, populations of cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish, and octopus) are increasing, despite continuous and heavy fishing. Cephalopods are particularly interesting, with complex intelligences described by Peter Godfrey-Smith in 2016 as ‘an independent experiment in the evolution of a large nervous system, the only such experiment outside the vertebrates’. In my local seas, octopus and giant cuttlefish are quite common, often curiously investigating us as we examine them. My local rocky shores are also home to the only cephalopod that can kill a human, the tiny and potently venomous blue-ringed octopus. Hundreds of human families play in that habitat daily with no fatal encounters; we peacefully share the space. Because we have forgotten this truth, that we can share, that we are all connected, planet and landscape and seascape and human and innumerable other species, we have lost perspective on change, and these become liminal experiences: looking into the large, thinking eyes of octopuses and giant cuttlefish; sinking into depth, eyesclosed, past the buoyancy zone; embodying the visceral sense of release and lightness of diving on empty lungs.

I didn’t start freediving to understand mortality, but that is where it has led me

buoyancy of the human body, to free-falling with gravity as increasing water pressure overcomes that buoyancy. And it is liminal between life and death – at great depth, you have to be exquisitely attuned to the totality of your body if you want to keep on living. You have to understand the symptoms of oxygen depletion in the particular way that it is expressed in your own body, and confidently know how much time you have to continue swimming deeper, as well as make the return journey to the surface before you black out. I keep in my journal a graph illustrating this relationship, with red and blue lines showing trajectories of living and dying. Freedivers I spoke with indicated there can be a wide range of physiological indications of oxygen depletion, and they had learnt quite specific cues to which they would respond. Despite this, many experienced freedivers assured me that death is seldom in their thoughts. The safety framing in recreational freedive training and diving is usually rigorous and very careful, with a number of key rules described as ‘safety through redundancy’, designed to keep divers well within the limits of what is safe for them individually. This is reinforced by the buddy system, so you never dive alone. Spearfishers, routinely self-taught, tend to be less particular in their approach, with hyperventilation often a common practice, and many spearfishers diving alone. Lifelong surfer and diver Tim Winton embodies this, with many lyrical passages in his writing reflecting the casual acceptance of these risks.

Liminality is a threshold state, the border between one condition and another. It is not either of them, it is ambiguous and disorienting. In many cultures, there are three stages in the liminal transition: a metaphorical death, a test, and rebirth. The liminality of freediving has multiple dimensions. It connects us to ancient stories in many cultures of mermen and mermaids: beings between human and water creature. Western cultures know them as sea-nymphs, nixies, silkies, etc. Miskito Indian divers in Central America call these beings liwa mairin, and in modern times attribute decompression sickness and other diving illnesses to the inimical moods of these water spirits. Diving is also in the boundary zone between earth and water, with air the defining element. It moves from light to increasing darkness with depth and back again. It moves from swimming down against the natural

Moving away from the regulated structures of safety and risk control lead you onto the rocks of danger and uncertainty, and danger and uncertainty, normal in most of nature, are the complements of safety and fulfilment in life. To live amidst all of these you need to be present, attentive – you need to learn to fail better. Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön argues that ‘all kinds of things happen that break your heart, but you can hold failure and loss as part of your human experience’. You need to find again your ancient bodily wisdom, your heart’s knowledge that while we are all alone, while there is always hurt and loss, your strength and beauty and intelligence and love are transmuted through your life’s relationships and work to be reborn in others.

Ihave failed to understand my father’s suicide all my life. There was no note, no message, I had not seen him for a year. Freediving has shown me a new way to understand death. In the yoga traditions, breathing in engulfs you with life. Breathing out generously gives that life back out into the world. After deep practice of yoga breath control, pranayama, the need to breathe often falls away for long, relaxed minutes. As the water closes over my head each time I dive, I let go my earthly concerns to sink into the blue embrace of an alternate world.

On that dune in the tropical night, my father took a different measure on his life and cast off his quotidian moorings. One of those moorings was me, and I have to fathom the place in my life of both harbour and open sea, port and storm.

In freediving I often think about death, but it is not always ‘death anxiety’ as the psychologists construct it. There is real danger, as well as the imaginary circling sharks. In physiological terms, breath-hold diving is progressive asphyxiation. It is possible because of a profound suppression of metabolism: it changes the way your body functions. Surfacing after a prolonged dive, you are not the same person: your body has moved through dramatic changes, you have been to a place where few venture. If much life is lived on the surface of things, freediving lets you plunge beneath that surface. Freediving has led me to an understanding of the paradoxical joy of being close to death: the compassion and peace.

I have lived much of my life feeling marginal, feeling like an imposter in my jobs: I expect rejection, a predictable outcome of two parents sequentially leaving when I was young. Only recently have I begun to understand that there might be strengths in those places on the margin. Freediving alone, freediving actually free of all that positivist framing and safety paraphernalia and other people, brought me back to my father’s death. He had become more and more marginal to what the world considers important, and eventually, alone, stepped off that edge, stepped free of all that judgement and demand. There is no possibility of answers once that boundary is crossed. Alone, immersed in the spaces of the silent water, I am maybe learning to let go of the questions.

the batfish are curious and often come to investigate us in the deep water, we begin to understand the diurnal patterns of changing activities and species across an undersea topography that becomes familiar. And fundamentally we engage with the saltwater itself: we taste it, swallow it, rinse it through our sinuses, feel it flow across our skin – it is both all around us and within us. The tears in our eyes, the sweat on our skin, the blood in our veins, arteries, organs, have the same salt concentration as ancient oceans, reflecting the time when the ocean water itself served as the fluid transport in the bodies of our biological ancestors.

On that dune in the tropical night, my father took a different measure on his life and cast off his quotidian moorings. One of those moorings was me

Deep in the ocean’s embrace, on one breath, feeling your mind and body change, freediving is a transformational encounter. Like all of life, it is a journey between two breaths, the first breath of life and the last breath before death, the last breath before immersion and the first breath of surfacing again into air. In yoga and meditation, practitioners speak of ‘resting in the space between breaths’. In marine mammal physiology, researchers describe the way seals will drift underwater, not swimming, not breathing, not hunting – resting in the space between breaths. On this blue pathway, naked of technology, with just one breath, the freediver’s unshielded body is open to the silent sea. The transformative encounter connects the World Ocean to the ocean within, bringing us home to the cycles of how we are born and die alone and together on this planet. g

In blue water diving most life is not visible, for most large sea creatures live in shallower waters. In deep blue water the freediver is exposed in every direction, completely vulnerable. That vast continuous space, that absence, is an entry, an opening. Empty space is open to anyone, an invitation. Can I live without trying to fill the silences and empty spaces? Can I learn to live in these silences and spaces? In the extraordinary emptied bliss at the end of a yoga session, when my teachers cup their hands over my ears in the penultimate position of savasana (appropriately, the corpse pose), the muted roar of the ocean fills the silence: the tides of salt blood pulsing through my body. It feels like the hand of god.

One of my teachers in Bali urged us to swim on the shallow reef before the deep water, observing and learning local marine species and ecologies, as well as being in the sea generally: ‘you need to spend time in the ocean, make it your friend’.

We become familiar with one turtle that seems always to be found in the same patch of reef, we know

Michael Adams teaches and researches in Geography at the University of Wollongong, and before that worked for environment NGOs, the national parks service, and Aboriginal organisations. His focus is on human–nature relationships, especially with Indigenous and local communities, and he likes full-immersion methodologies. He writes in a variety of forms, including narrative nonfiction and peer-reviewed academic articles. ❖

Thanks to William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Simone Weil, Tim Winton, Nam Le, the octopus and seal researchers, my many teachers, my various first readers, my family, the Bundanon Trust, and all the humans and non-humans with whom we share the seas. The photograph on page 29 was taken by Daniel Koval in Hawai‘i.

The Calibre Essay Prize, created in 2007, is Australia’s premier essay prize. Originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund), Calibre is now funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC.

Explorations

Catherine Noske

DATSUNLAND

by Stephen Orr Wakefield Press

$29.95 pb, 312 pp, 9781743054758

Datsunland, a collection of short stories and the latest from Stephen Orr, is in many ways flawed. The collection is uneven: the final (titular) work is a novella previously published in a 2016 issue of Griffith Review, which overwhelms the earlier, shorter stories, exhibiting the depth and nuance which several others lack. The narratives and characters alike at times are underdeveloped, and rely on wellworn tropes of the Australian Gothic. And the return of objects and places through the stories, (most notably the all-boys school Lindisfarne College), which acts to structure the stories in reference to one another, occasionally feels tokenistic or forced. But despite this, the collection works. At its best, the writing is insightful and strangely beautiful. Even at its weaker moments, it is consistently powerful. Orr holds the collection together with an impression of force and linguistic brutality.

Orr’s last novel The Hands (2015) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and was described in Josephine Taylor’s review as having ‘the scope of a Greek tragedy’ (ABR, December 2015), a quote which appears on the back cover of Datsunland. While The Hands follows a single family, Datsunland opens up into a broader interrogation of Australian life, through a series of unflinching portraits which traverse the South Austra-lian landscape, and draw on connections of migration, religion, and colonialism to reach back towards Ireland. It takes on many of the same questions as The Hands in its return to rural experiences, but consistently refuses resolution.

It might be this which makes the collection compelling. There is a modernist sensibility to the continued fluctuations in the narrative perspective, furthered by intertextual allusions within the text and an emphasis on the experience of

consciousness in the writing style. Moments in almost every story border on interior monologue, and descriptions regularly use parataxis to push at the boundaries of linguistic representation. This aspect of the writing allows for an exploration of masculinity in the Australian setting, and opens a range of related narratives relevant to contemporary society, from the racial tensions the opening story, ‘Dr Singh’s Despair’, to the simmering violence of domestic abuse, which permeates the collection as a whole and comes to a head with the murder of a six-year-old in ‘The Adult World Opera’. The final story, ‘Datsunland’, is a beautiful example of this. Shifting constantly across the perspectives of schoolboy Charlie, his father Damien, and his guitar teacher William, it combines the experiences of all three. The movement between characters is often unexpected, undermining and layering different experiences and assumptions to destabilise the reader’s engagement with each. The effect as a whole is to feel in the story an anxiety in the mundanity of life, and an insistence on questioning moments of purpose and fulfilment, even while allowing for the simplicity and beauty of such moments. That said, certain weaknesses in the collection as a whole do at times inhibit its reading. There are stories which are too recognisable, such as the IRA shooting of a busload of Protestant workers in ‘The Confirmation’, a reimagining of the Kingsmill massacre. But more disruptive is the sense that several of the characters invoked are stock types, made familiar by the Gothic overtones of several narratives, a literary context invoked likewise in the book’s design. In ‘The Syphilis Museum’, for instance, grandmother Flora sets fire to a museum and murders its ultra-religious caretaker in revenge for the failure of that man’s father to offer her mother contraceptives and thus prevent her (and her children’s) suffering from the syphilis her husband brought home with him. The (somewhat confusing) interweaving of the small-town minds and relationships meets in the piece with an interrogation of morality within the Catholic faith, a common theme explored in several works. But it relies on somewhat caricatured protago-

nists to carry the narrative, limiting the possibilities of engaging with the more interesting conceptualisation of faith that lies beneath.

Similarly, women in the collection are either absent or unconvincing. Of the fourteen stories, eleven focus directly on the experiences of men, and the remaining three seat their female protagonists beside a (dominant) male focalisation. Orr’s women are contained and constrained by men, offered limited perspectives, and rarely provided with any agency in the narrative structure. In ‘The Shot-put’, Barb’s mourning for her lost son is subsumed by Sam’s depression and her solicitude for her husband; in ‘A Descriptive List of the Birds Native to Shearwater, Australia’, Susan’s growing disenchantment with her new husband gives way to his growing consciousness of the associations of bullying and family violence which subconsciously drive his behaviour; and in ‘The Syphilis Museum’, Flora’s role in the narrative enters only as the climax of the story, and despite some moments of focalisation, sees her act as antagonist rather than fully developed protagonist. That this is a work which seemingly intends (and succeeds in) considering Australian masculinities doesn’t quite excuse the transparency of the female characters as portrayed.

Overall, however, the collection is powerful, driven by the viscerality of Orr’s writing. The depiction of violence, emotional and social as well as physical, leaves an impression. This is writing which can shock, which does not hesitate in portraying extremes, but which at the same time holds the capacity for simplicity and tenderness. There is an eeriness in the reading as a result. Orr’s work here left me sensitive to the instability of Australian ground. g

Catherine Noske is the Editor of Westerly Magazine.

No refuge

Donata Carrazza

NO MORE BOATS

by Felicity Castagna Giramondo

$26.95 pb, 232 pp, 9781925336306

No More Boats is Felicity Castagna’s newest work since Small Indiscretions (2011), a collection of short stories, and her award-winning Young Adult novel, The Incredible Here and Now (2013). This versatile writer depicts a plausible community set in Sydney’s inner west in 2001 and an ageing Italian migrant, Antonio Martone, whose life is falling apart and whose crises coincide with the Australian government’s obsession with secure borders.

From the book’s first pages, we sense that Martone will soon reach a point of exasperation and will act out his frustrations with a gun. His actions will coincide with the political manipulation of the MV Tampa and the attack on the Twin Towers. What leads to that moment is the heart of this story

Chapters are devoted to each of the four Martones: Antonio, his wife Rose, and their adult children, Clare and Francis. The third-person narration moves seamlessly through their interconnected lives and from past to present, involving other characters who will be instrumental in the story.

Antonio migrated to Australia by boat in 1961 and made strong connections at the Villawood Migrant

Hostel. His friend Nicolai Molatzzo assuages his anxieties and helps him to find work as a builder. Antonio meets and later marries Rose. Australian-born and raised by a depressed British single mother, she is open to losing herself in the attentions of an exotic foreigner. The couple buy a block of land in the developing suburb of Parramatta. Antonio is sure he is living the future he was hoping for when he left impoverished Calabria: ‘All he wants is this, his own patch of land, this moment in the afternoon; the future to keep coming and coming.’

Manifestations of the migrant dream, though clichéd, can reflect an entire group’s values and means of comfort. They turn up in Antonio’s trust in bricks and mortar, his concrete front yard, a serious fruit and veggie garden, and a statue of Saint Francis beside an image of his deceased father on the mantel. However, the life that Antonio has constructed for himself and his family is vulnerable. A workplace injury forces Antonio into early retirement, but his certainties were dissipating long before this incident. ‘Nico and Antonio … were the last of their kind’, workers whose building skills, precision, and attention to detail are no longer important in a society that wants McMansions and contractors willing to build them. His boss, who is rapidly becoming wealthy, uses the cheapest materials available and pressures his employees to get the job done within sixty days. Antonio, weakened, prowls the western suburbs at night, staring at houses without eaves in soulless suburbs, all the while noticing a changed social landscape that is constantly reiterated in the media, especially by ‘the dull man’ who declares, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’

Rose has her share of disappointments too, but mostly it is Antonio who has become ‘surly and pensive … he resisted going softly, giving in to age’. Rose escapes to a friend next door, a place of refuge from her marriage. Her husband’s behaviour becomes even more incomprehensible to her; he paints an enormous sign across the concrete of their front yard that says ‘No More Boats’; it draws much unwanted attention from

supporters and critics alike. Antonio’s behaviour not only pushes his wife away, but also brings the weaknesses of this family unit to the fore. Everyone plays the role expected of them, but no one is really communicating. Francis, the dope-smoking twentythree-year-old son, is aimless and disengaged, but insightful enough to recognise that even within the hierarchy of his own friendship group he is unlikely to prosper. In a humorous scene, Francis becomes our least likely hero when he acts decisively. Clare, his sister, lives in ‘impossibly hip Surry Hills’, formerly the working class suburb home of her mother, but now a haven for the woman who can’t wait to ‘shake the Parramatta off her’. Clare has quit her job as a teacher but hasn’t told her family yet. She works in a bookshop and has loveless sex with a boyfriend from her university years. A growing intimacy with a Vietnamese work colleague, Paul – lying, like her, to his family about his life choices – is vital in lending the book optimism.

So obsessed is Antonio about the elusive future that he has never provided his children with a comprehensive view of his own sacrifices and struggles. Nor has Rose, whose early hardships, shared with others, might have instilled in their offspring a sense of generational progress – not the rootlessness that characterises their lives.

Castagna is canny in showing Antonio’s demise: the way that an unreasonable and culturally confused person can be preyed upon by shrewd political agendas and reactionary interest groups. No More Boats offers us a way of understanding the contradiction of one migrant turning against others. This is an important book. Thankfully, publishers like Giramondo have the courage and acuity to uncover stories that investigate the complexities and inconsistencies that are part of contemporary Australian society. g

Donata Carrazza is Chair of the Mildura Writers Festival Committee and, with Paul Kane, has edited two books: Vintage: A celebration of ten years of the Mildura Writers’ Festival (2004) and Letters to Les (2005).

Then and now

Naama Grey-Smith

GRAVITY WELL

by Melanie Joosten Scribe

$29.99 pb, 281 pp, 9781925322057

Gravity Well opens with Carl Sagan’s famous ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ quote, suggesting themes of astronomy, loneliness, and humanity’s cosmic insignificance. Though I was immediately smitten with the cover design (a nebulacoloured orb, its top and bottom halves depicting mirrored but not identical female silhouettes amid a sea of cosmic black), I worried that the novel might overdo the astronomy analogies. Yet it soon became apparent that Melanie Joosten’s writing is as subtle as it is intelligent. The astral references are frequent but add interest and depth. All appear well-researched, and many – such as the Voyager Golden Records –sent me googling for more.

Gravity Well follows the intertwining stories of Lotte – an astronomer who leaves her husband in Canberra to take up a job in Chile – and Lotte’s best friend, Eve, who is in the throes of grief after a tragedy. The character-driven narrative delves into the psyches and memories of each as chapters alternate between their points of view. Jumping back and forth in time through their reminiscences is both a narrative strategy and a thematic concern as Joosten explores the nature of time and its perception. For Lotte, ‘retrospect works like a telescope: looking back in time to predict what will come – but never soon enough’. For Eve, raw grief makes her feel ‘in two places at once, the then and the now’.

Though Lotte and Eve are both convincing characters, they are not always easy to like: they nurture their malcontent with self-flagellation and occasional cruelty to their ‘kind and solicitous’ husbands. Both fear that they will be unwanted; they put emotional and sometimes physical distance between themselves and those they

love in what forms the novel’s central image of ‘the complications of family as a solar system: each person like a planet [...] influencing the paths of their companions’. Independent Lotte can be self-centred (later we learn why, in a satisfying plot twist), while Eve is convinced ‘she had lost the right to assert her own needs’. So why do we stick with these flawed protagonists? Because Joosten is in control of her material. She shows us, quietly and deliberately, that Lotte herself is ‘itching with annoyance the provenance of which she couldn’t face’.

Melanie Joosten has to date published three very different books. Her début, Berlin Syndrome (2011), is a psychological thriller. A Long Time Coming (2016) is a collection of essays on old age. Gravity Well is a family drama. While I was writing this piece, ABR published Anwen Crawford’s one-anda-half-star review of Cate Shortland’s film adaptation of Berlin Syndrome , which was soon followed by equally unflattering critiques elsewhere. I knew the movie was due out that week: it was the reason I couldn’t get hold of Joosten’s novel on which the film is based, as Perth bookstores awaited the imminent release of the tie-in edition. Deadline looming, I opted for the ebook. While all this movie talk may have little bearing on Joosten’s own writing, it did make me reflect on the extent to which an author’s ‘then’ affects their ‘now’. Should a book be considered in its own terms, or in the greater context of a writer’s creative output?

Well, both. After reading Mr Vertigo as a teenager, I reached next for The Music of Chance and In the Country of Last Things, and there are things I got from a Paul Auster phase that I wouldn’t from a single Auster. In art, obsession is often rewarded. Then again, it is not unusual to hear a friend lament their lost admiration for an author they once loved, their favourite books tainted by those they wish they hadn’t read.

On its own terms, Gravity Well is a quiet, intelligent story about loneliness and friendship, about grief tempered by hope. I admired Joosten’s thrilling plottwist just past the halfway mark, and her beautiful imagery – from ‘the thick

northerly wind buffeting every surface so that breathing was like drinking’, to a coast in its changing moods, ‘the midday sun stripping the landscape of depth, pulling every part of the view onto the same plane’. Eve’s job as an acoustic engineer gives Joosten cause to explore aural landscapes, too, and these finely observed descriptions make Gravity Well a pleasure to read.

Once I had read Berlin Syndrome, Gravity Well took on an eerier edge in my mind, filtered as it were through its dark lens (I leave my gendered analysis of Berlin Syndrome for another time). Common stylistic and thematic preoccupations became apparent. Both novels explore the power dynamic of an intimate relationship – between lovers in the former, friends in the latter. Both probe the relationship in an intensely domestic setting while alternating perspectives between the two central characters. And both represent the psychological effects of trauma through disrupted chronology. But where Berlin Syndrome has a high-concept premise (as expected from a thriller), Gravity Well takes the less extreme setting of a family home in Ballarat. Here the characters are troubled but not psychotic, their failings and betrayals familiar. The story thus relies more heavily on the strength of Joosten’s writing – and a steady pillar it is. The cover quotes for Gravity Well are penned by 2015 Stella Prize winner Emily Bitto and 2017 Stella shortlistee Emily Maguire. It won’t be surprising to see Melanie Joosten’s name on next year’s list. g

Naama Grey-Smith is senior editor at Fremantle Press.

AS THE LONELY FLY

by

Sara Dowse

For Pity Sake Publishing

$34.99 pb, 327 pp, 9780994448576

Sara Dowse is a fine observer of politics and power. Her new novel, As the Lonely Fly, traverses three continents over fifty years and contains a multitude of characters, but its focus is honed in on three sisters, of sorts. While Chekhov’s play of that name is typified by waiting, Dowse’s story is of continuous flux and upheaval. Clara-later-Chava, Manya-laterMarion, and Zipporah flee from Ukraine’s pogrom-soaked landscape to markedly different lands of promise; America and Palestine – known to them as Eretz Israel, the longed for Land of Israel.

The book is populated by luftmenschen Dreamers. Founders and builders of the future state of Israel. These are dreamers of agency and urgency, many wrestling with ethical and philosophical quandaries, even as they construct cities or work machines. Can the new state be founded upon principles of gender and racial equity? Is humanity doomed to forever enact and experience violence? Dowse has managed to encapsulate both ideas and the human struggle.

Clara/Chava is the narrative’s force; a firebrand communist and seeker of justice disillusioned with Zionism. She eschews materialism alongside vulnerability. Amos Oz delineates the Jewish dialectic contained within Zionism thus, ‘Israel is a dream come true and, as such, it is disappointing. The taste of disappointment is not in the nature of Israel, it is in the nature of dreams.’ This is essentially Clara/Chava’s undoing; she cannot endure this truth.

As the Lonely Fly contains some unfortunate mistakes in Hebrew and religious terminology. It remains, however, an ambitious novel in scope, subject matter, and design. Weaving in and out of perspectives and timeframes, the Russian and Palestinian scenes elevate an occasionally faltering story. The American strand tends to dwindle, perhaps because it lacks these luftmenschen that Dowse evokes so well and Clara’s vivifying presence. Nevertheless, this epic imparts Israeli and Russian experiences while capturing their tonal complexities.

Tali Lavi

‘A

city of wheat’

Literary witnesses on the wheatbelt

Delys Bird

LIKE NOTHING ON THIS EARTH: A LITERARY HISTORY OF THE WHEATBELT by Tony

Hughes-d’Aeth

UWA Publishing, $49.99 pb, 608 pp, 9781742589244

In his Epilogue to this major study of the West Australian wheatbelt and its writers, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth describes his work. With no ‘exact precedent’ in Australian scholarship, it is ‘best thought of as an amalgam of literary history, literary sociology and literary geography’. To achieve this, Hughesd’Aeth traces the idea of the wheatbelt through intensive readings of the work of eleven writers. In their writing it is a created place, ‘an entity sustained by human imagination’. The literature captures and records the changes, broadly environmental and social, that have impacted on it.

While the wheatbelt in Western Australia can be seen as part of an Australian and worldwide phenomenon, the advent of large-scale wheat farming in the nineteenth century, its characteristics are peculiarly its own. It covers an area close to the size of Britain, in the most ancient part of Australia, and exists on a largely waterless plain. Its limits are defined by rainfall patterns and its beginnings in the late nineteenth century were enabled by the gold boom in Western Australia. The discovery of gold brought people seeking a new future

to the state, while access to superphosphate gave the land its potential fertility.

To read the work of his wheatbelt writers, Hughes-d’Aeth uses an ‘event/ witness’ model. The ‘creation of the wheatbelt is the event’, and the writers are its witnesses. All of them, with one exception, have lived in the wheatbelt; some were born there; several worked there intermittently; others farmed the land, and the chapters on each of these eleven writers begin with brief biographical details. The first three – Albert Facey (1894–1982), Cyril Goode (1907–82), and James Pollard (1900–71) – are roughly contemporaneous. Although their experiences, and their writings, differ widely, each is engaged in that early essential work of manual clearing of the land, together with attempts to establish viable wheatfields. Alternating moods of hope and despair, and the effects of extreme isolation and loneliness, all emerge in the work of these three. The advent of the Great Depression drove them off the wheatbelt, signalling the end of the first phase of its development. Nevertheless, Facey’s hugely successful autobiography, A Fortunate Life (1981) projects what Hughes-d’Aeth calls ‘a moral component to the wheatbelt project’, the widely held belief that the wheatbelt offered its settlers a fresh start, deeply imbued with the ideologies of ‘goodness’ and ‘improvement’. After a stint at one-teacher schools in the wheatbelt, J. K. Ewers returned to Perth in the 1930s and be-

A WAGR E class steam locomotive hauling the first train of bulk wheat in Western Australia, 1931 (Rail Heritage WA, Archive Photo Gallery image P7118 via Wikimedia Commons)

gan his major work, a wheatbelt trilogy, of which only the first two novels were published. Peter Cowan, not much younger than Ewers, is vastly different both in his experience of the area (it is now a ‘post-pioneer era’) and in his writing, which signals the beginnings of an environmental consciousness. Cowan apprehends the wheatbelt as a literary region; for him ‘regionalism is something the Australian novel needs’. In Cowan’s spare, modernist stories, the wheatbelt is an existential place, ‘characterised by silence and menace’.

In these ways, Cowan is seen as the ‘first modern writer of the wheatbelt’, followed by the very modern Dorothy Hewett, for whom it was her family home. Class and race are defining factors in Hewett’s wheatbelt writing, differentiating it from that of the earlier writers, as does the range and formal amplitude of her work. Hewett’s wheatbelt becomes, for the first time, a tragic, contested place, that history traced in her epic poem ‘Legend of the Green Country’ (1966) and the play The Man From Mukinupin (1979).

Jack Davis, poet, dramatist, and activist, is a ‘pivotal figure’ who ‘introduced Noongar language [and culture] into European theatre’. His writing depicts the appalling consequences of the creation of the wheatbelt for his people, who were forced off their land into depleted, marginal existences. In zoologist Barbara York Main’s two major works, she recognises not just the loss of a ‘natural’ world, a complex ecosystem which cultivation has destroyed, but also the difference in land use of the Noongar inhabitants and the settlers who transformed the area.

Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well (1986) is the best-known novel of the wheatbelt, which in her writing, becomes a symbolic place, known simply as ‘the wheat’, silent, endless, engendering both contemplation and fear, a place of primal fantasy. Oceana Fine (1989), Tom Flood’s single, early, neglected, prize-winning novel opens with Finn, a student holiday wheatbin worker. Travelling to the wheatfield, he is motivated by a desire ‘to see if I could find something in the country. In nature.’ Rex Cleaver, head of a wheatbelt dynas-

ty, denies him that hope, one common to much wheatbelt literature, and voices the material, capitalist triumph of the wheatbelt: ‘There’s nothing natural out there, boy. It’s a city of wheat.’

As similar preoccupations in the work of these very different writers become apparent, apparent too are the effects of social and historical shifts, notably an increasing awareness of the costs of the creation of the wheatbelt.

John Kinsella’s prolific output documents a place where ‘ancient ecosystems have been shattered’, one which was formerly a ‘marvellously intricate living world’, that included the ‘lifeways of the Noongar’. Kinsella’s development of his ‘counter-pastoral’ poetic mode, and his major reputation, make him an important witness of the degradation he writes about.

A brief review can only indicate the richness of this book and the reach of its ideas. As Tony Hughes-d’Aeth notes, the ‘event’ of the wheatbelt, understood in relation to deep time, is momentary. Yet the consequences of those brief one hundred years are vast. Hughes-d’Aeth acknowledges the importance of the wheatbelt for the economic life of its inhabitants and the country, yet mourns what has disappeared. He ends with a plea for the future, using York Main’s words: ‘Our goal now … is to reshape such [wheatbelt] landscapes so that they both satisfy our physical needs (through … agriculture) and reflect our spiritual visions (which must surely encompass nature conservation …)’. g

Delys Bird, following many years as an academic and editor, is an occasional book reviewer.

CLOSING DOWN

by Sally Abbott Hachette

$29.99 pb, 282 pp, 9780733635946

Closing Down is about survival and the rituals that allow it; those that keep the fraying edges of life and society together, that stop a relationship disintegrating, that stave off insanity. In her début novel –which won the inaugural Richell Prize for Emerging Writers – Susan Abbott asks: how do you survive when your world is breaking into pieces?

Abbott’s narrative alternates between Clare and Robbie. Through them, we glimpse a world crippled by climate change and economic crisis, where recurring disasters become nothing more than a ‘few words flickering quickly by on a screen’. Both characters have rituals for survival. For Clare, walking and recording the dusty lineaments of the decaying town of Myamba keep her alive, despite the ‘unutterable sadness of it all’. Robbie’s love for his partner, Ella, sustains him, but, increasingly, ignoring a world that has ‘become far too much to bear’ is the only way to cope.

Abbott’s vision of rural Australia is stark and confronting; it is a place of decay and grief; where men hanging from their necks in sheds is ‘just a thing that happened’. Abbott can also be sharply satirical. News reports of mass deaths are forgotten endnotes among sausage sizzle day announcements and PSA’s reminding viewers to take their ‘Vitamin D Every Day Twice A Day’. The narrative works best when Abbott reveals her world in discreet fragments, or when her focus rests on the intimate relationships that make up her novel. At times, however, the narrative stalls under the weight of needless exposition, such as the inexplicably detailed chronicling of Myamba’s supermarket.

A hurried final act leaves questions unanswered, or worse, forgotten. It means that the promise of Abbott’s darkly imaginative world isn’t fully satisfied. Overall, though, Closing Down remains an arresting vision of survival and resilience in a broken world.

Piri Eddy

Not quite human

Danielle Clode

WILD MAN FROM BORNEO: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE ORANGUTAN

by Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffen

University of Hawai‘i Press US$28 pb, 330 pp, 9780824872830

What does it mean to be human – nearly human, not-quitehuman, or even inhuman? Such questions have preoccupied writers and researchers for centuries, from Charles Darwin and Mary Shelley to the uncanny valley of robotics, AI, and a transhuman future. In Wild Man from Borneo, Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffen explore this question through the prism of our relationship with one of our closest relatives, the orangutan.

Our similarity to apes and monkeys is both their most disturbing and most appealing feature. When I worked as a zookeeper, I disliked the primate round, mainly because the female baboons seemed to regard me as a rival for the dominant male’s affections. So I was surprised, when I left, that it was the primates I felt the need to farewell, particularly the young hand-reared orangutan Indah. The personable status of orangutans is evidenced by our ready recollection of Mollie at Melbourne Zoo or George at Adelaide Zoo, and the grief recently expressed over the unexpected death of Karta in childbirth.

The title neatly encapsulates the focus of this book. ‘Orangutan’ is Malay for ‘man of the forest’, and yet locally this term did not apply to the red ape but to human forest dwellers. Its misapplication seems to have been a Western error. The confusion continued with early accounts

describing such bizarre creatures that it is not at all clear whether they were humans (‘wild’ or otherwise), orangutans, chimpanzees, or even gorillas.

The arrival of living orangutans in Europe, and the dissection of dead ones, cleared up some disagreements and generated many more. As a cultural history, this book is not as concerned with the nature of these great apes, as with our shifting perceptions of them. As the authors state: ‘this book is less about their actual behaviors (in the wild or in captivity) or their anatomy, tool use, intelligence, mating and rearing practices than it is about the orangutan–human encounter over four centuries, about the ways in which their actual or imagined presence has impinged upon us, and how we have envisioned, studied, and treated them.’

The role that the great apes played within debates over human rights and slavery make particularly compelling reading. Did the great apes have two hands or four feet? Could they speak, be ‘humanised’ or assimilated into society? Biologists, looking across the full diversity of living forms, were inclined to note surprising similarities, while others saw immeasurable differences. Just as they were enlisted in the evolutionary debates of the times, orangutans and the other apes were also recruited to the cause of racial discrimination.

‘Rewriting orangutans as humans helped enable the racial ranking of all other humans.’ In order to justify the superior position of white Caucasians, apparently inferior or more primitive races had to be demonstrated. A small number of little-known, physically distinctive populations with a long and independent history, like Australian Aborigines, were rather arbitrarily positioned at the bottom of the ladder to justify placing other races on intermediate rungs. Placing great apes, like orangutans, further down this scale, strengthened the illusion of a linear relationship between traits that actually exhibit fairly random and meaningless variation.

One of the most appealing elements of such ‘cultural’, as distinct from traditional, histories is their willingness to draw on rich but often neglected fictional resources to gain an understand-

ing of how we view, and have viewed, the world. The early literary depictions of orangutans reflected our simultaneous fascination with, and fear of, the nearly human in the disturbing jailer/ murderer ape characters of Walter Scott and Edgar Allan Poe. More recently, the orangutan seems positioned as wise narrator/guide or eco-warrior, perhaps most popularly exemplified by Terry Pratchett’s Librarian.

The use of orangutan actors in film is more complex, perhaps sharing more in common with circus performances and old-fashioned zoo displays than the more nuanced and complex representations found in literature. The chapter ‘Orangutans on Stage and Screen’ explores this difficult terrain, revealing a shift in focus away from what it means to be human towards how humans treat, or mistreat, other animals.

I was disappointed that the detailed exploration of the cultural aspects of our scientific understanding of the orangutans did not continue into the twentieth century. Little is made of the way the study of animal behaviour served to embed and reinforce sexist clichés until it came under the critical eye of a more balanced feminist analysis. The switch from studies of male competition to female choice, or ‘promiscuity’ to polygamy, has as much cultural significance today as human–ape relations to slavery and human rights did in the past. Gender might have also added an interesting dimension to the individual relationships with orangutans (mostly young females), as well as their depictions in film and literature. The significance of women in pioneering work on the great apes and primates more broadly seems to have been skimmed over, while much of the discussion of modern conservation efforts (particularly given the orangutan’s role as charismatic megafauna in logging and palm oil debates) feels rather cursory.

That said, the great strength of this book lies in its historical analysis and it provides a detailed, insightful, and entertaining exploration of our ever-shifting relationship with our close cousins. g

Danielle Clode is currently writing a biography of nature writer Edith Coleman.

Winter Gems from Text Independent Publishing Since 1992

A literary blockbuster from the bestselling author of The Historian. Alexandra Boyd travels to Bulgaria to heal the wounds of grief, but finds herself caught up in the history of a beautiful, battered country.

‘Evocative and richly imagined.’ Dominic Smith

OUT 19 JUNE

An exquisitely written memoir told in a series of poignant and often hilarious vignettes about a young woman alternately seeking to make peace with and raging against the reality of her approaching death.

‘Illuminating.’ Gretchen Rubin

An astonishing work of creative nonfiction that combines personal experience with scientific research.

Kate Cole-Adams delves into the unconscious mind and asks the question: where do we go when we go under?

‘A work of splendid richness and depth.’ Helen Garner

Unnerving and brilliant— a new novel from one of Australia’s finest writers.

‘Darkly surreal ... Macauley at his brilliant best.’ Ceridwen Dovey

Familiar and unique, shocking and intimate—this is a raw coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of working-class Melbourne in the 1980s.

‘Stark, poetic, truthful.’

Carmel Bird

OUT 19 JUNE

The highly anticipated new novel, from the author of Dog Boy, winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary

Award for Fiction. A powerful literary work about frailty, redemption and the healing power of animals.

‘Astonishing.’

Sydney Morning Herald

The most unexpectedly uplifting memoir you’ll read this year. Raised in isolation and trained to be a ‘superhuman’, Maude Julien found the strength to escape her own parents.

‘Harrowing, heartbreaking, and against all odds uplifting.’

Saturday Paper

An entertaining, thoughtprovoking exploration of sleep. Snooze looks at the sleeping patterns of some of history’s greatest figures, the demise of sleep in today’s increasingly fragmented world and the author’s own family’s quest to master the ancient art of a decent kip.

Nearly unspeakable things

Paul Hetherington

SOME THINGS TO PLACE IN A COFFIN

by Bill Manhire

Victoria University Press $25 pb, 95 pp, 9781776561056

Poetry books that focus on memory, recuperation, and loss are common, but it is rare to find poems that speak about such matters as sparely and eloquently as these do. Bill Manhire’s new poems are bony and sinewy, resonating with an awareness of public and personal grief. Although these works often speak by indirection, many of them pack a real punch. As Manhire probes the awkwardness of memory and recall, he also reflects on knowledge’s elusiveness.

There is a strong sense of the provisional throughout this book, and of words that gesture at issues they are unable to fully encompass. The poems are sometimes opaque, as if Manhire does not wish to completely yield up his meanings. Many of them also occupy the suspended place where human beings try to imagine and memorialise the dead – moving the reader towards the unimaginable and the irredeemable.

The opening poem, ‘Waiting’ sets the scene: ‘The window waits for light. / The path to the river waits / for twigs and stones and feet.’ The reader immediately understands that there are unresolved issues and significant indeterminacies afoot. ‘Poem in an Orchard’ develops these themes while introducing a more sombre note, evoking someone who topples ‘out of our quiet conversation / into the lower-level light, / out of family and creation / into what we have come to call the insect night’.

Further poems explore a wide range of topics: a Mao impersonator who stares ‘at invisible things’; an idea of an unspecified ‘enemy’ that will take away ‘this world that you once woke into’; and a ‘survivor’ who reflects that ‘We will

never sit in such places again’. Manhire conjures childhood and allies it to preoccupations with entropy and change. For example, a school bus becomes emblematic not only of the past, but of what is troubling, irretrievable, and incompletely understood: ‘The heart can hardly stay. The heart implodes / The body gets down and walks across a field.’ This is a verbal dance around the impossibility of making secure meaning out of shifting and friable memory. This theme of being alienated from crucial aspects of past experience is given a different emphasis in one sequence, where the speaker fails to ‘reach’ the ‘beautiful world’, a place of childhood, imagination, and literature rather than the real: ‘It was not the trees. / It was somewhere beyond the trees. / It was not the window or the lake.’ The sister of this poem’s speaker seems to be missing and ‘So much cold came out of the earth, / we could not talk about it.’

Other poems are wry or ironic. For instance, ‘Coastal Farewell’, comments on its depiction of parting lovers as ‘like some ancient Chinese poem / from the something-or-other Dynasty’. A number of poems are not fully explained, as if language is unable to reveal the meanings that attend to certain ideas and events. An example is ‘Learning’, where the ‘other language’ is ‘all zigzags and bad decisions’ and where ‘For a moment the raft / is reachable, then it isn’t.’

A sequence of poems, ‘Known Unto God’, commissioned for the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, memorialises unknown New Zealand soldiers killed in World War I, along with more recent refugees. There is a sheet of black paper before this section of the book, and war’s carnage is evoked by small, pointed evocations: ‘Once I was small bones / in my mother’s body / just taking a nap. / Now my feet can’t find the sap.’ This writing emphasises the way individuals are trapped within warfare’s larger movements, unable to escape or control it, their destinies sometimes made by hideous happenstance. Manhire, exhibiting great tonal control, refuses to be maudlin. The poems suggest that while language may memorialise, it can only gesture glancingly at war’s horror.

A contrasting group of poems

makes use of various song-like gestures, conjuring a poetic world where serious themes – such as ‘The end of empire is a special emptiness’ – are framed by more popular tropes. Later poems take up a wider variety of references, one beginning with a line by W.B. Yeats, another satirising the idea of a politician’s election address, and a further example playing teasingly with the notion of autobiography. A poignant group of prose poems probes memory failure, questioning ‘what will last?’ in our lives and culture.

Bill Manhire’s new poems resonate with an awareness of public and personal grief

The volume’s title poem remembers the painter Ralph Hotere, a reproduction of whose painting Untitled (c.1971) is on the book’s cover. This one-page work conveys a sense of a whole life by listing the kinds of things the poet imagines placing in his friend’s coffin. The diversity of suggestions is beguiling, sometimes surprising, even quixotic: ‘Some Lorca, some lacquer. / A fishing rod. A hammer. / The dog Matiu. / Timber & bricks. A Tiger Moth. / Some rope, some sky, some ocean.’

The volume concludes with a sequence entitled ‘Falseweed’, which is simultaneously about the environment and the struggle to make poems – and thus, ‘to take flight’. There is also a kind of poetic coda, in which the speaker states, ‘I was defeated, done with speaking’, again negotiating the space of the ineffable.

Many of this volume’s poems are constructed as spare statements that are sometimes tenuously connected.The emphasis is on missed connections as much as on a coherent whole – which is an appropriate way to approach what is lost or hardly known. For Manhire, the beautiful world is an ungraspable place, but his gestures at naming it – however incomplete – are finely conceived and salutary. g

Paul Hetherington’s most recent poetry collection is Burnt Umber (2016).

Snakes, sea, and settlers

Two poetry books on nature and place

Rose Lucas

Michelle Cahill and Amanda Joy have produced two engaging and proficient collections of poetry. In their different ways, each revels in worlds of perception, imagination, and poetic craft.

Amanda Joy’s first full-length collection, Snake Like Charms ($22.99 pb, 113 pp, 9781742589404) comes out of UWAP’s new poetry series and marks the emergence of an important voice in Australian poetry. In her work, Joy, who won the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her poem ‘Tailings’, highlights an intensity of almost ecstatic perception. We see this perception ranging across the specificity of place, in particular West Australiaa, notions of myth, the intimacy of relationships with lovers, children, and, at the core, the relationship between the individual human and the natural world. These ideas are woven together through the trope of the snake – both as a recognition of the power of the external world and as part of an imaginative engagement with that world. The snake – creature and metaphor – can be part of an Australian eco-system, beautiful, dangerous, even a mythic go-between the worlds of the spirit and the body. In the poem ‘Synecdoche’, Joy writes: ‘Can’t say – / poor snake / Your strangeness is maybe / what we can’t imagine / living without.’

Using the trope of the snake, Joy’s work explores aspects of this dislocating strangeness and the ways in which we might both be drawn towards and repelled by the slippery magnificence it represents. In ‘Wading Pool’, the speaker describes the snake in her child’s wading pool – the ‘only one I killed’ – when the fierceness of love is enough to act, ‘Axe in hand’. Most encounters, however, involve a greater sense of respect, even worshipful attention. In ‘Snake Skin, Roe Swamp’, the poem describes both the physical business of a snake

shedding its skin – ‘loosen first at the lip, retract / backward over bluing eyes / dull crown, those sorcerous jaws’ – as well as the space which might be shared, literally and figuratively, with the snake: ‘I tease open a brittle end, puzzle / my arm inside, until it is sheathed / to the elbow, ghost eyes puckering / my skin. My pulse, its unsealed centre.’ The snake, as a marker of the strange, is other to the speaking self, who is nevertheless drawn towards it, desirous of becoming snake, of finding the fleeting metamorphic identity of snake/human who can be both world and observer, grounded and ecstatic.

In a series of ekphrastic poems, Joy also plays with the shifting shapes of snakes represented in art and stories. As in ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (after Nicolas Poussin)’, the snake is the thing that is hidden, or only partially visible, suggestive of the death that lurks for us, inevitable, in the shadows: ‘Running as if the corpse wasn’t already green / as if the snake hadn’t lain motionless in dark umber / this past four hundred years.’ Yet in ‘Solitude’, one of a series of seminarrative poems tracing a young girl’s pregnancy, a confrontation with a snake on a moonlit path corresponds both to the subliminal unborn child and to the possibility of release: ‘As I froze I felt a flutter / under my belt and envy / for the snake joining / shadows / The silence of night / its solitary escape.’

Michelle Cahill is a prizewinning writer of poetry and fiction. The Herring Lass (Arc Publications, $18 pb, 70 pp, 9781910345764), her third full-length collection, demonstrates an assured style and vision. In a range of styles from stanzas, prose poems and couplets, Cahill’s poems are richly evocative of both narrative and place. In the title

poem for example, we see, in an almost painterly way, how the Herring Lass’s ‘knife flashes in four-second strokes, her wet hands never stray from a salted barrel’, while also glimpsing her story as her children ‘stray’, and ‘are yet to be fed’. These impulses beyond the lyric and the visual and toward the narrative are sometimes explored using dramatic monologue form, providing us with new and surprising perspectives. In ‘Day of a Seal, 1820’, for example, it is the voice of the hunted seal who speaks of a familiar colonisation: ‘A tall ship patrols the coast / the pelagic fish skirr. / I sniff the kelp and bloodworms, / moulded into an eroded kerb.’ In the longer poem, ‘Youth, by Josephine Jayshree Conrady’, which tells the story of the speaker’s transition from ‘a girl / tripping on the hem of her saree’ to the ‘youth’ who takes to sea, ‘dressed in kurta with kersey breeches’, there is a tension between the linear demands of narrative and the evocation of image or experience. Perhaps this isn’t surprising in a writer who herself moves between poetry and prose.

The sequence of poems ‘The Grieving Sonnets’ not only demonstrates an experimentation with this oldest of poetic forms, but also a more lyrical, subjective, and explicitly Australian viewpoint. The sonnets place us, with the speaker, in the specificity of bush, rock wallaby, cave, and river, certainly evoking beauty through imagery and wordplay but also alluding to the complex strands of guilt and loss. Reminiscent of Judith Wright’s ‘Nigger Leap, New England’, Cahill’s poems point to the difficult position of the settler Australian, torn between complicity and grief: ‘I’m not / unkind or ignorant, but I’m here in this mould: / history’s a genocide.’ Shifting between one’s own and another’s story, between the lyrical and the narrative, between what is perceived and what is experienced, this collection is a powerful reminder of our own tenuous position in the ‘killing fields’ of our own history. g

Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet who also works in the Graduate Research Centre at Victoria University. Her most recent collection of poetry is Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016).

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Contributors

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Ian Dickson

Morag Fraser

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Sophie Knezic

David Larkin

Susan Lever

James McNamara

Dina Ross

Michael Shmith

Subscribe to our free fortnightly e-bulletin, ABR Arts.

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.

Epiphanies

Gig Ryan

FRAGMENTS

by Antigone Kefala

Giramondo Poets

$24 pb, 82 pp, 9781925336191

A HOUSE BY THE RIVER

by Diane Fahey

Puncher & Wattman

$25 pb, 97 pp, 9781922186874

Antigone Kefala’s Fragments , her fifth book of poems and first since Absence: New and selected poems (1992), is often menaced by the past, like her first collection, The Alien (1973). Here too are some subtly demolishing portraits, as well as buoyant poems such as ‘Metro Cellist’ and the slightly brooding ‘Summer at Derveni’: ‘Afternoon heat / empty of voices / on the foil surface / heads drifting / like heavy ornaments.’ While early work transmuted the impact of her migrations from Romania to Greece to New Zealand to Australia into a pervasive sense of loss, these new poems allude to, rather than relate, such journeys that pass through languages and decades: ‘When they came back / their eyes were scorched / their hands like open wounds / the road, they said, / nothing but fire / no coolness / as they were promised / in the fables’ (‘Pilgrims’ Tales’).

As with Diane Fahey, Kefala is a keen observer of the world around her, but whereas Fahey aims for informed, yet vivid, notation of the natural world, Kefala’s descriptions are pertinently brief but sieved through discomfiting interpretation. At least two poems equate masculine power with violence: a gun like ‘a metal erection’ (‘Weapons’); ‘The killers / spoke in bullets’ (‘The Film’). Other poems are compressed psychological portraits: ‘He was lending us his presence / sure of its value. / His past, a famous story / he no longer challenged / he was wearing it now – / an ill fitting garment’ (‘Public Figure’).

How to reconcile with, and incorporate, one’s past is a continuing preoccupation in Kefala’s work, as poems

niggle at the conventions of persona and politeness that may conceal ruins. Her dramatically short lines emphasise this tone of foreboding: ‘The past / a drink, a poison / we thirst for’ (‘Photographs’); ‘Let it burn everything, the fire. / For who can rise now / out of their ashes?’ (‘Death by Fire’).

Fragments is divided into five sections that may be read chronologically. The first three pivot on memory and experience; later poems, such as ‘The Fatal Queen’ (presumably Clytemnestra), have a more tightly wound intensity, but all throughout these fragments some bleakness, or admonishing vision, invades, such as the quick shift in images from dawn to death in ‘First Encounters, Dawn’: ‘Below, the valley smoked / between the charcoal stubs / of the burnt trees, / the charred flesh covered / in fine drops of sweat.’ In Kefala’s poems, each site is a plane of time necessarily rippled and haunted by the past’s undertow, and nothing is static.

In Diane Fahey’s poems, her chief concerns have been visual description and story, from her earlier retellings of myths and fairy tales in somewhat jaunty tones (such as in The Sixth Swan, 2001), to imagist perceptions of travel (The Stone Garden, 2013). A House By The River, her twelfth book, continues that descriptive interest in its first two sections, which form an almanac of seasons, birds, her mother’s garden (the title of the first poem), as well as some ekphrastic poems. But its central concern is in the third and fourth sections that record her mother’s gradual decline, and the following bereavement: ‘Unlocking the door, I step into winter’s / closed, infinite room, a pulled thread of grief / down my body’s left side ... / This, it would seem, / is weather for visiting unreclaimed selves / crying with diamond beaks from a packed nest’ (‘After the Rain’).

Most poems are written in loose unrhymed sonnets which may conclude with half-rhyme, in present tense, often employing present passive forms, and grammatical inversions. These forms possibly work better in the poems of grief, but feel laboured in many others, in which description is so crowded as to lessen the impact of a particularly apt

image – ‘the sound of their wings a shuffled card deck’ (‘New Holland Honeyeaters’); ‘A black-shouldered kite ... poised on a shelf of air’, (‘The Long Fields, the Cliffs’). The collection would have benefited from the trimming of a few of these poems which seem peripheral to its later personal content, though Faye’s eye for detail and her use of metaphor can be impressive. As with the American poet Mary Oliver, whom Fahey cites as an influence, any depictions of nature necessarily have ecological implications, as the poet records life before the coming degradations and extinctions. Like Oliver, Faye also seeks either epiphany, or submersion of self, in nature. The third section measures the all-consuming experience of caring for a loved parent, chronicling daily rituals and tragedies.

Slowly, you are not quite yourself: the woman I know as gracious, lucidly patient ...

‘You do too much,’ you diagnose, innocent of the cure: ill health for me, death for you; whichever knocks first. (‘In Care’)

Fahey’s nature poems anchor to their enclosed moments, reciting each angled detail, whereas many of these more harrowing poems are criss-crossed by a profusion of intentions – filial piety, confession, record, prayer – as well as by overwhelming love and loss. Some of the best are the simplest ones, such as ‘Luck’, which lists the poet’s mother’s treasured good luck charms. g

Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems was published in 2011.

Poetry in the ACT

States of Poetry highlights the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. Funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, this is the first nationally arranged poetry anthology published in this country. The individual state editors choose six local poets actively publishing new work. The complete state anthologies appear free of charge on our website. A mini-anthology (one poem per poet) appears in the print edition. Jen Webb, who has selected the 2017 ACT anthology, writes in her online introduction: ‘The six poets selected for this year’s mini-anthology are at different stages of their literary careers, each with a different focus, aesthetic, and sense of audience. All six are energetic contributors to the local literary ecology. Public or more private, long established or emerging, all offer something rich and evocative in their practice and in their bodies of work.’

What you get when you search for silence

(poem composed of Hansard search results from November 1962)

one of his colleagues has gone into a significant silence to silence us, but this is having no effect

listen in silence spoken and heard in silence

the Prime Minister has observed an unusual silence on this matter. There was an old Australian play, written many years ago, called ‘The Silence of Dean Maitland’

The honourable member talked about the silence of Dean Maitland. The silence of Arthur Calwell is the more remarkable aspect of this matter

I received a certain amount of ridicule, and a certain amount of scorn by silence there is a period of awful silence while research is carried out, and the soldier continues out of the silence into which he has preferred to enter

I am also conscious of the silence, that there was silence. That is the answer about the £10,000.

Melinda Smith ❖

Patriotism

‘... the last refuge of a scoundrel’ Samuel Johnson

But here and there a whisk of it does no essential harm: an accidental win or two in sports you never follow, a minor decency observed by those you didn’t vote for, a set of figures showing that we’re still not quite the worst of countries with a moral fault but clearly in the running.

The high point comes though when a boy or girl who seems to hail from Beijing or Bangkok or even Addis Ababa starts addressing you in diphthongs first heard long ago among your parents and their friends who’d seen off a depression and managed World War II, that accent which is ours alone, mysteriously quite unlike all other Anglophones, its vowels worn down by space and weather, eucalypts and stones.

Geoff Page

Wiradjuri country

1,000ks Wiradjuri country Eagles, angels, sun bursts, gum trees, geraniums and a pocket full of poetry. I travel my country, my land, my life, my religion.

The bush calls me back to the time of before. Before tar and cement. Brick walls and tin roofs. To the time of Creation where men were men and honesty was Lore.

Wiradjuri country, Spirit of the earth. Red dirt, dignity. Truth and justice. Lores of the land.

The wind whispers as it captures me reaching deep into my soul thousands of years of memories enter my spirit as they guide me through country.

Dignity and pride as I stand proud before my Elders of long time past I honour them with dignity and courage as I walk upon my land.

I am Wiradjuri.

Kerry Reed-Gilbert

❖

Lucy afloat

After the scattering of ashes Pulpit Rock, 26 November 2014

And then the light on these layers of grief, grit, glow that make a rock.

From blinding white to ochre soft, then rust and pink running into each other –who knows which colour came first or if the glow came before the grit before the grief?

Not even the rock knows the secrets of its chronology. It is we who look who think we know or wish to know as we stand on it to steady our feet, steady our own running into each other and into grief or grit or glow.

Still Life

As if all the world’s ravel, its bright course of device were to stream through a pinhole in the side of a box and emerge into a corridor of Delft tiles on which tiny figures from childhood or a dream semaphore at my self-portrait, ghostly pentimento in its dun vestments, and the servant drying linen in the dunes; the images unclear, inverted. Details such as these meant something to us once, we’d have recognised the tulips, citrus, overturned bouquet, understood why a chalice struts on damask drapes. Now language falters; out of my time I gape at the mantel, a strand of dropped cargo, the tendered quay at which ships ready their serene freight; ponder an hourglass, insects, the gap that sets beyond reach the risqué hare proffered to an abandoned lute pewter languor of a herring on its plate crimson fruit chased in lattice light.

Mark, Pauline and Me

1970

It is now, I think, that God touches me. I slit open the great bag of silence, say There are more stars in the universe than the grains of sand. We are lying on the grass, we are a trinity, on the grass. We are lying under a dark, pointillist sky. Bullshit Mark says there’s no God. Soon, it will be the close of school. I didn’t say there was. The world will be like a novel that was too difficult, finished at last and put aside. You were going to. I am considering the night sky. No, I wasn’t. At my right hand, Pauline has become breath. She stretches out her arms and legs, as far as they will go. Science tells us everything. Our ancestors will know everything. It is like a scene from an old Western, where someone hapless is staked to the ground for the ants to devour. Our ancestors are dead. Above, the stars are scuttling about, there are millions of them. Don’t get smart. You know what I mean. The stars are ready to pick us apart.

John Foulcher

Isi Unikowski ❖

Merlinda Bobis ❖

Publisher of the Month with Henry Rosenbloom

What was your pathway to publishing?

I had been a writer and editor at school and university, I’d worked in the Whitlam government, I’d been a freelance journalist, and I was interested in politics, history, books, and writing, so it was a natural progression –though I didn’t realise it at the time.

What was the first book you ever published?

A small book by an unknown author by the name of Henry Rosenbloom, titled Politics and the Media, in 1976.

Do you edit the books you commission? Usually.

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

What are the main qualities you look for in an author?

In non-fiction, a fresh take on an old story, or new, ground-breaking insights, or a strong argument. In fiction, the capacity to make me feel pleasure as I’m reading, even if the material is hard to take. In either category, nothing beats a strong voice and a beautiful style.

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

I love editing, and always have. There comes a stage in each manuscript when you see the world through the author’s eyes, and when you see what’s working and what’s not. It’s dealing with both that is the great challenge and, potentially, very satisfying. Apart from that, I love helping a new author find his or her voice.

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

I’ve written (and edited) since I was a schoolboy. Most of the time it’s been journalism of one kind or another, although I did write the abovementioned small book more than forty years ago. I would like to think that my own writing has sensitised me to the need, as an editor, to always think of the reader.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?

In the current era, I am full of admiration for Andrew Franklin, the founder and publisher of Profile in the

United Kingdom. I think Michael Heyward at Text is a world-class publisher. In the United States, Cindy Spiegel is a brilliant editor/publisher at her eponymous imprint, Spiegel & Grau. One of the reasons why I am still an editor and publisher is that I read A. Scott Berg’s wonderful biography of Maxwell Perkins, titled Max Perkins: Editor of genius, in 1978. Around this time, I also became deeply impressed by Di Gribble, when she was a co-founder of McPhee Gribble.

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

I think that large publishing houses, like Hollywood film studios, have a lot of pressure on them to play safe, either in terms of genres or sequels. I would probably do the same if I was in their shoes. However, independent houses have to think differently. Speaking purely for Scribe, some of our most successful books have been highly individual, and have been written by previously unknown authors.

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

Launches are evanescent, authors’ moods change, and good reviews don’t usually sell books. Nothing beats rapid sales, and any publisher who denies this is lying. Rapid sales transform the usual tepid and torpid economics of publishing, and make everything seem worthwhile – and everybody happy.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

Much the same as it’s always been.

Henry Rosenbloom is the founder and publisher of Scribe. A son of Holocaust survivors, he was born in Paris, France in 1947, was educated at the University of Melbourne, where he became the first full-time editor of the student newspaper, Farrago, and later worked in the Whitlam Labor government. The author of Politics and the Media (1976), he has been a book printer, freelance journalist, book reviewer, and occasional newspaper op-ed and feature writer. In 2010 he was presented with a George Robertson award for service to the publishing industry.

FINDING NEVO

by Nevo Zisin

Black Dog Books

$18.99 pb, 224 pp, 9781925381184

‘Coming out’ stories remain one of the most potent sources for young people to understand their own relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Living in a largely heteronormative society, many young people find a place in these stories to validate and challenge their thoughts and experiences.

Nevo Zisin’s memoir, written at the age of twenty, covers these areas but also speaks to those living outside sex and gender binaries. In recent years there has been a wealth of resources developed for people who resist such classification, and it has become a burgeoning and popular field in independent publishing. Zisin’s preferred pronouns are ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘their’. It has been some time since ‘they’ has become the preferred singular pronoun in common English usage, yet many people are still surprised when someone adopts ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.

Growing up, Zisin identified more closely as male than female, but their understanding of themselves shifts and deepens as they age. For much of their teenage years they identified as lesbian, by the end of high school they identified as trans, and at eighteen they started taking testosterone, which offered a new sense of their body and helped ease the experience that is referred to, often inappropriately, as gender dysphoria. Later, their self-identity becomes more complex than either/or. Nevo was fortunate in attending a high school that was part of the Safe Schools Coalition, which also offered Nevo’s peers insights still unavailable to the majority of Australian school students.

The memoir closely follows Zisin’s navigation of family dynamics, school, and their Jewish culture. Its strength lies in its ability to interrogate social constructs through both feminist and queer theoretical lenses. At times the memoir becomes bogged down in recollections of teenage angst, common to most young people, but Zisin is an assured writer and the memoir is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on gender diversity.

Crusader Hillis

Catholic actions

Examining the Split

John Rickard

OF LABOUR AND LIBERTY: DISTRIBUTISM IN VICTORIA 1891–1966

by Race Mathews

Monash University Publishing, $34.95 pb, 408 pp, 9781925495331

Iwas a student at Sydney University when, in 1954, the embattled Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt went public, accusing a small group of Labor MPs of disloyalty, their attempt to gain control of the party being directed from a source outside the labour movement. He identified the Melbourne News Weekly as their mouthpiece. Few had heard of B.A. (‘Bob’) Santamaria, who ran News Weekly, but his name now spread far and wide. The name had an exotic flavour, particularly when associated with a secret Catholic organisation known simply and mysteriously as ‘The Movement’. Soon we students were drunkenly singing an Evatt-oriented version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in which the chorus began ‘Santamaria, Santamaria, Keon and Mullens disloyal to me’ (Keon and Mullens being the two Victorian Labor MPs particularly associated with the Movement). Having come from an Anglican background, and having grown up at a time when sectarianism was still common, I tended to see Catholics as a regimented lot who did what they were told and attended Mass every Sunday. It therefore came as a surprise to me that what became known as ‘The Split’ was not only a split in the Labor Party but a split, with intellectual ramifications, in the Catholic community as well.

In Race Mathews’s Of Labour and Liberty, the Split is a disaster for Catholic intellectuals, its significance needing to be understood in the context of the Church’s historic attempt to come to terms with what in the nineteenth century had been identified as ‘the social problem’. The story begins in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which called for social justice in overcoming mass poverty and social

conflict, affirming that it was within the power of the state to improve the economic condition of the working class. Cardinal Manning, a convert from Anglicanism who was largely responsible for the English translation of Rerum Novarum, was active in support of trade unions, notably playing a pivotal role in settling the 1889 London dock strike, on terms advantageous to the dockers. Sydney’s Cardinal Moran was much influenced by Manning and saw the Labor Party as the best option for Australian Catholics, the great majority of whom were working-class.

In the wake of Rerum Novarum, some Catholic intellectuals, looking for an ideology that would provide a clear alternative to the extremes of capitalism and socialism, developed the theory of distributism. The starting point was ‘the restoration of property to the average citizen’. The Flemish priest Joseph Cardijn, who became a leading advocate of distributism, argued that the working class had to accept responsibility, ‘sharing in the running of industry and industrial concerns’. There was an emphasis on local production and commerce, with a hint of nostalgia for the pre-industrial Catholic guilds. Indeed in England, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton (another convert), in advocating distributism, stressed the importance of tradition which meant, Chesterton said, ‘giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors’.

Two experiments in distributism have attracted attention. In the small town of Antigonish in Nova Scotia priests at the University of St Francis Xavier launched a movement which in the depressed 1930s sought to assert the autonomy of the local community

by developing cooperatives and credit unionism. Even more important has been the example of Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain. Here, in the 1950s, Fr José María Arizmendiarrieta brought to fruition a ‘great complex of manufacturing, financial, retail, civil engineering and agricultural co-operatives’ that Mathews researched for an earlier book, Jobs of Our Own: Building a stakeholder society (1999).

In Melbourne, Archbishop Mannix was receptive to distributist ideas, but the formation of the Campion Society in 1931 was the lay initiative of a group of Catholic graduates and students. The society aimed ‘to promote Catholic Lay Action in its intellectual life’ while encouraging its members ‘to attain a fuller understanding of Catholic culture’. Frank Maher and Kevin Kelly were particularly important in its formation and development. Catholic Action began to take formal shape in 1937 with lay-inspired moves to set up, with Mannix’s support, a national secretariat, but differences soon emerged concerning the precise scope of Catholic Action. The official, papal line was that it was ‘primarily a formative, educative action’ and not political, and this was the view of the Campion Society’s leaders. But some, like the young, precocious Bob Santamaria, sought to blur the boundary between the educative and political. He had been taught history by Maher at St Kevin’s College and had been encouraged by his teacher to attend Campion Society meetings; although he had been a brilliant student Santamaria later confessed that ‘the higher flights of philosophy and history’ were quite beyond him, and that he had slept through the first two meetings he attended. But he was an ardent activist and had soon established a close, advantageous relationship with Mannix. During World War II, Santamaria was instrumental in forming a Catholic movement to fight communism in the trade unions. By the end of the war he was secretary of the theoretically non-political Catholic Action National Secretariat while also pursuing the anti-communist crusade in what had officially become the Catholic Social Studies Movement. Not much in the way of ‘social studies’

was involved in the infiltration of the unions, which was soon marked by an authoritarian secrecy that Santamaria seemed to relish.

Distributism was not helped by the sympathy some of its enthusiasts had for fascism. Belloc applauded Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as indeed did Santamaria. Parliamentary democracy as a form of government was under attack between the wars, and even the liberalminded Maher expressed a preference for ‘organic democracy’. Since World War II, distributism has had a chequered career. The Antagonish Movement seems to have withered away, and in Victoria the cooperatives and credit unions which were enthusiastically set up have tended to atrophy or lose their original purpose. Mondragón survives intact but is not without its critics.

Mathews does stress the importance of distributists seeking progressive allies outside the Church, and criticises Mannix for sometimes unnecessarily alienating Protestants. He notices that in his celebrated Harvester Judgment, which established the basic wage, the Irish-born but Protestant H.B. Higgins seemed to echo the language of Rerum Novarum. Indeed, he knew the encyclical well, having favourably reviewed it in an 1896 lecture published as Another Isthmus in History.

Mathews is concerned, as per the subtitle, with Victoria and gives us only occasional glimpses of what was happening in other states, but it does seem that Melbourne took Catholic Action more seriously than other archdioceses. Essentially, this book is addressed to Catholics. The author laments today’s upwardly mobile, conservative Catholics who disdain the social justice policies of their Church. Mathews is in effect urging Catholics to reclaim their heritage and recognise that distributism might help deal with increasing inequality. Can political democracy survive, he asks, in the absence of economic democracy? Whether or not distributism is the answer, it is a question worth asking. g

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

SUCH A LOVELY LITTLE WAR: SAIGON 1961-63 by Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel NewSouth

$37.99 pb, 274 pp, 9781551526479

For those seeking a concise illustrative history of the Vietnam War, Marcelino Truong’s graphic novel, Such a Lovely Little War, is the ideal place to begin. Those seeking a graphic novel memoir as engaging as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986–92) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2001–2), will be unsatisfied.

‘Marco’, as the author is referred to in this book, is the son of a Vietnamese diplomat, Khánh, and his French wife, Yvette. His family, including his two older siblings, were yanked from the ‘cherry pie’ idyll of America in the early 1960s when Khánh was recalled to Saigon as the war between the North and South began to escalate. In addition to the historical events and atrocities that unfold around them, the Truongs must endure Yvette’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder, triggered by a mixture of anxiety for the safety of her family and a longing to return to ‘civilisation’.

One glaring weakness in the narrative is the absence of a compelling protagonist. Truong’s five-year-old self is little more than a curious onlooker, and the grown-up Truong, who dryly narrates the memoir, appears only briefly at the end to reflect on the war with his elderly father (instead of his mother, the more interesting character).

Such a Lovely Little War is skilfully illustrated. However, the oppressive red colour scheme throughout the main narrative is incongruous in the more peaceful familial scenes in Washington or Saint-Malo, France. It is a welcome relief when fully coloured splash pages or artefacts such as stamps, children’s drawings, and propaganda posters appear, but these intriguing snapshots are few and far between. While Such a Lovely Little War makes little effort to elevate its genre, those unfamiliar with the history of Vietnam’s catastrophic war – told from the perspective of the Vietnamese – will find a valuable primer in Truong’s account.

Dilan Gunawardana

Lying in wait

Michael Winkler

THE MIND OF THE ISLAMIC STATE

by Robert Manne Redback

$22.99 pb, 186 pp, 9781863958813

One of the many contradictions of Islamic State, as exposed in Robert Manne’s latest work, is that a mob seemingly dedicated to deeds rather than words is in fact logocratic. For all of their murderous antipathy towards the People of the Book, Islamic State has relied not on speeches or policy platforms, but on a succession of books.

While some trace the genealogy of Islamic State to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (from whom, Wahhabism) or the 1928 formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and others insist it must be measured as commencing with the Qur’an in the seventh century, Manne argues for a more recent foundation: the writings of Sayyid Qutb. The quixotic Egyptian claimed that the world had fallen into jahiliyya (spiritual darkness). His remedy was violent struggle, which he commended as ‘an act of highest compassion’. A similar black-is-white contortion was Qutb’s decree that armed force was required to give people the freedom to choose Islam.

Qutb was hanged in 1966, but his promotion of hakimiyya – the idea that sovereignty can never belong to the state but only to God – and vigorous anti-Semitism infected a number of intellectual successors. Manne shows how texts by post-Qutb authors have driven the ‘progressive radicalisation or brutalisation of both the Salafi jihadist ideology and the behaviour of its adherents’. Each tome is more extreme than the last. Part justification, part battleplan, these texts provided a ‘new jurisprudence and ethic of jihad’ for a ‘new hardened and brutalised psychological type’ of fanatic.

It is difficult to reconcile the crudity of these authors’ monocular Manichaeism, troglodyte sexual politics, and

grotesque Jew-baiting with the sophistication of the intricate theological arguments employed as underpinning. Every declaration, however brutish, is tied to abstruse parsing or pressganging of hadiths or Qur’an passages.

Ayman al-Zawahiri found a way around Islam’s apparent condemnation of suicide to legitimise the jihadist suicide bomber, so ‘the warrior is fused with the martyr in a way that licenses a new form of attack’. Abu Bakr Naji ordered punishment ‘with the utmost coarseness and ugliness’. Overturning the dictate against killing other members of the faith, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi advocated killing Shi’a Muslims, labelling them ‘the most vile people in the human race … the prowling serpent, the crafty evil scorpion, the enemy lying in wait’. These statements are pavers on the path towards contemporary Islamic State’s worldview of extreme violence towards a startlingly broad range of perceived enemies.

According to Manne, this radical descent has taken Islamic State to the Gates of Hell. The requisite reading material at this destination is the online magazine Dabiq , ‘an indispensable source for an understanding of the ideology of the Islamic State’. Dabiq is a slick and sickening combination of modern graphics, aggressive Zarqawiism, arcane theology, and colour snaps of beheadings, mutilated corpses, and triumphalist posing. In consort with online videos, social media spruiking and other web publications, Dabiq represents the collision of an ideology that draws (however pervertedly) on ancient roots with the febrile DIY potentiality of modern communications. French journalist and former Islamic State captive Nicolas Hénin noted in Jihad Academy: The rise of Islamic State (2015) that, ‘Islamic State transforms jihad into a product of globalisation with strong Western connotations … Islamic State members are products of Facebook and Twitter.’ Manne contends that Dabiq expresses an ideology ‘more consistent and coherent, in my view, than the ideology of Nazism’. Stalin and the Nazis went to considerable effort to conceal their crimes. ‘By contrast the Islamic State has made a considerable effort to publi-

cise its … darkest deeds not with shame but with pride.’

There is a disconnect between the Islamic State leadership’s apparent insistence on elaborate theologically linked ideology and the attitude (and aptitude) of its rank-and-file thugs. French sociologist Olivier Roy revealed Islamic State recruits as being ‘frustrated or on society’s margins’, who, through indulgence in violence, ‘feel invested with a sense of omnipotence’. Hénin claimed, ‘Many jihadists are mediocre Muslims and many are fresh converts, or recent returnees ... They compensate for being newcomers to the faith with extraordinary radicalism.’ This tallies with anecdotal evidence about those Australians who have joined the movement, men of limited intellect with a passion for violence and little capacity for unravelling the intricacies of Qur’anic scholarship.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. Islamic State has barely enough fighters to populate Dubbo. Manne may be criticised for not drawing a direct line from Islam to the Islamic State, a right-wing hobbyhorse, despite the lack of evidence over 1,300 years for the view that Muslims have been notably more barbaric than their Abrahamic cousins. He delineates the scope of his work clearly: ‘The emergence of a genuinely new and significant ideology is one of the rarest events in political history. Salafi jihadism is the most recent example.’

The question of what should be done about Islamic State is beyond the ambit of this brief book. The half-hearted ischemic approach has not worked so far, and as the malignant cells spread through Europe, Africa, and Asia, Manne makes it clear that the battle ahead will involve ideological struggle as much as military intervention. Osama bin Laden anticipated an apocalyptic clash between extremist Islam and the West: ‘The victory of one civilisation would bring darkness to humankind. The victory of the other would bring liberation and light.’ On the evidence of this estimable book, bin Laden was absolutely right. g

Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.

My Duce

Diana Glenn

CLARETTA:

MUSSOLINI’S LAST LOVER

by R.J.B. Bosworth

Yale University Press (Footprint) $39.99 hb, 312 pp, 9780300214277

This fascinating volume on the fate of Clara (Claretta) Petacci, mistress to Benito Mussolini, by distinguished historian R.J.B. Bosworth, is a meticulously researched and multi-layered account tracing the fateful relationship between the fascist dictator and his younger paramour. From the genesis of the affair to its well-known aftermath, Bosworth enlivens our understanding of the vicissitudes of the doomed partnership by bringing Claretta’s voice to the fore. Having with great care and thoroughness translated extracts from her personal diary and correspondence, he creates a compelling account of their relationship and its many travails.

The searing image of the lovers’ bloodied corpses hanging in public view in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto in 1945 is the starting point for a frank and intimate account that is interlaced with public and private events. From then on, all is on view as the author draws out the visceral and deeply personal aspects of Claretta’s involvement with Mussolini, recording both her highly charged declarations of lifelong devotion to, and worship of, her Duce, alongside details such as the pragmatic itemisation of their experience of sexual congress which she recorded in her diary with the word si (‘yes’), appropriately underlined for good measure. At the same time, Bosworth expertly draws on a multiplicity of sources in order to provide a comprehensive account of the love affair, the constant rivalries and jealousies occasioned by Mussolini’s other sexual exploits, the unrelenting exertions of his wife, Rachele, to destroy the Petacci alliance, the demands of children, legitimate and illegitimate, and myriad other entanglements (all closely monitored by the secret police) that contributed to the daily pressures

of ‘a national boss who did not always have government business at the top of his agenda’. Amid this web of domestic strife and political power-mongering, the author spares no one in highlighting the supreme egoism of the Duce, the rampant publicity-seeking of the Petacci family, and the self-serving efforts of the Mussolini clan.

Bosworth first introduces his subject with allusions to the many artistic representations of ‘Ben and la Clara’ (as Ezra Pound termed them in his Pisan Cantos), in the form of poems, plays, a semi-documentary, film, and biographies. While he contends that with the passing of time ‘the world has largely forgotten Claretta’, this is not the case in Italy, where dark tourist sites and purported ghost sightings are part of the attraction that her memory continues to exert on the imagination of the Italian people: ‘Italy remembers’. In his narration of her story from her privileged upbringing in the Petacci family’s elegant dwellings to her final resting place in a mausoleum in Rome, the author traces sites of memory connected to Claretta’s life with a singular and unrelenting curiosity and flair. Regarded as ‘delicate’ by her parents, Claretta did not embark on secondary education, but her propensity for self-expression was strong. Her first recorded letter to the Duce at age fourteen is revealing of the adolescent worship that would later transform into an enduring love. However, as the author makes evident, the relationship between the younger woman and the older married man, who continued to engage sexually with numerous women during their time together, remained one of authoritarian and patronising control, even as her adolescent worship of him as a divine being transmogrified into a shared mutual passion. Even at the height of their affair, Claretta was subject to a continuous barrage of telephone monitoring and communication from the Duce: ‘On 3 January 1938 his tally of telephone calls reached thirteen (at 8.45, 10.45 and 11.30 a.m., and at 2.30, 3, 3.15, 4, 6, 6.15, 7, 8, 8.15 and 9.45 p.m.).’

Although Bosworth’s account is peppered with the tales of other diaries, such as the fate of the false Mussolini

diaries, and the publications of ‘true’ accounts and histories by other family and party members, ultimately it is Claretta’s detailed recording of exchanges and actions that holds sway. In April 1945, as events were reaching a fearful climax, Claretta entrusted her personal records to her friend Countess Caterina Cervis, but eventually the papers were stored and catalogued in the archives in Rome. In fending off claims for their return by the Petacci family, the state’s lawyers deemed them ‘of genuine political import’ for their insights into the historic events of the day.

As the veneer of impregnability of Mussolini’s political persona began to crumble in the dying days of the regime, the ‘defeated old puppet dictator’ was forced to face his enemies and their retribution. The historical record is replete with analysis of Mussolini’s role and activity as a political figure. However, Claretta’s personal sacrifice and obsession continue to intrigue and mystify a postwar Italian public. As the author observes, despite strenuous efforts by many writers over the years to ignore her influence in Mussolini’s life, ‘Claretta’s impassioned and doughty “love” may have found a deeper place in Italian souls than anything that genuinely survives of Fascist ideology and practice’. Bosworth’s interweaving of intimate scenes with the exigencies of Mussolini’s role in the social and political events of the day gradually reveals Claretta’s role as a protagonist in popular history. The author employs his sources masterfully, and the volume is a fundamental contribution to our understanding of this relationship and provides a unique window into its curious workings. g

Diana Glenn is Dean of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University.

Notes

Adrian Walsh

THE PRODUCTION OF MONEY: HOW TO BREAK THE POWER OF BANKERS

by Ann Pettifor Verso

$26.99 hb, 192 pp, 9781786631343

What is money, how do we create it, and how politically significant is its production? In The Production of Money, political economist Ann Pettifor makes the striking claim that the way we currently produce money gives rise to one of the most substantial challenges facing Western democracy. But how could this be so? Money is produced by printing presses and there we have the end of it. What threat could it represent for democracy?

At present, the Western democratic institutions that have remained fundamentally unchanged since the settlements at the end of World War II are under considerable threat. Most notably – and this has been much discussed by various political pundits – there are powerful political groups who reject ideals such as the separation of powers and limits upon executive authority and who have used the economic upheavals and social dislocations resulting from the global financial crisis to pursue what are fundamentally anti-democratic agendas.

But there are also threats to democratic institutions from another direction as a consequence of the liberalis-ation of the economy. Such liberalisation effectively limits the power of Western democracies to control the excesses of financial capital. Arguably, it has been the financial capital’s freedom from constraint – and the social dislocation that subsequently ensued from that freedom – that has paved the way for those who would undermine our democratic traditions and democratic institutions. It is these threats from the free movement of capital with which Pettifor is principally concerned.

Pettifor – who has a background in macroeconomic policy research and

who led the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt reduction in the developing world – is an unapologetic Keynesian. (Early in the book, she makes the remarkable claim that John Maynard Keynes and Charles Darwin are the two great British intellectuals.) However, Keynes’s ideas have been unfashionable within the economics profession and with policymakers since the mid-1970s when classical economic theory, with its deification of free markets, reasserted itself. This book is, in part, an extended plea for a return to Keynesian economic policy.

It should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Keynes’s work that Pettifor endorses greater governmental control over the economy. Pettifor cites recent empirical studies that suggest that there is no robust support for the idea that international financial integration provides quantifiable benefits. Much of what Pettifor asserts about the proper relationship between the State and the economy is standard Keynesian fare. In the years since 2008, many critics of the global financial system have made similar points about the need to reregulate the financial sector. However, what is most distinctive about Pettifor’s analysis are her claims regarding the production of money itself and how that very production affects public policy significantly.

Three key claims about the money system stand out as particularly noteworthy, especially for the layperson with little acquaintance with the inner workings of finance. First, Pettifor argues that rather than being printed by governments, money is made by private banks. Intuitively, this seems odd. Whenever television news items concerning impending changes to lending policy are reported, they invariably switch to footage of the government mint with freshly pressed notes. But as Pettifor notes, when banks loan money they do not do so on the basis of cash they have saved. Each time a bank deposits a personal or business loan in a bank account, they simply ‘tap numbers on a computer keyboard’. Most of the loans upon which business depends are not the result of government activity but are produced by private lending institutions.

Secondly, Pettifor notes that money

does not come from savings but is underpinned by trust. When one loans money to another person or institution, one is expressing trust in their ability to pay it back. So long as those who borrow have the ability to repay the loan then this is all that is required for the system to function effectively.

Thirdly, Pettifor defends banking as a fundamental public good. This is, in a sense, quite surprising since one might naturally assume from the book’s subtitle that the author is opposed to all banking. However, Pettifor is not opposed to credit itself; indeed she sees credit as an essential element of a well-functioning society. Pettifor argues that credit is creative but needs to be constrained so as to ensure that the banking system works in the interest of society as a whole. The point is not to strip banks of their ability to create money, but simply to regulate their activities.

The Production of Money provides genuine insights into the international monetary system and its influence on our current political arrangements. Pettifor argues that private control over the production of money hands monetary policy itself over to the private sector: she argues that the power of bankers must be subordinated to the will of democratically elected governments. Whether re-regulation of the banking sector is politically feasible is a matter of some considerable debate, especially given the political power wielded by the banking sector. However, Pettifor observes that such control has been achieved before –here she takes Roosevelt’s battles with financial élites in the 1930s as inspiration – and thus can be done again.

Be that as it may, the threats posed by highly mobile international capital that Pettifor identifies are genuine and clearly need to be addressed if the social dislocation of recent times is to be avoided. Pettifor presents a compelling case why the production of money cannot remain a sphere that is immune from democratic control. g

Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England. His most recent work is the edited collection The Ethical Underpinnings of Climate Economics (2016).

Signallers

Simon Caterson

CODE BREAKERS: INSIDE THE SHADOW WORLD OF SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE IN AUSTRALIA’S TWO BLETCHLEY PARKS

by Craig Collie Allen & Unwin

$32.99 pb, 389 pp, 9781743312100

In architectural terms, if no other, the Australian counterpart to the famous World War II code breaking centre at Bletchley Park initially could not have been more different. While Alan Turing and his celebrated colleagues cracked the German Enigma code at a secluded mansion in the English countryside, Australia’s code breakers began working out of a nondescript apartment block situated on a busy inner-city thoroughfare in Melbourne opposite a public golf course.

The Monterey apartment building still stands on Queens Road, Albert Park, though there is no hint as to the history making top-secret work that went on there. Back in the day, a brand-new building was considered ideal office space, as no one had moved in who would need to be relocated. A subsequent unit known as Central Bureau was set up in Cranleigh, an ivy-clad gabled mansion in South Yarra that more closely resembled the leafy environs of Bletchley Park.

The fact that so much of the military intelligence effort was concentrated in Victoria during the early part of the war was testament to the real fear at that time of a Japanese invasion of Australia. Strict curfews and other air raid precautions were observed in Melbourne, as if the threat level was similar to that faced by London. (Later, when the fear of invasion had receded, much of the Central Bureau’s operations were moved north to Queensland, and then relocated to the Philippines once the Japanese forces were in retreat.)

Despite the Australian code breakers’ remoteness from the battlefront, their efforts, conducted jointly with the

Americans, were, according to Craig Collie, just as important to signals intelligence in the Pacific War as those of the Bletchley Park team during the Battle of the Atlantic. Collie, a former television producer and SBS TV production executive, who has published three previous books on Asian aspects of wartime history, set himself a challenge with Code Breakers. The actual business of signals intelligence in itself is not dramatic: ‘The breaking of Japan’s naval codes was an arcane but tedious process requiring great patience.’ It was also an operation that required various aspects to be carried out in ignorance of the general plan so that no one knew more than they needed to.

Cryptographers applied the methods of an exact science to fragmentary and often misleading data, frequently only arriving at their solutions by a process of eliminating vast arrays of alternative explanations. If the enemy became aware that their military code had been broken, they would simply change it. Sometimes the length of time it took to crack the code meant that the solution was obsolete by the time it had been discovered.

One advantage enjoyed by the Central Bureau code breakers was the unintended consequence of the rapidity of the Japanese advance across vast distances. ‘Japan’s empire was spread so widely across the western Pacific and Southeast Asia that changes in their code were not uniform, the same message sometimes being sent in uncoded kana Morse and another in code.’ If the Japanese receiving station didn’t have access to the latest code, the message would have to be re-sent in the old one.

Collie concedes in the acknowledgements that ‘This was not an easy book to write.’ Readers with an interest in the subject will be grateful to him for pulling together all the strands. Collie laments that ‘The post-war embargo on revealing intelligence activity during the war has meant that much of the knowledge is gone. After forty years, personal accounts are prey to faulty memory and to the desire to move into the spotlight or to settle old scores’.

Despite the dispersed and highly technical nature of the primary material,

the author breathes life into many of the shadowy personalities involved and the inter-agency rivalries that operated among and between the American and Australian code breakers. At least on the American side, there was a certain competitiveness and institutional suspicion, as well as cooperation, which didn’t always sit well with the generally more laid back Australians.

Notwithstanding the intellectual sophistication and organisational challenges involved in signals intelligence, Code Breakers is mostly a story of success as the result of sheer persistence in the face of considerable odds. Although signals intelligence had predicted yet failed, due to bureaucratic unpreparedness, to prevent the attack on Pearl Harbor, a valuable early contribution was made to the Allied success in the Battle of the Coral Sea and at Midway, where the Japanese naval fleet suffered a decisive defeat.

It is worth pointing out that the Australian and American cryptographers had much greater success in cracking the Japanese codes than the Japanese had in penetrating Allied secret communications.

In an era when it seems increasingly difficult to get anything done in Australia that requires cooperative effort in the national interest, the can-do approach and industriousness of the much smaller and less well-resourced wartime generation in hindsight only grows more impressive. Apart from what it adds to our knowledge of the history of cryptography, Code Breakers convincingly provides yet another example of how Australia, despite its geography and population, contributed disproportionately to the Allied cause in World War II. g

Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer.

Radical centre

Robert Crocker

GRIFFITH REVIEW 55: STATE OF HOPE

edited by Julianne Schultz and Patrick Allington

Griffith University/Text Publishing

$27.99 pb, 306 pp, 9781925498295

South Australia remains something of a national contradiction in terms, and this is brought out well in this richly diverse and varied collection of essays and stories. Shifting its focus away from Adelaide to many of South Australia’s older industrial and pre-industrial centres, including Whyalla, Port Augusta, the Riverland, and Clare, Griffith Review’s State of Hope is no tourist guide and does not contain any particularly useful historical overview for those who might want one. However, the editors ask an important question which those living in other states often want to know: what makes South Australia so different? The answers, and there are many, come together piece by piece in the reading of this collection. Few readers will be left unrewarded by at least some of the assembled guests at this particular literary dinner party. So, what does make South Australia so different? Well, firstly, there is the story of South Australia’s colonial origins, which, by Australian standards, is unaccustomedly idealistic, certainly more than the usual story of a grab for land. As Julianne Schultz in her introduction points out, South Australia was founded by Reformers (with a capital R), idealistic gentlemen devoted not only to freedom of religious belief and political association, but to equality of opportunity, and even a fair and equal treatment of indigenous peoples, at a time when

none of these things was valued elsewhere. This reforming spirit periodically erupts from South Australia into national politics, with the Nick Xenophon phenomenon being a useful example, summed up here in Dennis Atkins’s essay on the ‘radical centre’. This is good for the state, because it means those in Canberra who forget why this ‘radical centre’ exists, and why South Australia persists in embracing new things they don’t like, must at least look over the border occasionally and attend to our demands. Like their nineteenth-century forebears, it seems, South Australians prefer their centre-right pro-business party to embrace social issues more positively than their eastern neighbours, and Xenophon embodies this tradition.

Secondly, South Australia is not ‘a green and pleasant land’, except for a month or so in the winter. As the old saw goes, it is ‘the driest state in the driest continent’, having what my father used to refer to rather too kindly as an ‘ascetic climate’, cold and windy in the winter and often oppressively hot in the summer, with an erratic rainfall. This has created a history of many failed attempts to ‘make good’ on the land, which is evidenced not only by the smaller size of Adelaide compared to the other capitals, but, more tragically, by the ruined homesteads of those who once dared settle above the so-called Goyder’s Line to the north (named after an extraordinary South Australian). Apart from the shared Murray, there is no big river in the state, and no easily accessed source of water, apart from a few creeks in Adelaide itself. This creates natural constraints that everyone in South Australia feels sooner or later, but constraints that have probably inspired an unusual spirit of ingenuity and innovation.

Thirdly, as many of the essays in this collection suggest, including Robyn Archer’s charming memoir of growing up in Adelaide, it is the creativity and risk-taking of a handful of persistent South Australian individuals that have again and again come up with the goods. For example, the successful resurrection forty years ago of the state’s wine industry, now worth over $2 billion to the state’s economy, was not the result of

politicians luring large companies with public largesse to start growing more grapes. As Max Allen’s perceptive essay on the more recent upsurge in quality winemaking in the Riverland shows, these things have a way of starting in the hearts and minds of a few brave individuals who are willing to ‘give it a go’, often against considerable odds, and typically against the advice of those who think they know best.

Finally, and closely related to this, South Australia has an unusually positive attitude towards the arts and culture, which persists despite the deadening hand of a reactionary conservatism that has progressively white-anted not only the legacy of Don Dunstan, but creativity, education, and science across the nation. As in the social sphere, Dunstan built upon a structure that had deep roots in South Australia. For example, Adelaide’s surviving art, design, and music schools are amongst the oldest in the nation, despite the state’s relatively small population and typically persistent lack of funds. Its artists, writers, dancers, musicians, and scientists have on many occasions achieved international fame, even if leaving Adelaide and South Australia was the price they had to pay, something else that again and again crops up in South Australia’s story.

As this rich and distinctive collection of essays and stories shows, despite its relative isolation, small population, entrenched social and economic problems, and troubling post-industrial malaise – nicely summarised in John Spoehr’s opening essay – South Australia is an unusual, extremely diverse, and persistently innovative sort of place. Like an annoying younger brother to Australia’s much larger and richer east coast states, the state persists in being a sort of living laboratory of creatively divergent endeavours that occasionally, and spectacularly, bear fruit. South Australia still has many reasons to be a ‘state of hope’. g

Robert Crocker teaches the history and theory of design, and design for sustainability, in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia. ❖

Art

ABR Arts

Peter Hill on Van Gogh and the Seasons

Film

Barnaby Smith

Whiteley (Transmission)

Opera Alastair Jackson

Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci (Opera Australia)

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.

Film

Anwen Crawford

Things to Come (Palace Films)

National Gallery of Victoria staff installing Vincent van Gogh’s Wheatfield, 1888, as part of Van Gogh and the Seasons at NGV International (photograph by Tobias Titz)

Whiteley

by Barnaby Smith

In 1980, Brett Whiteley completed his famous portrait of Patrick White, Patrick White at Centennial Park 1979–1980, disagreements over which caused a terminal rupture in their friendship. Of his intentions for the painting Whiteley said, ‘Could I make a vision of the feeling of his literature plus how he lived, and the complexity of him as a person, his humour, his bitchiness, his pronouncements?’

Director James Bogle, in many ways, asks the same

with techniques of collage and even fantasy, combine to produce a fascinating glimpse of a brilliant artist whose work and life retain a special place in Australia’s cultural consciousness.

Bogle’s largely narratorless film charts Whiteley’s journey from a childhood in the affluent Sydney suburb of Longueville to his death at fifty-three in a Thirroul motel room in 1992, an event that several of the film’s talking heads suggest was inevitable in the wake of Whiteley’s on-again-off-again heroin addiction, which lasted the best part of twenty years. The narrative is driven by diary entries recited by actors, tasteful dramatisations, and old interviews (including with one of Whiteley’s biographers, Barry Pearce, the makers opting not to approach Ashleigh Wilson, author of Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing [reviewed in ABR, September, 2016], for a more contemporary angle on Whiteley).

These storytelling devices are balanced, quite beautifully, by a manipulation of graphics in which motion is brought to still photography. In a charmingly lo-fi way, images are overlayed and interspersed with each other, while others are edited to produce a three-dimensional effect. Occasionally reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, the technique brings a vibrancy and expressiveness to that comparatively staid staple of similar documentaries, the faded old black-and-white photo.

question of Whiteley himself and his art with this fastpaced, alluring patchwork of a documentary. Indeed, like the White portrait, some artistic licence, along

Another endearing feature of the film is Whiteley’s unique manner of speaking in the mish-mash of interviews that have been collated. His rampant chatter is incomprehensible gibberish at times – the film opens with one of his more nonsensical soliloquies as he disappears down a philosophical rabbit hole – but there is certainly something colourfully, chaotically poetic to his turn of phrase. Many of his heroes after all – Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Dylan –were literary figures, even if he does lament grappling with ‘the battleship heaviness of words’.

Words, of course, feature heavily on a number of Whiteley paintings, including The American Dream (1968–69), his spectacular multi-medium expression of confusion and disgust at the Vietnam War. One of the most entertain-

A still from Whiteley

ing sections of Whiteley covers the years in which Brett, wife Wendy, and daughter Arkie lived in New York in the late 1960s as this enormous eighteen-panel painting was created. Its depiction of violence and apocalypse saw Whiteley exploring aesthetics that echo Theodor Adorno’s remark, ‘The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: Radically darkened art.’ The American Dream was a precursor to Whiteley’s fabled Alchemy (1972–73), also in eighteen panels, which, though less political and more spiritual than its predecessor, continued this electrifying period in Whiteley’s career, when his goal appeared to be a kind of compassionate provocation of an existentially complacent public.

Wendy Whiteley is almost as much the star as Brett himself

Wendy Whiteley is almost as much the star of Whiteley as Brett himself. Her descriptions of their life together are sad, funny, and devoid of sentimental nostalgia. The film confirms that Wendy was not only his artistic muse and loyal companion (until their 1989 divorce at least), but also remains the faithful guardian of his legacy, and the most insightful interpreter of his work – perhaps more so than the man himself.

Indeed, if there is one theme threaded throughout Bogle’s documentary, it is the mystery of where Whiteley’s visions and inspiration came from. His devotion to exploring Rimbaud’s ‘derangement of the senses’ dictum through drugs and alcohol was certainly one factor, but the film makes it clear that Brett, Wendy, and others saw his gift as a mysterious bestowal from god-knows-where.

This can lead to an over-mythologising of this Australian icon – I am not old enough to have experienced Whiteley’s presence and stature on the nation’s cultural scene. From this vantage point it seems that in discourse today Whiteley can be elevated to the point that, like Rimbaud, the storied image of the man, the legend, overshadows both the works themselves and his humanity. Whiteley does not shirk away from the latter: in the film Wendy describes him as ‘vicious’ to live with, and in terms that verge on the patronising regarding his extramarital affairs, sees him as an immature boy going through a ‘phase’.

Bogle is ultimately successful in juxtaposing the flaws and inconsistencies of the man with the undoubted genius of his paintings, producing an imaginative, unconventional film that leaves the viewer happily ‘transmuted’, to use one of Brett’s favourite terms, into an intoxicating reverie that is not unlike the dazzling effect of the paintings themselves. g

Whiteley (Transmission Films), 90 minutes, directed by James Bogle. Barnaby Smith is a writer, musician, and poet currently based in northern New South Wales.

Van Gogh and the Seasons

by Peter Hill

In the last seventy days of Vincent van Gogh’s short life, he painted seventy paintings. His intense career as an artist lasted for a single decade, from the age of twenty-seven to thirty-seven. Before that he had been, variously, a trainee preacher, an evangelist to miners, a labourer, and an art dealer. These brought little success and no satisfaction. How would he fare as an artist? His brother, Theo, was always his staunchest supporter, emotionally and financially. And it was to Theo that Vincent addressed more than 600 letters.

Not content with having the most productive ten-year period in art history, Van Gogh’s Protestant work ethic also saw him produce enough memoiristic writing to fill four huge volumes. Some have seen him as a demented saint or martyr, and more myths have revolved around him than any other artist (that he lost his ear in a duel with Gauguin; that he did not commit suicide at all but was shot in the stomach by a local boy with a fixation about the American Wild West, etc.).

By contrast, Van Gogh had a clear vision of where he was going and of his own work and worth. ‘On no account would I choose the life of a martyr. For I have always striven for something other than heroism, which I do not have in me.’

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1914) should be recommended to every art student – and indeed I always do this – along with Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists (1550). They are both page-turners, full of delicious gossip, high ideals, and often very low lives.

Van Gogh could be predicting Beckett’s ‘Try again, fail again, fail better’ when he writes to Theo on 1 October 1882, ‘Once again hard at work drawing, I sometimes think there is nothing nicer than drawing … Things like this are difficult, however, and don’t always work straight away. When they do work, it’s sometimes the end result of a whole series of failures.’

Van Gogh wrote about the seasons almost as dazzlingly as he painted them. It is this seasonal overview, the dream child of Dutch curator Sjaar van Heugten (former head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum,

Amsterdam), that makes the NGV’s current exhibition so special. A large part of the ground floor is divided into four spaces, and each is assigned a season. After a gallery full of the Japanese prints that so influenced Van Gogh, we begin with autumn, partly because the exhibition itself opened in autumn, but also because Van Gogh used to say that autumn was his favourite season. In the first series of rooms you will find a selection of his autumnal drawings and paintings made across his entire career, from 1880 to 1890. And so it is with each season – winter being the darkest of them all, the weather too cold to paint outdoors, but many fine drawings were made inside, with a model. And he talks about the seasons in his letters.

‘Last winter I met a pregnant woman,’ he writes, ‘deserted by the man whose child she was carrying. A pregnant woman who walked the streets in the winter – she had her bread to earn, you’ll know how. I took that woman on as a model and have worked with her all winter. I couldn’t pay her a model’s full daily wages, but I paid her rent all the same, and thus far, thank God, I have been able to save her and her child from hunger and cold by sharing my own bread with her.’

This woman is Sien Hoornik. She also has a young daughter. Van Gogh takes her into his house and is determined to marry her against his family’s wishes. In summer, with the arrival of Sien’s child, he writes to Theo: ‘We have a definite need of each other, so that she and I were no longer to be parted, our lives became more and more intertwined and it was love’. His new life would be made up of ‘a new studio, a still young household in full swing. No mystical or mysterious studio, but one rooted in real life. A studio with a cradle and a commode’. But by September he realises city life is beyond his means. He splits from Sien and heads

first for the cheaper Hoogeveen and then for Nieuw Amsterdam. Three years later, he would move to Paris and throw himself into contemporary experimentation with his soon-to-be close friends the Australian John (Peter) Russell, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Émile Bernard.

Two years later, in 1888, he moves to Arles in the south of France, lodges in the Restaurant Carrel, and turns up the colour spectrum to full volume. The final two rooms of this great exhibition – Spring and Summer – have marvellous examples of this period, including a golden wheat field and an astonishing self-portrait. g Van Gogh and the Seasons continues at the National Gallery of Victoria International until 9 July 2017. The exhibition catalogue, Van Gogh and the Seasons ($79.95 hb, $39.95 pb, 288 pp, 9781925432350) is written by Sjraar van Heugten, with contributions by Joan E. Greer and Ted Gott (NGV).

and curator.

Peter Hill is an artist, writer,

Orchard in blossom, 1889 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Avenue of poplars in autumn, 1884 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)

Cav-and-Pag

Alastair Jackson

Such was the early international success of this double bill that both works were performed together at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in September 1893 – Pagliacci less than sixteen months after its world première in Milan. Impresario George Musgrove even secured the original Canio, tenor Fiorello Giraud, who had been chosen for the part by Ruggero Leoncavallo himself. The two works (known for generations as Cav-and-Pag) have been presented many times since that illustrious Melbourne season and, with few exceptions, have been box-office hits. They are so compatible that on the rare occasions when one of the operas is paired with a different work I feel rather cheated.

This latest Opera Australia production is actually an Olivier Award-winning co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and it does not disappoint. Director Damiano Michieletto cleverly blends the plots of both operas into one village, making full use of the revolving stage. The works are set in the late twentieth century, with Alfio making his first appearance in an Alfa Romeo. The eternal emotions of lust, betrayal, jealousy, and death are just as relevant today as in the 1890s when the works exemplified the verismo style of opera which was then emerging, and which predated by half a century a similar trend in Italian cinema by the likes of Visconti, Fellini, and de Sica.

end of a performance. Until his dying days, Leoncavallo recalled the man’s voice ringing out through the court. Thus was born the model for Canio.

Each opera has its own sets. Cavalleria Rusticana () takes place in a bakery and the village square, against the backdrop of Easter preparations, while Pagliacci () is played out (onstage and off) in a village hall with a backstage. The two works were further linked by the Pagliacci posters advertising the coming play in the square during Cavalleria Rusticana. I would have preferred a more attractive setting for the village square – perhaps a few tubs of colourful blooms. A blue Italian sky never goes amiss and would have been a contrast to the tragic events which unfold in both works. Still, the updating works well and is never distracting or irrelevant to the action on stage.

Making her Melbourne début Serbian soprano Dragana Radakovic (Turandot in the 2016 Handa Opera in Sydney) was a convincing Santuzza, both vocally and dramatically. She played the betrayed lover with great passion and sorrow before vengeance took its toll. She was well matched with tenor Diego Torre as Tu-

Pietro Mascagni loathed the term verismo and initially denied that Cavalleria Rusticana, first performed in 1890 and based on a drama by Giovanni Verga, was any such thing. In later years, Mascagni had to admit that his most successful work relied on passion expressed with an impetus and fire which exactly matched the Sicilian temperament. Leoncavallo, the son of a judge, based Pagliacci on a true case over which his father presided. The young composer vividly recalled the trial of an actor who, in a fit of jealous rage, murdered his wife at the

riddu, the man who has deserted her. Torre has become a familiar figure to Opera Australia audiences. His voice is ideally suited to the Italian repertoire, from Verdi to Puccini, and he was compelling as the simple and caddish villager besotted by a former lover who has since married.

José Carbó and Sian Pendry were splendid as Alfio and the unfaithful Lola, whilst Mamma Lucia was sung and acted with great pathos by Dominica Matthews. The tense exchange between Alfio and Mamma Lucia when discussing Turiddu’s supposed excursion to buy wine was chillingly dramatic, as was Alfio spilling his wine as a prelude to the challenge. Lola was a perfect seductress

Diego Torre as Turiddu and Dragana Radakovic as Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana (photograph by Keith Saunders)

with a voice to match. The piety of the Easter Hymn and Santuzza’s poignant ‘Voi lo sapete’ were especially moving, as was Turiddu’s touching farewell to his mother (‘Mamma, quel vino è generoso’).

Conductor Andrea Licata always gets the best from Orchestra Victoria, and the riches of Mascagni’s score were a highlight of the evening. Only once, in the Turiddu–Santuzza duet, did the sound somewhat overshadow the singers. Licata’s tempi were perfect; he brought out every subtlety in the lush orchestration, especially in the Intermezzo. His conducting of Pagliacci was just as impressive.

Pagliacci featured several of the same singers and was cleverly presented, making use of doubles and enabling the crazy Canio to visualise his wife and her lover, Beppe, on the village hall stage, even though both were on (our real) stage and performing independently.

Diego Torre was, if anything, even better as the in-

creasingly manic Canio. His ‘Vesti la giubba’ predictably brought the house down, and he was ably partnered by the young Russian soprano Anna Princeva as Nedda. Her aria ‘Stridono lassù’ was exquisitely sung. José Carbó shone in the Prologue and showed yet again what a fine and reliable baritone he has become. Samuel Dundas and John Longmuir were excellent in the supporting roles of Silvio and Beppe. The Opera Australia Chorus (under Anthony Hunt) and the Children’s Chorus (under Michael Curtain) sang and acted well in both works, and were especially effective as the horrified audience in Pagliacci as the play progressed to its tragic finale. g

Cavalleria Rusticana / Pagliacci (Opera Australia) was performed at the Arts Centre Melbourne 10–20 May 2017. Performance attended: 10 May.

Alastair Jackson is a retired medical practitioner and has a long involvement with music, opera, and the arts.

Black Door with Snow

After Georgia O’Keeffe: Series 1 – From the Plains, 1919 and Back Door with Snow, 1955

‘The essential thing is what we always miss.’

Jorge Luis Borges

Warm billowing swill of night, I hold you back, I pull you tight. This will not do. It’s not all right. I hate the rhyming pangs of night. The frankfurters shrivel in their pink skins. The pot, boiling over, sizzles dry and when you call petroleum quaffs grey green coffee eyes.

Black door with snow, I’d rather leave you open but Dot once said of Death (misquote) you’re not simple and neither am I. I refuse to believe (but reserve the right for later) O damn it, I will not cry. How come blue lightning strung with Buddha’s tears swarms in kernels, lime Sturm und Drang the second time, a second call, another round of rind? He’d better fast track those handyman jobs and paint the downspout green, or I’ll be stuck with it, my mother says. And then, there’s the other, a shadow on her lung, a ball of liver, two more hairy balls sprouting in her brain, and my father with his tarmac tincture, nothing lost, nothing gained. Nothing is still something absence says, and then the phone flaps dead, not for want of coins or payment plans or my father’s steely Bring on the drugs, I’m not complaining. Tensile the drill of satellites ahead, herding dis-comfortable sheep. Night with its brush of mushroom accordions. Stars stuck on with lipstick, finger paint and sleep.

Shari Kocher ❖

Shari Kocher is the author of The Non-Sequitur of Snow (2015).

All about Bianca

David McInnis

SHAKESPEARE’S CINEMA OF LOVE: A STUDY IN GENRE AND INFLUENCE

by R.S. White

Manchester University Press (Footprint) $154 hb, 247 pp, 9780719099748

Does William Shakespeare still matter? The question was posed frequently throughout 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. Those sceptical of Shakespeare’s enduring relevance faced the challenge of explaining the seemingly endless proliferation of films and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in an age ostensibly dislocated from early modern sensibilities and politics. R.S. White’s timely book on the influence of Shakespeare on Hollywood cinema offers a refreshing account of the ‘contestatory and symbiotic’ relationship between Shakespeare’s generic innovations and the development of cinematic genres in early Hollywood. For White, although the influence of Shakespeare on contemporary film culture can be measured by the sheer number of explicit adaptations, a more significant legacy can be discerned in the degree to which Hollywood’s comedies of love exhibit ‘a deeper, structural analogy’ to Shakespeare on the level of genre itself.

White’s thesis is that Shakespeare’s presence in virtually every cinematic genre imaginable is less the product of the ‘apparent ease’ with which his plays can be referenced, but rather ‘the fact that his plays have had some part in the creation of these movie genres’. (An intriguing by-product of this claim is the observation that resistance to Anglocentric tradition made France’s film industry a distinct outlier in the global market precisely because it escaped the formative influence of Shakespeare on its cinematic genres.) Occasionally, White overstates the originality or ‘singularity’ of Shakespeare (to borrow Gary Taylor’s term from Reinventing Shakespeare , 1989), but his usual practice is to more cautiously suggest that ‘Shakespeare helped to prioritise some paradigms of love’ that were ‘absorbed into movies’.

The Taming of the Shrew is accordingly valued for its contribution to the formation of ‘odd-couple’ or ‘screwball’ comedy, in which adversarial relationships between the sexes are explored along a broad spectrum encompassing ‘social conservatism, populism, and egalitarian attitudes’, depending on the historical context. Here, White provides a helpful overview of seminal film versions of Shrew including the Mary Pickford–Douglas Fairbanks production of 1929 through to Franco Zeffirelli’s more ‘simplistic’ 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the conservative heteronormativity of the 1950s musical Kiss Me Kate. But it is the attention to the less obvious beneficiaries of Shakespeare’s love-paradigms that stand out: the ‘sexual antagonism’ and ‘anarchic individualism’ of such screwball comedies as Love Before Breakfast (1936), Adam’s Rib (1949), or the ‘anti-romantic comedy of marriage’, It Happened One Night (1934). White’s subtitle, ‘genre and influence’, is slightly misleading in that a ‘process of reciprocal enlightenment’ (rather than unidirectional ‘influence’) characterises his scholarship: for example, these films’ reliance on pre- and postwar attitudes to gender in constructing plausible motivations for characters who, in Shakespeare, were merely commedia dell’arte stereotypes, offers the opportunity to read Shrew through Hollywood, not merely the other way around. In the context of Shrew this might mean renewed attention to the fate of Katharina’s sister, which yields ‘surprising, underlying similarities of genre between All About Eve [1950] and The Taming of the Shrew’, provided ‘we respect Shakespeare’s design, which places more weight than productions usually afford on the plot concerning Bianca’. Perhaps, White suggests wryly but provocatively, we might think of Shrew as ‘All About Bianca’.

A chapter on the ‘structural components of romantic comedy’ emphasises the way films are as likely to borrow liberally from a variety of plays as to adapt a single Shakespearean precursor. Arguing that, for a modern audience, Shakespeare essentially ‘invented’ the forms of comedy now popularly associated with him, White outlines key

conventions from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice that are shown to exert a constant influence on film genre ‘despite the economic, political, cultural, and historical changes’ accompanying over a century of films (he also includes a ‘clear and comprehensive’ list of the ‘shared territory’ as found in film). The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Bringing Up Baby (1938) are accordingly linked to Dream, whilst Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) is ‘an economical foreshortening of As You Like It’.

Subsequent chapters on musical comedy’s reliance on Shakespearean conventions and on ‘disguise and mistaken identity’ repeat the formula of surveying explicitly Shakespearean examples followed by less intuitive instantiations of generic influence that exhibit such shared conventions as the contrast between repressive institutions and a ‘green world’ of liberation. White’s concept of ‘genre’ is capacious enough to encompass the disguise motif as ‘at least a sub-genre of romantic comedy’, and flexible enough to accommodate a specifically ‘Romeoand-Juliet genre’ in the final chapter. Whilst acknowledging Shakespeare’s liebestod myth sources, White argues that Shakespeare’s handling of the love-death myth is the most familiar in Western culture. He distinguishes Romeo and Juliet from the other Shakespeare plays in his study on the grounds that ‘the actual narrative’ (rather than a more ‘generalised genre such as “romantic comedy”’) influenced movies. More so than in previous chapters, White here moves out from Hollywood to consider the effect of Shakespeare on global cinema.

White’s chosen focus on genre formation is not a Rorschach test in which every inky film presents Shakespeare’s likeness; the attention to structural analogies between Shakespearean romantic comedy and Hollywood love stories is compelling, and although it is ostensibly a cinematic study, it encourages the reader to critically reinterpret Shakespeare’s plays rather than merely strain to spot the Shakespearean allusion in films. g

David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Things to Come

by Anwen Crawford

Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) is a married professor of philosophy, with two adult children, a sunny, book-lined Parisian apartment, and several published works to her name. Success has granted her self-assurance, at least in public. Early in Things to Come (or L’Avenir, to give the film’s French title), we watch her cross a student picket line without compunction, the arguments of the young protestors seeming to bounce off her. At home, over a family lunch, her husband, Heinz (André Marcon), also a philosopher, teases her about the gradual retreat of her youthful ideals. ‘Okay, I was a communist,’ she says defensively. ‘No shame.’ Who changes, and why, and how one lives with it – these knotty questions underpin a film that nevertheless proceeds with subtlety and wit.

Things to Come is a portrait of a woman who loses nearly everything that she thought she could rely on, but it isn’t a tragedy, much less a melodrama. In the lead role as Nathalie –and she appears in nearly every scene – Huppert is resolutely unsentimental, and often funny. Nathalie is competent but also a bit fretful, understandably so, given that she is pressed upon not only by her husband and students, but also by her publisher, and especially by her histrionic mother, Yvette (a perfectly formed performance from Édith Scob), who threatens to kill herself every few days. With all these demands upon her time and attention, Nathalie is almost always in a rush, and sometimes the camera follows her in a flurry.

And then it all begins to fall away. Heinz, who has been having an affair, decides to leave her. ‘I thought you’d love me forever,’ Nathalie says to him, crestfallen. (‘What an idiot’, she admonishes herself.) Yvette becomes unmanageable and is moved into a care home. Nathalie’s prestigious publisher falls sway to a new marketing team, which decides to repackage her backlist in lurid colours. ‘This looks like an ad for M&Ms,’ she scoffs, glancing at one mock-up. For Nathalie, this particular change is not only unwelcome but unnecessary, and therefore insulting; she reacts similarly when, returning home one afternoon, she discovers that Heinz has reclaimed his portion of their shared library. ‘My Levinas, with all my notes!’ she exclaims, more affronted by that small but visible forfeiture than by larger, less tangible losses.

Nathalie’s commitment to philosophy, and her acute sense of life’s absurdities – which she expresses with a short, sharp

laugh – are bulwarks against her emotional dissolution. Things to Come is a rare and welcome film for not suggesting that a woman is unnatural or unfeeling to care for her work as much as for her family. Nor is Huppert, as a performer, the ice queen that she is often lazily described as being. She brings restraint to the character, but she is never controlling; as the film goes on, she allows Nathalie to crumple when no one is looking. For all Nathalie’s exasperation at the various demands placed upon her, she wants to be needed, and she is most vulnerable when she feels that she has been forgotten. At one point, she seems to have been abandoned even by her mother’s cat, Pandora; when the cat returns, Nathalie’s delight is real.

A cat is not the only brightness in her life. As a counterpoint to Heinz’s desertion, there exists the intriguing prospect of Fabien (Roman Kolinka), a handsome former student. Sexual and political tensions run between them. Fabien, an anarchist, leaves Paris for a commune in the countryside; when Nathalie visits, he criticises her for never putting philosophy into action, and for being too willing to accept the material comforts ofbourgeois life. ‘I’ve changed,’ she admits to one of Fabien’s comrades. ‘But the world hasn’t’, comes the impatient reply. It is an open question as to who, if anyone, is correct in this tussle: perhaps Nathalie’s life contains hypocrisies, as most of our lives do, but she is also unsettled by her protégé’s moral certainty, which she believes might make him cruel.

The film’s ease with political questions and texts feels very French – Rousseau crops up more than once. It must also be, in part, a reflection of director Mia Hansen-Løve’s own milieu; both her parents were philosophy teachers. At thirty-six, Hansen-Løve has made five feature films, and these dramas have mostly been about the lives of Parisian artists and intellectuals. The Father of My Children (Le père de mes enfants, 2009) told the story of an indebted film producer who kills himself, and of the family he leaves behind; the central character was partially based on the real-life figure of Humbert Balsan, who died in similar circumstances. Eden (2014) had a more youthful cast, and centred on music DJs; it too was partly inspired by a real person, in the form of the director’s brother, also a DJ. HansenLøve handles her material deftly: she has a clear sense of narrative structure, but allows each story to unfold without it seeming forced or hurried. Her actors clearly trust her, and she keeps the camera at a mostly unobtrusive distance from them, observing but not prying. Things to Come deservedly won Hansen-Løve the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.

As the certainties that regulated Nathalie’s life disappear, she discovers a new freedom, not of the kind that she might once have expected as a young radical. There is no triumph here, no glorious new dawn; the future is still entangled with the past. Nathalie is marked by loss, but not destroyed by it. ‘Woe to him who has nothing to desire,’ she tells her students, quoting Rousseau. So she keeps on. g

Things to Come ( L’Avenir ) (Palace Films), 102 minutes, written and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve.

Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly

Three Little Words

by Andrew Fuhrmann

There is something more than a little ersatz about Three Little Words, the latest play by Joanna MurraySmith. It has all the usual parts, but it doesn’t feel like a real play.

It opens – you’ll never guess – in a suburban living room. Tess and Curtis (Catherine McClements and Peter Houghton), a convivial middle-aged couple, are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary. To celebrate this auspicious landmark, they’ve decided to get a divorce. Tess, it seems, has had enough. She still loves Curtis, but she finds him a bit of a bore. She wants more from life. More of what exactly she does not know. It’s just a feeling, a ‘yearning’. Curtis is quietly heartbroken but goes along with the plan because – well, why not? He is sensitive to a fault and determined to support his wife in everything. Even their teenage daughter (never seen) is cool with it.

Annie and Bonnie (Kate Atkinson and Katherine Tonkin), however, are shocked. They are friends of the family who, like Tess and Curtis, have been a couple for twenty years. They try to convince Tess that her desire for self-fulfilment is a pipedream and that she is trashing a not-so-bad marriage for the sake of a romantic illusion, an airy nothing, a fantasy. In part, their dismay is selfish. Long-term relationships are hard work, and they too have had their ups and downs, their secret hungers and confusions. What if divorce is somehow contagious? Tess, they reason, had a duty to stick it out. She failed and now they are all in danger.

It is not as if any of this is obviously preposterous. Some happily wedded couples do end things more or less amicably for the sake of a change. What begins amicably sometimes ends in open warfare. And yet, Three Little Words somehow manages to make it seem like the most implausible nonsense in the world, a simulacrum performance.

Throughout the play, the actors perform on a large, square platform crowded with the most unexceptional possible furnishings. ‘I don’t want to be saddled with history,’ says Tess. ‘I’m going to only buy Ikea. It’s cheap and its ubiquitous and it doesn’t touch your soul.’ She follows through on this promise and solemnises her separation from Curtis by purchasing one of those omnipresent BEKVÄM step stools. Is this meant to show up the superficiality of her desire for freedom? In any case, the banality of the set

only exaggerates the overall feeling that this is not a real play, that it is somehow a showroom play, with as much substance behind it as a shelf of faux books.

Not that all the books in this play are fake. Much is made of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934). It was over this book that Tess and Curtis first bonded. Fitzgerald, says Curtis, expertly captures the surfaces of privilege. Tess agrees. And perhaps Three Little Words, which, in its own way, is about feckless and doomed lovers, is meant to be something like that: a critique of the restlessness and disappointments of today’s privileged, always worried about what they might be missing out on, never satisfied with what they have. And yet it is hard to take seriously a show that offers up such flimsy epigrams as ‘Loyalty is the lie we tell ourselves to justify our fear’.

Still, there are one or two zippy exchanges and funny lines. Often I wished that this production could be cut free of living-room naturalism and social satire, and done over as pure farce. Joanna Murray-Smith can do farce well, as she proved most recently with Day One, A Hotel, Evening (2011). And so much here might be excused if the actors themselves could laugh a little. For example, the cumbersome antique item called a tantalus cabinet, a name so pregnant with significance that it begs to be giggled at. Director Sarah Goodes, however, treats the play as though she were still working on Switzerland, the psychological thriller by Murray-Smith that Goodes directed for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2014. It all seems so ponderous, so slow and stiff and laboured. Meanwhile Paul Jackson has lit the stage as if he confused the play with Pinter’s The Homecoming (1934), all twilight and melancholy.

Catherine McClements is pretty good as the ingenuous Tess, and offers throughout a fine blend of girlish optimism and middle-aged mania. Like Nicole in Tender Is the Night, she has a ‘moving childish smile that is like all the lost youth in the world’. She stands at the corner of the stage, shrugs her shoulders, sighs and stares longingly out past the audience, as though the yearning for something different were the most natural and human yearning of all. Despite her capriciousness and her inadvertent rudeness, this woman, in McClement’s hands, does come off as innocent and sympathetic in her sincerity. In comparison, Peter Houghton, Kate Atkinson, and Katherine Tonkin all tend toward transparency, disappearing into the scenery, snorting and puffing from behind the couch.

Three little words. Which words? Perhaps – is that it? There is very little in this play that isn’t announced in the first ten minutes. It is like a Potemkin play. We get the big façade, but there is nothing behind it, or very little: no clever reveal or discovery scene, no killer twist, no confounding reversal. The shouting just gets louder as everyone slides toward misery and meanness. g

Three Little Words (Melbourne Theatre Company) was written by Joanna Murray-Smith and directed by Sarah Goodes. It ran from 18 April to 27 May 2017. Performance attended: 22 April.

Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic.

Angela Hewitt

by Christopher Menz

Canadian-born pianist Angela Hewitt is well known to Australian audiences through her regular visits and her memorable performances and recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s keyboard repertoire. Her legendary performances of Bach, encompassing superb playing and thoughtful and considered interpretation, have demonstrated how successful harpsichord music can sound on the modern instrument. While not seeking to imitate the harpsichord in any way, Hewitt has created a style that is sensitive to the eighteenth-century idiom, without the extremes and idiosyncrasies of her famous compatriot and Bach specialist, Glenn Gould.

Hewitt’s current Australian tour with Musica Viva features two different programs. The first opens with a pair of Bach’s Partitas; after interval we have Scarlatti, Ravel, and Chabrier. The second program combines two Partitas and two sonatas by Beethoven. Sensibly, Hewitt does not want to be pigeonholed in the Baroque repertoire.

them they illustrate a rich and inventive use of musical form. Not surprisingly, they remain popular with pianists and harpsichordists today.

In this Judgement of Solomon, ABR Arts opted for program one, which began (after a calming sidelong look from our pianist) with the most popular of the set, the Partita no. 1 in B-flat major. Hewitt’s account of this, with her intense focus, elegant and subtle variants in the repeats (all of which were observed), occasional rubato, and superb ornamentation, showed her total command. The Sarabande, as the central movement, was especially beautiful. This was followed by a superb rendition of the fourth in D major, a work that is almost twice as long as the first and musically much more complex and demanding, for performer and audience alike.

After interval, Hewitt played five of Scarlatti’s 555 keyboard sonatas, a perfectly balanced selection that covered the virtuosity, elegance, grace, and variety that characterise these dazzling early examples of the form. These short works – one movement under ten minutes in length – are extraordinarily inventive, with many of them demanding exceptional technical brilliance and interpretative taste to make them convincing. Hewitt’s performance of the most famous of all Scarlatti keyboard works, the Sonata in E major Kk380, was mesmerising.

The six Partitas were written between 1726 and 1731, when the set was published as Bach’s Opus 1. Written for harpsichord, each Partita commences with a different movement. In order of the six Partitas, they are: Prelude, Sinfonia, Fantasia, Overture, Praeambulum, Toccata. Each introduction is followed by a varied sequences of dance movements, including: Allemande, Corrente, Sarabande, Menuet, Passepied, Gigue. Between

After such masterworks from the Baroque, the program was followed by a jump in time to Ravel’s Sonatine (1903–5), an exquisite threemovement gem. It was in this work that the beautiful sonorities and tone of the Fazioli piano, chosen by Hewitt, became most apparent. Her superb articulation, honed by years of playing the Baroque repertoire, gave this and the final work in the program, Emmanuel Chabrier’s virtuosic Bourrée fantasque (1891), impressive clarity. With an encore of the perennial Debussy favourite Clair de Lune, from the Suite Bergamasque, Hewitt demonstrated great mastery in nearly two centuries of compositions for the keyboard. g

Angela Hewitt’s national tour for Musica Viva began in Sydney on 8 May 2017 and culminated there on 27 May. Performance attended: 16 May. Christopher Menz’s review of Angela Hewitt’s second recital appears online.

Christopher Menz is ABR’s development consultant.

Angela Hewitt (photograph by Keith Saunders)

The bounds of history

Michael Morley

THE POLITICAL ORCHESTRA: THE VIENNA AND BERLIN PHILHARMONICS DURING

THE THIRD REICH by Fritz Trümpi, translated by Kenneth Kronenberg University of Chicago Press (Footprint) $92 hb, 327 pp, 9780226251394

This study, which first appeared in German in 2011, was hailed at the time as definitive: properly so, as it incorporates so many aspects from so many areas of research. It marks a significant contribution to such fields as musicology, cultural history, the relationship between art and politics – not just in the Nazi era, but the periods preceding that, which saw the emergence of the two orchestras – and the role of the state and of the audience in shaping repertoire, and the relationship between the orchestra and the media.

The introduction manages the difficult task of summarising the crucial historical issue of ‘two cities, two orchestras’ while also reminding the reader of more contemporary questions such as the ‘German sound’ of the Berlin Philharmonic – which led to what the author describes as a ‘hot debate … [which] emerged from a polemic against the principal conductor of the orchestra, Simon Rattle’ – versus the Vienna Philharmonic’s approach, which ‘hews neither to the German sound nor even an Austrian one’. These convenient shorthand descriptions are deftly set against each other and analysed, even before the author spells out the work’s primary aim.

This aim is clearly and succinctly articulated early in the book: ‘I will show how the histories of the Vienna and the Berlin Philharmonics are closely intertwined with the foreign-policy histories of Germany and Austria and how the ways in which the orchestras were instrumentalized were therefore politically determined from the outset.’

Along the way, the author then proceeds to tie this crucial question to such others as the politicisation of the orchestras and how ‘political exigencies and perspectives moulded their programs and concert practices and how … these influenced the performance of music’. This may sound heavy on theory and socio-cultural-political discourse: in practice, the author has a fascinating and complex tale to tell, and does so brilliantly, combining a sure overview of historical data with a remarkable command of the often separate, often intersecting narrative strands.

Along the way, in six chapters, an elegant summary and conclusion, and, for the statistically minded, an appendix which examines the question of repertoire with the aid of a series of graphs and commentaries, Trümpi is as comfortable assessing the increased state influence on the orchestras during the years 1918–33 as he is considering the orchestras’ multifaceted media presence, or the burning issue of National Socialism and the Politics of Programming.

Whether he is considering the role of factory and work-break concerts (strangely enough, surprisingly few: the Berlin Philharmonic performed only five during the course of the war, while the Vienna Philharmonic performed none before 1943, and, until the end of the war, just twelve), or projects for fictionalised depictions of the orchestras, the author’s thorough research and ability to make these accounts live on the page make for lively reading. In the case of the latter, his presentation of the unrealised project ‘The Vienna Philharmonic in Outer Space; a Treatment for a Screenplay’ could, with few alterations, belong in an episode of Monty Python Consider, for example, the following passage, drawn from the treatment submitted by a certain Professor Seibert (who also, at Furtwängler’s suggestion, was later granted an honorarium of 450 RM, resolved without discussion, ‘because of his advanced age’):

The treatment … begins in Heaven, where Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner are having a conversation … In the second

scene the chairman of the association presides over a ‘director’s [sic] meeting’ in the Grosser Musikvereinssaal … at which two outsiders are present: ‘A female: the fantasy sent from Heaven, and a male: an engineer specializing in stratospheric flight.’ Those present decide to undertake a ‘flight to Heaven in two massive airplanes’ whose propellers are giant treble clefs.

Demonstrating a nice line in understatement (after pointing out that the scenario closes with – what else? – a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth), the author notes: ‘this story line had completely slipped the bounds of reality and history’.

Elsewhere, Trümpi offers story lines and characters which are all too closely linked to reality and history, and which, in the case of the examination of the history and role of the Vienna Philharmonic, result from the important fact that he is the first researcher to have access to the orchestra’s archive. Not that this was a straightforward exercise: his first applications (in 2003 and 2004) were denied, and it was only in 2008 that agreement was reached to allow ‘more or less unlimited access’.

Undoubtedly, this had to do with Austria and Vienna’s less than wholehearted interest in revisiting its Nazi past – unlike Germany, which actually gave a name to such historical and cultural investigations: ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’. When one reads, in this study, that, during the Nazi years, among those awarded ‘The Ring of Honour of the Vienna Philharmonic’ were not just the conductor Clemens Krauss, but Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach; that others honoured included the Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, the Gauleiter of Carinthia and Salzburg, the mayor of Vienna, and the director of the German rail system; and that these distinctions were not revoked until 2013, it is an indication yet again of the thoroughness of Trümpi’s research and a reminder of Austria’s dilatory approach to acknowledging its history. g

Michael Morley is Emeritus Professor of Drama at Flinders University.

JA PURE DROP: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF JEFF BUCKLEY

by Jeff Apter Echo

$32.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781760404031

eff Buckley is a man frozen in time, not just by virtue of being elevated into the pantheon of ‘died-too-earlyrock-gods’. Before his untimely drowning in 1997, Buckley appeared to exist in a sort of musical and emotional stasis: a young fogey caught among the cultural ruins and vestiges of his estranged father, who died aged twenty-eight from a heroin overdose in 1975. It is a topic that Jeff Apter passes over but doesn’t mine in his re-released Jeff Buckley biography, A Pure Drop

Apter (who churns rock bios out like sausages) runs through the usual accoutrements of rock-star life: studio tensions, time pressures, executive meddling, flattening commercial imperatives, broken relationships, band direction, the enervating nature of the road, sex, and drugs. But readers looking for titillating excess will be disappointed. Buckley’s rock adventures are mild when contrasted with biographies like Wonderland Avenue (1989) or Keith Richards’s Life (2010). Trade your cocaine for marijuana, your orgies for an energetic round of monogamous sex, and your televisions hurled out of hotel windows for occasionally churlish stage moods.

Following his early success, Buckley joked that he had become ‘the poster boy for fifty-year-old rockers’. Indeed, Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Jimmy Page, and David Bowie (among others) were taken with his musicality. It becomes clear that Buckley’s fan base in the musical firmament was more closely aligned with his musty musical tastes (e.g. Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan) than with his cutting-edge musical contemporaries. The early exit of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke from one show upset Buckley, who began working hard to win the respect of his grungy peers. While Buckley had savant-like musical talent, over half of his only studio album consisted of co-writes or covers, leading one critic to label him a cipher. All in all this is a relatively benign book within the rock-bio tradition, but interesting enough for rock tragics or Buckley enthusiasts.

David Latham ❖

Boosterism at the Biennale

The rise of the mega-exhibition

Sophie Knezic

BIENNIALS, TRIENNIALS, AND DOCUMENTA:

THE EXHIBITIONS THAT CREATED CONTEMPORARY ART by Charles Green and Anthony Gardner Wiley–Blackwell, $42.95 pb, 304 pp, 9781444336658

Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art represents an apposite study of the biennials and triennials – also known as megaexhibitions – that are proliferating around the world. Apposite since, with the exception of Bruce Altshuler’s twovolume account from 1863 to 2002, no art-historical text has offered a scholarly appraisal of these extravaganzas.

The current tally of international mega-exhibitions is a whopping 207, of which thirty-four will take place in 2017. They range from the grandfather of them all: the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895; the most august: documenta (founded in 1955 and occurring every five years); to the new kids on the block: Karachi Biennale; Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art; and Desert X in the Coachella Valley, California (each launched in 2017). Melbourne will host the inaugural NGV Triennial in December. Remarkably, 2017 also brought the first Antarctic Biennale; an expedition aboard a research shipcum-cruise vessel which took place over twelve days in March.

Faced with this phenomenon, the authors’have set out to do three things: to chart a global history of postwar biennials framed within the economic context of advancing neo-liberalism and local and national politics; to focus on exhibitions of particular historical significance as discrete case studies; and, most importantly, to draw conclusions about the systemic effects of these exhibitions on the broader field of contemporary art.

While most mega-exhibitions are launched with optimistic rationales piv-

oting on cultural munificence, the true benefits of such events have been viewed equivocally. Their critical reception ranges from championing their socially subversive potential to a demonising their existence as colonialist relics (with antecedents in nineteenth century world fairs) or enterprises complicit with advanced capitalist economies and their aspiration to increasing cultural capital and tourist flows, as well as political expedience in boosting the interests of their corporate sponsors. They have also been dismissed as ‘festivalism’ – art as a spectacular event-based form of pageantry. Green and Gardner negotiate their critical path with an awareness of mega-exhibitions’ double-edged nature. They pay close attention to the political vicissitudes of each exhibition they foreground, while continually framing their analysis within the wider condition of the global. The last aspect is crucial, as the authors are keen to differentiate the term ‘globalisation’ from ‘globalism’: the former understood as inescapable worldwide transformations in political economies; the latter defined as ‘the self-conscious desire to be seen as global’. Although biennials and triennials have taken place across a spectrum of locales with historically specific circumstances, political players, and cultural ambitions, their placement within this dialectic of globalisation and globalism is a key hermeneutic of the text.

Each of the mega-exhibitions is distinguished by particular characteristics. documenta 5 (1972) was defined by the prominence of its Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. This illustrates the rise of the ‘star-curator’ as a charismatic

independent figure whose status eclipses that of any of the artists featured in the exhibition. documenta 5 also represented the beginnings of curators wresting from art historians and art museums the task of decreeing the arthistorical canon, effectively usurping their roles as arbiters of contemporary art. The Third Biennale of Sydney (1979) and the XV Bienal de São Paulo (1979) were emblematic of a second wave of biennials, located in the world’s peripheries yet initiating vigorous dialogues that turned on artistic translation across geographic divides. Structured as ‘cultural encounters’, these biennials absorbed the methods of global exhibition-making while bringing local artistic practices to the fore, resulting in new configurations of internationalism.

The second Bienal de La Habana (1986) represented the emergence into the international arena of a biennial not staged in a First or Second World nation. In its explicit renouncement of European or American artists, it formed an ‘alliance of the “non-aligned”’, a South-to-South dialogue that further transformed the internationalist discourse of contemporary art by filtering it through the perspective of a critical post-colonialism. The Asian Art Show, Fukuoka (1979); Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane (1993); Gwangju Biennale (1995); and the Shanghai Biennale (2000) re-inflected this discourse in their varied endeavours to define contemporary art in Asian regional terms.

During this period, contradictions nonetheless emerged between the desire to celebrate cultural difference and the necessity to subject it to critique, promote art in populist terms or to allow its anti-institutionalist drives full sway. A successive wave of biennials including the Second Johannesburg Biennale (1997) and the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya (2005–8) reframed biennials in terms of locations in crisis, thematising the realpolitik of migration, war, and displacement. Political

activism and critique also intersected with recent exhibitions such as the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013) and the 19th Sydney Biennale (2014), where anger mounted against authoritarian regimes or corporate sponsors profiteering from detention centres. In spite of the text’s wide-ranging focus, this dimension of activism is effectively traced, anticipating more focused studies such as the newly published title by Sternberg Press, I Can’t Work Like This: A reader on recent boycotts and contemporary art (2017).

Three terms are leitmotifs in Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: ‘neoliberalism’, ‘globalism’, and ‘contemporary’. However, a more interesting one that hovers in the interstices of the text is ‘entanglement’. Appearing almost as frequently as the other three, this term not only does more to conjure the complicated tensions within the undertaking of biennials/triennials but shrewdly describes the mutually constitutive relationship between the flourishing of mega-exhibitions and the lineaments of contemporary art. This mutuality becomes the ultimate argument of the text, albeit one that has been manifestly propounded by art historian Terry Smith, as well as receiving its most theoretical interrogation by philosopher Peter Osborne.

The topography of these large-scale exhibitions is examined through a scholarly method that displays impressive art-historical research alongside an evaluation of discrete exhibition scenarios in rigorously analytical terms. The result is an intricate historical mosaic in tandem with acute critical judgements on mutations in the meaning and consequences of contemporary art. If there is a downside to Green and Gardner’s text, it is that its scrupulous historical detail results in a certain dry positivism. Notwithstanding, Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta is destined to become a key text in the historiography of mega-exhibitions. g

Sophie Knezic is a Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne.

An installation at the inaugural Antarctic Biennale in 2017

by Ben Brooker

In recent years, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949) has twice been returned to bestseller lists around the world: in the wake of the United States National Security Agency’s global surveillance scandal; and following Kellyanne Conway’s decidedly Orwellian coinage of ‘alternative facts’ while defending Donald Trump’s false claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

Few other novels have colonised the public consciousness so widely. We turn to it to make sense of the seemingly senseless, combing its ingenious totalitarian vocabulary for clues as to how the English language has become so degraded, and how our politics have descended into sinister farce. (Orwell’s essential point, of course, was that the two are inextricably linked.) It seems, in some ways, a curious fate for a work of fiction so coloured by the circumstances in which it was written, so plainly the product of postwar Britain’s grim austerity.

Yet there is a sense – and it is one that sits at the heart of this adaptation – in which Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith is a man out of time, a permanent but changing reflection of whoever opens the book. Readers in the 1950s, depending on their political persuasion, read it as a critique of the Soviet Union or of fascism. In East Germany and North Korea – anywhere the book is banned – it must take on a searing, specific relevance to those wily or lucky or brave enough to procure a copy.

the dystopian world described in the book – that the play’s framing scenes, in which Winston’s diary is the subject of a book group meeting, are drawn. In this way, Orwell’s worry about the erosion of belief in objective truth becomes the play’s guiding dramaturgical principle. ‘Where do you think you are?’ those around him repeatedly ask Winston, and we begin to wonder. Icke has said: ‘This could be the future that Winston imagines when he starts to write the diary. It could be us thinking about Orwell. Or it could be the people who write the appendix … looking back at the primary text of Orwell’s novel or Winston’s diary.’ There is a kind of fatalism inherent in Winston’s journey in the play – reinforced by scenes that repeat with slight variations each time, like something in an inescapable nightmare –but there is also hope in the idea that we are responsible for, and complicit in, Winston’s ultimate fate. Is he to be remembered or forgotten?

Part of the success of this production, however, lies in the fact that these metatextual conceits don’t prevent Icke, Macmillan, or Australian associate director Corey McMahon from capturing the visceral materiality of the book. Chloe Lamford’s wood-panelled, retro-futurist set is lushly detailed, easily conjuring up the musty establishment air of the BBC studios that were Orwell’s model for the interior of the Ministry of Information. Short of actually reproducing the vivid odours of the book – ‘boiled cabbage and old rag mats’ – the directors nevertheless locate their adaptation in the body through the use of sensory shock, namely repeated bursts of light and noise, often preceded by a highfrequency drone, that in their totality prove deeply unsettling.

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan build this mutability into their script, never precisely fixing Winston in time or space. Although faithful to both the spirit and narrative of the novel, it unfolds like a sort of fractured memory play, the reliability of Winston’s viewpoint and the authenticity of each moment constantly called into question. Somewhat perversely, the play’s point of departure is the book’s mysterious appendix, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, which readers tend to skip over and the US publishers wanted Orwell to remove. It is from this appendix – anonymously written sometime after 2050 following the dissolution of

If this adaptation has a signature mood, it is a pervasive unease. We never see Big Brother and the play is all the eerier for it. The scenes during which Winston and Julia meet in the room in Charrington’s antiques shop take place offstage, and are relayed to the audience via a live video feed. Icke and Macmillan don’t deploy the iconography of CCTV surveillance as merely an aesthetic layer. Chillingly, it is only when Winston is being obviously surveilled that he declares his sense of freedom and privacy. The flimsiness of this illusion – and it is, of course, our illusion too in a time of mass surveillance and data collection – is exposed in a stunning coup de théâtre that plummets the audience into the Ministry of Love’s white void, the mythical-sounding ‘place with no darkness’, where Winston is to be rehabilitated by the State. His protracted torture – fingertips slashed, teeth pulled out, electrocution almost to death – is as difficult to watch as anything I have seen on the stage.

This is partly the effect of the two fine performances that anchor this production. At first I thought Tom Conroy too young and handsome to convince as Orwell’s unheroic hero, described in the novel, not unlike Orwell

Tom Conroy as Winston Smith in 1984 (photograph by Shane Reid)

himself at the time of its writing, as thirty-nine years old and physically unhealthy; but he tracks Winston’s journey from wide-eyed agitator to hollow-eyed conformist with a compelling, richly detailed blend of physicality and earnestness. Terence Crawford, meanwhile, is ideally cast as O’Brien, bloodless, clipped, and quietly commanding –more bureaucrat than despot. Ursula Mills does well enough with the material at hand – really, she’s too good an actor for a role as limited as Julia – and the rest of the cast are sound.

There really is no comparison between Orwell’s organised dystopia and the chaotic travesty that is the government of Donald Trump. I am inclined sometimes to think we would be better off turning to Steve Bannon’s favourite books, or – god help us – the novels of Ayn Rand to bring the Trump era more clearly into focus.

And yet how glad we are that it’s there whenever we need it, this cautionary tale for the ages. It is a spiritual

Minnie & Liraz

by Carol Middleton

It all begins with a funeral. Slowly, painfully, the ambulant residents of Autumn Road Retirement Village, Caulfield, edge their way on to the stage. From the door into the corridor appears a wheel, then a hand fumbling for the entrance, heralding the arrival of the fifth resident, who whizzes triumphantly onstage in her electric buggy. Liraz (Sue Jones) has arrived.

With Minnie & Liraz, Lally Katz’s latest play, there is no doubt we are watching a comedy. Sue Jones’s pernickety parking settles the matter. If the residents are lacking in enthusiasm, both for the deceased and for life itself, Norma (Georgina Naidu) conducts the ‘life celebration’ with lashings of joie de vivre. She conjures up the rich events of a little life, while, sotto voce, Minnie (Nancye Hayes) corrects her. Her bridge partner may be dead, but she is giving her short shrift.

Bridge is central to the plot. Katz draws on her experience of living in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, as well as on her relationship with her beloved Jewish grandparents in New Jersey, to draw a picture of the aged. Some can’t wait to die; others battle on. As in her 2011 play Neighbourhood Watch, Katz steals the details of petty lives and banal conversations to lift the lid on the darker elements of human nature: in this case, ambition and the bridge tournament that sparks it.

Katz has the ability to make everything funny: death, suicide, infertility, hip replacements. The play unfolds as the forthcoming contest for the Australian National Seniors’ Bridge Cup approaches and all the cards are slowly revealed.

Sue Jones’s electric performance demonstrates how comedy is made: each sentence released with perfect timing

thing as much as anything else – a candle in the dark. We need not belabour its prescience to hear what it has to tell us about the times we find ourselves in, when objective truth is under renewed assault from the political party Noam Chomsky has taken to referring to, not without cause, as the most dangerous organisation in human history. This production is a perfect distillation of Orwell’s unfading vision of a world in which the corruption of language and politics are not simply correlative but indivisible. g

1984 (State Theatre Company of South Australia), directed by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan and adapted from the 1949 George Orwell novel. The May 2017 season in Adelaide will be followed by seasons in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, and Perth. Performance attended: 16 May 2017. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.

Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, and playwright.

and burning intensity, elaborated with gestures and facial expressions and toots on her mobility scooter. The other actors, particularly those playing more sober characters, could have made more use of timing and pauses to raise the comedic temperature.

Nancye Hayes, as Minnie, is sane and businesslike, rather pale and guarded beside her glittering friend Liraz. When her granddaughter Rachel arrives, we begin to see Minnie’s weak spots – her misgivings and regrets about her estranged son, obsessing about the whale-watching trip she refused him. There are so may regrets in these little lives, so many reparations to be made.

Director Anne-Louise Sarks and set designer Mel Page bring a light, imaginative touch to the performance, aided by dramatic music and lighting. A revolving stage switches the action between the various spaces of the retirement village. Between the two halves of the stage is a corridor with a glass wall, where characters let off emotions, pursue each other, or die. This in-between place is a brilliant theatrical device, a space for darker selves to emerge.

Georgina Naidu, as Norma, celebrant, nurse, bridge game convenor, life writing tutor, and general dogsbody at the village, orchestrates the lives of her charges and the play itself. In a versatile and lively performance, she responds to the humour of the play and the appreciative audience with increasing liberation and élan. Life must go on, however many dark thoughts and darker deeds have taken place, and will always, when looked at through the lens of comedy, be funny. Lally Katz’s burgeoning career ensures it will, and this Melbourne play, in its world première, puts us centre stage in contemporary comedy. g

Minnie & Liraz (Melbourne Theatre Company), written by Lally Katz and directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, continues at Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne until 24 June 2017. Performance attended: 18 May. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.

Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author.

Critic of the Month with Morag Fraser

Which critics most impress you?

Ones who write memorably, whose language combines critical acuity with verve. I could name many, but Robert Hughes, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, and Brian Matthews are four Australians critics I read and reread, and from whom I have learned much, even when I’ve disagreed with, or been provoked by, them.

What makes a fine critic?

Understanding, fairness, and an ability to read deeply, write honestly and dispassionately, with wit and gusto. Erudition helps, particularly when lightly worn. My four critics bring a formidable breadth of knowledge to their task, but they use it to explore and illuminate, not as a weapon of ego. I should be realistic about ego, though, about myself at least: I subscribe to George Orwell’s dictum: ‘Embrace the ego, revel in beauty, and write with a purpose.’

Do you accept most books on offer, or do you prefer to be selective?

I am much more selective now than I was when I first began writing reviews thirty years ago, for all the obvious reasons. What remains true is that I accept books that pique my interest, expand my understanding of the world and the creatures in it, and about which I believe I can write responsibly.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

Hard question for a former editor to answer. What I can say is that I am profoundly grateful to the editors – professionals all of them – with whom I have worked. They have saved me from egregious error but have never once messed with my prose. Can’t ask for more. As to feedback from readers: I cherish some emails/letters/notes from writers who have told me I’ve done them justice. It’s a presumptuous thing to do, to anatomise someone else’s work, so to have a writer brave enough to initiate discussion of one’s criticism, and to have both of us come through smiling, is a rare joy. I remember with great fondness a conversation I once had in a Rundle Street café in Adelaide with a famous Australian writer who was clearly bent more on understanding than cutting my throat. Humbling, and gratifying.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Necessary, for the sake of the culture. We live with bombast, hypocrisy, lies, and literary afflatus, to which informed criticism can provide the necessary corrective. But it must be good and focused on what’s wrong with a work rather than what is wonderful about the reviewer. I will confess to enjoying demo jobs when they are delivered with the panache of George Bernard Shaw, or Pauline Kael when, for example, she took aim at the American sentimentality of both film and director of Dances with Wolves with this sentence: ‘Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.’

Cautionary tale: I once wrote a very critical review which the newspaper lawyers only just let through (they were worried by the word ‘meretricious’). The novelist lived 16,800 kilometres away. But of course I found myself in a taxi with her a week later, on our way to a festival event. I think she must have been too grand to read provincial newspapers because she didn’t utter a word. Neither did I.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Unavoidable in Australia, because our circles are so small. I have reviewed the work of writers with whom I am acquainted. Some have become friends, so I no longer review their work. Most of the books or works I review now are by writers, artists, or musicians I will never meet. Helps to be a bit of a loner.

What is a critic’s primary responsibility?

To be honest, fair, insightful, encouraging where appropriate, and, in D.H. Lawrence’s words, to write ‘for the race, as it were’. Frieda told Lawrence that he was driven by egotism and a desire to let everyone know how he was clever he was. But I’ve always remembered his words, and they have guided me – I hope.

Morag Fraser was editor of Eureka Street magazine from1991 to 2003, and chair of Australian Book Review from 2006 to 2013. (She first wrote for ABR in 1995.) She has been a journalist, a teacher, chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival, and adjunct professor in Humanities at La Trobe University.

PICTURES OF HEALTH.

Our fifty years of teaching and learning alone didn’t put us in the top echelon of world universities. Nor have our fantastic buildings, thriving campuses in Adelaide and our vast geographic footprint, with satellite campuses in six regional South Australian locations, and in Darwin, Alice Springs, Katherine and Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory.

What got us into the top 90% of research at or above world standards was commitment*. An unshakeable, unbreakable commitment to Making a Difference.

Pictures of health illustrates Flinders University’s first Poche PhD Scholar Maree Meredith’s three-year study into why art centres are considered essential for community health and wellbeing on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands.

This ground-breaking research is also giving back to Aboriginal communities, providing an Anangu conceptual framework for mapping the research process, translating the research process into language and developing a governance model of decision making for research.

As well as research, all of us at Flinders are learning how our university can move ideas to innovation through research and enterprise: ideas that are not just fanciful thoughts, but ones that make a difference now and in the decades to come.

We Go Beyond the norms and the barriers.

That’s what Making a Difference is all about.

Researching the health effects of art in APY Lands: making a difference. flinders.edu.au

Artwork: Nyankulya Walyampari Watson, Ngayuku ngura

(detail), Image © Nyankulya Walyampari Watson / Licenced by Viscopy, 2017

FIRST AUSTRALIANS LIVED THROUGH THE ICE AGE AND ARE THE LONGEST CONTINUING CULTURE IN THE WORLD

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS FOR OUR FUTURE?

Monash Arts

Making a difference through research

For over 60,000 years Aboriginal Australians lived and thrived in the Australian landscape. They had sophisticated and complex social systems with languages and religions that were unrecognisable to 19th century Europeans. Today, more of the ingenuity and wisdom in Aboriginal Australian’s practices and knowledge systems is being uncovered – revealing significant potential solutions for our imminent global challenges.

To this end, Head of Monash Indigenous Studies Centre Professor Lynette Russell, Professor Ian McNiven and Associate Professor John Bradley have just launched a new interdisciplinary project that explores Australia’s heritage from the deep past through to today. It will include comparative insights from the United States, Europe, Canada and New Zealand.

This project dovetails with a seven-year multi-university interdisciplinary research programme created by the ARC Centre of Excellence of Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

We spoke with Professor Lynette Russell about what kind of evidence the Indigenous Science Project is discovering and examining, and how this can inform ways to face some of the world’s biggest issues such as global warming, climate change and how to live sustainably.

Access the full interview at artsonline.monash.edu.au/news-events/ first-australians-ingenuity/

You can also scan or Shazam the QR code below to instantly access it.

Have you considered research?

Research areas

» Film, Media and Communications

» Historical Studies

» Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

» Literary and Cultural Studies

» Philosophy

» Social and Political Science

» Theatre, Performance and Music

Practice-based research degrees

» Creative writing

» Journalism

» Music composition

» Music performance

» Theatre performance

» Translation studies