Australian Book Review - June 2022, issue no. 443

*INC GST

Andrew Fuhrmann Nationhood on stage Elizabeth Tynan Britain’s atomic oval Linda Atkins Shouting abortion Sarah Balkin The Nanette turn Peter Rose Music of hypnosis

Notes of a son and literary executor

John Harwood on Gwen Harwood’s long-awaited biography

Keepers of the flame

Advances

As in 2021, ABR readers won’t have to endure the winter with a double issue in June and July. We are delighted to present a discrete June edition.

Highlights include extensive coverage of Gwen Harwood’s life and work – and the complicated biographical project that Advances has followed with interest for some years. Harwood scholar Stephanie Trigg reviews Ann-Marie Priest’s biography, My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood (La Trobe University Press).

Elsewhere, Gwen Harwood’s son and literary executor, John Harwood – a biographer himself – contributes a fascinating account of his management of this celebrated literary estate since the poet’s death in 1995. The article, ‘Gwen Harwood and the Perils of Reticence’, is an interesting addendum to Ian Hamilton’s seminal book Keepers of the Flame: Literary estates and the rise of biography (1992).

Harwood writes candidly about difficulties in his parents’ long marriage and about his resolve to obviate any hurt to his father: ‘I loved my parents equally and was determined that, so far as I had anything to do with it, nothing that might distress my father or his many old friends would find its way into print.’ He writes about the ‘collision course’ he was set on with one of his mother’s early proposed biographers, Gregory Kratzmann, who subsequently withdrew. Now, like Advances, Harwood welcomes Priest’s detailed and absorbing biography.

These two features are complemented by one of Gwen Harwood’s most withering poems, ‘Suburban Sonnet’.

Other highlights include Elizabeth Tynan on nuclear colonialism in the 1950s, typified by the Menzies government’s craven approval of British atomic tests at Emu Field in South Australia, which is the subject of her recent book, The Secret of Emu Field.

In coming months, the Supreme Court of the United States is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision offering constitutional protection of a pregnant woman’s freedom to have an abortion. As American women contemplate the impact of this judgment – perhaps the apogee of conversative judicial activism in the United States – we are pleased to be able to publish an essay by Sydney obstetrician Linda Atkins. ‘Shouting Abortion’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize.

Generous support from Matthew Sandblom and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund underpins this extra issue. We thank them both warmly.

Prizes galore

When the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize closed in early May, we had received 1,325 entries, from thirty-six different countries. Each year our three literary competitions – the Jolley, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize – generate thousands of new literary works that otherwise might never be written. It’s a fillip, an incentive, with a total of $12,500 in prize money to be dispersed. Judging is now underway. We look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue and then naming the winner towards the end of that month.

Meanwhile, the Porter Prize, now in its nineteenth year, will open on 11 July, with total prize money of $10,000.

Walking the walk on climate change

The season of electioneering and democracy sausages may be over, yet the issue of climate change remains acute, heedless of the political calendar. Most writers are by nature solitary creatures, and so heartening it is to see them band together for the Writers on Climate Action initiative. Led by Kate Grenville, the group wants climate to be at the forefront of voters’ minds each time they head to the polls. As Grenville writes in her ‘Book Talk’ feature (which appears on ABR’s website): We’ve got a lot of urgent issues swirling in our minds. The cost of living, employment, refugees, taxes, corruption, defence, Indigenous justice ... They’re all important and they’ll all shape our future. But the writers who have come together believe that one issue underlies all the others: the need for a reliable climate.

This is not about politicking in the conventional sense of ‘pushing any particular candidate or party’; rather, it is about making action on climate change an indispensable part of any political platform.

On the road

Masks on and passports at the ready – ABR is delighted to be presenting several cultural tours with Academy Travel in 2022 and 2023 across Australia and – mirabile dictu – abroad.

First up is an eight-day tour (October 12–19) exploring some of Victoria’s most beautiful countryside, historic towns and cities, and superb regional galleries. A group of no more than sixteen will be led by ABR’s Development Consultant, Christopher Menz, through some of Australia’s oldest regional galleries as well as the wonderful modern and contemporary collections at Heide and TarraWarra.

See the ABR or Academy Travel websites for full details.

Book now before it’s too late!

New directions

As we go to press on 23 May, the status of the new Labor government – majority or minority – is undecided, but it’s clear that the Coalition government led by Scott Morrison has been defeated. He leaves a stain on our public life that may take years to eradicate. Only a national integrity commission – of the unfettered kind proposed by Labor and teal candidates during the campaign, and strongly advocated for by some of our most distinguished jurists – will reveal the full extent of the profligacy and impropriety of the outgoing regime. It cannot come soon enough.

Next month we will ask a number of commentators to nominate one policy direction they would like Anthony Albanese’s government to pursue over the next three years.

At the top of my own desideratum would be a longoverdue investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s malign role in Australian politics, plus a more edifying style of campaigning, without puerile ‘gotcha’ moments and endless talk of election sausages. We must be able to do better than this. Ed.g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

1

Australian Book Review June 2022, no. 443

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Stacy Chan, Florence Honybun Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live.

Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $80 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia.

All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments.

Letters and online comments are subject to editing.

The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website.

Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information Front cover: Detail from An outdoor portrait of Gwen Harwood in 1959.

Previous Control Number: UMA/I/7047 Previous Control Number: BWP/26275 206872 Item: [2005.0004.00008]. Photograph from Meanjin/C.B. Christesen collection, University of Melbourne Archives.

Photographer unknown. Australian Book Review is reproducing this image in good faith having undertaken a reasonable and diligent search to identify the photographer/copyright holder. All reasonable attempts have been made to trace, contact and credit the copyright holder of this image. However, if you are the copyright holder for this image please notify Australian Book Review.

Page 23: High-rise residential buildings at Sighthill in Glasgow, Scotland (Iain McGillivray/Alamy) Page 63: Harriet Gordon-Anderson and Robert Menzies in Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet (photograph by Brett Boardman).

ABR June 2022 LETTERS

7

Hessom Razavi, Elizabeth Tynan, Susan Lever, Ian Campbell

COMMENTARY

16 34 42

John Harwood Linda Atkins Elizabeth Tynan

Gwen Harwood and the perils of reticence Shouting Abortion Britain’s atomic oval

POLITICS

57

Bernard Caleo

61

Lyndon Megarrity

Our Members Be Unlimited by Sam Wallman & Orwell by Pierre Christin and Sébastian Verdier, translated by Edward Gauvin Operation Jungle by John Shobbrook

BIOGRAPHY

8 53

Stephanie Trigg Miles Pattenden

My Tongue Is My Own by Ann-Marie Priest Maria Theresa by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger

POEMS

9 14 32 41

Gwen Harwood Peter Rose Judith Beveridge Andrea Brady

Suburban Sonnet Styptic Old Jetty The Rest

HISTORY

54 55

Philip Dwyer Briony Neilson

The Politics of Humiliation by Ute Frevert Convicts by Clare Anderson

LANGUAGE

13 21

James Jiang Sarah Ogilvie

Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu How our language dates us in the digital world

MEMOIR

10 11 60

Sarah Balkin Timothy J. Lynch Hessom Razavi

Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby Diplomatic by Joe Hockey with Leo Shanahan The Uncaged Sky by Kylie Moore-Gilbert

LITERARY STUDIES

38 39

Iva Glisic David Jack

Internationalist Aesthetics by Edward Tyerman Cacaphonies by Annabel L. Kim

THEATRE STUDIES

58

Andrew Fuhrmann

Australia in 50 Plays by Julian Meyrick

EDUCATION

51

Ilana Snyder

Waiting for Gonski by Chris Bonner and Tom Greenwell

WRITING

33

Merav Fima

The Writer Laid Bare by Lee Kofman

FICTION

24 25 27 28 29 30 31

Shannon Burns Diane Stubbings Amy Baillieu Laura Elizabeth Woollett Naama Grey-Smith Sarah Gory Cassandra Atherton

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart The Colony by Audrey Magee & The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz Red by Felicity McLean The Signal Line by Brendan Colley Mothertongues by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell Three new short story collections

POETRY

44 46 48 50

Anders Villani David Mason Sarah Day Toby Davidson

Running Time by Emily Stewart & Inheritance by Nellie Le Beau The Jaguar by Sarah Holland-Batt Acanthus by Claire Potter & Glass Flowers by Diane Fahey Revenants by Adam Aitken

INTERVIEW

62

Frances Wilson

Critic of the Month

ARTS

64 65 66

Ruth McHugh-Dillon Tim Byrne Peter Rose

Maixabel Hamlet Lohengrin

Wayne Reynolds

Maralinga by Alan Parkinson

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

3

ABR Patrons

The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR).

All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible. To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822.

In recognition of our Patrons’ continuing generosity, ABR records multiple donations cumulatively.

(ABR Patrons listing as at 23 May 2022)

Parnassian ($100,000 or more) Ian Dickson

Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999) Morag Fraser AM Maria Myers AC Anonymous (1)

Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999) Blake Beckett Fund Colin Golvan AM QC

Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999)

Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Pauline Menz Ruth and Ralph Renard Mary-Ruth Sindrey and Peter McLennan Kim Williams AM Anonymous (2)

Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)

Bill Boyce (in memory of Kate Boyce, 1935–2020) Emeritus Professor David Carment AM Margaret Plant Lady Potter AC CMRI John Scully

Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999)

Peter Allan Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) and Sue Glenton Dr Neal Blewett AC Helen Brack Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) and Dr Grazia Gunn Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO Dr Alastair Jackson AM Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser Peter McMullin Steve Morton Allan Murray-Jones Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck David Poulton Peter Rose and Christopher Menz Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Anonymous (1)

Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999)

Gillian Appleton Professor The Hon. Kevin Bell AM QC and Tricia Byrnes Professor Frank Bongiorno AM 4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

Dr Bernadette Brennan Des Cowley Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Helen Garner Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Professor Margaret Harris The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Dr Susan Lever OAM Don Meadows Susan Nathan Professor John Rickard Robert Sessions AM Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Noel Turnbull Mary Vallentine AO Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Bret Walker AO SC Nicola Wass Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Anonymous (3)

Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)

Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation ( JRA Support Fund) Kate Baillieu Professor Jan Carter AM Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Professor Paul Giles Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Tom Griffiths Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Dr Barbara Kamler Linsay and John Knight Professor John Langmore AM Pamela McLure Rod Morrison Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Emeritus Professor Roger Rees John Richards Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Emerita Professor Susan Sheridan and Emerita Professor Susan Magarey AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Professor Janna Thompson Lisa Turner Dr Barbara Wall Jacki Weaver AO

Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (3)

Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499)

Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox Professor Dennis Altman AM Paul Anderson Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin Professor Frank Bongiorno Peter Burch AM BM Sonja Chalmers Robyn Dalton Joel Deane Jim Davidson AM Jason Drewe Allan Driver Jean Dunn Johanna Featherstone Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Roslyn Follett Steve Gome Professor Russell Goulbourne Dr Michael Henry AM Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Anthony Kane Professor Grace Karskens Alison Leslie David Loggia Kimberly and Julian McCarthy Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Muriel Mathers Felicity St John Moore Dr Brenda Niall AO Angela Nordlinger Jane Novak Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Diana and Helen O’Neil Barbara Peterson Estate of Dorothy Porter Mark Powell Libby Robin Stephen Robinson Professor David Rolph Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Professor Lynette Russell AM Michael Shmith Professor David Throsby AO and Dr Robin Hughes AO Dr Helen Tyzack Emeritus Professor James Walter Ursula Whiteside Kyle Wilson

Anonymous (6)

Symbolist ($500 to $999)

Damian and Sandra Abrahams Lyle Allan Professor Cassandra Atherton Douglas Batten Jean Bloomfield Raymond Bonner Professor Kate Burridge Megan Clement Alex Cothren Stuart Flavell Dr Anna Goldsworthy Dr Peter Goldsworthy AM Anne Grindrod Dilan Gunawardana Paul Hetherington Robyn Hewitt Dr Amanda Johnson Robyn Lansdowne Michael Macgeorge Hon. Chris Maxwell AC Emeritus Professor Michael Morley Dr Lucy Neave Penelope Nelson Patricia Nethery Mark O’Donoghue Gillian Pauli Jonathan W. de B. Persse Emeritus Professor Wilfrid Prest AM Professor Carroll Pursell and Professor Angela Woollacott Dr Ron Radford AM Ann Marie Ritchie Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Peter Stanford Professor Rita Wilson Anonymous (2)

Realist ($250 to $499)

Philip Brown and Penny Andrews Barbara Hoad Margaret Hollingdale Penelope Johns Margaret Robson Kett Ian McKenzie Anastasios Piperoglou Alex Skovron Margaret Smith Emeritus Professor Graham Tulloch Anonymous (1)

Bequests and notified bequests

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

Nuclear colonialism Elizabeth Tynan

Notes of a literary executor John Harwood

Abortion: the coalface of feminism Linda Atkins

A dearth of political leadership Frank Bongiorno

Calibre Essay Prize Simon Tedeschi

The Collaery case Kieran Pender

Identity politics Mindy Gill

From the archive

Frances Wilson and Peter Rose in conversation

Gillian Appleton Ian Dickson John Button Peter Corrigan AM Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy Peter Rose Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Denise Smith Anonymous (3)

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

5

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 Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

RANZCO and refugees

Letters

Dear Editor, On 16 March 2022, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) endorsed an inaugural Position Statement on refugees. Entitled ‘Providing Equitable Access to Eye Health Care for Refugees and People Seeking Asylum’, the document was approved after nine months of deliberations. As an ophthalmologist, I was the paper’s lead author. RANZCO now joins fourteen other medical and nursing colleges in Australia with a policy on refugee health. On the one hand, we are a late addition to this group; on the other, we are the first surgical college to adopt such a position (while individual surgeons have spoken out, the Royal Australian College of Surgeons remains silent on this issue).

The Position Statement makes four key recommendations.

One, refugees and people seeking asylum should be provided with access to comprehensive eye assessments. Most receive general health assessments on arrival in Australia, but eye health is not always included. Two, those that need it should receive access to eye-care services, such as glasses (optometry) or eye surgery (ophthalmology), irrespective of visa or Medicare status. Three, we do not condone mandatory, indefinite detention for refugees, especially children, given the detrimental health impacts of prolonged incarceration, and the pursuant risks to vision. Finally, we need to grow the evidence base on the eye health of refugees, an area that currently lacks research. Clearly, much work lies ahead.

RANZCO’s Position Statement was conceived in 2020– 21 during my time as ABR’s Behrouz Boochani Fellow. As such, a straight line can be drawn between an investment in the literary arts and the potential to improve people’s lives. The arts, in other words, can be an activator for humanitarianism.

Thank you to Peter McMullin (who funded the Fellowship) and ABR; long may these investments continue.

Hessom Razavi, North Perth, WA Hessom Razavi’s influential Fellowship articles helped to make ABR a platform for the refugee advocacy he has continued to pursue at RANZCO. This is another splendid outcome of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship. Ed.

Black mist

Dear Editor, Michael Winkler has written a sharp and insightful review of my latest book, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia (ABR, May 2022). I am really glad to see his thorough and sensitive understanding of its story about the Operation Totem tests at the South Australian test site in 1953.

He quite rightly wonders why I did not use the infamous quote about the Totem I ‘black mist’ from the British scientist Ernest Titterton, who was quoted in the media in 1980 following the first public disclosures of the phenomenon: ‘No such thing can possibly occur, I don’t know of any black mists ... The radioactive cloud is in fact at 30,000 feet, not at ground level.

And it’s not black ... if you investigate black mist, sure your [sic] going to get into an area where mystique is the central feature and you’ll never be able to establish [it] or not.’

I had used part of this quote in my earlier book, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story, in the short section devoted to the Emu Field tests, so I made the decision not to reuse it in the new book. But I agree that it is a resonant quote, and one that points to Titterton’s dismissive attitude to any safety concerns around the conduct of British atomic tests in Australia.

Elizabeth Tynan, Alligator Creek, Qld

Eighteen up

Dear Editor, Further to Faith Gordon’s argument about the disenfranchisement of sixteen-year-olds (‘The Case for Lowering the Voting Age’, ABR, May 2022), I would like to add that current sixteen-year-olds will not have a chance to vote federally until they are nineteen. In New South Wales they won’t vote in a state election until they are twenty-one. The statutory terms of Australian parliaments means that most people must wait well beyond the age of eighteen for their first chance to vote.

Susan Lever, Erskineville, NSW

Retrieving Hemisphere

Dear Editor, Steps are underway to enable the digitising of an important general interest Australian periodical from last century: Hemisphere – An Asian-Australian Monthly (later Magazine bimonthly), which was published by and for the Commonwealth of Australia from 1957–84. Some readers may recall the periodical, which was edited by two outstanding editors: R.J. Maguire (1957–69) and then Ken Henderson (1969–84).

A loose grouping of persons with interests in Australian literature (and environmental history), as well as others with a focus on Asian studies, have followed with interest these developments. Funds have now been raised through donation to enable the National Library of Australia to proceed with will project so that eventually, through TROVE, new generations might be able to access the material originally produced in print.

Hemisphere was unique compared to other Australian general interest periodicals of the mid-twentieth century; perhaps only Hemisphere combined ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ material in its remit. It explored the ‘deep cultures’ embedded in these two terms. It moved beyond the sole imperative of defining ‘Australia’ to having a vision of the region beyond. (It was also probably unique in that although it began publication by and for the then-small Commonwealth Office of Education in North Sydney, it was published from Canberra for most of its publication life). It was not ‘controversial’ in dealing with Australian foreign policy and political issues of the day, such as the Vietnam War, and from current perspectives it lacked an autonomous Indigenous Australian focus, although, via articles on Australian ‘prehistory’, it was a significant publication that conveyed to the general reader scientific work of the era that broadened awareness of Indigenous settlement in Australia to beyond 60,00 years.

I trust this advice will be of some interest and that this important project will provide new generations with past perspectives on Australia and the region generally.

Ian Campbell, Sydney, NSW AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

7

Biography

Harwood’s many voices A nuanced biography of the poet Stephanie Trigg

My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood

by Ann-Marie Priest

La Trobe University Press $37.99 pb, 454 pp

‘ You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,’ said the Red Queen. ‘Alice – Mutton; Mutton – Alice.’ The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.

‘May I give you a slice?’ she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.

‘Certainly not,’ the Red Queen said, very decidedly: ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!’

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

T

he Red Queen’s impossible rule offers a striking allegory of the biographer’s dilemma. While your subject is still alive, it seems reasonable to get to know them and build a relationship of trust with them. In this way you might be better able to understand their private and intimate worlds. If your subject is a writer, you might become more confident in your ability to weave closer correspondences between their life and work. But if you then become privy to their secrets, and perhaps even come to love them as a dear friend, it becomes almost impossible to write about them dispassionately: to ‘cut’ them with your knife and fork.

This quandary is particularly pointed when the subject is someone like Gwen Harwood (1920–95), so famously adept at masking both her authorial name and her poetic voice. As Ann-Marie Priest shows, Harwood was extremely guarded and careful in her writing, displacing and concealing most of her grand passions and emotional trials from those who would have been hurt by a more open, confessional poetics.

Two other scholars attempted to write Harwood’s biography in the several years before the poet’s death in 1995. Alison Hoddinott, already an old friend and the author of a critical study of Harwood’s poetry, started conceiving a biography around the same time as Greg Kratzmann wrote introducing himself to Harwood with the same idea. Harwood kept each in ignorance of the other’s plans, and eventually both withdrew from the task.

Kratzmann became a dear friend and confidant of Harwood, but he found himself unable to write the kind of biography he wanted, because he was unwilling to expose details of Harwood’s relationships that had potential to hurt her family and friends, even after her death. He had to promise Harwood he would not write anything that would ‘cause pain’. Instead, he turned his attention to editing her letters (A Steady Storm of Correspondence, 2001); and, with Hoddinott, edited Harwood’s Collected Poems, 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

1943–1995, in 2003. Hoddinott also published a collection of Harwood’s letters (Idle Talk, Letters 1960–1964, 2015).

As Hoddinott and Kratzmann both found, and as Priest was warned, writing a biography of Gwen Harwood is not for the faint-hearted. But Priest is unencumbered by a strong personal connection to Harwood or her family. Writing more than twenty years after Harwood’s death, when so many of the poet’s beloved friends and friendly beloveds are now also dead, has surely been liberating, too.

Priest interviewed a number of Harwood’s friends and correspondents, but she works primarily from textual evidence, and approaches this emotional minefield with forensic precision.

She moves with ease through the archives: Harwood’s voluminous correspondence, some diaries and various documents from private and public collections: most notably, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, where Priest based herself for six months.

Priest is an attentive reader of Harwood’s poetry: from the formal collections and libretti through to her occasional verse, and the many unpublished fragments, often hilarious and scurrilous, that appeared in her letters and postcards. Harwood also often wrote letters about her dreams, which add a surprisingly luminous dimension to this study. Priest builds her narrative from the overlapping threads of Harwood’s reading and writing, her playful multiplication of voices and personae, her musical and philosophical studies, and the many vicissitudes of the writing life. More personal material is handled gently: especially the shifting dynamics of a very difficult marriage; and the ebb and flow of various friendships and several love affairs, mostly with men, and sometimes, though these relationships were perhaps less sexual, with women.

The public path of Harwood’s life is well known. After showing early promise as a pianist and organist, she married young and moved from Brisbane to Hobart in 1943 with her academic husband. After her four children were all established at school, she started slowly publishing the poetry she had been working on, but she could not help feeling distanced from the poetic and cultural gatekeepers of Australia in the 1950s, both by geography and by gender. Inventing several pseudonyms, mostly male ones, with more intriguing cultural biographies than her own, she managed to place many more poems in key journals. In the first years of her publishing career, these male personae received far more invitations to participate in anthologies and other literary events than Harwood ever did. Harwood’s fury at these exclusions and her contempt for the poor literary judgement and favouritism practised by more established poets are presented forcefully here.

Her first major brush with fame came in 1961, when Douglas Stewart at The Bulletin accepted the sonnet she submitted over the name ‘Walter Lehmann’, with its now famous ‘FUCKALLEDITORS’ acrostic. The ensuing scandal and Harwood’s unmasking set up a powerful dichotomy in Harwood’s reception, fuelled by the shocking image of the ‘Tas housewife’ on the verge of being prosecuted for obscenity. It was a powerful declaration that she should not be pigeonholed as a domestic goddess.

After her first volume of Poems was published (not until 1963), Harwood’s reputation as a poet and librettist began to grow steadily, and in the last years of her life she was honoured many times over, with prizes, fellowships, several honorary degrees, and the Order of Australia. She died in 1995, at the age of

seventy-five, and remains one of Australia’s pre-eminent poets.

Many of her poems offer deeply felt meditations about language, philosophy, dreamscapes, and music, as well as surreal visions, flights of fancy, and dizzying wordplay. Harwood’s technical facility with metre and form was outstanding, though it is often noted that in her later works the poetic line breathes a little more easily. Some of her poems and, later, her comments in interviews drew attention to the difficulties of balancing household and familial demands with the need for solitude and writing time. There is also a strong strand of her work engaging with romantic and sexual desire.

When I was working on Harwood’s poetry in the early 1990s, it was hard not to wonder about these poems that spoke to such deep sexual passion but also – though less blatantly – about the apparent frustrations and difficulties in a long marriage. Were these love poems textual experiments, inspired by the long history of erotic literature in English? Were they to be read as if written by different, though unnamed, voices or personae? Were they reliving old memories? Or were they poems arising from current or recent sexual affairs? It seemed to me that this latter, most likely scenario was indeed the case, but just as Greg Kratzmann had pulled back from writing Harwood’s biography, I also felt that if these stories had not been made public, it was not my business to speculate about them. In any case, as Harwood had written to Tony Riddell in 1959, ‘To me now it seems impossible to see beneath the surface of women if they don’t show their interior life of their own accord.’

Freed from the power to hurt, this biography opens up the complex private world behind Harwood’s emergence as a public figure, by exploring the unpublished web of dispersed texts in which Harwood did disclose much of her interior life. With the benefit of distance and hindsight, Priest unfolds a nuanced and layered version of Harwood’s emotional life, her bouts with depression, anxiety, anger, and frustration, as well as her deep passions, both inside her marriage and beyond it. One of the most poignant and painful threads is the number of times Gwen contemplated leaving her husband, Bill, even while still feeling bound to him in many ways. He was jealous of her friendships, and for many years forbade her to write to Riddell, her oldest and most intimate friend. He was also angry whenever he felt her poetry violated his own privacy.

Even when Harwood finally managed to scrape together some financial independence, she found it impossible to wound or hurt her increasingly ill husband by leaving him, even though she raged against his contempt for poetry, his evident misanthropy and growing social isolation, just as she was starting to revel in the pleasure of travelling and entertaining, meeting other poets and musicians, and enjoying the fruits of her success as a writer.

Priest unravels the long threads of Harwood’s most important and loving friendships, going right back to her first great love, Peter Bennie. Without sensationalising these stories, Priest traces Harwood’s involvement in several passionate sexual relationships, with Tom Pick, Norman Talbot, one or two others, perhaps; and a number of deeply romantic and loving friendships with women: especially Ann Jennings, Vera Cottew, and Lotte Wilmot.

Some friendships (for example, with Vincent Buckley and James McCauley) began in enmity and ended in loving affection. Other

friendships were punctuated or ended by misunderstandings and perceived betrayals. Of all these relationships, perhaps the most moving is the story of Harwood’s last intimate love, Rosemary Cohen, who took turns with Bill Harwood attending Gwen on her deathbed.

This is a compelling biography. It offers no great challenge to the genre: it is not particularly experimental; and nor does Priest foreground her own voice, judgements, or decisions. Brief remarks about local and cultural contexts are offered at various times, but rightly, I think, Priest puts Harwood’s voice – or rather, her many voices – at the heart of this volume. It is hard not to regret the absence of an index, however: not just to the poems discussed, but to the many players in this important chapter in the cultural history of Australian poetry.

Priest explains her choice of title in the brief introduction to My Tongue Is My Own. For Harwood, ‘Owning her tongue was about claiming the right not only to speak but also to be silent – even to lie. It was about using her voice as she chose: to hide or to reveal herself, to try out different characters, different truths and possibilities, and to speak … the love she felt compelled to own.’

As Harwood lay dying, Cohen offered to move closer to care for her, but Harwood refused. ‘I don’t want a broom-wielder or assistant laundress,’ she said. ‘I want a crazy selfish bright-tongued lover.’ It is this glittering, passionate voice – Harwood’s own tongue – that now rings loud and clear. g Stephanie Trigg is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne. Her books include the critical monograph Gwen Harwood (OUP, 1994).

Suburban Sonnet

She practises a fugue, though it can matter to no one now if she plays well or not.

Beside her on the floor two children chatter, then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot boils over. As she rushes to the stove too late, a wave of nausea overpowers subject and counter-subject. Zest and love drain out with soapy water as she scours the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.

When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.

She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

Gwen Harwood

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

9

Memoir

The Nanette turn

A stand-up comic defies convention Sarah Balkin

Ten Steps to Nanette

by Hannah Gadsby

H

Allen & Unwin $49.99 hb, 386 pp

annah Gadsby’s show Nanette (2017–18) starts out funny but then shifts to long, angry monologues that refuse its audience the release of laughter. By breaking the conventional contract between a comedian and her audience, Gadsby rejected her own former practice of turning her traumatic experiences into jokes. Nanette’s international run and subsequent release as a Netflix special spanned the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which gauged public support for marriage equality,

Hannah Gadsby in Douglas (2020) (Ali Goldstein/©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection)

as well as the international #MeToo movement against sexual assault. As high-profile performers such as Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby respectively admitted to and were tried for sexual misconduct, comedians became important figures in public debates about the relationship between artists and their work. Gadsby brought to these debates the perspective of a gender non-conforming 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

lesbian and sexual assault survivor from rural Tasmania. Nanette became an emblem of queer and feminist anger or – depending on one’s point of view – of the humourless, politically correct ‘cancel culture’ many comedians rail against.

Gadsby’s memoir, Ten Steps to Nanette, details her life leading up to the show that launched her international celebrity and changed stand-up comedy. As Gadsby points out in the book, Nanette came before #MeToo; its early performances responded instead to Australia’s plebiscite on marriage equality in 2017, which revived traumatic memories of public debates about homosexuality during Gadsby’s childhood. (In 1997, Tasmania became the last Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality.)

Threaded through the book are a history of gay law reform in Australia and explanations of how the homophobia and gender norms Gadsby encountered as a young person in Smithton harmed her. By positioning herself as a person from a particular time and place, Gadsby qualifies her post-Nanette international celebrity as an icon of the woke left.

Gadsby asserts her cultural specificity in a different way when, early in the book, she takes ‘a moment to directly address any Americans who may be reading this: your comedy gods are not mine’. She emphasises that she is a festival comic, meaning that rather than ‘stacking jokes one on top of the other’, as American stand-ups conventionally do, she makes ‘shows out of interconnecting material that is designed to pull an audience through a cohesive hour-long experience’. By reminding American readers that Nanette has generic antecedents in festival comedy, Gadsby also reminds them that she is skilful and had a career in Australia prior to the show.

With its interconnecting subsections on Gadsby’s life and career, Australian gay law reform, and her experience of autism, Ten Steps to Nanette might be described as a longer-form version of her approach to festival shows. But where in Nanette Gadsby was ‘at war with the form’ of comedy, in Ten Steps she gently bends the form of memoir.

Gadsby calls attention to her interventions into genre conventions when, for example, she distinguishes her approach from that of an ‘imaginary ghostwriter’ who ‘would insist on putting at the top’ of her account of her life at the age of twelve the fact that she was being ‘intermittently molested’ by a man in her community. Gadsby chooses not to lead with this experience, she explains, because ‘when you are forced to keep a trauma secret in order to survive, you need to actively avoid incorporating the traumatic event into your official version of self ’. Gadsby wants her perspective of that time to structure the story, but also explains how events affected her even when she was unaware of or emotionally distancing herself from them.

The book also revises the chronology conventional to memoir; for example, Step 1 is an epilogue, while a prologue follows Step 10.

Memoir Gadsby’s concluding prologue is a previously unpublished story she wrote as a child, which she describes as technically her first book: ‘How Siffin Soffon Became Friendly with a Dragon’.

There is a long tradition of queer interventions into chronology; for instance, Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) features neither four saints nor three acts and includes an instruction to repeat the first act. But Gadsby links her own reordering to trauma more than to queerness, noting that ‘there is never a straight line to be found through a life punctuated by trauma’. Here, as in her performance work after Nanette, she experiments with genre conventions, which are socially recognised ways of organising and understanding stories.

By reminding American readers that Nanette has generic antecedents in festival comedy, Gadsby also reminds them that she had a career prior to the show Fans and scholars of Gadsby’s work may find the book most enlightening in its restoration of her autistic perspective to her writing and performance of Nanette. Gadsby intentionally excluded her autism from the show because she realised that the ‘misinformation that is built into most people’s understanding of it’ would get in the way of what she wanted to say. While Gadsby has discussed her autism in subsequent shows such as Douglas (2019), Ten Steps reveals the safeguards she put in place to protect herself and her audiences from meltdowns triggered by reliving her traumas while performing Nanette.

Noting that sounds can cause her physical pain and, less often, pleasant feelings, Gadsby describes how she seeded the show with ten phrases that made her feel good, such as the line about her favourite ‘sound of a teacup hitting its saucer’. Gadsby spent several days alone repeating these phrases ‘over and over again under the influence of my best guess at microdoses of MDMA’. She explains that the phrases functioned as disguised modes of stimming – repetitive movements or tics such as hand flapping or rocking back and forth commonly used for selfsoothing – during performances of Nanette. Gadsby was thus able to regulate her emotions and retain her authority on stage. This account of Gadsby’s neurodiverse performance practice shows how a sophisticated program of masking (performing social behaviours considered neurotypical) facilitated the delivery and reception of a show whose premise was that comedy could not tell Gadsby’s full story.

Nanette’s impact on contemporary comedy is still being felt.

At the 2021 Melbourne International Comedy Festival, trans comedian Anna Piper Scott called a section of her show that contained traumatic material the ‘Nanette turn’, suggesting that Gadsby’s genre intervention has become a convention in its own right. Ten Steps to Nanette will be felt in a different way, not as a revolution in the genre, but as a fuller account of the life of an artist who has been profoundly affected, and who has affected others, by telling her own story. g Sarah Balkin is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Golf diplomacy

A canny emissary in Washington Timothy J. Lynch

Diplomatic: A Washington memoir

by Joe Hockey with Leo Shanahan

I

HarperCollins $34.99 pb, 306 pp

n the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.

Hockey’s character is the root cause of his significant success: his unusual persistence, his distrust of career diplomats (fearing leaks, he never sent a diplomatic cable), his disdain towards his own boss, his loathing of cocktail parties, his understanding of, but recurrently misplaced faith in, Donald Trump, and how he made sport generally, and golf specifically, a vehicle for his diplomacy. All are illustrated in his account.

Hockey was federal treasurer under Tony Abbott (2013–15), delivering an unpopular budget in 2014 that was widely credited with his boss’s removal by Malcolm Turnbull. Hockey, we learn in this book, never forgave this act of regicide – not least because it meant that Hockey himself would not succeed Abbott. Turnbull, the prime minister who sent Hockey to Washington, drifts through the book as a nervous nellie, both suspicious of Hockey’s risk-taking but also in need of it.

The fallout from the infamous phone call between Trump and Turnbull, when the new president, in his first call with a foreign leader, all but hung up on his Australian counterpart, was cleaned up by Hockey’s subsequent bringing them together aboard the USS Intrepid – ‘it was like the two men were the best of friends’ – and a White House state dinner (‘a great success’).

Despite his name – an Anglicised version of his Armenian grandfather’s Hockedunian – the sport Hockey excelled at was golf, or at least golf diplomacy. It was a golfer, Greg Norman, who effected his first meeting with Trump. It was on a golf course that Hockey got to know Trump, sinking a long putt to earn the president’s respect, in the author’s telling. And it was via golf that Hockey was able to restore bilateral relations after that first awkward phone call.

Shakespeare has the French dauphin goad Henry V by gifting him tennis balls. But Hockey used the same sport to build bridges.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

11

He is hardly the first ambassador to draw on this. But he was especially adept at using military symbolism and ceremony to bring a notoriously anti-war, Vietnam draft-dodging Trump into Australia’s orbit. Hockey’s defining slogan was ‘100 years of mateship’. Not even the British could match this (‘250 years of mateship [apart from the first 100 and Vietnam]’). He had it plastered across the Australian embassy. It worked, giving his diplomacy a historical anchor that even the most ahistorical of presidents could appreciate.

The spectre that haunts the narrative is, of course, President Trump. Barack Obama (too left and lawyerly) and Joe Biden (too old) are much less interesting to the Australian ambassador. Trump fascinates him. Hockey reminds us that he had predicted Trump’s 2016 win all along.

He credits himself with being especially attuned to what made Trump tick. Hockey’s feel for American populism, when so much of the coastal media were deriding it, gave him empathy when others chose anger. In the build-up to the 2020 election, Hockey created ‘Mary Milwaukee from Wisconsin’, a Trump voter who didn’t care about Trump’s ego. What she did care about was holding down her $11.11-an-hour Walmart job, her right to worship, the respect accorded her army son, and her daughter’s ability to afford college. When Trump spoke for her, argues Hockey, he elevated his campaign. But he did not do this enough.

The book is punctuated by the author’s dashed hopes that Trump could be something more than an anti-establishment rabble-rouser. There is genuine affection for Trump (‘He’s a funny guy, and good company – when he wants to be’) but also exasperation. Too often, bemoans Hockey, Trump saw compassion, much needed in 2020, as a sign of weakness. ‘He failed to understand that the nation was crying out for some sympathy from their leader over Ambassador Joe Hockey meeting with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. what was happening to them.’ Trump’s capacity for own Image supplied. goals perplexed the sports-loving ambassador.

The narrative is bookended by the presidential elecThe networks this afforded Hockey were exploited throughout tions of 2016 and 2020, whose results were not accepted by the his ambassadorship. Convinced that, like him, every Washington losing side. Ambassador Hockey offers us a sure-footed and official hated cocktail parties, Hockey schmoozed for Australia realistic account of the ensuing national turmoil. What is remarkable is how stable was the relationship between Canberra on that tennis court.

Somewhat predictably for an Australian, sport is central to the and Washington. Political scientists might call this path dependbook and its author’s grasp of his new home. ‘There is no better ence: the interests that diplomats seek to advance are pretty fixed. introduction to the United States,’ writes Hockey, ‘than the Super The relative power of states dictates the enduring tenor of their Bowl.’ ‘Having a love of sport is a great asset in diplomacy.’ Most relationships much more than do shifting personalities.

And yet Hockey offers us a vivid glimpse of how the personcodes get a mention. In a hilarious account, the author attends a National Hockey League game with his son. On attempting to ality and psychology of democratic leaders can be appropriately manipulated to advance the interests and prosperity of their buy him a uniform, Hockey has his credit card rejected. peoples. This is how Hockey saw his diplomatic function. And he was good at it. Determined not to retard Australian interests ‘That’s not a real card,’ said the store clerk. by indulging a distaste for Trump – the trap into which his ‘What? Yes it is,’ I replied.

British counterpart, Kim Darroch, fell – Hockey found a way to ‘Joe Hockey? That’s not a real name!’ work with this perplexing man. That he enjoyed a modicum of ‘It is! That’s my real name!’ success during a time of great tribulation remains testament to ‘C’mon, really? Joe Hockey?’ his diplomacy and his persistence. g Sport is complemented by military history. The shared sacrifice, the bleeding together of Americans and Australians since Timothy J. Lynch is Professor of American Politics at the 1918, is a frame of reference for much of Hockey’s diplomacy. University of Melbourne.

Over the objections of frugal career diplomats, he renovated the grass tennis courts at his official residence. ‘This may not sound like a big deal, but it was actually the only one in Washington, DC … all of a sudden several members of the Trump administration and members of Congress all wanted to come around and play.’

12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

China

Back to the future

China’s quest to break down its language barrier James Jiang

Kingdom of Characters: A tale of language, obsession, and genius in modern China

by Jing Tsu

P

Allen Lane $45 hb, 336 pp

icture, poem, or puzzle? The Chinese written character has been one of the most enduring obstacles to and catalysts for intercultural appreciation. When, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wanted to demonstrate the relative backwardness of Oriental thought, he could find no better exhibit than the form of its writing. Attached as it was to ‘the sensuous image’, the putatively pictographic Chinese character forfeited access to the conceptual abstraction that afforded European thinkers their passports to the ‘free, ideal realm of Spirit’. Yet a century later, it was this very characterisation of Chinese writing – as irreducibly concrete and free of intellectual mediation – that persuaded the philologist Ernest Fenollosa and poet Ezra Pound of its therapeutic promise for Western art. ‘Full of the sap of nature’, the Chinese character would inject primitivist vitality into the dry husks of romanised verbiage. What had made it peripheral to the historical florescence of ‘reason’ now legitimised it in the name of aesthetic modernism.

But as Jing Tsu shows in Kingdom of Characters, the problems and misunderstandings occasioned by Chinese writing plagued more than Western cognoscenti. As reformers during the death throes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) saw, assertions of political sovereignty rested on the capacity to exercise effective ‘linguistic governance’ (a term I borrow from Tsu’s 2010 study, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, where one can see the first germs of her new book). This applied not only internally where linguistic standardisation was integral to nation-building (so far, so Benedict Anderson), but also on the world stage, where China’s ability to assert itself – diplomatically, technologically – was largely predicated on its characters’ finding equal footing on the alphabetic terrain of increasingly globalised communication networks. But how to do this when the semantic bedrock of a script in uninterrupted use for close to two millennia barely registers beneath a horizon of shifting topolects and accents, let alone a giant dust cloud of illiteracy?

Beginning with the heroic efforts of the exiled Qing official Wang Zhao to establish a transcription system, Tsu charts the birth pangs of modern China through various attempts to phoneticise, alphabetise, mechanise, simplify, and encode its cast of tens of thousands of characters. Written in a vivid and accessible manner, Kingdom of Characters serves as a useful primer on not only the Chinese language and modern Chinese history, but also

the history of print and information technology. The reader is given insight into the diplomatic wrangling over international telegraphy pricing, the development of the typewriter keyboard and phototypesetting, and the birth of Unicode, an international standard for coding the world’s writing systems. While there is no shortage of fascinating detail, the book’s celebration of technical ingenuity and scientific progress occasionally verges on the mawkish (‘he was raised on the cusp of two worlds – the traditional one, where he was the good Confucian son, and the modern one, where he needed to be the daring scientist and engineer’), almost as if Kingdom of Characters were in part a Chinese update of Samuel Smiles’s series of biographical pep talks in Lives of the Engineers (1861).

Yet this meliorist mood is dampened by a structural intimation of plus ça change. We are made to see more than a passing resemblance between the pivotal scene in the first chapter, when Wang forcibly brings the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation to install the Beijing-based vernacular as the national standard after much bickering between the northern and southern delegates, and the overheated discussions of the Ideographic Research Group in the final chapter, with delegates from Taiwan and Hong Kong disputing the accession of characters to Unicode as either new or variant glyphs. While the wheel of reform has not stopped turning for China since the 1912 Xinhua revolution that brought an end to its dynastic history, there can be the occasional stroboscopic illusion of reverse rotation. At such moments, we are, as it were, back to the future.

In some sense, the story Kingdom of Characters has to tell is less about the Chinese language than it is about the entrenchment of mechanisms of technical and bureaucratic control that is a harbinger of modernity. But against Max Weber’s pessimism about the world’s progressive disenchantment, Tsu posits the triumph of a collective will. As she puts it rather rousingly in the final chapter, ‘The Chinese script revolution has always been the true people’s revolution – not “the people” as determined by Communist ideology but the wider multitude that powered it with innovators and foot soldiers.’ The credit for modernising China is thus wrested out of the hands of the Communist Party and given to those closer to the ground. But what is offered as a neat post-ideological reinterpretation of ‘the people’s revolution’ can smell awfully like another kind of ideology.

In the main, Kingdom of Characters does little to disturb the notion that modernisation is tantamount to industrial and economic development on a Western schedule. To be sure, Tsu’s roster of Chinese ‘innovators’ had much to learn from their counterparts in America, Europe, and Japan, and Tsu lets her case studies do much of the talking. But the line between paraphrase and endorsement isn’t always so clear. Surprisingly, there is little in the explicit framing of this narrative-rich, conceptually thin book that might make the reader think twice about the unilinear (not to mention Eurocentric) path to modernity underwriting notions of China’s ‘backwardness’ or ‘belatedness’. Not only has such a historical metanarrative been challenged by recent sociologists and postcolonial thinkers, but it also isn’t entirely consistent with the thrust of Tsu’s own histories.

As the Russian critic Yuri Tynianov once suggested, the true innovator can be difficult to tell from the archaist. In many of AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

13

Tsu’s accounts of forward-thinking, innovation and conservation are two sides of the same endeavour. Despite the recommendation of one of its creators, Unicode has become a repository for ‘preserving past antiquities’, cataloguing terms gleaned from esoteric source texts such as ninja manuals. The digitisation of written characters would not have been possible without the card-catalogue systems used by Chinese librarians. One of the key precedents for Chinese romanisation (pinyin) was the system developed to preserve Dunganese (a Sinitic language now largely spoken in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). In each case, the spur to invention was harnessed to a bid to consolidate, not overthrow, the past. Modernity, wherever and however we happen to look for it, seldom faces forward without looking longingly over its shoulder.

Some far-reaching conclusions, however, lurk at the edges of Kingdom of Characters’ comforting vignettes of a nation lifting itself up by the bootstraps of its inventors, engineers, and

linguists. One such conclusion is that far less separates natural from artificial languages than one might imagine. Each time a mother tongue is subjected to a new notation regime, it is essentially de-naturalised, requiring its native speakers to patch up their linguistic programming. Indeed, a few of the reformist schemes mentioned by Tsu brush up against Esperanto and BASIC English. Such latter-day utopian linguistic projects recall seventeenth-century European attempts to establish a ‘character real’ – a universal formal medium for learned exchange that used the Chinese character as a reference point. The dream was to subsume linguistics under informatics. For China in the twentieth century, the technological streamlining of its script was much less a philosophical fantasy than a necessary safeguard for its future – and its past. g James Jiang is Assistant Editor at ABR.

Styptic (E.R. 1926–2022)

2 am. Prompter than usual. Nocturnal emails, a commonplace book to aphorise – fillipia!

I write to someone in Oxford, then Wagga, pondering the etiquette of commissioning in the middle of the night.

Then, reading them to myself lowly, I happen upon some poems by Hardy, dismissed as a ‘practitioner’ by T.S. Eliot, who was deemed ‘styptical’ by Christopher Ricks, whom I also read on Philip Larkin – Required Writing.

I hunt for my old Faber copy on the shelves, fruitless.

Now it’s time to mortify my journal, followed by a first cup of coffee.

Waiting for it to brew I listen to the 4 am news.

The opposition leader, despite Covid, remains vigilant, like the Queen with her infernal boxes, age notwithstanding, nor viduity, nor Prince Andrew.

Meanwhile the US president sends Ukraine another billion dollars in arms – plus his handsome secretary of state.

It sounds like too much but never enough.

Flexing my back, aware of winter’s first chill, I think of you lying there on your electric blanket all night long, listening to the news on the hour, avid, foetal, sleepless, unwarmable, shocked always when the ABC newsreader identifies himself as David Rowlands, the father who stopped sending you bulletins when you were three, never to be heard from again.

Except you’re not there.

Peter Rose Peter Rose’s sixth and most recent collection is The Subject of Feeling (2015).

14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Commentary

Gwen Harwood and the perils of reticence Notes of a son and literary executor

by John Harwood

W

hen Ann-Marie Priest wrote to me in 2015 asking whether she might talk to me about her proposed biography of my mother, and requesting my permission to examine some correspondence in the Fryer Library, which I, as Gwen Harwood’s literary executor, had placed on restricted access, I replied with a terse refusal to cooperate. Since my mother’s death in December 1995, I had kept tight control of her vast correspondence, nearly all of which she had donated to various research libraries over the last two decades of her life, and I saw no reason to change my ways.

As a biographer myself and a great admirer of Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame: Literary estates and the rise of biography (1992), I knew perfectly well what I was doing. The archetypical stand-off between would-be biographer and family executor had not changed, in essence, since the Copyright Act 1842, which, as Hamilton remarks, had the effect of intensifying the involvement of wives, sons and daughters in the administration of their loved-one’s literary leavings.

The prompt issue of a family-controlled biography would, it was perceived, both safeguard the biographee’s good name (by forestalling unauthorised attempts) and also see to it that the good name was, so to speak, kept warm … A legend could be fed and milked.

After the funeral would come the slamming of doors, the scrubbing of marble and then, within two years or so, the emergence of what Gladstone called ‘a Reticence in three volumes’.

Gwen Harwood, however, had no desire for a Reticence.

Quite the contrary; in the last years of her life, she enlisted not one but two official biographers: Alison Hoddinott, an old family friend, editor of Blessed City (1990), the young Gwendoline Foster’s wartime letters to her best friend Thomas Riddell, and author of Gwen Harwood: The real and the imagined world, a necessarily reticent life-and-work-in-progress; and the late Gregory Kratzmann, then a lecturer in English at La Trobe University.

She promised them both her full support, and, it must be said, led them a merry dance, until Hoddinott sensibly withdrew from the floor. My mother’s plan was to oversee the writing of her own life, and to this end she not only gave Kratzmann exclusive access to everything she had already donated to libraries, but also began sending him jiffy bags full of her incoming correspondence.

My father, F.W. (Bill) Harwood, a mathematical linguist who despised poetry in general and regarded my mother’s poems, in 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

so far as they even touched upon his own life, as an unconscionable invasion of his privacy, was in his mid-seventies and in poor health, whereas my mother, despite ominous warning signs about her own health, fully expected to live to a hundred and to be present at the launch of her own Life. Instead, in January 1995, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. During her last bleak year of ever-decreasing mobility and remorselessly encroaching pain, she invited me to act as her literary executor, and I accepted.

I was well aware, when I did so, that my parents’ marriage had been far from harmonious. They were, in temperament and belief, polar opposites: my mother impulsive, gregarious, extravagant in her loves and hates (but quick to forgive, no matter what the offence); my father reserved, solitary, averse to displays of emotion (though unfailingly loyal to, and greatly loved by, his own circle of friends). She was profoundly committed to the high Romantic vision of art and music and love as the ultimate sources of meaning in life, and to the rituals (though not the doctrines) of high Anglicanism. He was a diehard materialist, atheist, and behaviourist who had spent his working life seeking to develop a set of algorithms capable of programming an AI, as we would now put it, whose speech would be indistinguishable from our own, thus proving that human beings (with the possible exception of himself and his close associates in this endeavour) were no more than self-deluded automata. (He was also a highly skilled craftsman who would, I suspect, have been much happier running a boat yard.) My parents had been trying to convert each other for close on half a century, during which my mother, who had spent six months in an Anglican convent in her early twenties, had lost her faith in the biblical God, and read deeply into Ludwig Wittgenstein. My father had not moved an inch.

Likewise, he seemed perfectly content to live out his days in Hobart, where he had been appointed as a lecturer in English immediately after his discharge from the navy in 1945, whereas my mother, from the moment of her arrival in Hobart, saw it as a place of chill desolation: Even as I say How Beautiful How Charming why do I feel that some demonic presence hovers where too much evil has been done … (‘1945’)

From that day forward, Brisbane would forever be the ‘blessed city’ of warmth and light, lost freedom and lost loves. And she

would rail against the constraints of marriage and childrearing, not only in private but in some of the most powerful poems ever written about the plight of the gifted artist driven to create and yet condemned to domestic slavery because she happens to have been born female. As her fame grew in the 1960s (along with her four children), she contemplated leaving my father. But in 1964 he was diagnosed with severe Type 1 diabetes, which then meant that he could easily die of hypoglycaemia if left unattended, and so she stayed, lamenting her exile from Brisbane more and more vehemently as the decades passed.

In their last years together, he offered (more than once in my presence) to divide their assets equally so that she could return to Brisbane, but she would not accept, for fear, I think, of being haunted by guilt if he were to die alone. As several of her poems testify, she knew on some deep level that the ‘Blessed City’ she longed to return to was the youthful self from whom she had parted in 1945, the life she might have lived:

Though you summon the dead you cannot come as a child to your father’s house.

(‘Return of the Native’)

And yet, for all the savagery of poems like ‘Burning Sappho’, ‘Suburban Sonnet’, and ‘In the Park’, the husbands (there is almost always a dramatic element in her work, no matter how unmediated it may seem) are not presented as villains or monsters; there is, rather, a sense of inevitability: this is simply how things are, how gifted women are bound to end up if they choose to marry. Other equally personal poems insist, with equal force, that she has chosen freely: No hand ravished me from the height I claim.

Freedom is power to choose. Each day I choose my life, choose to be woven in other lives … (‘Littoral)

And few readers, encountering ‘Iris’, when it first appeared in 1971, would have doubted that the marriage depicted – undeniably her own, right down to the specifications of the boat my father built – was rock solid: Give me your hand. The same pure wind, the same light-cradling sea shall comfort us, who have built our ark faithfully. In fugitive rainbows of spray she lifts, wave after wave, her promise: those whom the waters bear shall live.

(‘Iris’ was, ironically, the poem that most infuriated my father: when he came upon it in The Australian he was speechless with rage that she should dare to write so openly of their marriage – and be read by so many.)

T

his, at any rate, is roughly how I would have sketched the marriage at the time of her death. For all her railing against being stuck in freezing Hobart with HIM – an

icy monosyllable generally uttered through gritted teeth – she had after all stayed, and, indeed, had died holding his hand. But a few months later, Gregory Kratzmann told me that my mother had had several affairs during the marriage, not to mention a two-year affair with her married music teacher in Brisbane, beginning when she was seventeen, all of which she had freely, and by the sound of it eagerly, discussed with Kratzmann before her final illness. In one mood, he said, she would exhort him to ‘go for broke’ and Tell All; in another she would insist that ‘we mustn’t do anything that would hurt Bill’ – not, at least, until he was safely dead.

But now she was dead, and I, as her executor, had the power to determine what, if anything, I would allow Kratzmann to quote from her massive correspondence. (Whereas extracts from published works may be quoted without permission according to the terms of ‘fair dealing’, unpublished correspondence is fully protected, as Ian Hamilton discovered late in the writing of what became In Search of J. D. Salinger.) I loved my parents equally and was determined that, so far as I had anything to do with it, nothing that might distress my father or his many old friends would find its way into print.

Thus Kratzmann and I were set on a collision course. He had a contract for a biography; I was prepared to countenance Gwen Harwood: A literary life, as it were – leaving out the affairs and anything (much) about marital distress – whereas he believed that my mother’s ultimate wish was for him to Tell All. He could, of course, have proceeded by loosely paraphrasing from the embargoed letters, which he had already photocopied. But that might have led to difficulties with his publisher (Oxford University Press), and in any case he did not wish to alienate me and my siblings. He therefore agreed to edit a volume of correspondence on my terms, and so A Steady Storm of Correspondence, after rigorous pruning by me, appeared in November 2001.

Some readers were aware of what had been left out; others wondered why so many of the letters had been excerpted. But my father was still alive, and so were friends and family who would have been deeply distressed on his behalf. By a strange coincidence, he died of a heart attack a few days before A Steady Storm was launched in Hobart.

There was no other biographer then in prospect: Kratzmann and Hoddinott went on to edit a fine edition of Gwen Harwood’s Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003), and I continued in my role as keeper of the flame, happily approving the reproduction and performance of her poems and libretti whilst keeping much of her archived correspondence (of which I had read only a fraction) under embargo. I more or less assumed that things would go on thus indefinitely, with A Steady Storm taking the place of the biography my mother had hoped for.

Then last year, I read Ann-Marie Priest’s ‘Baby and Demon: Woman and the Artist in the Poetry of Gwen Harwood’ (2014) – which I ought to have read when she first wrote to me – and realised belatedly that Gwen Harwood, despite my best efforts, had found her biographer. My Tongue Is My Own is exactly the Life that Gwen Harwood – that is to say Gwen Harwood the poet, musician, and unconquerable free spirit despite all the burdens of domesticity – would have wanted. With admirable enterprise, Priest has tracked down the thousands of letters I had AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

17

embargoed, and trawled through public records in search of many small but illuminating details which would otherwise have been lost. And she has orchestrated Gwen Harwood’s protean voices with such inwardness and authorial restraint that her narrative often reads like autobiography at its most compelling.

Many people will, I imagine, be drawn to this book by their love of the poems, without perhaps knowing much about the poet beyond the anodyne biographical sketches available online.

To them – and even to those familiar with A Steady Storm – My Tongue Is My Own may come as something of a shock – as it has to me, not necessarily because of the love affairs mentioned above, although readers can now put names to the lovers and beloveds central to many of the poems. But the fifty-year marriage at the heart of the story takes on a darker hue; darker than I had anticipated. (The irony of my being the one person who had free access to the archive all along isn’t lost on me.)

When Gwendoline Foster met Bill Harwood in September 1943, she was free to go where she liked, do what she liked, and love whom she liked, all with her devoted parents’ blessing. She and Bill fell deeply and passionately in love, but the warning signs were clear. Whereas she regarded love as an infinite resource, like sunlight, he wanted her exclusive devotion; he was jealous even of her piano-playing, despite the joy it brought her. ‘If he could make me invisible to everyone else,’ she wrote at the time, ‘he would do so gladly.’ He insisted that she break with all of her male friends, and burn every letter she had ever received from a man.

To all of these demands she willingly acceded: ‘If I am to be Bill’s I can keep nothing,’ she told her closest friend, and later: ‘What you see as tyranny is only the immeasurable demands of love.’ As Priest remarks: ‘Donne’s love poems and the language of Christian mysticism came together for Gwen in a kind of frenzy of self-surrender.’

Their first home was an isolated cottage halfway up Mount Wellington; Bill took over Gwen’s savings and kept all their money in his own name, doling out just enough for household expenses (she, of course, did all the housework). He chose their friends, discouraged all other visitors, and would not buy her a piano: ‘The loss was so intolerable, she would later say, that she turned to poetry to assuage it.’

Nevertheless, she thought of their marriage, during those early years, as happy. So long as she adapted herself precisely to his wishes, he was a loving and devoted companion. When crossed, he would retreat into cold silence, which she found unbearable; she would rather deform herself than endure his disapproval.

To their mutual friends, they seemed an ideal couple: ‘they admired one another’s intellect and – crucially – laughed at one another’s jokes’. The young Alison Wright (later Hoddinott) was drawn ‘like a magnet to evenings of laughter, of discussion, of argument’.

As the 1950s passed, Gwen became more assertive in making friends of her own, despite the demands of four small children.

Then in 1957 she fell ‘deeply, truly, tragically in love’ with a married man ‘who loved me & did not wish to change me’. The affair lasted only a few weeks before he was posted to Sydney; they both had young children whom they could not contemplate leaving, but the loss of him left her sleepless and distraught for many months.

My Tongue Is My Own is, first and foremost, a portrait of an artist compelled, in circumstances that would have defeated many people, to transform herself into a poet of extraordinary power and technical virtuosity. She acquired a piano, earned her own money, secured her reputation, travelled alone interstate, had love affairs. Much of the time, she and Bill got on perfectly well, but though the balance of power had shifted, the essential dynamic of the marriage remained: when crossed, he would retreat into ‘scaly coldness’, as at the publication of ‘Iris’ in 1971: ‘He hates my poetry almost as much as he hated my musical activities,’ she lamented. His diabetes inhibited her from leaving him; whenever she resolved to end the marriage regardless, his health took another turn for the worse, until it seemed, in the mid-1970s, that he had only a few years to live.

When Hoddinott began working on the letters that would make up Blessed City, Bill’s fury erupted again. ‘He really worked me over,’ Gwen wrote to Hoddinott in 1986, ‘his knowledge of what is in them is minimal but he is furious with me 1) for ever giving anything to the Fryer 2) for letting the material out of Dracula’s vault 3) for ever having written anything …

I no longer have the strength to fight off his emotional blows.

It’s absurd that we ever got married.’

Bill was never violent, and never used the threat of violence; Gwen would certainly have left him if he had. Cold withdrawal, and lectures on her ‘defects of character’, were his weapons of choice, and she could never distance herself sufficiently to blunt them. When Blessed City appeared in 1990, and a visitor asked Bill what he thought of it, he replied, ‘I read a couple of pages, but it was so UTTERLY BORING I gave up.’ As Gwen remarked to Alison: ‘The equivalent in a drunken wife beater would be a blow to the face I suppose.’

Australian Animal Law CONTEXT AND CRITIQUE

Elizabeth Ellis July 2022 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

mildurawritersfestival.com Featuring guest authors Max Allen Larissa Behrendt Anna Clark Gerald Diffey Reg Dodd Melinda Hinkson Yumna Kassab Stuart Kells Anne Kenney Krissy Kneen Malcolm McKinnon Sam Morley Clare Wright With special guests Nic Brasch Stefano de Pieri Antony di Mase Jacinta di Mase Nick Gadd Paul Kane Maxine McKew David Nichols Spiri Tsintiziras Damien Wright and Stereo Stories in Concert at the Mildura Arts Centre

Full program and weekend package available 20 May

14 - 17 July 2022 Four days of words, food, and wine, featuring Australian & international writers

T

hough Priest’s account is scrupulously even-handed, and far more nuanced than this sketch might suggest (she encourages us to understand, rather than simply condemn, my father’s conduct), the point of view throughout is almost exclusively my mother’s, not only because it’s her Life but because my father, to the best of my knowledge, left nothing in writing that so much as hinted at marital discord. Whereas my mother, in her letters to intimate friends, was the equivalent of a singer who can not only span five octaves but also sustain a note at either extreme, pouring out her heart’s blood at sixty words a minute, wherever she could find space for her Remington. The raw intensity of her rage and anguish burns off the page, sweeping all before it.

Many readers will construe my father’s behaviour as coercive control (I already know of several who have). And up to a point it was. Coercive control, as we now understand it is, in essence, the isolation, financial control, gaslighting, and surveillance of the victim, enforced by violence or the threat of it; and deception of the victim’s friends and family (‘but he always seemed so devoted to her …’). My father did his best to keep my mother away from anybody he didn’t approve of, and to constrain her financially, but there was no violence and no deception. He was ruthlessly honest about his feelings: if he took a dislike to you, you would know all about it. Whereas if he did like you, he would be your friend for life (and gladly help you build your house, design and install you a watering system, or take you out sailing). The tributes at his funeral were heartfelt and unstinting.

The paradox at the heart of the marriage is that if my mother hadn’t married Bill Harwood (or had left him as soon as we children were grown), she might have lived a far happier life, but we wouldn’t have the poems. ‘If I’d stayed in Brisbane I’d never have written a line,’ she said to me on more than one occasion, meaning ‘if I hadn’t married Bill’. I’m sure she would have written many lines (assuming she hadn’t devoted her entire life to music), but not the ones that made her reputation.

This may sound perverse, given my father’s enduring hostility to her work. Part of his initial attraction for her was that he’d written his MA thesis on Coleridge’s theory of the imagination, but he was already reacting against literature; soon after they were married, he burned his thesis in the fireplace. His behaviourist, reductionist materialism, as I now see it, was a fortified enclave he had built to keep the troubling realms of art, literature, and music at bay. As my mother put it, around the time of his furious reaction to ‘Iris’: ‘Bill keeps telling me that poetry is just a language game but also that it is a violation of our privacy for me to write it – how can a “language game” be that?’ And later, speaking to a group of drama teachers: ‘Those who try to discount the imaginative use of language do so because they fear its power.’

My father, like many mid-century philosophers, misconstrued Wittgenstein as the ultimate positivist, whereas my mother understood that the concluding proposition of the Tractatus (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’) meant that everything that really mattered in life could not be analysed, only embodied in works of art. My father, sadly, learned nothing from their fifty-year debate, whereas she absorbed and transformed every argument he could muster. Throughout her work, scientific materialism is satirised to brilliant effect.

20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Likewise, the conflict between the demands of domesticity and the desire for absolute creative and emotional freedom is not only a defining theme, but a propelling force in some of her finest poems. (Priest is wonderfully insightful on this.) Throughout the marriage, friends would urge her to open her own bank account, offload the housework, insist on uninterrupted time for her writing, but she could never conquer her compulsion to be an ideal wife and mother. And if she had conquered it – as she asked herself on several occasions – would she have gone on writing at the same pitch of intensity?

M

y Tongue Is My Own leaves me with a heightened sense of the contrast between the angst-ridden letters raging against domestic slavery and marital torment, and the unfailing poise and self-awareness of her poetic voices.

Grief at the loss of loved ones resonates throughout the poems, whereas the raw fury of those letters is transformed in them; the poems speak from above, from a plane of imaginative freedom where anger, resentment, guilt, and despair are transcended as each poem comes together at last. Both realms are equally real, but the transcendent self can only be inhabited fleetingly, in a realm beyond ordinary time, and once she finishes a poem she must descend into the everyday, where the clock is always ticking, never knowing for certain if she’ll be able to recapture that visionary delight. ‘I choose to be woven’ is itself written from the height of freedom.

Gwen Harwood’s sprezzatura – her seemingly effortless technique (rivalled, I’d say, only by Byron in Don Juan) – was essential to that transcendence. The power she commanded wasn’t, she always insisted, accessible just through writing things down, however heartfelt; she needed the constraints of form, something to push against, forcing her to rethink and rewrite (much of which she did in her head, in the midst of housework) and so work her way into what she really felt, thought, meant, believed.

And when she pushed hard enough for long enough, she could enter another realm of being.

But mastery of form wasn’t enough; once she’d finished a poem, she never knew when (or if ) her next real poem would come to her. Every poem was a gift, and the mystery at the heart of the process could never be explained, only embodied. From outside, of course, all of this can sound like mystical yearning.

But for her, it was ultimate imaginative reality.

So, to conclude my executor’s tale: if I’d known what I was withholding, would I have done the same? Whilst my father was alive, yes; my mother knew, when she appointed me, that I would act as I did. Beyond that, I don’t know. But, thanks entirely to Ann-Marie Priest, it has all worked out for the best. My Tongue Is My Own deserves all the praise it is sure to attract. g John Harwood was born in Hobart and educated in Tasmania and at Cambridge University. His published work includes poetry, fiction, biography, environmental journalism, literary criticism, and satire. His novels The Ghost Writer (2004), The Séance (2008), and The Asylum (2012) have been translated into several languages and won several awards. ❖ This article was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Language

Crunk, wig, and slaps

How our language dates us in the digital world

by Sarah Ogilvie

A

t a dinner party recently, the conversation turned to how our language gives away our age. No more so than in the use of slang, proposed one guest, who suggested that each person’s use of slang, like a favourite pop song, is frozen in time from their teenage years. Take, for example, terms for something considered ‘wonderful’. The theory goes that if someone still says swell, tickety-boo, or snazzy, chances are they were teenagers during World War II. Boomers, those born after the war until the mid-1960s, are the most likely to use super duper, wild, or far out. Someone nearing fifty, a Gen Xer, is probably the most likely to say brill or wicked. Millennials and Gen Z would be the ones saying crunk, wig, and slaps.

The theory does hold to a certain extent: each of these words was actually coined in the periods when these generations were teenagers. Sociolinguists know that it is young people who are the primary drivers of linguistic innovation. But there are just too many exceptions for the theory to be true. Slang is invariably far older than one imagines. It usually takes years for ‘new’ slang to reach the mainstream. By the time most teenagers are using what they think is new slang, the words have already been around for decades in marginal subcultures where they were invented as ways to bond and to create in-groups and out-groups.

Most current slang originated many years ago in African American English (think bae, boujee, fam, shade, and woke) and found its way to the mainstream via jazz, rap, hip-hop, and

social media. Gen Zers would probably be surprised to learn that their words were created not by them but by their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, or even earlier: lit meaning ‘great’ (1914), woke ‘to be aware of discrimination and injustice’ (1962), fam ‘close friend’ (1996), throw shade ‘to express contempt’ (1990), ship and shipping ‘to advocate for romance between two people’ (1990). We might therefore find both a Melbourne teenager and an elderly man in Harlem, a Black neighbourhood of New York, using the same slang.

It is in the realm of social media and texting that our differences in age are most glaring. We saw it with Senator Richard Blumenthal in a recent US Senate investigation into child protection on the internet, when he thought he was being a hard ass by asking Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Global Head of Safety, ‘Will you commit to ending finsta?’ The clip went viral. He had shown that he had no idea of what a finsta (a fake Instagram account used among very close friends, often to express one’s intimate feelings) was. For starters, he used finsta as a mass noun rather than a count noun, and he implied that Facebook’s platform could identify and control the creation of finstas.

We all know how cringeworthy it is when older people try to act or dress younger than their age; they rarely get it right. This extends to the digital space. If an older person tries to present themselves as younger online by using Gen Z slang, they will be caught out by more than just their words – too much punctuation,

Book of the Week

A new review every Monday to your inbox, free to read.

Sign up on our website.

www.australianbookreview.com.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

21

too many capitals, too many hashtags, too many emoji (and the wrong ones!), too many numbers instead of letters (gr8, 2mrw, l8r are so 1990s).

In digital communication, Gen Zers have devised new social codes and new typographical tones of voice as ways of compensating for the absence of physical voice or body language. Failure to respond immediately to a text may indicate hostility. A full stop

Slang is invariably far older than one imagines at the end of a sentence or after an abbreviation might indicate that the writer is angry with the recipient. All caps are shouty. ~tildes~ and *asterisks* are used for sarcasm, and lol is used to express irony, softening, or passive aggression, with different implications depending on where it occurs in a sentence. There was a time when lol meant ‘lots of love’, but it now means ‘laugh out loud’ or ‘lots of laughs’, as one grandmother discovered when her granddaughter texted to say that the family dog had died, and she innocently responded ‘lol’.

Texting is a minefield, as any parent of a Gen Zer has learned when trying to text okay to their child. Should the message be okay, ok, K, kk, k, or something else? These five responses have come to communicate drastically different things. A response of k. means ‘you’re in big trouble’ for two reasons related to per-

ceived intentionality. First, the letter is lowercase, showing that the sender took time to ‘undo’ the default capitalisation on their phone. Secondly, there is a full stop after the letter. If the sender took extra time to ‘personalise’ the response in this way (by going into the part of the keyboard where the full stop is listed), it must mean that they were not happy. In contrast, kk has a cheerful and positive connotation; it is understood as a quick, low-effort way to soften the curtness of the single letter.

These new social codes are extended to the use of memes, humorous pictures or videos that go viral. As anyone who has learnt another language will attest: humour comes last. Jokes are the most difficult thing to ‘get’ when learning a new language.

The equivalent today is learning the language of internet memes.

Memes are the new slang. Just as slang is a counter-language that reacts against a standard, so it is with memes. The most popular memes originate within internet subcultures such as Black Twitter, weird twitter, trans twitter, alt-right, or leftbook (leftist-leaning Facebook groups) and are intended to be ‘relatable’ for their own communities, and hence impenetrable to outsiders.

No matter how much Gen Z slang an older person can try to learn, nothing will date us like those extra typographical tones of voice and the impenetrable memes of the digital world. g Sarah Ogilvie’s most recent books include Gen Z, Explained: How to live in a digital world (2021), The Whole World in a Book (2020), and The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries (2020). She is a linguist at the University of Oxford.

‘A literary biography can be a form of creative writing in the way it engages with its audience, its shaping of amorphous material, its narrative drive, its style and elegance. This one does all these things in an original way … Hobby’s prose is clear, supple and alive with gentle humour. His lightness of touch belies the exhaustive detail of the research.’

NICHOLAS JOSE

Available at mup.com.au

22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

F I C T I O N A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022 23

Fiction

The hunted

Douglas Stuart’s second novel Shannon Burns

Young Mungo

by Douglas Stuart

L

Picador $32.99 pb, 400 pp

ike the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s second novel is set in the post-Thatcher, post-industrial, working-class Glasgow housing schemes dominated by unemployment and dysfunctional families. Both novels are populated with alcoholic mothers and violent or absent fathers whose neglected children are forever vulnerable to abuse and hardship. Their titular protagonists must fit into their environment if they want to survive, but neither possesses that talent.

Shuggie detests the untidiness of other boys and their passion for sport, their assertive physicality, and Mungo exhibits a similar wariness. Shuggie dances compulsively; Mungo has a facial tic.

They both walk with feminine flourishes that can’t be modified.

Other boys conceal their fears and yearnings, but theirs rise to the surface. One character observes of Mungo: ‘It’s like your face has a mind of its own. It’s showing what you feel on the inside without ye even asking it.’

The social worlds and domestic lives represented in Stuart’s novels threaten to produce caricatures instead of rounded figures.

These are extreme settings with outsized personalities that are formed (or malformed) by intense experiences. There is little room for subtlety. In Shuggie Bain, if a boy is violent or abusive, a violent and abusive father is quickly introduced to explain the boy’s behaviour. The same patterns apply in Young Mungo.

Mungo’s older brother, Hamish, is a brutal and domineering gang leader, much like his dead father. We learn that he was viciously strapped by his mother as punishment for misbehaviour as a child and that he had to repress any desire for nurture and safety.

Hamish despises softness because he has been deprived of it, just as he despises the middle-class Glaswegians who ‘draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket, but they knew none of its chill, none of its need’.

Mungo struggles to read people effectively, to ‘see the difference between what someone said and what they truly meant’.

This deficit leaves him continually susceptible to manipulation and peril. The reader is always worried for him. Mungo is named after a saint and, like Shuggie before him, is saintly in his predispositions. Perhaps this is a product of youthfulness: Saint Mungo becomes Young Mungo, who is so vulnerable, neglected, and brutalised that he can only be an exemplar of virtue. While his siblings respond to their childhood deprivations by acquiring a thick skin or embracing a cynical world view, Mungo retains a need to trust and love people who are inclined to exploit his need.

24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Mungo’s love is only truly reciprocated by two people. One is his older, intelligent, industrious sister, Jodie, who does the bulk of the parenting in their household. Jodie cannot wholly fill the void left by their dead father and largely absent and self-absorbed mother. Nor does she want to. Instead, she wants Mungo to develop a capacity to survive without being mothered, as she has. If he can achieve this, Jodie will be liberated from the self-sacrifice required to care for him and freed to cultivate her own talents. But Mungo is a resolutely childlike fifteen-year-old. Only extreme events will jolt him out of his dependence.

Hamish exhibits a more troubling interest in Mungo. He expects his brother to grow into a version of their father, to fight Catholics, exude toughness, and embrace tribal hatred and domination – to be the hunter instead of the hunted in a social environment that punishes perceived weakness. It is the kind of man the soft-hearted Mungo can never be.

Gentleness carries class and gender connotations in this milieu.

It is a quality, or collection of habits, that commonly develops in the safe cocoon of unbroken families headed by fathers with soft hands. To be gentle and naïve instead of hard and cynical is to exhibit attributes of the enemy. A member of Hamish’s gang is called a ‘poofter’ because he occasionally slips into ‘the Queen’s English’ and has ‘a proud mother and a working father who still lived at home’.

A stable family and sound education are forms of treacherous otherness. It’s even worse to be gay. In the context of Hamish’s gang, and the macho ethos of the Glasgow schemes, ‘There was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.’

One of the more sympathetic men in the novel lives outside of Glasgow. He describes his own possibly gay (or perhaps just feminine or odd) son as ‘artistic’, and guesses that Mungo is artistic too. Gently he suggests to Mungo that he will need to ‘go off in search of people that like the same things as him’. For Mungo, the man’s soft hands ‘spoke of days sat reading books in the sun’. The habit of tender concern belongs to other social worlds, or to those who don’t fit in.

Mungo’s innate and expressive vulnerability finds its match in James, a Catholic boy who is still grieving the loss of his mother.

The two boys are desperate for maternal comfort and support, which they can never have. They fall in love and into dangerous conflict with Hamish and the prevailing social prejudices. Half of the narrative of Young Mungo is infused with strains of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story. Most of its ingredients promise tragedy. The other half is more like a horror story. When Mungo’s mother sends him off to learn how to ‘be a man’ with two sketchy strangers, we expect the worst.

The young protagonists of Stuart’s novels are subjected to hardship but don’t inflict it. They are on the side of loving innocence and avoid conflict when they can. The redeeming strength of Shuggie Bain is its focus on a mother who cannot escape addiction and despair. She is a destructive presence in her children’s lives, but she is not a bad person. The harmful or malignant characters in Young Mungo are simpler kinds of sinners, and Mungo exhibits no humanising flaws. He is a saint who endures great trials and demands our sympathy. This makes for a narrative that is full of eloquent feeling but thin on complexity and novelty. g Shannon Burns is the author of Childhood (Text, October 2022).

Fiction

Light below the water Exploring art and witchcraft Diane Stubbings

The Colony

by Audrey Magee Faber $29.99 pb, 376 pp

The Leviathan

T

by Rosie Andrews Raven Books $29.99 pb, 312 pp

wo new novels probe national myths and histories, offering insights into the political and religious forces that continue to shape contemporary conflicts.

Set during the height of the Troubles, Irish writer Audrey Magee’s The Colony begins with English artist Mr Lloyd travelling to a remote island off Ireland’s west coast, ‘a rock cutting into the ocean, splitting, splintering, shredding the water’. Lloyd insists on being ferried across by currach rather than by the motorboat the islanders themselves use when crossing to the mainland, a requirement that immediately foregrounds how much of Lloyd’s conception of the island is bound up in romanticised notions of the bleak Irish landscape and the hardy individuals – twelve families in all – who inhabit it.

Also spending summer on the island is Jean-Pierre ( JP) Masson, a French academic who is studying the Irish language. He brings with him his own idealistic view of the islanders, imposing on them the burden of preserving the old language. He refuses to call fifteen-year-old Séamus by the anglicised version of his name ( James) and demands that Lloyd – who speaks only English – keep his distance from the islanders lest he pollute their native tongue. JP resists arguments that English, for better or worse, is essential to the islander’s economic well-being; that the language is evolving across the generations, just as the physical island itself is changing in the face of rising seas. The changes are subtle, ‘but visible to someone who has watched it, known it, all [their] life’.

Ostensibly, Lloyd has come to paint the cliffs, but his efforts

soon focus on his increasingly intimate portraits of James’s widowed mother, Mairéad. In part to keep James from revealing what he is drawing, Lloyd takes him on as an apprentice of sorts. While James attends to Lloyd’s material needs, Lloyd halfheartedly nurtures James’s aesthetic sensibility.

James wants nothing of fishing, ‘that drowning tradition’ that has been the fate of all the men in his family, including his father, grandfather, and uncle, all of whom drowned at sea.

Instead, James dreams of studying art in London and exhibiting his work in the city’s galleries.

In a deft rendering of the apprentice who becomes the master, Magee demonstrates Lloyd’s inability to perceive life and nature as it is. Lloyd’s artistic vision – like JP’s conviction that Irish is central to the islander’s ‘thinking, their being’ – is bound up in his own unique history, in the affections, aspirations, and disappointments that have formed him. He envisages the world through the eyes of others, filtered through the pictures he sees in books, the judgements of his ex-wife, and the imagination of artists such as Rembrandt and Gauguin.

It takes James’s innate, unschooled perspective to show Lloyd what he is blind to: ‘You copy what already exists … you’re not understanding the light at all, you have it sitting on the top of the sea but it doesn’t do that … it buries underneath … lighting the water from below as well as above.’

Magee’s novel shares this same quality of light. As was the case with her first novel, The Undertaking (2014, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction), within Magee’s deceptively simple prose there lies a story that is ingeniously layered, themes of national identity, colonisation, and political struggle manifest in both the individual desires of the islanders and the encroaching news of the death and turmoil occurring in Northern Ireland.

The symbolic heart of The Colony is Gauguin’s defining work Where Do We Come From? What are We? Where are We Going?

(1897–98). Lloyd adopts it as the template for the major work he paints while he is on the island, the one he is certain will bring him fame. And what Magee offers in The Colony is her own elegantly composed version of Gauguin’s painting, not merely appropriating his work but thoughtfully refiguring its themes of death, destiny, and the failure of representation.

Less effective is Rosie Andrews’s The Leviathan. Set largely during the English Civil War (1642–51), The Leviathan skirts

Give the gift of ABR!

Recipients can access new issues, archival material going back to 1978, and discounted prize entries. Gift subscriptions cost $80 for digital only and $95 for print plus digital.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

25

Take two!

Australian Book Review is delighted to offer a range of joint subscriptions with other Australian journals.

Eleven issues of Limelight (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$154

Four issues of Meanjin (print and digital) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$165

Four issues of Overland (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$130

Two issues of Westerly (print and digital) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$121

Four issues of Island (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$131

Four issues of Griffith Review (print only) plus eleven issues of ABR and one year’s digital access

$150

Available for Australian addresses only.

www.australianbookreview.com.au 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

around themes of good and evil, sovereignty and enlightenment.

Thomas Treadwater has returned home after fighting with the Parliamentary Roundheads against forces loyal to Charles I. The sheep on his family’s farm are lying dead in the fields, and his father is unconscious in his bed ‘like a scarecrow that had had the stuffing beaten out of him’. Thomas’s sister Esther tells him that two of their serving girls have been blamed for the calamities that have fallen on the house. Subsequently, both have been imprisoned for ‘witchcraft and compacts with the Devil’.

Within Magee’s deceptively simple prose there lies a story that is ingeniously layered The Leviathan begins as a typical witchcraft tale wherein infirmity and misfortune are read as acts of Satan, with women characteristically scapegoated as the conduits of such acts. However, the novel takes an unexpected turn when all talk of witchcraft is abandoned, it becoming apparent that a more mysterious and malevolent power – a creature that has taken human form – is responsible for the disorder and confusion that has beset not only Thomas but the nation itself.

The remainder of the novel revolves around Thomas’s efforts to discover the why and wherefore of the creature, how it has lain dormant for years in the body of a pious young woman, and why it has chosen this moment in time to unleash its vengeance and wrath.

To assist him in his quest for the truth, Thomas turns to John Milton (yes, that John Milton), his old tutor. Becoming Sherlock Holmes to Thomas’s Watson, Milton leads Thomas on a chase to the edge of the North Sea where the men witness for themselves the ‘monstrous shadow [rising] further out of the water, stirring the sea like a boiling pot’.

Andrews’s intent here seems serious. Even so, The Leviathan – with its earnest narration, heightened language, and an internal logic that doesn’t bear close scrutiny – almost reads as parody.

What particularly undermines the novel is Andrews’s inability to imbue the narrative with any genuine sense of terror. Nor is she able to capture the visceral potency of a creature capable of both driving people to suicide and rousing the forces of nature to such an extent that the land is wracked for a full week by torrential rain and cyclonic winds (Andrews manages to shoehorn the Great Storm of 1703 into the narrative by allowing the creature to sleep for sixty years before making its presence felt a second time).

There are resemblances to Sarah Perry’s more convincing The Essex Serpent (2016), a novel which similarly draws on myths of a colossal sea creature, but which, being set in the Victorian era, is more firmly tethered in tensions between science and faith.

In contrast, The Leviathan is anchored to neither its historical context nor the discourse of the time, for example debates pivoting around the legitimacy and source of legislative power, the relationship between spirit and matter, and the contract between the individual and the state. Thus, while a diverting enough yarn, The Leviathan fails to establish any broader significance to all its chaos and fury. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Fiction

Posthumous mortifications Steve Toltz’s exploration of fear Amy Baillieu

Here Goes Nothing

by Steve Toltz

W

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 373 pp

hat happens when we die? Human curiosity about the afterlife has inspired countless artists and storytellers from the earliest myths through to Dante and Boccaccio. More recently we’ve had Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and George Saunders’Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as well as sitcoms like Netflix’s philosophical The Good Place and Amazon’s capitalist dystopia Upload, and now Steve Toltz’s alternately bleak and bonkers take in Here Goes Nothing.

Here Goes Nothing is the third volume in Toltz’s thematic ‘trilogy of fear’, a voluble sequence of dark comic novels that Toltz has described as ‘spiritual autobiographies’. The books variously explore the fear of death (the Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole, 2008), the fear of life and suffering (Quicksand, 2015) and now, the fear of the opinions of others (with a variety of other fears thrown in for good measure). The tone is set from the beginning as a character sardonically reflects: ‘Nobody was ever thinking about me. Now that I’m dead, I dwell on this kind of thing a lot’. He goes on to question why he wasn’t more experimental sexually when he was alive: ‘So what if I was heterosexual? Don’t most vegetarians eat fish?’

Toltz has always liked exploring philosophical and metaphysical questions in his fiction. In Here Goes Nothing, he takes this predilection in new and sometimes unexpected directions. The novel is presented in two intertwined narratives. The first follows occasional petty criminal and former foster child Angus Mooney as he wakes up in an unexpectedly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, where his harried ‘welcome clerk’ offers him an ‘Interim Death Certificate’ and an envelope full of discount vouchers.

Angus is shocked to realise that he was wrong about life after death, and to discover that he is now existing as his ‘quintessential self ’ in an unsettling place where he worries there may be ‘more human centipedes than centipedes’. This version of the afterlife is compelling, although many of the lingering questions the reader may have about its workings are glossed over when Angus conveniently misses his orientation session.

The second storyline is set in a perturbing near-future Sydney. While mostly recounted posthumously by Angus, this narrative begins a little while before his death when the ‘owlish’ Owen Fogel rings the doorbell of the house where Angus and his wife, Gracie, live and asks to be shown around ‘for old time’s sake’. Owen soon inveigles his way into their domestic lives as an unorthodox houseguest. For a while, Gracie, Angus, and Owen

make an entertainingly unlikely trio. Gracie is an unconventional marriage celebrant with a mild social media addiction. She and Angus met when she officiated his best friend’s wedding, cheerfully haranguing the bemused couple before offering them a list of ‘survival tools’ including ‘No bathroom lightbulbs over 40 watts!’

Unlike Angus, who is a ‘total and shameless sceptic’, Gracie is naturally curious and open to spiritual and supernatural possibilities. Angus is more circumspect and easily embarrassed than his gloriously blunt wife, but his self-consciousness pales in comparison with Owen’s, which causes the latter to be mortified by almost everything, from New Year resolutions to ice-cream. Meanwhile, there are troubling news reports about an ancient virus that has started to infect domestic dogs in Greenland after the discovery of a Pleistocene wolf.

Sometime-screenwriter Toltz gleefully ignores the old Hollywood maxim about killing dogs with the creation of the ‘K9 virus’ (also known as ‘the Siberian flu, or Man’s Best Virus, or the Good Boy Disease’), a plague that has arrived nipping at the heels of the now vanquished Covid-19 though exponentially more deadly. For the first part of the novel, this new pandemic plays out mostly in the background, but the ramifications become increasingly urgent as Owen’s illness and Gracie’s pregnancy progress.

Fans of Toltz’s previous two novels will find much to appreciate here. In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Toltz observed that ‘one’s style is like one’s smell … it is what it is, and it’s applied to whatever the story is.’ This is certainly the case for this sequence of novels. Although not explicitly connected, these frenetic, questioning, list-filled narratives share an idiosyncratic flavour and could all take place in the same universe (which would raise interesting questions about the fate of one character in Quicksand who came to believe he was immortal). Certain Toltzean archetypes recur, including that of the dangerous mentor, and Toltz again deploys a mixture of different writing styles and formats. Online reviews and social media posts are used to great effect, especially a harrowing livestream. Big questions are explored through a mix of dark humour, unexpected situations, and zingy one-liners. Group therapy sessions and religious services in the afterlife are a highlight.

Toltz covers a lot of ground in Here Goes Nothing, offering filibustering commentary on a miscellany of ideas including the importance of ritual, the cult-like aspects of work, the ethics of haunting, and musings on magnetism. The worlds he creates are vivid and compelling. From Heidegger to Roald Dahl, allusions and references abound, while in the afterlife long-dead artists create new works of varying quality. That death is not necessarily the end does lower the stakes a little, but there are times where this is an undeniable relief.

Here Goes Nothing is dizzying and sometimes dazzling.

Though the darkness of the content might discourage some readers (lethal plagues, countless deaths, environmental degradation, war, the bleak inscrutability of bureaucracy, and the abject plight of ‘interdimensional refugees’), Toltz’s humour seldom falters.

Instead, he wields invention like a torch as he highlights and moves past a diabolical number of questions and concepts, dropping aphorisms and observations like embers. g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

27

Fiction

Cheese & Bacon Cheetos Ned Kelly as a Gen X teen girl Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Red

by Felicity McLean

‘E

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 256 pp

veryone knows how it ends,’ declares Ruby ‘Red’ McCoy, fourteen-year-old narrator of Felicity McLean’s second novel, Red. ‘What people are less interested in hearing is how it all got started.’

The ending in question is Ruby’s attempted murder of a police officer, a crime that is heralded from the novel’s outset. In this retelling of the Ned Kelly legend, McLean sets Red apart from existing depictions of the bushranger – from Sidney Nolan’s iconic series of paintings (1946–47) to Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and its subsequent punk-infused 2019 film adaptation by Justin Kurzel. She casts the mouthy, cocksure Ruby in the role of Kelly and transports the action to New South Wales’s Central Coast, circa 1989. It is a curious mash-up, though less surprising in the context of McLean’s oeuvre; her 2019 début, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, similarly fused Gen X nostalgia with the influence of another classic Australian tale, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Taking inspiration from Kelly’s famous Jerilderie Letter, Red is both a confession and a manifesto, detailing the McCoy family’s longstanding feud with the local police, their misdeeds, and Ruby’s world view. Ruby’s voice is distinctive: often rambling, unpunctuated, and littered with redacted profanities. She has a fondness for similes, word play, and baroque descriptions (‘looking like a Grimm’s fairytale giant yeah like David’s f ing Goliath’, ‘Easy come easy go easy as a Sunday morning’).

While there are moments of poetry and humour, Ruby’s language is frequently obfuscatory. One wonders at times if she is deliberately misleading the reader through her verbosity, or if she herself is unsure what she wants to say.

Ruby’s reliability as a narrator is further complicated by the cartoonishness of those around her. Sid, her ne’er-do-well father, communicates in ‘dad jokes’ and cockney rhyming slang. Her best friend Stevie is a compulsive liar. Sergeant Healy is a camp villain, all Brylcreemed blond hair and bombastic threats. Despite differences in age, class, and gender, characters often sound alike, appearing less like fully formed individuals than extensions of Ruby’s psyche. In itself, this isn’t necessarily a problem; Red is Ruby’s story, and it is entrenched in her point of view. However, while we learn how her story starts and ends, the question of ‘why?’ remains. Why, in 2022, retell the story of Ned Kelly as a Gen X teen girl?

Unlike the Kellys, the McCoys are not a large family, nor are

28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

they Irish convict–descendants rebelling against British rule at a time of anti-Irish sentiment. Ruby is the only child of a loving, if incompetent, single father. The much-vaunted feud between her family and Sergeant Healy’s only goes back as far as Ruby’s grandfather, Pep, and originates with a slight that strains plausibility. Acknowledging this, Ruby elaborates: The Healys hated us for what Pep had done … but more than that they hated us for what we represented … To the Healys we were dole-bludgers we were housos we were blue-collar union scum we were durry-smokers flanno-wearers ... we were petrol-sniffers bongusers nang-abusers meth heads even worse than that we were poor …

She is quick to add that she and her father aren’t ‘half these things’. Sid drinks, but he’s not an alcoholic. The McCoys’ pantry is poorly stocked, but Ruby doesn’t seem to mind eating tomato sauce sandwiches let alone to be at risk of malnourishment. She attends school and is a precocious reader, referencing The Grapes of Wrath, True Grit, and The Children’s Bach. She adores her larrikin father and his hare-brained mates, who have names like ‘Chook’ and ‘Ferret’. If the McCoys are poor, theirs is a happy-go-lucky poverty, without shame or desperation. They wear their flannel shirts with the blitheness of celebrants at a bogan-themed fancy dress party.

McLean’s choice to spare her heroine from the darker realities of intergenerational poverty – addiction, abuse, illness, educational disadvantage, housing instability – robs the central conflict of both verisimiltude and moral complexity. The McCoys seem to be targets of police discrimination not because they are disadvantaged but because they are wily, spirited, and fun-loving, and because the corrupt cops need somebody to victimise. The ‘petrol-sniffers’ and ‘meth heads’ whom the McCoys supposedly represent are absent from the narrative. There are no sex workers or rough-sleepers. Racial profiling does not exist in Red, as racial diversity does not exist.

Which brings us back to the ‘why?’ Why update such a quintessentially Australian story of police violence and discrimination, without their contemporaneity? The 1987–91 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was underway during the period in which Red is set. Since that time, a further 500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody. Recently publicised text messages exposed Zachary Rolfe, the policeman acquitted of the murder of Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker in March 2022, describing his work in Alice Springs as ‘cowboy stuff with no rules’. After being turned away from visiting Sid in prison 173 pages into the novel, Ruby bemoans: ‘What is it with this country and separating kids from their parents we’ve got form here oh we’ve got history.’ This insight is the closest Red gets to acknowledging the existence of Aboriginal people and the ongoing issue of state-sanctioned genocide, yet it swiftly takes a back seat to Ruby’s musings on Cheese & Bacon Cheetos.

For all McLean’s enthusiasm for the Kelly legend, and her formal inventiveness in rehashing it, the author fails to engage meaningfully with colonial history and its reverberations. For all her name-checking of 1980s working-class Australian culture – from Neighbours to Kerri-Anne Kennerley to Cottee’s Cordial – McLean offers only a celebration of Australiana, detached from the inequities of life in Australia. g

Fiction

Dreams and ghost trains Brendan Colley’s big-hearted first novel Naama Grey-Smith

The Signal Line

by Brendan Colley

W

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 298 pp

inner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is Brendan Colley’s first book. As it happens, my review copy arrived just as I launched into Rhett Davis’s Hovering (2022). Although fundamentally different, both novels open with a fraught return to a family home and a resident resentful sibling. Both protagonists have built a new life in Europe, but where Hovering suggests the possible remaking of the old house into some version of home, The Signal Line seeks to relinquish it.

After the death of his parents, protagonist Geo returns from Rome to Hobart, hoping to sell the house to fund his dream of a classical music career. Geo is a violist, like his beloved late mother. His brother, Wes, a police detective like their father, has also inherited the father’s violent streak. Alienated from his wife, denying his natural gift for music, and living in dysfunction, Wes refuses to move their father’s spent whisky bottles, let alone sell the house: ‘It was an anchor to the heart. Wes was connected to our father’s rubbish as I was to Mum’s viola, and we guarded these memories with our lives.’

Geo and Wes’s already tense dynamic is tested when a ghost train – one that can materialise anywhere tracks once existed – arrives in Tasmania the same night as Geo, carrying confused Italian passengers. In tow is a cast of characters that wouldn’t be out of place on Los Angeles’s Venice Beach Boardwalk – a Swedish ghost-train hunter, a conspiracy bookshop owner, two European hippie backpackers, and a man claiming to be a ‘truth-seeking journalist-slash-watchdog’. They come bearing crystals, Ouija boards, and an insatiable appetite for weed and whisky. Geo welcomes the chaos into his home and his life as a buffer against Wes’s violence, but also as a path to realising what he values.

With elements of multiple genres – including cosy mystery, family drama, paranormal fiction, psychological thriller, and romance – the novel explores themes of freedom, sacrifice, forgiveness, fulfilment, love, and friendship. It also evokes a tension between chasing one’s dream at all costs and sustaining meaningful human connections. In the words of Spanish backpacker Paco, ‘This is life. Life the asshole.’ Sten, an equanimous but lonely ghost-train hunter, compares his forty-year dream of boarding the train to Geo’s dream of winning a place in an orchestra: ‘Music is your signal line ... every time you practise you are chasing something ... any person who is serious about

their dream knows when they are on the line, and when they are not.’ For Geo, his girlfriend Alessia in Rome is a balancing force, reminding him that ‘chasing the dream is more important than the dream ... chasing something is what makes a person grow’.

The Signal Line’s strengths are Colley’s taut prose and his humour, which breathe life into his characters. Readers can implicitly recognise the speaker in every piece of dialogue – which supports a running joke about lines that are ‘un-Geo’ or ‘very Sten’. In one of the novel’s funniest scenes, Geo is racked with guilt but tries to hide it: ‘I pointed at the cask wine. “I’ll stick with the red. Help yourself. It’s deliciously fruity.” This was a phrase that didn’t sit on even the outermost ranges of my vocabulary.

Completely and utterly un-Geo.’ In another scene, Geo pretends to be a police officer: ‘“On behalf of the Queen, I’d like to thank you for your time and service.” What the fuck?’ These scenes work because the reader knows the claim to un-Geoness is true.

The paranormal is more than expository context for this story; it is the glue for its themes and characters. Geo admires his new friends’ commitment to unconventional modes of being as the mark of ‘true individuals’ in ‘an age where the true individual had departed’. When a paranoid ‘watchdog’ tells Geo, ‘Don’t compare me to those fools [journos]. News organisations are propaganda mouthpieces’ and proceeds to eat his own business card, Geo concludes ‘This man is a hero.’ He celebrates similar attitudes from backpacker Camille and bookshop proprietor Labuschagne.

For this reader, Geo’s romanticising of these characters was often a barrier to a sympathetic reading. Are non-conformist convictions admirable by default, regardless of their content?

For example, conspiracy theories of a ‘reptilian élite’ (mentioned once in the novel, in what Geo initially calls the ‘conspiracy bookstore’ but later comes to regard fondly) originate in harmful racist myths, as do some of the real-life conspiracy publications named in the novel. The more unsavoury aspects of such beliefs are not represented. Geo explains, ‘it was my nature to believe in anyone’s dream, just as I hoped everyone would believe in mine’, and the novel is marked with a generosity of spirit. Because it is written with a good heart, and because, after all, this is fiction, to assess The Signal Line’s affectionate portrayal of a range of paranormal and conspiracy beliefs feels ungenerous. Yet to dismiss my responses to this aspect of the work would be a failure, since they dampened my reception of the novel. In the age of misinformation, should novelists develop more scrupulous ways to tell dissident narratives? Author Ned Beauman, critic John Wood, and academic Peter Knight have all contributed to a discussion of this fascinating question.

Whether or not the paranormal is afforded any literal significance, the hunt for a ghost train succeeds as a symbol for a deep-rooted search for personal truth. It is also effective as a narrative device, with a neat plot that is consistently engaging.

The Signal Line is complete in its own terms. Readers approaching it with epistemological scruples may come away irritated while readers who seek comfort for the heart will be richly rewarded. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia. She holds degrees in communications and publishing and has edited award-winning fiction and non-fiction.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

29

Fiction

A living archive

Mothering as the ultimate synthesis Sarah Gory

Mothertongues

by Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell

A

Hamish Hamilton $34.99 pb, 352 pp

t the beginning of 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014), author, mother, and playwright Sarah Ruhl notes: ‘At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.’ Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell’s Mothertongues embraces, embodies even, this collapse of the boundaries between living and writing. Rather than extolling the proverbial ‘room of her own’, Bell and Dovey are asking us to heed the kinds of knowledge that come from being embedded in the everyday.

A hybrid, genre-defying book about contemporary motherhood, Mothertongues is woven from fragments based on the authors’ own lives, from texts both historical and literary, from imagined conversations and family histories, from the act of friendship itself.

It is intimate, moving from levity to depth, the corporeal to the cerebral, in the space of a page, a paragraph, a breath. It is a collection of ephemera – a stray thought, the contents of a handbag, breastfeeding diary excerpts, book lists, text message exchanges – that, taken together, form a living archive of twentyfirst-century motherhood.

Arranged in three acts, Mothertongues looks to theatre, particularly the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, as a framework to capture the ways motherhood upends our experience of time, and so of life itself. ‘As an artistic form,’ they write, ‘absurdism really captures something about motherhood.’ Mothertongues opens with a series of stage directions, a structural device that reappears throughout the book. A structural device, yes, but also a peek behind the curtain. A reminder that life writing is not necessarily confessional; that it is curated, which is not the same as being performative. Here, the theatrical works to refuse the artifice of ‘authenticity’ in favour of the anthropological. ‘This,’ Bell and Dovey tell us, ‘is the slice of life that we are preserving, performing.’

Mothertongues arrived in my letterbox the day before school holidays began, so I read most of it in parks and on beaches while my kids played, asked questions, requested food, insisted that I inspect a squashed caterpillar. This time, though, the fragmented style of reading engendered by their presence works in tandem with the text, complementing its structural fragmentation.

Taking as provocation Virginia Woolf ’s clarion call to women writers to break convention, Mothertongues joins a rich thread of contemporary motherhood life writing that uses the fragment as a building block. One has only to look to Maggie Nelson’s The 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Argonauts (2015), Rivka Galchen’s Little Labours (2016) or Ruhl’s 100 Essays, among others, to understand how the fragment resonates with the confounding experience that is early motherhood.

As a structure, it allows content and form to mirror one another, to inform one another. Motherhood is, after all, a masterclass in interruption, repetition, and moments of intense clarity.

Here, Dovey and Bell take the fragmented structure further, stretching it and playing with different devices from the theatrical, the conversational, the musical, the listicle; searingly honest one moment, farcical the next. Not every formal choice will work for every reader but taken as a whole they allow the text to lead us to unexpected junctures – just as the practice of motherhood can do. ‘Mothering is the ultimate synthesis of body and brain, spirit and intellect,’ Bell and Dovey write. ‘It’s like doing grounded philosophy every single day.’

There is a critique to be made that this book is yet another motherhood memoir written by white, middle-class, cis-het women (a demographic I fall into as well). While Mothertongues begins, seemingly, as a dialogue between Bell and Dovey, it becomes a polyphony of voices past and present, real and imagined: Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, the authors’ own mothers, songwriter Keppie Coutts whose songs are integrated into the text, Siri and Alexa, and the list goes on. Within this polyphonic layering, I do wonder what kinds of spaces a broader selection of voices might have opened up. Despite Bell and Dovey’s formal ingenuity, the motherhood narrative contained therein is relatively traditional – the book begins, after all, with Bell meeting the man who will become the father of her children.

But while this critique is perhaps valid, it is also too easy.

To leave it at that would be a disservice to the work the authors’ have done to make clear that this book is not supposed to be a universal rendering of the motherhood experience, but rather the beginnings of a conversation. And it is here, in the conversational, the polyphonic, that Mothertongues transcends itself. As I read, I lose track of which voice belongs to which author – indeed, it is rarely delineated anyway. After a while, I realise that it doesn’t matter, that the blending of voice creates a collective landscape of motherhood we are all invited into. The fragmented structure aids this sense of invitation, leaving space for our own remembrances, non sequiturs, meaning-making. ‘An actor is only really an actor when others are invested in the act of watching them,’ the authors write. At the heart of Mothertongues is this insistence on community as both political imperative and saving grace.

In the end, what Mothertongues offers is a text that opens possibilities not just for the ways we can write motherhood, but also for the ways we can think about it. Here, the mother– writer–self is fluid, amorphous – and not necessarily even singular.

Mothertongues is a bold contribution to a genre of motherhood life writing that is refusing the boundaries of narrative convention, and of conventional wisdom about what writing the self should look like. In the final act, the authors profess the hope that more mother–writers will join them in the ‘strangely fertile’ space that this book has cracked open, so that ‘maybe over time our numbers will multiply’. Indeed, I think that they will. g Sarah Gory’s essay ‘Ghosts, Ghosts Everywhere’, runner-up in the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize, will appear in our July issue. ❖

Fiction

Restless invention

Three powerful new short story collections Cassandra Atherton

T

he Burnished Sun (UQP, $29.99 pb, 288 pp) by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing (Transit Lounge, $29.99 pb, 240 pp) by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising (Vintage, $32.99 pb, 298 pp) by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.

Mirandi Riwoe’s The Burnished Sun is an unforgettable book that liberates women from their marginalised positions, prioritises their points of view, and restores their agency. Winner of the 2022 UQP Quentin Bryce Award, which celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality, the book’s title derives from The Merchant of Venice, when the Prince of Morocco, sensing Portia’s hesitancy, states ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, / The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun’. Throughout her stories, the exploration of related racist ideologies and outsiderness opens out into brilliant and blistering mappings of intersectional feminism.

The opening novella, Annah the Javanese, is told from the point of view of Gauguin’s model and lover. Much more than giving Annah a voice, Riwoe disrupts and rewrites the Gauguin archives. She argues that this challenge to archival authority uncovers that fact that ‘everything we know about [Annah] is from a middle and [upper] class … white background’. She unsettles Gauguin’s dominance by pointedly emphasising Annah’s pronunciation of ‘Paul’ as ‘Pol’ and, in the rich and cerebral inner life she creates for Annah, exposes her exoticisation, sexualisation and fetishization: ‘Dread lies cold and heavy in her stomach. She pictures herself trailing after him, as she did before, like the black servant in that painting of Olympia, or the dark man who waits upon the handsome woman in the magazine.’

The novella Fish Girl, shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize, takes a similar approach as Riwoe writes back to Somerset Maugham’s story ‘The Four Dutchman’ from the point of view of an Indonesian girl, Mina. The horror of Mina’s situation – set in four parts, each beginning with an epigraph drawn from Maugham’s short story – is graphic and haunting: ‘It’s pitiful how weak she is compared with the two men. She flaps on the deck like a fish. When she hears Haas call her a Malay trollop, her chest fills with so much hatred she’s sure the power of it will help her break free of her restraints.’

Between these two powerful novellas, there are ten short stories that explore iterations of these themes in the present day,

demonstrating Riwoe’s deftness as a writer of both historical and contemporary fictions. These include: ‘Hardflip’, which highlights racism in the skateboarding fraternity; ‘Dignity’, where Riwoe provides a confronting depiction of underprivileged women working abroad in often brutal conditions in order to send money to their families; ‘Growth’, about a ‘fetus in fetu’; and ‘What would Kim Do?’, where the influence of celebrity sex and porn on young people is explored through a vivacious character, Milly.

Finally, ‘Hazel’, perhaps the most potent and stirring story in the collection, is set in aged care during the Covid lockdowns, with a grandmother trying to communicate with her family through a large window. Riwoe’s masterful emphasis on the silence, fissures in time, and deep loneliness for older Australians in aged care and their families is heart-wrenching.

Eugen Bacon’s Danged Black Thing is a thrilling, genre-defying collection of short stories that draws on elements of urban fantasy, neo-surrealism, speculative fiction, science fiction, mythology, and poetic prose. Her stories unfold across many different continents and temporalities in pithy expressions of the Nietzschean philosophy of eternal recurrence. Bacon uses hybridity to dismantle boundaries and position identity as fractured and fluent.

‘Simbiyu and the Nameless’ tracks the dark misfortunes of the eponymous protagonist from the age of eighteen months to twenty-three years. The use of the second-person pronoun is particularly confronting as Bacon describes a ‘lurching darkness assembling, disassembling. A menace approaching, human, nonhuman, waving tentacles’ that is inescapable. Similarly, in ‘A Pod of Mermaids’, Angerboda is being shadowed by Loki as she attempts to mother a series of earthling boys. Believing her only solution is to ‘hide the gleaming’ from him, she pours this shining part of herself into the shell of one of her sons.

The repetition of the mother’s lamentations in this short story is underscored by Bacon’s use of anaphora: ‘Grief was missing a view of a crystal lake, not hearing hummingbirds breathing at dawn … Grief was the same question inside every border of a cupboard, and she was sitting knees up in its dusk. Grief was missing things that contradicted their truth.’

Bacon’s stories about the global climate crisis are some of the most striking and confronting in the collection. In ‘The Water Runner’, set in a dystopian and futuristic Tanzania, ‘a perpetual drought’ means that Zawadi ‘collects water from dead people’.

This is taken to neo-gothic extremes in ‘When the Water Stops’, when humans turn to vampirism to survive. Water is also used as a conceit in ‘Rain Doesn’t Fall on One Roof ’, where Bapoto ‘a migrant alone in this world, far from her clan’, tries to find work to support her young son. Her exhaustion and resilience are conveyed in bright bursts of intimacy with her son. While all the stories in this collection are remarkable narratives, those co-authored with Andrew Hook, Seb Doubinsky, and E. Don Harpe shift the scope of Bacon’s preoccupations and lose some of the lyricism and ambiguity that make her sole-authored stories unique.

Ennis Ćehić’s Sadvertising is an ingeniously self-reflexive and neo-surrealist collection of very short stories and microliterature. In taut and often biting narratives, Ćehić brings unexpected perspectives to the idea of advertising as powerfully manipulative. This begins with the hilarious ‘Poeticules’: AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

31

‘On Wednesday, they announced they were all poets. They’d had enough of being called copywriters … Advertising needed to be taken seriously; it was the poetry of consumer goods.’

It continues in the witty and pointed ‘Consummatum Est’, where two strategists, offended by the word ‘consumer’, change every document in which it appears to ‘human’. Ćehić’s critique of capitalism in the neoliberal era is often expressed in moments of black humour. Some of the most memorable stories, which draw on (what the reader is encouraged to believe is) the author’s real life experience in the advertising industry include: ‘NMBA’ or ‘No More Bad Advertising’, where Kendall Jenner worries that no one will respect her after doing a Pepsi advertisement that is ‘the greatest failure in advertising history’; ‘Meetings’, where Jo opines about the meaninglessness of meetings; ‘The Final Frontier’, where Cameron momentarily fools himself into believing he has ‘the best idea’; a logo on a T-shirt in ‘Brand of Living’ that anthropomorphically pushes out of its clothing and runs away; ‘Modern Feed’ where newsfeed is food for life; ‘Gorilla 2.0’, where Tom’s melancholic idea for a Cadbury advertisement affects the frenzied population; and ‘Nympholept’,

where Harry feeds Renata Baileys Chocolate Truffles on an extraordinary moss bed. While the stories in this collection utilise engaging hooks, many of the conclusions are a little strained or shut down possibilities for further ludic moments.

The centrepiece of the book is the three-part story ‘Meta Ennis’. These are fascinating pieces of metaliterature that ruminate on what happens to the artist in advertising. Significantly, in part three, Ennis (who appears self-reflexively) tells himself, ‘you don’t matter in this book’ and as his ‘mouth utter[s] … Move on’, he dismisses rather than kills the author.

These three collections exemplify how contemporary Australian fiction writers continue to challenge conventional mores and are restlessly inventive in their approaches to narrative. Each writer, in different ways, asks readers to step into richly imagined worlds where what we may believe we know is challenged, reconstructed, or subverted, sometimes strangely, sometimes in deeply salutary ways. g Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.

Old Jetty

I’ve come to walk along the jetty, watch the stingrays glide around the pylons, their sides fanning and flaring like the skirts of Spanish dancers, but there’s a large dog tethered to a pole, idling on low growl, speed-smelling the wind. Its eyes tell me it is used to the loneliness of this salt-stiff rope. Perhaps the owner is at the other end of the bay where the shore’s spiked with fishing rods, the water tented with sails, a new encampment of pleasure seekers at the marina and resort. I try to pass but the dog pulls on its leash. I notice that the spikes on its collar are as large as its teeth. The wind is cold and whines like a cowering animal through the sparse planks of a rowboat. Here the boats are breaking down to their components like beached sea mammals, diesel and rust tainting the shallows. Suddenly the dog judders, barks sharply as if it’s received a boot-driven command, an abrupt reminder of duty and rank. As I turn to leave, the noise stops. The dog lies down, rests its muzzle between its paws. I count the knots in its short, stiff rope.

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music: New and selected poems (2018) 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Literary Studies

Fighting nonesty

Lee Kofman on the creative process Merav Fima

The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering emotional honesty in a writer’s art, craft and life

by Lee Kofman

R

Ventura Press $32.99 pb, 327 pp

eading craft manuals may be another mode of procrastination for aspiring writers, but Lee Kofman’s latest book, The Writer Laid Bare, is well worth the time. Her sage advice, interwoven with an intimate account of her own creative development as a migrant writer, makes fascinating reading.

Kofman, a Melbourne author and writing mentor, was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel with her family as an adolescent.

After publishing two novels and a collection of short stories in Hebrew, she moved to Australia in her mid-twenties, where she struggled to recover her literary voice in a third language.

Kofman reveals that she experienced severe writer’s block for several years, until she realised that her writing suffered from ‘nonesty’, a term she coined to refer to the lack of emotional honesty in her work from that period. Now she is extremely honest about the hardships she faced over a decade ago and the remedies she discovered, which she shares with the reader. Only after overcoming these difficulties was she able to compose her profoundly personal memoirs, The Dangerous Bride (2014) and Imperfect (2019). These books are testament to the fact that, ‘Creative catastrophes … can produce great beauty.’

Kofman’s conviction about the centrality of emotional honesty to the writer’s success can be encapsulated by her assertion that writers must foster the art of deep observation to reach towards the dark, the complex, the paradoxical, the tense, the raw, and towards the truths of the stories we tell. For such purposes, the writer’s starting point should be themselves, no matter what genre they work in, because our self is the prism through which we create art. Artistic writing begins with self-awareness of, and honesty about, our psychological landscape – all those messy emotions, thoughts and memories that make us who we are.

All of this takes great courage and perseverance, especially when writing ‘what makes you blush’, as Kofman urges.

Kofman’s lyrical prose is engaging and her passion for helping other writers to fulfil their own literary goals is palpable throughout this beautifully produced book. The eye is immediately drawn to Alissa Dinallo’s black cover design, overlaid with fluorescent pink lettering and a delicately delineated gold figure covering her face with her hands. Far from being patronising or condescending, this book teaches by example, applying its wisdom to

the exquisite way in which Kofman weaves her own tale with remarkable openness and humility, presenting the book as a kind of hardware store from which the reader may pick the tools most suitable for their particular situation.

In contrast to formulaic or prescriptive writing manuals, Kofman treats the writing of literary works as a sacred act of creation, emphasising the importance of aesthetic as well as moral truth. Evoking the kabbalistic approach to language, grounded in the belief in the mystical power of the alphabet’s letters, Kofman suggests that making art constitutes a means of experiencing the holy, imbuing the creative process with spiritual significance.

Refreshing is the distinction throughout the book between artistic writing of literary quality and commercial or didactic writing that is politically driven. All too often, writing manuals proffer their advice without discerning between the various literary genres, even though the process and requirements tend to differ greatly. The examples she gives of state-sponsored Soviet propaganda clearly illustrate this point.

Impressive in the breadth and scope of her multilingual repertoire, Kofman repeatedly stresses the importance of attentive and wide-ranging reading for any aspiring or established writer.

She deftly incorporates illuminating references to works by other writers about the creative process, from Rainer Maria Rilke to Elena Ferrante and Albert Camus, including citations from popular manuals, such as Stephen King’s On Writing (2000) and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird (1994). These positions are eloquently supported by pertinent passages from both classic and more recent novels and memoirs. Declaring that ‘to write is to read’, she emphasises the importance of ‘reading up’, namely, choosing books with literary merit that have withstood the test of time, rather than merely striving to keep up with current bestsellers.

In a moving final chapter that addresses the struggles associated with writing during early parenthood, Kofman asserts that she continued writing when her children were small in order to prove to her mother that she could be a mother and a writer at the same time. Indeed, the author’s mother often figures throughout the book as both a motivating force and an ongoing challenge, vividly and humorously capturing the complexity of familial relationships. (Humour, Kofman states at one point, is among the most distinctive features of a writer’s literary voice.)

As writers, particularly women, must constantly navigate their multiple and often incongruous identities as spouses, mothers, daughters, and artists, she admits: ‘I struggle to … keep away my mother-and-wife-self when I write.’ Parents of young children will no doubt relate, and will value her encouragement by example, demonstrating that it is possible to realise literary dreams in spite of, or even in tandem with, caregiving responsibilities.

The literary community recently celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1992). Dubbed the ‘high priestess of creativity’, Cameron was a pioneer in the field of creative recovery and her book has seen a resurgence in sales during the pandemic, with locked-down populations seeking guidance in their diverse creative pursuits. Like Cameron, Lee Kofman approaches the creative process as a spiritual endeavour that demands introspection and self-awareness. As such, The Writer Laid Bare is a worthy successor and a welcome addition to any writer’s bookcase. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

33

Commentary

Shouting Abortion

A doctor reflects on the politics and economics of terminations

by Linda Atkins

I

performed my first abortion when I was twenty-five years old.

I didn’t want to: I had seen abortions performed before and knew the procedure was messy and brutal. The women were lightly anaesthetised, unparalysed, not intubated. Sometimes a woman would twitch, even flinch, under the anaesthesia as her cervix was dilated and her uterus evacuated. I wondered if any of the women knew in a visceral sense what was being done to their bodies. Being pregnant, and then not; afraid, and then less so, the immediate problem solved, the deeper concerns of poverty and violence left untouched by my team. I would see them afterwards. No complications. No, you don’t need to pay. Yes, you can go.

By the way, would you like a script for the pill?

I wondered if I should make the transition from onlooker to apprentice. In my obstetrics training, this particular surgery was considered optional; there was no pressure to participate. I didn’t have to be in the operating theatre if I felt that being a witness would conflict with my beliefs. But I showed up, mastered my distress, and watched, flinching at the noises and bright lights that never bothered me ordinarily: the unwieldy theatre spotlight, the legs draped, the vagina on show for all to see, the pregnancy hidden within its folds. Under anaesthetic, you leave personhood behind, you become less a conglomeration of thoughts and feelings and more a type of living puzzle while your body is altered in some way, under the knife, as surgeons say. The drapes isolate the region of interest, cover the remainder, a sort of purdah of the animated self, a necessary alibi for the surgeon to enable that invasion of the bodily sanctity that constitutes all surgery. Cold steel cures.

The anaesthetist was casual, chatty. It’s a simple procedure; even relatively junior anaesthetic trainees are expected to be up to the task by the end of their first year. He was entitled to sit in the background, legs crossed, his upper foot, clad in bright theatre clogs, rotating counter-clockwise, lazily. The registrar scurried around, trying not to let his anxiety show, the IV line was in, saline running, and the patient was off, unconscious.

I once read an article in the feminist press: ‘An Abortionist Speaks’. The author wrote that there was no room for sitting on the fence. If you believe in abortion and are able to provide them, you should act on your beliefs. To believe in the right to abortion and then fob off the task to others is cowardice. Next day, in theatre, I performed my first abortion. It wasn’t technically difficult –

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

the techniques are similar to those used in miscarriages. There was just more – more tissue – to evacuate. The patient didn’t lose much blood, the procedure was uncomplicated. Though it was messy and loud, it was over in a few minutes. I did a good job, not a great one. There was room for improvement, with practice.

Wordlessly, the obstetrician in charge of the list patted me on the shoulder. It was done.

There are many reasons why doctors choose to perform abortions, from simple recognition of social need, to feminist principles, all the way through to honouring the memories of greataunts or grandmothers who had died as a result of illegal, septic abortions. Then there is pragmatism, the need for money (abortion pays well). Mostly, though, it comes down to idealism. People who perform abortions do so because they want the world to be a better place. How can the world be improved by forcing women to carry unplanned pregnancies and bear unwanted children? Having worked for ten years in an under-privileged area, I have seen firsthand the links between social disadvantage and unplanned pregnancy.

During my training in the western suburbs of Sydney, I often went to ‘real theatre’ in the eastern, more affluent part of town.

The poorer parts of Sydney out west are not exactly popular workplaces for doctors, and so the few of us training there worked hard.

Shift after shift, eighteen to twenty-four hours straight, working or recovering from working, snatching breaks to study, psyching yourself up for the next epic shift. Going to the theatre in a different part of the city was a rare treat. One morning I had come off a twenty-four-hour shift, and was exhausted. Feet aching, I lolled in a theatre foyer chair and watched the passers-by.

Not one of them looked unhealthy. No one was smoking outside.

For the first time, I truly realised the link between privilege and good health. I felt unreal, disconnected from a world so very different from the one where I worked.

I also slept through the show.

Each week, I performed a couple of abortions, under anaesthetic, in the operating theatre. Note the terminology we use: actors at our tasks; the bright fluorescence of each operating room our stage. The youngest person I helped was twelve, the victim of a predatory uncle. But she was an outlier. Most patients were either in their mid-teens or older women with children already, victims of violence, drug addiction, or homelessness. Our abor-

tions were popular, because the hospital provided them gratis to women assessed by the social work department as being in acute need. We could have operated morning and afternoon, five days per week, and we still wouldn’t have met the demand. Unplanned pregnancy and lack of money were frequent companions.

I once wrote to Helen Garner after reading The First Stone.

I told her we were slaving at the coalface of feminism, trying to convince sixteen-year-old girls that pregnancy was not a great life choice, that staying in school would be better. I told her about writing a reference for a patient of mine who had to use her relative’s address on her application form because no retail employers would even interview her if she used her real address.

I told her about generational unemployment and how difficult it was to escape, how pregnancy could seem the better option, how a second pregnancy might also work, though it rarely did.

The author came to visit and wrote a story about my life: ‘Labour Ward, Penrith’. After the story was published, a male acquaintance from medical school rang me out of the blue. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘I knew it would be – you were always in everyone’s faces at med school, too.’

Was I? I don’t know a single female obstetrician who isn’t made of sheet steel. The long hours, the constant stress of life-or-death responsibility, the accountability expected even before expertise has been acquired, the throw-them-in-the-deep-end style of training weed out the faint of heart. I actually never experienced gendered discrimination at my unpopular hospital – they certainly couldn’t afford to be picky about trainees. But I also was never given any particular allowance for being a woman or a mother.

I appreciated this – it reminded me of my childhood in a similar working-class, immigrant area, where any kid with potential was respected, regardless of gender.

I first experienced gender discrimination at medical school, that upper middle-class microcosm of 1950s life values, where men were meant to be surgeons, women were meant to be GPs so they could work part-time and mother in the conventional, nurturing fashion. It was like a dating school, where middle-class private school kids became doctors, married, and spawned more doctors. I used to joke that medicine must have a genetic basis, because becoming a doctor was clearly hereditary. I had an alcoholic father, a crazy, violent mother, and no social skills. I had no money and when I was not at university or studying I was working as a checkout chick or doing chores at home. Poor areas felt normal and comforting to me – life was less confusing and people said what they actually meant.

A young patient once said to me – ‘You’ve had a kid since I last saw you, right?’ ‘Yeah, I had one last year, a little boy.’ ‘I knew you must have. You suck way less now than you did last time!’

As Jane Austen might say, I felt all the force of the compliment.

The flood continued; the faces changed but the need never went away. These violent delights have violent ends – but they don’t, they just keep churning over the same, few, mean, small, half-endings: new kid, new relationship, new kid, same hope broken on the wheel of poverty. It’s not just poor women who have abortions, of course, but imagine having to sit with an eagleeyed social worker pleading your case, why your abortion is more

important than those of all the other women clamouring for your spot in the queue, being judged and hoping to be the most deserving, the woman with the best and saddest story, so you can save those two hundred and fifty bucks and use the money for other pressing bills. I cringe now, even thinking about it. They needed us, and we judged them and assigned an order of merit, but in reverse. What we needed to provide was good education, free contraception, more choices than the pregnancy/pension path, the hopelessness of generational unemployment; we needed employers to look at an underprivileged girl and give her that first, most important chance. My pretensions to feminism were worth something, maybe a smidge more than nothing. But if they were, it wasn’t by much. What I did was worthy, but it didn’t effect change.

How can the world be improved by forcing women to carry unplanned pregnancies and bear unwanted children?

There is more research nowadays, and a better all-round effort to understand and counteract generational poverty, but poverty amasses a momentum that is difficult to divert. It is difficult to obtain employment when you don’t know the basic conventions of self-presentation or attire for an interview. It is even more difficult if English is not your first language and if you don’t own a car. It can be difficult understanding the importance of turning up to work on time, difficult to understand why you should stay at school until Year 12 when no one in your family has done so.

As for university – further education is so laughably inaccessible it never rates a mention.

In some parts of Sydney there are no compelling factors to discourage a girl from having her first child in her teens. Babies are often welcomed, and the Centrelink benefits, meagre though they are, can provide much-needed cash for a family. They can take the pressure from JobSeeker off for a few precious years, help a girl get off the endless, humiliating round of having to apply for jobs to retain her benefits. Babies are small and cute, too. This is truly where feminism is most urgent. Some girls escape poverty, myself included, but most do not. Escaping generational poverty is a lot like planning a murder – you need the means, the method, the motive, the opportunity.

In my case, my parents were Ten Pound Poms. Although neither progressed past the equivalent of Year 10, they had the immigrant respect for education common in my neighbourhood.

Many of the children raised in my part of Sydney did reach university, so many in fact that the local public high school became one of the first public selective schools in Western Sydney.

The population was mostly first-generation migrant from the United Kingdom, Malta, and Greece. In Girraween, money was scarce, but pretty much every man had a steady, albeit unskilled job. There is a big difference between blue-collar poverty and the generational unemployment poverty I was dealing with as a doctor. In a sense, I was protected from generational poverty by the prevalence of employment in my area and by the expectation that I would justify my parents’ sacrifice in leaving England. The children who grew up around me were likewise both protected AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

35

and expected to attain success. The difference essentially came down to ambition. I like to say that immigrant western Sydney was largely composed of families genetically selected for nous.

I was formed in the context of organised poverty, and I was drawn to chaotic poverty. Most doctors have no connection to poverty at all, and few know how to use its language. If you have grown up in an educated household, attended an independent

I don’t know a single female obstetrician who isn’t made of sheet steel school, assumed that you would go on to university, and been given the resources to attain an HSC mark well inside the top one per cent of the population, odds are high that you will not even be able to understand the context of chaotic poverty, let alone speak the dialect required to connect with your patients.

Currently, the population of greater Western Sydney is two and a half million people – one tenth of Australia’s population. A third of this population is composed of immigrants. There is little data as to where medical students come from, but from my experience, they are overwhelmingly middle-class. There can be an enormous, almost unbridgeable gulf of language and aspirations between educated and uneducated people.

My mother, herself an uneducated woman, although a voracious reader of Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, was admitted to hospital and ultimately diagnosed with a severe, degenerative neurologic disorder, which would eventually be responsible for her death. Mild dementia was common in sufferers from this condition, although the mode of death was progressive paralysis. My mother could understand, but explanations needed to be measured and succinct. Her frozen, mask-like face could not respond appropriately to social cues. I watched as a senior registrar in neurology imparted this fatal diagnosis. The trainee was extraordinarily intelligent, she had passed her exams to be a physician, and had only eighteen months to go before she was let loose to perform in the most fraught of specialties. She spoke so rapidly, and used words and concepts so complex, that my ailing mother did not understand a single word that was said. Nobody who came from my old neighbourhood would have understood either. The difficulty lay not with my mother’s mild cognitive impairment or inability to interject and ask for clarification, it was that she wouldn’t even have known what to ask. My mother nodded, confused, trying her hardest to seem amiable and participatory.

The registrar left with an audible sigh of relief. Job done, box ticked. The person who actually imparted the news to my mother was me. But what would have happened to her had I not been present?

What was actually going on here was an example of the chasm between the language and ideas of an educated person – a doctor who had grown up in a world where sentences like ‘an accumulation of a protein called Tau in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia’ made sense – and of an uneducated one. Worse, there was the desire of an uneducated woman, and an impaired one at that, not to make a fuss, not to be intrusive or demanding, to respect rather than question a person in a position of authority. My mother did not see that woman as a doctor, a healer or provider 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

of services; she saw her as a remote figure of power and herself as a supplicant rather than a participant in the conversation.

My mother ultimately died of the disorder, but not before making some foolish medical choices that were not thought through. She was too infirm to make decisions at crucial moments, and she was never allowed to exercise her options in soundness of mind.

My advocacy for her, my desire to avoid unnecessary suffering, were perceived as little short of manslaughter.

As T.S. Eliot said, set down this, set down this: if we truly desire to open a dialogue regarding privilege, we must understand the voices and experiences of those who have none.

M

eanwhile, I kept performing abortions, until I had one myself.

It would be true to say that I was the victim of a sudden marital breakup, but with the wisdom of hindsight ‘victim’ is technically correct but reductive. The pregnancy was planned, the break-up was unexpected, and I was left alone and distraught, with two young children and a third on the way, and no job for a year. I had no money. The obstetrician who would have delivered my third, and much-wanted, child performed my abortion instead. I heard the theatre staff chatting quietly, women I knew well, as I lay on the cold, narrow table, shivering with agony and grief. I woke in a trice, no consciousness of time having passed – bleeding, cramping, sobbing. I was numb. I wanted to die.

We talk about ‘losing’ a pregnancy as if it were a set of car keys, a game of checkers. We refuse to disclose miscarriages, call them ‘failed’ pregnancies, likening carrying a child to an exam or a driving test. We announce our pregnancies only when the danger period has passed, though everyone around us has already guessed. We have a culture of secrecy regarding pregnancy, unless balloons are called for, cards, a bassinet, the tiny onesies. We do not know how to discuss a pregnancy that does not end happily.

Our friends don’t have the tools to console us, our grief unwomanly and therefore furtive, our game-face on for the world to trivialise our pain, or better yet, ignore it. It’s only a loss. If you fall off the horse, you should just get right back on. But this was not an option for me. My husband had gone, and I was left to raise my children alone.

There was grief, you can be sure of that, hacking, exhausting grief that felt almost too overwhelming, like sitting on a manhole, pushing downwards with all my strength, while a monster, horrible and eerily strong, thrust up from beneath. There was a time when I felt out of control, drunk all night and nasty every day; a time when my friends feared for my sanity and I wondered whether I could go back to the world of pregnancy and my work with women again. I threw my only ultrasound image ceremoniously in the bin, I cramped my way through a pelvic infection, and broke down entirely when I opened the pathology bill, for ‘examination of products of conception’.

I didn’t stay quiet, my lost pregnancy was not swept under the rug, I told everyone about my abortion. There was a terrible loss, and I would not pretend it had not happened, I wanted to shout from the roof: It happened, this happened, to me. I made this awful decision to spare my children, my other children, who were too small to understand that Daddy was gone but Mummy was still having a baby. I crashed my car on the way to hospital for

my third shift back at work. I laughed it off. After my abortion, what was a mere crumpled car?

I never went back to performing abortions, but not by design. I was offered training in diagnostic ultrasound and moved away from general obstetrics, although prenatal diagnosis and abortion are inextricably linked. I believe I could have gone back to abortions, but there would have been tremendous pain and probably lasting damage to my psyche. That knowledge would not have stopped me because, ultimately, I learned about grief from my abortion. I also learned that grief does not always march hand in hand with guilt or regret. There was never any doubt in my mind that I had done the right thing, for my children and myself. The sensation of loss is not the same as wishing the lost to come back again.

But if only I had known then what I know now. We should have done more for those women in Western Sydney, those who begged for our services. They should have been given a language to speak, an opportunity to make other choices. We should have been women who walked by their sides, who understood and worked with them to better their lot. They deserved to love men who didn’t just have sex with them and walk away, partners who were kind, non-violent, hard-working. They deserved better schooling, better jobs, better lives. None of those were things I was able to give, so I offered them what I could: a step back, a second chance, a loss with no regret. There was no meaningful assistance, however, in enabling these women to avail themselves of this second chance. Why do we live in a world in which the least worst option may be a free abortion?

The goal of feminism is and has always been equality, but when we speak of equality using the words of privilege, when we discuss microaggressions and ignore our sisters, when we debate opportunity while failing to even see those with none, we do our cause a great disservice. Feminism is a broad church, but surely there is room to understand that providing opportunities for poor women – be it education, contraception, relationship advice, job assistance, and free abortions without question – would do more to alleviate chaotic poverty than almost anything else?

I believe in women, and their ability to shape the world, and I believe that given an exit strategy, few women would proactively choose chaotic poverty. I believe that we doctors need to do better, and that until we see as many medical students from Bidwell as we do from Randwick, our job is not done.

In my work in prenatal diagnosis, I remain peripherally in the field of abortion, although I now work in a tree-lined street in a wealthy suburb. When a wanted pregnancy is likely to result in a poor outcome, abortion is one of the options I canvass with frightened parents. There is still never an easy way to broach the idea that ending a pregnancy may be the kindest action. The circumstances change, not the loss or the pain.

Abortion is both a testament as to how far our rights as women have come and a strong indicator of how far we still have to go. The right to control our own bodies, to be able to weigh our choices and their consequences, the right to end a potential life in the service of existing life, that is something that should have been a given long, long ago. Although abortion has been available and obtainable for many years, it has only technically been legal in New South Wales since 2019. We were performing abortions

thirty years ago, but abortion was in fact illegal – unless the life and health of the potential mother were at risk. It was only when ‘health’ was defined as ‘social well-being’ that abortions could be performed outside the backyard. We were offering a service so repugnant it was deemed criminal. Every woman who sought and obtained an abortion began as an exception that eventually enabled this felonious act to be performed without fear of prosecution for both the provider and recipient. The fact that patients and providers could break the law routinely yet still receive a Medicare rebate, unquestioned, was hypocrisy of the highest order, and a fair indication as to where women stood in terms of status.

Most doctors have no connection to poverty and few know how to use its language Abortion is also an indication as to how far we, particularly feminists, have to go. Feminists cannot stand by as young, impoverished women fall pregnant repeatedly due to lack of other options. Eliminating poverty doesn’t require money, it requires education and opportunity, freely available contraception, and the use of abortion as a backup when all other plans have failed.

The Colorado Family Planning Initiative in the United States provided free or low-cost contraception for at-risk women and teenagers for five years, resulting in a forty per cent drop in the unplanned teen pregnancy rate, and a thirty-five per cent decrease in abortions. Even without providing education and opportunities, this initiative, funded secretly by Susan Buffett, was so successful that it scandalised Republicans and was scrapped when funding was exhausted. As the feminist who inspired me said, in this instance, there is no place for sitting on the fence.

When we debate equality, we must reckon with poverty and not let feminism be a middle-class phenomenon. We must make abortion available on demand, at little or no cost, and recognise the plight that drives women to seek the procedure. We must work to make abortion unnecessary, in the near future.

My own abortion, on reflection, was necessary and also the most emotionally painful experience I have endured. I wasn’t poor, and the decision was made for good reasons. I am glad the service was available and that afterwards I was surrounded by compassionate and caring staff and friends. It is an example of the care I try to give my own patients who seek abortion due to foetal abnormalities. I care for them as I wish I could have cared for myself, and I can see my own pain in their eyes too.

One day I hope to see less of this pain. Most of all, I hope to live in a world that my teenage daughter can navigate without fear, and with all the intelligent options of womanhood. I hope that one day our work will make her world safer and that I too will feel safe in it again. Until then, I guess I will continue to shout my abortion in the hope that someone will hear. g Linda Atkins is an obstetrician, married with three children.

‘Shouting Abortion’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖ This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

37

China

Roar, China!

Chinese cultural agents to forge ‘connections of solidarity and common interest’ through art. This engagement, as Tyerman persuasively argues, positioned China at the epicentre of the Sino-Soviet creative convergence Soviet mission to establish a new type of political – and aesthetic Iva Glisic – internationalism.

Internationalist Aesthetics is structured around four central chapters, each with a specific focus on works of fictional and documentary literature, theatre, and cinema. A large and diverse source base is tied together by the figure of Tretyakov, whom Tyerman heralds as ‘the most Internationalist Aesthetics: prominent cultural mediator China and early Soviet culture of China for a Soviet audiby Edward Tyerman ence’. Born in Latvia in 1892, Columbia University Press Tretyakov spearheaded a US$35 pb, 353 pp series of avant-garde projects e are drawn to this China, even though we still do from Moscow to Vladivostok not know China,’ wrote Soviet avant-garde writ- in the early 1920s before er and theorist Sergei Tretyakov in 1925. ‘But we travelling to China in 1924 must get to know China, we must get to know it well, and we to teach Russian literature must get to know it quickly.’ Tretyakov’s call was underpinned at Peking University. Tyerby a real sense of political urgency: the failure of socialist revo- man juxtaposes Tretyakov’s lutions across Europe had prompted a Soviet pivot toward Asia, work with other examples of and China had emerged as a potential partner for fostering ‘an Soviet creative production international community of enemies of capital’. Yet despite being to examine a wide range Sergei Tretyakov c.1939 geographically adjacent, Russia and China had long perceived of aesthetic responses to (Wikimedia Commons) each other as unfamiliar and distant. In an effort to bridge this China, from avant-garde divide, a comprehensive cultural campaign was devised to draw poetry to classical ballet.

His engagement with this material also brings to light Soviet China closer to the Soviet public.

The 1920s would become a decade of intense political and efforts to deconstruct the orientalist perception of China as exotic creative engagement between the Soviet Union and China, and inferior, and instead present the nation as a revolutionary and these activities are the focus of Edward Tyerman’s excellent peer. Ambitious, complex, and skilfully executed, Tyerman’s study is a true journey of discovery.

During the 1920s, Soviet artists found particular inspiration in current events and eyewitness reporting, and the resulting shift from fiction to fact in Soviet creative production is a central feature of Tyerman’s analysis. Internationalist Aesthetics thus opens with consideration of a volume of Tretyakov’s articles on China published in the Soviet press between 1924 and 1928, entitled Chzhungo (a Cyrillic rendering of Zhongguo, or ‘China’), alongside his 1924 poem ‘Roar China’. Chzhungo provides a testing ground for avant-garde experiments with ‘literature of facts’, which rejects fiction and uses exclusively documentary materials as a way to transmit China ‘as it is’. Meanwhile, ‘Roar China’ takes the form of poetic reportage, recording the broad range of trades seen on the streets of Beijing, with Tretyakov drawing on Futurist poetic experiments to transcend the language barrier and make the Chinese working class recognisable to Soviet readers.

A gathering at the apartment of Mayakovsky and Brikov in Sokolniki, 1925.

A chapter dedicated to theatre centres around a pair of Standing (left to right): Mayakovsky, Osip Brik, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Tretyakov, prominent China-themed performances, both inspired by Viktor Shklovsky, Lev Grinkrug, O.M. Beskin, P.V. Neznamov. real and widely reported events. Tretyakov’s ‘play-article’ Sitting: Elsa Triolet, Lilya Brik, R.S. Kushner, E.V. Pasternak, Olga Tretyakova.

Roar, China! (1926) borrows its title from his earlier poem (photograph from Maïakovski by Elsa Triolet (1939)/Wikimedia Commons) but explores a 1924 act of British imperial aggression in Internationalist Aesthetics: China and early Soviet culture. Bringing the Sichuan province. A ‘manifesto for an internationalist form together a rich collection of texts, films, and stage performances, of theater’, Roar, China! comprised a dynamic blend of reportage, Tyerman’s study reveals the extraordinary efforts by Soviet and historical re-enactment, and ethnographic study that resonated

‘W

38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Literary Studies with audiences worldwide. More conventional was the Bolshoi Theatre ballet The Red Poppy (1927), which presented the Chinese anti-colonial struggle in the traditional form of ballet, and through a love story between a Chinese dancer and a Soviet naval captain. Tyerman contrasts these two pieces to explore the rich and complex history of Soviet efforts to present China’s political awakening on stage. His focus on the role of translation in these plays provides further insight into how artistic experiments with language were employed to build the Sino-Soviet connection.

Tyerman’s study reveals the extraordinary efforts by Soviet and Chinese cultural agents to forge ‘connections of solidarity and common interest’ through art Tretyakov’s assertion that ‘China must be carefully and comprehensively squeezed into the consciousness of the masses through their pupils’ sets the tone for an analysis of various films that cut across a range of genres. Tretyakov’s (unrealised) film trilogy on contemporary China is considered against examples of revolutionary melodrama, expedition film, agitprop, and comedy.

In each instance, Tyerman highlights how film was used both to teach the Soviet public about its neighbour, and to introduce Chinese audiences to ‘the ideological power of Soviet cinema’.

His compelling analysis will doubtless inspire many to seek out and view these historic films.

Internationalist Aesthetics culminates in a discussion of what Tyerman describes as the most complex early Soviet publication on China: Tretyakov’s text Den Shi-hua, which appeared in instalments before being published as a book in the early 1930s.

Defined as a collaborative ‘bio-interview’, this work draws on a series of discussions between Tretyakov and his former student Den Shi-hua, which trace Den’s journey of political awakening from rural Sichuan, to Peking University, and ultimately to Moscow. By highlighting the ways in which Den Shi-hua departs from other contemporary forms of ego-writing, Tyerman celebrates the work as an advanced model for transnational and translingual literary collaboration in which the interviewer, the interviewee, and the reader all play an equal (and emancipatory) role.

Cutting across a range of genres and media, Internationalist Aesthetics brings together cultural history and translation studies to provide fascinating insight into how creative production was used to build understanding between China and the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Although the period of close relations between these two countries ended abruptly in 1927 with the suppression of communist forces in China, the artistic production that supported this rapprochement has lost none of its allure or significance, particularly in the context of contemporary efforts to forge a vision of progressive internationalism fit for our era. In illuminating the work of cultural mediators that shaped this internationalist aesthetic, Tyerman proves an excellent mediator himself, offering a new account of the Sino-Soviet creative convergence that will be highly valued by readers interested in Russian, Chinese, and indeed global history. g Iva Glisic is a historian of modern Russia, Italy, and the Balkans.

Ubiquitous shit

A faecal history of French literature David Jack

Cacaphonies: The excremental canon of French literature

by Annabel L. Kim

F

University of Minnesota Press US$27 pb, 288 pp

reud once argued that the pleasure of shit is the first thing we learn to renounce on the way to becoming civilised.

For Freud, the true universalising substance was soap; for Annabel L. Kim it is shit; and French literature is ‘full of shit’, both literally and figuratively, from Rabelais’s ‘excremental masterpieces’ Pantagruel and Gargantua and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom through the latent faecality of the nineteenth-century realists to the canonical writers of French modernity.

Cacaphonies offers an alternative history of French literature which calls into question the sanitising notion of a canon, restoring the faecal to its central place, not as a transgressive element to be pushed to one side but as the ‘fundamental component’ of

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932 (Agence Meurisse/Wikimedia Commons)

modernity. This book seeks to demonstrate that twentieth-century French literature has ‘shed none of the fecality’ that typified its pre-industrial and early modern counterparts. Kim situates her book within the broader academic discipline of ‘waste studies’, a growing interdisciplinary field which ‘responds to the urgent ecological planetary crisis […] brought about by the production of more and more waste’. What Kim refers to as ‘literary waste studies’, while not directly concerned with the question of planetary survival, nonetheless deals with shit as a modern problem AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

39

an outlook which encompasses at once past, present, and future.

As Kim neatly summarises apropos of Beckett: we are of shit, we are in shit, and we are headed for shit. As a statement about the modern Zeitgeist, this is very persuasive, and these two chapters are the critical high point of the book.

Less persuasive is Kim’s attempt to forge a faecal connection between Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, two writers who, according to Kim, have more in common than at first appears, particularly when viewed through the lens of shit. While Genet’s transgressive politics and Sartre’s bourgeois public persona seem at odds with one another, their sensibilities ‘converge in faecality as a means of figuring and giving form to the idea of freedom’. The main obstacle to this convergence is that Sartre, even in his fiction, is not an overtly faecal writer. Kim attempts to overcome this by establishing an identity between the two writers based on Sartre’s Saint Genet: Genet as self-fashioned shit, Sartre as the ‘philosopher fly’ hovering over him. The result is the somewhat tenuous equation of faeces with freedom, both being essentially ‘anti-social, anti-relational [and] anti-hegemonic’.

Marguerite Duras in Paris, 1988 (Pascal Baril/Abaca Press/Alamy) The remaining two chapters take this idea as both their foundation and their point of what Kim calls its ‘profound excrementality’. This excrementality departure, reorienting this concept of faecal freedom towards the cannot, Kim argues, be incidental to modern French writing; its figure of the other in the first step towards a faecal ethics. Through omnipresence points to something more essential to the modern a reading of Marguerite Duras’s War and Romain Gary’s The Life before Us, Kim shows how these Holocaust narratives situate shit French literary enterprise.

Despite the unsavouriness of the subject matter, Kim’s argu- as ‘the exposition of a radical care ethics’. Duras ‘writes fecality ment is that whatever unpleasantness may arise is far outweighed in such a way as to point toward the universal instinctualizaton by the ‘richness’ faecality offers as a way of understanding modern of care’ which transcends the typically gendered conception of French literature. The first step in arriving at this understanding is care as feminine; while Gary’s chiastic ass wiping (the woman an engagement with psychoanalysis and its monopoly on faecality wipes the young boy, the grown man later wipes the old woman) in literature. What Kim calls ‘psychoanalytic fecal filtration […] establishes shit as the universal ethical substance, the true testing flattens feces into a rather narrow identitarian frame, where think- ground of our relationship with others. Finally, in the third part of ing shit begins and ends with the self, the psyche’. Cacaphonies the book, Cacaphonies leaves behind the French modernist canon rather seeks to establish shit as ‘its own figuration … a conceptual and takes the leap into the twenty-first century. Here Kim looks and creative material that builds something other than the self ’. at two contemporary novels, Anne Garréta’s In Concrete (2017) In late-nineteenth-century France, shit began to lose its and Daniel Pennac’s Diary of a Body (2012), to demonstrate the corporeality – its existence as a ‘deeply embodied experience’ – ‘political uses of shit’ in our time; shit as an ‘anti-racist, antiand began instead to function more figuratively as ‘all the social patriarchal material’ in Garréta’s case; and as ‘the democratization entities that the bourgeoisie would like to purge from its social of literature and culture’ in the case of Pennac.

Cacaphonies has a clear teleology. While at times a little forced, body’. Progress, the ideology of the Enlightenment, which saw the gradual sanitisation of France and its literature in the nineteenth it culminates in the utopian ideal of shit as the true universalising century, went to shit in the early twentieth century. Literary substance, the great leveller of difference and distinction. This modernism reflected this. Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s ‘excremental ‘caca communism’, as Kim calls it, has both social and literary poetics’, particularly as it is articulated in his masterpiece Death on importance. However, Cacaphonies is primarily concerned with Credit, marked a return to Rabelaisian scatology and was the first the way shit disrupts the French literary canon’s claim to the attempt to both re-odorise the French literary imaginary and to eternal because shit is precisely that ‘concrete, corporeal’ reminder reconnect the twentieth century with the early modern. Céline’s of its impossibility. g exploding of French literature cleared the way for Beckett, whose French-language trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable David Jack is a freelance writer and editor. He holds a PhD in is for Kim the apotheosis of modern ‘excremental sensibility’, Comparative Literature from Monash University. while insisting on ‘the connection between the medieval and the early modern and the modern and the contemporary’. The subject of fecality in literary waste studies has tended to focus on the medieval and early modern periods. What Cacaphonies attempts to do is shift this attention to the modernist French canon and to

40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

The Rest

How much labour in yanking the moon one landing to the next, yard to parking lot scrub culvert wood, nightly rate of pills per hour how many threads of linen go to make up the cold worker’s coat?

It is possible to wish for no power more than oblivion a cold runnel that changes day to day when you are the only one not sleeping through it, sipping tea off the beaded lips of the child who is the reason we work to maintain bodies in orbit the traditional moon and billionaire junk soon lights alive trademarks mirrors held to the sun.

That work is mine runs through me like honey making my limbs actually hot.

My child wakes up with shorter hair as the maples turn the colour of cough syrup they can’t speak too many threads caught in their teeth ‘this is just what it’s like being a human’ much less teen I say the words but they are all new and forming their identity they cross and recross that same gulley dripping onto marker paper wanting to obliviate gender maybe also them going from name to name; too fretful at bedtime about the animals the impossibility of a normal life making films, going on airplanes too hot to sleep. The student explains their absence as a recent exposure to massive amounts of carbon dioxide and yet there’s not enough for Christmas to slaughter the cows humanely; turkeys flown in from Brazil the cold forest border things we countenance in our reflection as sky light freckled with moss over the kitchen table.

Behind my chair stands a stranger says she isn’t thinking of me at all but I am still with her in the night, doing my duty to drag the sun up onto the ledge so my child can keep working on finding a name for life soon to be forgotten soon to be lived and warmed between the hands of their glittering skilful drawings of people with giant eyes becoming trees becoming weapons

Andrea Brady ❖

Andrea Brady’s most recent collection is The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan, 2021).

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

41

Commentary

Britain’s atomic oval

The vassalage of Australian governments in the 1950s and 1960s

by Elizabeth Tynan

Australia became the oval on which Britain’s nuclear game was to be played.

Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia

W

hen I was launching my book Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story in 2016, one of the guests put it to me that the name Maralinga should be just as recognisable in Australian society as Gallipoli. This comment suggested that the British tests had a broader meaning that spoke to a national mythology and were not just interesting historical events.

I have pondered this comment many times since, especially while writing my most recent book, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia. Both of these books provide insights into the national character not of just Britain but of Australia as well, just as the Gallipoli story does. The stories of the atomic tests do not necessarily make for rousing patriotic reading, but instead pose serious questions about how Australia saw itself then in relation to its former colonial master, and about whether echoes of that self-image persist to this day.

Gallipoli remains a foundational myth for this nation, albeit more complicated now, but still embedded deeply in national folklore. At the very least, Gallipoli is recognisable as a place of national importance, wreathed in a comfortably opaque fog of reverence. Maralinga does not have anything like the name recognition or the cultural resonance, and Emu Field and Monte Bello have effectively none at all. Yet at Monte Bello Islands (Western Australia), Maralinga and Emu Field (South Australia), between 1952 and 1963, Australia itself was put to the test, along with the twelve full-scale atomic weapons and hundreds of associated toxic experiments.

One way to understand the British tests is through the concept of nuclear colonialism. This powerful explanatory term captures a global geopolitical hierarchy in which the nuclear-armed countries have, from the beginning, transferred the risks of atomic testing onto countries and populations lower down the pecking order, generally to colonies or former colonies, or to their own indigenous peoples.

The term nuclear colonialism was coined in the early 1990s by the US anti–nuclear weapons testing activist Jennifer Viereck.

This species of colonialism is defined as ‘the taking (or destruction) of other peoples’ natural resources, lands, and wellbeing for one’s own, in the furtherance of nuclear development’ (‘Nuclear colonialism’, Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth, www.h-o-m-e.org/nuclear-colonialism.html).

42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

The concept of nuclear colonialism makes at least some of what Britain did during its test series in Australia comprehensible.

Australia, as a sovereign nation, indeed had agency in its decision making around the tests, but the fact that it did not exercise it effectively points to the weight of colonial history bearing down upon the individual decision makers. For Britain’s part, the casual way it placed an obligation on Australia and later walked away without a backward glance at the aftermath (until forced to do so by the Royal Commission created by the Hawke government) indicates an imperial aloofness and sense of entitlement in its dealings with Australia.

In The Secret of Emu Field, I mention the ‘peculiar bonds of colonialism’. What I meant was the distorting effect a history of imperial conquest has on former colonies’ relationships with their colonisers, leading sometimes to servility. This was the case in relation to the atomic weapons tests in Australia that saw the federal government ask few questions about the risks of the tests and contribute more to their cost than Britain had even asked for.

The Australian government seemed both pleased to be asked and overly eager to volunteer resources that hadn’t been requested.

In a personal letter to his British counterpart in November 1953, Prime Minister Robert Menzies assured Winston Churchill of the ‘ancient structural unity’ that bound Australia to Britain.

That ‘structural unity’ was the backdrop for a series of unwise decisions by the Australian government. As I wrote in Atomic Thunder: ‘The truth is unpalatable but must be faced: Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s was essentially an atomic banana republic, useful only for its resources, especially uranium and land.’

Both of these commodities were of considerable interest to Britain, which wanted them with no strings attached. While uranium sales were subjected to harder bargaining by the Australian government, the land was not. Large swathes of Australian territory were handed over with few questions asked and little oversight, especially for the first two test series at Monte Bello Islands and Emu Field in the early 1950s. The two fission bomb tests known as Operation Totem at Emu Field in October 1953 did incalculable damage to the Anangu people of the Western Desert.

The Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia was a mid-1980s exercise in holding the ‘Mother Country’ to account. Menzies was not spared: ‘In taking it upon himself to embrace British interests as being synonymous with those of Australia, and to expose his country and people to the risk of radioactive contamination, Menzies was merely acting according

Approaching Maralinga (photograph by Andrew Burden)

to his well-exposed Anglophilian sentiments. It was consistent with his approach when, as Prime Minister in 1939, he announced that as Britain was at war with Germany, Australia also was automatically at war with the same enemy.’

The Royal Commission is not without its critics, some of whom point to the way it positioned Australia as a victim of Britain rather than an independent nation with decision-making powers, even if these were not well exercised. Scholar Jessica Urwin argues that, contrary to the emphases placed by the Royal Commission, ‘facilitating a nuclear program on Australian soil sought to fulfil British and Australian desires’.

The desire to do business with Britain on uranium exports and the development of Australia’s own nuclear capability were compelling motives, quietly sitting beneath the overt Anglophilia of the prime minister. While there is no doubt that the Menzies government had motivations above and beyond simple sycophancy, colonial history gave Menzies’ motives a ready-made loyalty narrative, but that loyalty seemingly made Australia incompetent when dealing with the dangerous reality of the tests.

Although Britain did consider using some parts of its own homeland for atomic testing, there was no appetite in Whitehall for domestic populations being exposed to poisonous fallout.

The merest hint in the British parliament of such tests being held in Scotland or Lincolnshire was howled down (https://www. sundaypost.com/news/experts-nearly-dropped-atomic-bombscottish-landmark-1950s/). Impassioned speeches were made promising that tests of this kind would never take place in the British Isles, owing to the risks. Instead, Britain made a thor-

ough search of its former colonies and finally settled, somewhat reluctantly, on Australia (Canada was much higher up the list).

The people who would bear the brunt of these tests would not be British civilians – they would be Australian.

When the Australian population came to know about the first atomic bomb test, Operation Hurricane held in October 1952, the response was mostly positive. Part of the reason for the equanimity was the obedience of the Australian media, many parts of which were cheerleaders rather than investigators. The entrenched marginalisation of Aboriginal populations was also a factor in the ease with which the tests were established and conducted.

Media compliance was greatly assisted by the instigation of a system of secret D-notices in the lead-up to Operation Hurricane.

While Britain had lobbied Australia for decades to establish a D-notice system, Menzies was the first Australian prime minister to acquiesce. These ‘Defence notices’ were not legislated but were instead covert agreements between the government and the media not to report on certain specified activities in the interests of ‘national security’. Flattered at being treated as national security insiders, the media owners all agreed.

President of the Royal Commission, James ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland, described Menzies’ actions in making Australian territory available for the tests as both ‘grovelling’ and ‘insouciant’.

Resources and Energy Minister Peter Walsh, suddenly finding himself responsible for the radioactive mess at the British atomic test sites when the Hawke government came to power in 1983, went further. In 1984, he described Menzies as ‘the lickspittle AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

43

Poetry Empire loyalist who regarded Australia as a colonial vassal of the British crown’. This framing of the tests as an act of colonial servility still dominates in the post-Royal Commission era.

Australia itself was a non-nuclear nation, albeit one in possession of those banana republic goods sought after by a developing nuclear nation. The Australian government was excluded from managing the way tests were conducted and kept itself ignorant

‘It’s me talking’ Poetry’s vexed first person Anders Villani

Running time

by Emily Stewart Vagabond $25 pb, 75 pp

Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s was essentially an atomic banana republic of the contamination left behind until years later. During the early tests, at Monte Bello and Emu Field, the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee did not exist, so Australia did not have the veto on the firing of each test that was available from 1956 onwards.

Should Monte Bello, Emu Field, and Maralinga have a special place in Australia’s national conversation, as Gallipoli does?

After all, Gallipoli is hardly a tale of triumph – it has failure and colonial hubris written all over it. Inasmuch as Gallipoli and the Australian atomic test sites are the places where Australia willingly surrendered its own best interests in a vain attempt to gain favour with its erstwhile coloniser, there are reasons to assent.

Like all such endeavours, it backfired. Australia was left with a contamination problem that cost tens of millions of dollars to partially remediate, and an ongoing legacy of illness and anxiety among those who were most exposed to the toxins.

The story of the British tests portrays Australia as an immature democracy, anxious to please Britain. It was a shadowy time, with little information of substance placed before the Australian public for their informed consent. The secrecy of the atomic tests enabled experiments of considerable risk to be conducted and their aftermath to be left unaddressed for many years. These stories may have not so much Gallipoli’s mythic themes of forging a nation in the heat of battle as the rather less palatable ones of ineptness and insecurity that are the consequences of a lack of national direction. Australia did emerge, at least partially, from this post-colonial funk in the decades after the British nuclear tests to seize hold of its sovereignty, but the firmness of that grip is always an open question.

I claim in my books that in handing over part of its territory to a foreign nation for secretive and dangerous activities, Australia’s responsibilities as a sovereign nation were compromised during the eleven years of the British atomic weapons test programs.

This larger meaning of the tests gives them ongoing significance as Australia continues to play a subordinate role to ‘great and powerful friends’ that have little real interest in Australia itself. g Elizabeth Tynan is an associate professor in the Graduate Research School at James Cook University in Townsville. Michael Winkler reviewed her latest book, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia, in the May 2022 issue of ABR. ❖ This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Inheritance

T

by Nellie Le Beau Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 74 pp

he lyric subject, literature’s most intimate ‘I’, has vexed critics for centuries. Is it the poet? Is it a fiction, a device? Or is the relation between author and speaker, as Jonathan Culler suggests, ‘indeterminate’, such that ‘any model … that attempts to fix or prescribe that relationship will be inadequate’? Two new award-winning Australian poetry collections offer fine-grained considerations of personhood and the poem’s capacity to represent it.

Emily Stewart’s Running Time blurs, and at times erases, the line between artificial and human intelligence. The book’s four sections comprise sequences of untitled poems, line endings unpunctuated, free-floating. In the opener, the speaker’s selfconsciousness boots up: ‘every summer I doomscroll’; ‘I dive into my cerebral offcuts’; ‘I was hiding my seriousness / and glitched.’

Are we not, wired into phones and computers, already cyborgs?

Yet the poem also asserts that ‘the brain filled with shame cannot learn’, a statement that betrays a search for personal growth – and love.

Computational references populate the collection; driving this computing is what Stewart calls ‘the alluring challenge / of the unprocessed event’. In one poem, ‘phone turns Woolf to wooof ’, an autocorrect to the incorrect that foreshadows the speaker’s later acknowledgment that ‘I know where I’m going wrong / flicking between screens / my mood is split / and my meaning.’ Existence threatens to reduce to ‘signing in from / whenever / always’. Elsewhere, Stewart puns on ‘browsing’: stressed out glossy light spiralling outside feeling fine getting back to throwing a stone browsing privately

The lineation here typifies Stewart’s poetics: short, fragmentary, parsed into discrete units, alive with sonic pattern.

This formal approach, and the flat affect it fosters, compounds the sense of the poem as a cipher. What is ironic about such depersonalisation is how Stewart achieves it through a single first-person voice. In fact, the poet courts this irony: ‘this isn’t botspeak it’s me talking / um / about / our lighthearted r/ship’; ‘will you look it up / deepfaking literaturr’. At one point, we

find the speaker ‘glowing up at my laptop / facing the wall / the vacant lot’. The human has become technology. Virtual space has become physical.

The quote above also reveals the book’s metapoetic dimension.

Running Time tracks a writer using her medium to ‘inscribe [her] relations’ with the world. Sometimes, those relations suggest mystical agreement between language and thing: ‘in the instant of wakefulness / … / image and text lies evenly / forming the shape / of what happens next’; ‘the tide speaks pure verbiage’.

More often, Stewart resists the tendency to mine imagery for symbolism. Part of the book’s code-like quality derives from its lack of specific, sensory images. When such images do appear, vivid because of their scarcity, Stewart bats them away as marks of the speaker–poet’s indiscipline: ‘Toyota Echo (intrusive image) / an old vernacular / where I spent too much time’. After an intimate disclosure – ‘I take my books to bed with me / I pause I catch a breath’ – the speaker in the next poem chides herself: ‘don’t backflip now / I’m aware I’m not everybody’s / sound.’

Readers of Running Time, which won the 2021 Helen Anne Bell Bequest Poetry Award, may find the first-person speaker unapproachable, given how little she reveals of her biography.

Can the subject appear both omnipresent and evanescent, human and ‘bot’? Near the book’s end, a list arrives: ‘dislodged brick / wraparound sunglasses / a toddler’s sock / personal slight / Tasmanian Oak (5 planks) / rubber band / wrapper / stick’. Why this lurch towards things in a collection with so few? To declare that ‘this rummaging / is a live consciousness’. A consciousness ‘giving off / … a feeling not a lecture’. A consciousness that loves: ‘you / turn up against my thigh / crash the site’. Never encrypted from view for long is the lyric’s most human feature – its optative mood, or expression of wishes: my fantasy is that crisis is revelatory that change is a process I can trip the wire on.

‘I

have spent / All morning,’ admits the speaker late in Nellie Le Beau’s Inheritance, ‘under wattlebird, / Asking the land.’ Asking the land what? A question for its own sake, but implying a responsive world, in which ‘tamarind sleeves’ are ‘rare / books pressed by sunlight,’ and ‘the night sky of Lynn’ is ‘bronze-aged, calling’. If Le Beau’s début spans myriad forms, geographies, points of view, and historical epochs, its keynote remains a subject’s immersion in – and attempt to sing – the numinous, ‘this gift / … / this infinite wing’.

Much of the collection, winner of Puncher & Wattmann’s 2020 Prize for a First Book of Poetry, is set in rural Australia and North America. Unfamiliar places accumulate and become their own music: Broken Bow, Delight, Telluride, Trois-Rivières, Prairie Siding, Paincourt. Such particularity extends to perception, often of flora and fauna: in ‘wattle season’, ‘Young emus / hang / foot-first caught / by the wire / loops of the white lamb / paddock’; ‘to the reed warbler’ celebrates the bird’s ‘chant, sharp / to the martens flitting seamless / above the water’s grain’. When a pod of beached whales lies ‘Heaving with the weight / Of oxygen, their lungs / Shutting out sunlight, closing / Like blinds at noon

in the desert’, we think of the speaker’s father in another poem, moving from Niagara Falls ‘to a desert place, slicing / grapefruit with a new tongue’.

Yet, like Robert Haas and Gary Snyder, whom she quotes in epigraphs, Le Beau’s ecopoetic rootedness bursts into myth, allusion, and tangent. The book’s most impressive poems are its most formally and conceptually ambitious. In ‘Sepulchral’, the speaker is an entombed Denisovan human, ‘waiting for the new world’, and then a contemporary witness to a young woman entering or exiting a strip club, ‘tak[ing] the corner / like a tumbleweed’.

‘Long Haul’ apostrophises a flight attendant named ‘Agnieszka’, never to reappear, on subjects as diverse as ‘placing scrambled eggs in the microwave’ and ‘a ramhorn sliced in layers / of bone and meadow’. The speaker’s grandfather, a fur-trapper, and Scheherazade walk together between Ontario and Quebec, the queen holding his pelts. Gilgamesh enters a Richmond injecting room ‘search[ing] for the letters’ of an ancient stone tablet. ‘Canticle for Allen Dulles’, a former CIA director, ends with the speaker finding the man ‘in bear grass’: ‘I called to him, and moss became / his tongue and rivers settled / under black ice, dissolving / frost shards in every mouth.’ Le Beau closes multiple poems with such metaphorical flourish, calling to mind Haas’s ‘Interrupted Meditation’: ‘I’m a little ashamed that I want to end this poem / singing, but I want to end this poem singing.’

At the book’s heart is the power and resilience of the feminine – ‘the women’, the poet writes in ‘Praising the Northern Loon’, ‘who made me’. Le Beau thrice references the Hebrew Book of Esther, in which a woman saves her people from genocide. In one poem, the speaker, Esther herself, tells how ‘As a girl / Barefoot I collected / Owl feathers.’ Elsewhere, the speaker, now nearer the poet, who is nearer Esther, says: ‘As I girl I / favoured geese.

Canadian, like / My father and the guns he kept / To scare them.

I collected / Their feathers, named them.’ What happens to these collections, these names? They become poems, ‘Feathers … pasted / To light, measured / In stars.’ g Anders Villani is a PhD candidate at Monash University and an ABR Rising Star.

Double your digital delights For only $100, get a full year’s digital access to both ABR and Meanjin.

Visit our website for more information.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

45

Poetry

Consoled by language Sarah Holland-Batt’s third collection David Mason

The Jaguar

by Sarah Holland-Batt

I

University of Queensland Press $24.99 pb, 144 pp

first encountered Sarah Holland-Batt’s poem ‘The Gift’ in The New Yorker. It begins, ‘In the garden my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche’ – an unremarkable opening, I thought, to a poem of personal anecdote, a genre too ubiquitous among our contemporaries. Rereading the poem in the context of her third collection, The Jaguar, I became acclimated to her style and manner, and admired the alertness of its verbal performance. If the new book remains a personal memoir, narrating the devastating illness and death of her father, it is also charged

ordinary material, though his was also combined with the public and moral emergency of a society in conflict. In America, where Holland-Batt has lived and studied, a new collection by Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets, also described as a verse memoir, has just won the Pulitzer Prize. While they are very different writers, Seuss and Holland-Batt handle the personal with unusual skill. Their best poems feel intended, shaped by urgent thought and diction.

Holland-Batt has said she feels both American and Australian in her poetic identity. Her father, an engineer who emigrated from England, took the family to America as well as Australia.

His long descent into Parkinson’s disease has also been the subject of Holland-Batt’s journalism and advocacy concerning the conditions in Australian aged care facilities. Her poems honour this subject matter with unflinching observation and skilful metaphor, as in ‘My Father as a Giant Koi’: He cannot trust the scratched headlamps of his eyes so he navigates by feel, angling his huge whiskered head mouth-first toward the fork, weaving like an adder charmed by smoke, then he bites down to find the world suddenly there again, solid as metal and bait.

When her language escapes rationality, as she does in ‘Empires of the Mind,’ driven by the relentless absurdity of illness, Holland-Batt conveys a richer, sadder ambiguity, her father repeatedly ‘crying about Winston Churchill’.

And the women in their beds call for it to stop like a Greek chorus croaking like bullfrogs each to each in the dark – unsettled, loud, insatiable – the unutterable fear rippling through them like a herd of horses apprehending the tremor of thunder on a horizon they cannot see but feel.

Sarah Holland-Batt with her father at Springbrook

throughout with a strong writer’s intelligence and vulnerability.

‘I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,’ she writes, ‘every day I will know it opening in me.’

The problem with most poems of personal anecdote is that they too rarely compel us, as the best poetry does with its talismanic power, to reread, to return again and again to an uncanny rightness of saying. They are too rarely memorable. In the right hands, such material can resonate beautifully. Think of the distances leapt by a poet like Seamus Heaney from such 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

The jaguar of the book’s title, an animal as exotic and uncontrollable as her father’s disease, makes several appearances, from the car he buys in his strangely masculine denial of death, to a friend’s pet in a prose poem, ‘Brazil’, about a journey never taken. There she sees her father ‘lifting a cup filled with jaguar’s blood up to the light, how it gleams like wine, I see the raw jaguar’s heart filleted in the finest slivers, carmine red, laid out like a stinking meat flower in front of him’. It’s a weird carnality, this effort to devour a vanishing life. The jaguar appears again in ‘Ode to Cartier’, where something wild prowls in the language: ‘Hunter, huntress – / there’s life in me yet.’ And again in ‘Meditation on Risk in New Hampshire’, asking ‘why the body courts / proximity to what can kill it …’ The same poem gives us the image of a grizzly in Alaska, rearing ‘to full height to see what we were’.Though bears do not actually charge in that posture, Holland-Batt seems fascinated by the possibility of danger.

She uses animal imagery less for its beauty than its otherness, irrational as the human passions.

One can hear the poet’s antecedents in her rhythms, figures like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, though without the former’s public position or the latter’s extremity. Holland-Batt has already,

Category

Support Australian writing ‘Since I began writing for ABR, I have been moved by the staunch support Peter Rose extends to his writers, and how strongly he values and encourages their independence of thought. I look forward to writing criticism that embodies the magazine’s rigour, fearlessness and uncompromising vision, and can think of no better place to cut my teeth as a young writer.’

Mindy Gill, ABR Rising Star

Now more than ever we need quality independent journalism – a critical culture worthy of our national literature and culture.

Become an ABR Patron and support Australian writers.

What do ABR Patrons support?

Payments to writers National arts coverage The Rising Stars Program Three annual literary prizes Creative writing in the magazine Discounted subscriptions for young readers

Those donating $250 or more become ABR Patrons. If you would like to support ABR, details of our Patrons Program are on the ABR website under the Support menu.

Alternatively, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822. Current Patrons are listed in every issue of ABR. ABR is a bona-fide Deductible Gift Recipient.

All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible.

ABR Bequest Program

Have you considered making a gift in your will to ABR? Bequests help us to extend the work of the magazine. ABR thanks its expanding group of notified bequests.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

47

Poetry before the age of forty, been showered with awards and honours, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for her second book, The Hazards (2015). She has edited two volumes of Best Australian Poetry and made herself an indispensable presence on the literary scene, publishing Fishing for Lightning (2021), a remarkable collection of mini-essays on poetry and poets, all of which first appeared as columns in The Weekend Australian.

She knows how to make the experience of poetry accessible to a wide public. If she hasn’t yet written poems I want to have by heart, that doesn’t mean she never will.

A few poems in this book lack the emotional energy of her best work. ‘Monopoli’, for example, reads like a postcard from her travels, leaving a whiff of privilege. Better poems, such as a series about her love life, will make many readers nod with recognition at their observations about narcissistic men and the poet’s own ambivalence: ‘and above all, take note of all the things I say – / pull me closer, push me away’. Often the poet is guarded and solitary, consoled by language more than anything else. I most enjoy her moments flirting with rhyme, as she does in ‘Driving Through Drystone Country’: Slovenly roofs pitch over hay store and cow stall – industry of the particular – and everywhere the regular metre of drystone walls, arrowheads of shale fitted with flagstone precision.

Monuments to nothing but labour and time.

Plein-air altars for rain and wind.

These are lines in which memoir crosses over into poetry.

The writing about her father is powerful because of such poetry, the way the words are worked at, rubbed and turned and used for digging into the truth with unsentimental feeling. ‘Late, late, late, late, late. / You are late in your dying.’ This comes from a strong final sequence, ‘In My Father’s Country’: At night the lights spot on like lanterns in rolling spray, quaint font rocks and swings on the gastropub. My whisky sears and cracks its ice – the sting, the saw of true north. Then I think of you sleeping on your frozen front lawn.

And I cannot get warm.

There’s no denying this poet’s vocation, nor is there any doubt about what she could yet accomplish. Reader, take note. g David Mason is an American writer and permanent resident living in Tasmania. His most recent books are The Sound: New and selected poems and Voices, Places: Essays.

48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Inhabited space

Subtle edge-work in two new collections Sarah Day

Acanthus

by Claire Potter Giramondo $24 pb, 75 pp

Glass Flowers

by Diane Fahey

Puncher & Wattmann $27 pb, 134 pp

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions … From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.

V

irginia Woolf, in her seminal essay on modern fiction (1919), might have been describing Claire Potter’s method in her fabulous and highly original new collection: Acanthus. These poems seem to break apart consciousness before it becomes encoded, crystalised, as syntax. As a consequence, they have an uncanny and richly compelling ability to lead you away from the dimension in which you think you have entered the poem, in its opening lines, into something entirely different by the time you have reached the end. Somewhere between the beginning and the end something can be depended on to have shifted – mood, pace, imaginative compass bearing, subject plane.

You think you are on one edge, only to find yourself on another.

As Potter herself says: ‘on the edges something occurs almost out of the corner of one’s eye like an annotation: this insignificance is precious and full of life … these edges are very important to architecture as well, are such interesting places’ (Author Note).

Tangency is evident in some of the titles of these works: for example, ‘Eight-nine Degrees’ and ‘The Art of Sideways’, the latter of which might describe the whole collection.

Potter, born in Australia, has a background in psychoanalysis and teaches writing at the Architectural Association in London.

I started to imagine alliances between the two disciplines in the poems, recalling Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) and his axiom that ‘inhabited space transcends geometrical space’.

Each of Potter’s spaces, domestic, urban, celestial, leafy, is an opportunity for imagination, memory, and language: a freezing London pond in which the subject is swimming; an apartment in New York in which she is ‘ratcheting [her] fly and running out the door’; the interior of a closed green tulip, peeled backwards, from which she hears ‘only / the silent sequence / of snowwater into wine’. Spaces are porous points of reverie: a bedroom; a chapel; the space ‘within the mess of leaves’ of a fallen copper beech; objects on a desk; the capaciousness of a piece of writing.

The positioning of words in the line and of lines on the page, and the frequent use of type spaces and extended dashes, are often integral to the poems’ shaping of edges, external and interior.

‘Three Steps outside the TAB’ is illustrative of Bachelard’s delineation of memory by physical spaces. In this reminiscence, the young child waits all afternoon for her grandfather on the TAB steps which are ‘concrete and absolute / solid and lengthwise between two pillars and a portico’. The steps are both a physical world for the child and a portal for the poet into the site of the child’s intimate narrative.

An extraordinary poem in which human energy transcends the physical space of the room or the house is ‘Eighty-nine Degrees’. Here, sexual desire ignites; the house becomes abstraction, a concept of enclosure for something powerful and immaterial: A couple trying to keep to the clock ill-tempered in a storm they stray undone and fly across the table

In conveying the energy between two people as living event, this poem is comparable in power to Theodore Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ – once read, never forgotten. At the other end of the emotional arc, the loss of loved ones – a mother, a stillborn infant – is alluded to so weightlessly the poems are like paper nautilus shells.

Potter’s reading is loosely woven into her poems. She alludes to Homer, Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, Barthes, Brodsky, and possibly ‘The Moon-Bone Cycle’ from the Wonguri-Mandjigai people of Arnhem Land, as lightly as she absorbs the vocabulary of sewing into her literary warp and weft: ‘smocking’, ‘thread’, ‘moss-stitch’, ‘tulle’, ‘worsted’, ‘shir’, ‘lacy’, the age-old language of needlework soothes, anchors, domesticates the mythological, the quotidian, and the psychological.

If I had room to quote more of these beguiling poems – ‘Of Bird’s Feet’, ‘Night Chronicle’, ‘Call Them Blueprints of Weather’, ‘After Chopin’, ‘Weeping Foxes’, ‘Room of Clouds’ – it would reveal more of their sensual lustre, the strange quality of silence they contain, and the potent risk of their poetics. These poems enrich one’s experience of the day to day. Potter has the capacity to trap, encase, and breathe time so that it becomes an element the reader can be a part of.

I

n quite different ways, the architectural – built and organic – inspirits many of Diane Fahey’s poems in her new collection, Glass Flowers. Gardens, galleries, vessels, hospital wards, windows, rooms, ancient caves, skies, and hedges are both subject and genesis for these limpid poems of observation, meditation, and reflection. Fahey is an established and accomplished poet; this is her thirteenth collection of poems. A quintessential observer of the natural world, she does not just notice but notices the process of noticing. The result is focus and stillness.

‘Unearthly’ observes cloud shadows as they pass over oceans, and each other, ‘slide over mountain islands’, cliffs, wheatfields, human lives – to ‘turn our bones wintry’. This long view might be a metaphor for the vagaries of history. Spatial consciousness expands into an even longer view, from satellite perhaps, as dark-

ness extends beyond Earth’s periphery: ‘thousand-mile shadows / cutting through that cold radiance, / probing the void’.

A similar dissolving of the boundaries of physical experience occurs in the next poem, ‘Autumn begins’, a meditation on the moon and cosmological indeterminacy: ‘I can never / in any true way, know what I see.’ With typical spareness, Fahey sums up her relationship with ‘this sky-borne companion’ as ‘intimate remoteness’ – a lovely oxymoron. ‘Cloud Life’ pursues the association between clouds, shadow, light, and transience: Each day I welcome, now, whatever light is on offer, the clouds a parable of how darkness, radiance, may defer to each other, even embrace, even cohabit, then sheer apart …

Delicacy and integrity of perception are encapsulated by brevity in, for example, the gentle and engaging drama that unfolds between gardener and bird, in raindrops ornamenting foliage, or the immaterial: ‘Each human day / a crucible with hairline crack’. ‘Bowers’, an example of Fahey’s treatment of the elusive and transitory, is reminiscent of W.H. Auden’s little gem ‘Their Lonely Betters’; both poems wistfully admire the non-human world for being unencumbered by word and thought. In such poems, my favourites from this section, the emotional presence of the observer is implicitly understood. On occasions, the subject speaker mediates in a way I find obtrusive between poetic subject and reader response, for example: ‘I flow with the blessed air’ or more instructionally: ‘Accept, be blest.’

The final work in this collection, ‘A Death in Winter’ is a sequence of seventeen poems in memory of Leo Seemanpillai, a Tamil refugee to Australia who died in June 2014, ‘after an act of self-immolation’. Fahey’s courageous narrative is unstinting record, witness, apology, prayer, reflection, and, above all, homage to Seemanpillai. The sequence too, looks unflinchingly at how the author, and all of us, live with the sorrow and the shame of such a story. The opening lines suggest a breathing in as Fahey summons the courage to begin: ‘Let me, first, take my bearings / by speaking of weather, the season’. This is a sequence of great breadth and skilful poetic restraint; it encompasses personal grief, respect, moral outrage, and political condemnation, skirting delicately around the edges of despair by its exercise of tenderness and love. g Sarah Day’s most recent works, Towards Light and Tempo (Puncher & Wattmann), were shortlisted for the Tasmanian Premier’s and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.

Tired of words, words, words?

Follow us on Instagram instead. instagram.com/australianbookreview

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

49

Poetry

Souveniring absences

An award-winning poet’s seventh collection Toby Davidson

Revenants

by Adam Aitken

S

Giramondo $24 pb, 96 pp

ince his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.

the French revenir, is one who returns from a long absence or after death as a spirit. There are three curious ‘Revenants’ poems towards the end of the collection, but returning travellers and spirits (and the poet’s returnings to them) appear throughout.

As we learn in ‘Sincerity’, Aitken’s father is reaching the end of his life, and Revenants begins with a series of poems crafted from his unnamed father’s letters as a young Aussie ‘ad man’ in 1950s Singapore: You got drunk in ’57, fell in love in ’58.

At the Foreign Correspondents Club you wagered on a horse with an Irish name.

The stake was Cognac and cigars.

Last week you swapped the lucky digger’s hat, your grandfather’s, for Dutch clogs.

No luxury you can’t have: you push a button (I imagine – myself as you) and ‘a boy’ runs into the room, lighter at the ready. (‘Cognac and Cigars’)

Aitken’s memoir, One Hundred Letters Home (2016), featured earlier versions of these poems. In it, Aitken reveals that since childhood he has been souveniring his father: ‘He was so often absent. I became the kind of son who replaced a real father with images, and I did this by carrying in my pocket tokens to remind me of him … golf balls, his fountain pen.’

Repossession and repression are key themes as the early focus of Revenants drifts from his father’s distasteful comforts within a lingering British colonial shadow to life under army rule in Bangkok, where his parents first met (‘Martial Sarit Cleans Up Bangkok, 1959’; ‘The Suspect’). The second section of Revenants starts with an aching vigil beside his father (‘Sincerity’), but then gravitates to his unnamed mother by way of his own schoolyard experiences of racism: I remember the school ground: eager to kill, I punched him, but gently, diplomatically, orientally.

Why didn’t I just poison his sandwich?

Named the Inscrutable I was angrier and more silent than I looked.

In private moments I would devise sermons on fear and fathers

Adam Aitken (Giramondo)

Revenants, Aitken’s seventh collection, is divided into three untitled sections. The first two negotiate the past and present in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Australia, and Hawai’i.

The third section, like Aitken’s prior collection Archipelago (2017), is set mainly in his adopted France. A revenant, derived from 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

in the voice of my mother.

Having never given up loving you, you became the template of my becoming. (‘The Far East’)

One Hundred Letters Home locates this incident in Perth,

Education not long after his family relocated to Australia in 1968. Here, an eight-year-old Aitken found that he and his brother had to answer for their misidentification as Japanese one moment and Chinese the next, while their father sought work in Sydney (another Far East) and their mother doubted her Australian citizenship.

Such is the emotional heft of these intergenerational pieces that Revenant’s mid-collection shift to fresh locales comes as some relief. Three Hawai’i poems (‘The Day Danno Died’, ‘Ala

Uneven playing fields The long wait for needs-based funding Ilana Snyder

Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools

Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry Moana’, ‘Weather Report’), for example, more freely inhabit the contemporary world and Aitken’s own independent experiences within it. The third section continues in this vein and explores Aitken’s interest in art and artists from Monet to the prehistoric walls of the Occitan caves in Southern France. There are idyllic scenes of day-to-day life in ‘Seasonal Domestic’, ‘Vespers’ and the delightful ‘Village Cat’ (‘She comes to me / in a dream on four legs, / Her boundaries have / become my own’). Aitken’s works often have a languidly observant tone which some readers will relish and others may grow impatient with, but the poet’s restraint, craft, and humility ensure that those who travel with him are rarely unrewarded.

Revenants is profoundly transnational, drawing upon Aitken’s multicultural childhood and his adult life divided between Australia, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and France. In addition to the French poems of the final section, there are three unlocated poems: ‘Revenants 1’, ‘Revenants 2’, and ‘Revenants Again’.

Revealing as little as their titles, the short lyrics feature three sets of revenants: the ghosts of peasant children, a woman lost in a dream, and indistinct yet powerful presences which implore the poet to ‘Cast off, troubadour, / Stumble into the dream / And get well soon.’

All three pieces are stunningly un-Aitkenlike, and they promise much about the poet’s future direction. The trouble is, however, that such an abrupt about-face in style and substance can’t be satisfyingly achieved in miniature. The ‘revenants’ poems deserve their own section or collection; they need more room to tease out what they are and aren’t, their moods and modes of playfulness and revelation. More extended revenant sequences, such as those in Graeme Miles’s Infernal Topographies (2020), show what can be achieved when more space is granted to such presences. If Aitken expands this series in future, it would prove a radical departure which might provoke some fruitful creative tension with his signature fusion of situatedness and in-betweenness. As it stands, the three poems only hint at what the poet might achieve when he decides to disrupt situatedness itself and inhabit a less literal in-betweenness. Revenants can be enjoyed as an independent work or as part of a longer continuum which may be entering an intriguing new phase. g Toby Davidson is a poet and senior lecturer at Macquarie University, and author of Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s life with poetry (2021) and Four Oceans (2020).

by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor

I

UNSW Press $39.99 pb, 367 pp

n 2011, when businessman David Gonski was reviewing education funding in Australia, he visited two primary schools in Sydney’s west. At the first, he found the principal dealing with glass from a break-in the night before. As he sat in the school’s reception, he observed that the children arriving for school were from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds.

When they toured the school, the principal told him of the challenges he faced: homes without books; scant parental involvement. The second school, just a few minutes by car down the road, seemed a world away. The children were in school uniform, Gonski was greeted by a concert of beautiful singing, the buildings were perfect. The school served a different group of students.

Truancy was not a problem.

Gonski believed that ‘differences in educational outcomes should not be the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions’. But that morning in western Sydney, Gonski

David Gonski speaking at the 2021 Archibald Prize (Richard Milnes/Alamy)

witnessed the growing divergence between the responsibilities Australian schools faced and the resources they had to meet them.

The impact of family background was much more pronounced in Australia than in comparable countries like Canada, where students were able to achieve their best irrespective of upbringing or school attended. The gap between the disadvantaged and the privileged was growing.

The Gonski Report offered the School Resource Standard as AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

51

a solution: first, identify the resourcing enjoyed by those schools where most students were achieving above-minimum national standards; second, take that as the best guide to the necessary resourcing for a successful education and call it the baseline level of funding which all students should receive, plus ‘loadings’ for particular school and student needs; third, set up a system to continuously verify and evaluate the calculations underpinning the first two steps. A body of independent experts would perform this task. School funding would be needs-based and sector-blind.

Government funding to non-government schools has grown at five times the rate of funding for government schools It seemed like a simple but powerful response to Australia’s educational inequalities, and it was welcomed by all school sectors. However, by 2015 the momentum on school funding reform had stalled. Even though the Gonski Report generated optimism, the problems have only gotten worse. The system has become even more inequitable with additional funding going to less needy schools. Over the past decade, government funding to non-government schools has grown at five times the rate of funding for government schools.

Waiting for Gonski provides a clear-eyed, compelling account of the Gonski reforms, recommended more than a decade ago, and why they failed. The majority of government schools are yet to be funded to the School Resource Standard, while many non-government schools are over-funded, especially as fees sit on top of the government funding.

In a meticulously researched book, Greenwell and Bonnor set themselves the task of examining how we reached such pervasive inequality. We learn that inequality was a structural feature from the outset in the establishment of Australia’s public primary schools between 1872 and 1893. The schools were free, compulsory, and secular, but state aid to church schools was abolished.

The system created the first ‘unlevel playing field’ – a dual system of schooling from the beginning: one public and one private. This changed after the 1960s, when the private sector successfully lobbied for funding, but, Greenwell and Bonnor point out, ‘one unlevel playing field replaced another’.

Hope for change came with the Karmel Report, published in 1973. However, as Simon Marginson wrote in 1984, it ‘did not develop an understanding of the dynamics of the dual system of schooling that operates in Australia’ and it ‘failed to go to the roots of inequalities in schooling’. Greenwell and Bonnor argue that Gonski also failed to address this issue. Rather than tackle the complexities of the public–private system, Gonski left untouched the issues of school fees and very different school sectors.

Inequities in school operations, including enrolment policies, were not considered.

The Gonski review recommended adequate funding for schools where students had greater needs, but did not seek to explain why these students were concentrated within disadvantaged schools, most of them government schools. Although it recognised the impact of peers on student achievement in a system where students’ socioeconomic background determines 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

the school they can afford to attend, the review did not make the connection between this systemic reality and the worrying low levels of student achievement in Australia.

Ken Boston, a member of the Gonski review panel, now attributes much of our educational woes to weaknesses in the report and failures of implementation. Noting the model was to be needs-based and sector-blind, he says: ‘Quite the opposite has occurred.’ Gonski made ‘needs-based’ equity funding part of our vocabulary but not part of our system. In the face of intense lobbying, many of the Gonski recommendations weren’t taken up or were twisted in ways that reinforced existing inequities.

Sectarian education politics stymied funding reform.

Gonski failed because successive governments didn’t implement its recommendations. Julia Gillard was constrained by her own commitment that no school would lose a dollar. When the Turnbull government passed needs-based education funding legislation in 2017, its goal wouldn’t be achieved for at least a decade. More recently, the Morrison government established funding for private schools outside the needs-based model. This was designed to soften the financial impact for non-government schools during the transition to a new funding model but served to further undermine Gonski. Needs-based funding has been continually delayed and, even with a possible change of government, there is absolutely no reason to expect funding models to alter.

This important book demonstrates how politics, self-interest, and an incapacity to think beyond the forward estimates can overturn even the most commendable objectives. Hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed into schools across the country.

Only some of that money has gone where it was most needed, and the governments that provided it know little about how it was spent. They do know, however, that it hasn’t helped.

Over a decade later, the problems have worsened. Educational outcomes for students in Australia’s schools continue to decline, and there is an increasing correlation between social disadvantage and under-achievement. Commonwealth funding continues to favour wealthier private schools, and Australian students have slid down the world rankings in reading, science, and maths.

NAPLAN results in maths and reading improve infinitesimally.

Many schools still do not have the resources or the teachers they need, and the learning gap between the most advantaged and disadvantaged students has increased. Public schools have not received all the money they were told they would get, and probably never will.

The title of Greenwell and Bonnor’s book alludes, of course, to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. We are all waiting for something or other – for hope, for relief, for freedom, for redemption. But Greenwell and Bonnor believe there is an alternative. Unlike Didi and Gogo, the two tramps who find themselves in a situation which they don’t understand and over which they have no control, we can act, we can change things, we can make a difference. Waiting for Gonski ends with a bold call to action. For our education system to succeed, nothing less than substantial structural change will suffice. In the book’s final words: ‘We can create something better for Australia’s schools and kids.’ g Ilana Snyder is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University.

Biography

Europe’s dowager empress Maria Theresa and the fate of the Habsburgs Miles Pattenden

Maria Theresa: The Habsburg empress in her time

by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, translated by Robert Savage

F

Princeton University Press $72.99 hb, 1061 pp

ew Australians today will have heard of the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). And yet this queen of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, ruler of Mantua and Milan, who was also grand duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress by marriage, bestrode the eighteenth-century stage like a dumpy colossus. The mother of some sixteen children, she styled herself as matriarch for a nation, while the marriages she arranged for her children saw her emerge as a Queen Victoria-like figure: the central node in contemporary Europe’s game of thrones. She is, moreover, the sovereign whose likeness has probably been reproduced more than any other, via the celebrated Maria Theresa thaler, a twenty-eight-gram silver coin which became a trade currency around the Mediterranean for two centuries. Her daughter Marie Antoinette may be more famous, but was notably less successful. Unlike that more notorious cakeconsuming queen, Maria Theresa died in her own bed, and Austria’s later tribulations only made her reign seem a golden age.

In her lifetime, Maria Theresa was an enigmatic figure to her subjects. She secured her father’s throne at great odds – and against the cynical opportunism of most of Europe’s other ruling dynasts – during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). It was said that she was beloved for her beneficence and approachability, yet her court was remote from the lives of most people. The administration she inherited from Emperor Charles VI was also complex, convoluted, and ultimately unfit for purpose – a dense patchwork of local rights and reciprocities between the crown and provincial nobilities which even her most able ministers struggled to modernise. The passage of time, moreover, caused Maria Theresa gradually to fall out of fashion in both élite and intellectual circles. Like the bouffant periwig and her cherished Roman Catholicism, her policies and values soon seemed to have come from a different era. The future, meanwhile, belonged to a more natural, ‘Enlightened’ Weltanschauung, which her eldest son, Emperor Joseph II (1741–90), personified.

Maria Theresa never understood Joseph’s rationalising zeal or his aversion to the archaic court rituals which she had inherited, ultimately, from the Habsburgs’ defunct Spanish line. Mother and son endured a testy relationship in which she could never quite bring herself to relinquish power, while he could not quite bring himself to usurp it. The basic problem was a constitutional conundrum which her status as a female ruler had thrown up. Unable to be Holy Roman Empress in her own right, she arranged for the

office to be devolved first onto her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine (1708–65), and later onto Joseph. Yet she remained ruler of the Habsburgs’ ancestral lands, which denied both husband and son the resources to enforce their writ as previous emperors had done. Francis Stephen took his diminished status in good humour, but Joseph’s impatience was palpable and spilled out in a decade of quixotic attempts at reform after his mother’s death.

That she has much to answer for when it comes to the frustrations and failures of his solo reign is one of this book’s subtexts.

Certainly, Viennese society already viewed the empress as faintly fossilised by the time she expired on 29 November 1780.

Only later, as Austria’s international standing deteriorated, was she rehabilitated, such that nineteenth-century Austrians and Germans viewed her and her arch-adversary the Prussian King Frederick II as the twin poles of a collective national psyche: she its defensive, conservative, and feminine element, he the bold, masculine, and aggressive counterpart. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger’s stated purpose in this biography is to challenge such myths, which she finds unhelpful for an authentic appreciation of the empress’s substantial and, in many ways, quite extraordinary achievements. However, what marks this work out from previous efforts is surely its well-rounded, holistic approach to its subject: chapters on international politics sit alongside others on the empress’s domesticity, religiosity, and physical appearance. Stollberg-Rilinger’s text is long but not excessive in Robert Savage’s attractive translation. Her book could be a model for how such biographies of the great and the good are constructed: a wealth of contextual detail and quirky anecdotes are marshalled in pursuit of a grand vision which becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Certainly, the empress comes alive again in these pages, and the reader will feel that they are being led to appraise her under expert and authoritative tutelage. The chapter on Maria Theresa’s relationship with her husband is particularly fascinating for the humanising agenda it throws up: her need to dominate but also defend him; her jealousy towards his other lovers, but also her strict sexual pragmatism. He, for his part, was determinedly uxorious, a Denis Thatcher figure avant la lettre who picked his battles and remained content to play second fiddle. When he died of a heart attack in 1765, Maria Theresa was genuinely heartbroken, spending the rest of her life in mourning and retreating for part of each month into a contemplative period of solitude.

And yet the great reckoning of Maria Theresa’s reign in Austria is surely that it was a failure, marking the moment when rivals in Russia and Prussia began to eclipse the Habsburg dynasty decisively. So should we not then see the empress as an Angela Merkel figure? In focusing on the rich nuance of Vienna’s court life and politics, Stollberg-Rilinger ends up understating the infelicity of some of her fateful choices, most notably the decision to throw her lot in with Bourbon France. And that begs the question: could she have done otherwise? A different policy would also have denied the world the spectacle of Marie Antoinette as queen of France. Without Maria Theresa’s predilections, the eighteenth century would have had a very different face. g Miles Pattenden is Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Australian Catholic University.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

53

History

The new pillory

the stories Frevert begins with is that of the thirteen-year-old Izabel Laxmana, who committed suicide after her father posted a video of him cutting off her hair, punishment for posting too Shame and humiliation in history many selfies. It might seem trivial, but it was a humiliation she Philip Dwyer did not want to live with.

Frevert examines three broad categories of shaming and public humiliation: pillorying and public beatings within legal and judicial frameworks; sites of public shaming from the classroom to online bullying; and the idea of humiliation in international The Politics of Humiliation: relations. The first part of the book is a tale readers will be familiar A modern history with: the use of the pillory and corporal punishment in Europe

by Ute Frevert to punish petty crimes. Shame and humiliation are two sides of the same coin, but humiliation, to be felt, must be public; it Oxford University Press must be done in the presence of other people who witness the £25.00 hb, 352 pp individual’s shame and embarrassment. Eventually, those kinds s I started to read this book, right-wing extremists of public punishments disappeared, contested by the rise of ideas stormed the US Congress, spurred on by a president around human dignity and by changing notions of honour. who was unable to accept defeat at the ballot box. It has Educators, however, took much longer to change their minds long been recognised that Donald Trump is a narcissist, but, as about corporal punishment. In the nineteenth century, German, Ute Frevert aptly points out in The Politics of Humiliation, nar- American, and English advice manuals for mothers instructed cissism and shame are closely related. Trump feels humiliated by them to teach their children to feel ashamed. The feeling had to his defeat and is therefore psychologically incapable of accepting be developed over time and carefully cultivated. Manuals also his loss, on any level. But there is another side to Trump’s behav- talked about the use of physical violence, especially for boys, as iour: he has been quite ‘shameless’ in the way he bends truth and part of the education process. A caning in front of the classroom humiliates other political leaders. was meant to bring with it humiliation and shame. This kind of Ute Frevert, a German historian, is director of the Center punishment was questioned, but only in so far as some believed for the History of Emotions in Berlin. In this new book, she the punishment should be private and not made public. offers an overview of the uses of public humiliation over the Public shaming had many forms. The Nazis used public past two hundred years. A large part of it focuses on German humiliation as a tool in their construction of a racially defined history, but there are plenty of examples from other countries. community (Volksgemeinschaft). As early as 1935, Brownshirts in At its heart is a desire to understand why people feel the need the city of Breslau conducted so-called pillory parades through to humiliate others in public, even one’s own children. One of the streets against couples deemed ‘racially defiled’, often accompanied by marching bands and large crowds. There always seemed to be hundreds of people willing to take part in this shaming ceremony, following the person or couple, insulting or jibing them along the way. Clearly, some Germans enjoyed the spectacle, revelling in the crude humiliation of a targeted group of people.

For a short period during the war, German women who slept with ‘foreign men’ – French prisoners of war set to work on farms, or Polish or Russian forced labourers – were publicly humiliated by having their heads shaved and then being paraded through the streets so that people could express their disgust. In this instance, the practice was stopped in the face of widespread criticism. Even the Nazis responded to public opinion. Nazi Germany was not the only country to conflate national honour with women’s bodies. In France, after the liberation, women who had slept with Germans were often publicly shamed by having French women accused of collaboration are paraded through the streets of Paris their heads shaved. It was a case of men (German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons)

A

54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

History taking revenge on women who slept with the enemy, but women took part too, often gleefully, as can be seen in the photographic evidence from the period.

One would think that this kind of public shaming was well and truly in the past, but, as Frevert shows, it has simply morphed into other forms. The media has increasingly taken on the role of a ‘social pillory’, as she calls it, and has sometimes brought down high-profile politicians in the process. Think of the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart, obliged to drop out of the race amid revelations of extramarital affairs. Closer to home, the New South Wales Minister for Transport, David Campbell, filmed leaving a gay sex club in Sydney, was then shamed into resigning from politics. Public figures have always been the target of disapproval, but the power to degrade others has increased exponentially through the media and social media, as has the audience willing to watch. This is the opposite of a society that values non-violent communication, respect, and human dignity.

Shame and embarrassment can also apply to foreign relations. The current relations between China and Australia are an interesting case in point. China’s humiliation at the hands of the West and Japan in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes up a good part of chapter three. The period between the First Opium War in 1839 and the communist takeover in 1949 is still known in China as the ‘century of humiliation’. It puts a slightly different slant on the claim by China’s deputy head of mission to Australia, Wang Xining, that his country’s feelings were hurt after Australia announced that it would lobby for an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. It’s true that China likes to play the victim of past aggressions to bolster contemporary political agendas, but given their treatment at the hands of European colonial powers, their sensitivity can perhaps be better placed in context.

What Frevert so eloquently demonstrates in this well-written book is that shaming and humiliation have played a central role in the history of the modern world, the impact of which was really only moderated, often with great resistance, in the latter part of the twentieth century. But if the state stopped using shaming as a punitive strategy, private individuals today merrily resort to it when individuals or groups are targeted and singled out for humiliation. The state is now meant to protect its citizens from public humiliation, but, as in many domains associated with electronic media, it has failed to catch up. The pillory has not really left us; it’s just taken on another form. In the modern world, Frevert argues, demeaning images posted on social media ‘now stick to victims (and perpetrators) like feathers on tar’. They have long-term and lasting consequences. In some respects, they are worse than the pillory, or tarring and feathering, because the images stay on the internet forever and can reach a worldwide audience. Ultimately, as Frevert points out, the politics of humiliation depends on a public staging and on an audience that is willing to watch and applaud. In liberal democratic nations, citizens demand respect from one another, but it is still obviously not always forthcoming. g Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle.

Spreading the convict stain A wide-angled view of the history of punishment Briony Neilson

Convicts: A global history

by Clare Anderson

I

Cambridge University Press $49.95 pb, 405 pp

n July 1887, a group of British naturalists set out from southern England bound for the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha in search of botanical specimens. They left Southampton with high expectations. Charles Darwin, in the 1830s, had visited Fernando as part of his Beagle expeditions and had remarked on the richness of the island, including its thick vegetation. On arrival half a century later, the naturalists found Darwin’s description bore little resemblance to the almost entirely denuded landscape they encountered. Fernando’s topographical metamorphosis was not only the product of ruthless extraction of natural resources but also a strategic precautionary measure undertaken by its Brazilian administrators to restrict the movements of the island’s main inhabitants – transported convicts – who risked crafting the abundant wood into escape boats. Assisting the naturalists with their research were two sentenciados (convicts), one of whom, Marçal de Corria (transported for murder), could converse in English. Thanks to the convicts’ local knowledge, the scientists would gather essential information and specimens that eventually made their way into the collections of the British Museum.

The experiences, encounters, and material traces of these British naturalists in the Brazilian penal colony serve as the fascinating and evocative opening of Australian historian Clare Anderson’s Convicts: A global history. Spanning six centuries, from the fifteenth to the twentieth, and detailing systems that encompassed almost the entire globe, Convicts is a tour-de-force account of the prevalence and endurance of the practice of ‘punitive relocation’. Motivated by a variety of concerns – the desire to manage troublesome populations (including political dissidents, petty offenders, and serious criminals), the wish to occupy and develop isolated geopolitical borderlands or islands, and the drive to make effective use of available manpower – a diverse array of empires and nations (Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, Italy, Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark–Norway, China, Japan, and various independent Latin American countries) used convict transportation. Anderson’s stated goal is to ‘write a new global history from below’ by looking closely at convicts’ lives and at how they found agency in and resisted their condition.

Situating penal transportation within a continuum of exploitative work practices, including indigenous labour, enslavement, indenture, and bondage, Anderson illuminates the overlapping and contrasting experiences of convicts, colonised peoples and the subaltern.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

55

The book is organised into two parts. In the first, Anderson in France’s Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), officials examines the context in which punitive relocation was adopted and plantation owners feared a repeat elsewhere. When hundreds and shows the connections between convicts and the history of rose up in Barbados, they were met with merciless force by the unfree migration and coerced labour, especially of the enslaved. British; the rebels rounded up, the ringleaders executed, and the In the second, which focuses primarily on the late modern period, remainder put on a ship bound for Honduras.

On arrival at Honduras, however, Commander Arthur refused Anderson reveals how these practices fit within the history of punishment and exposes the role of convicts in shaping knowl- to allow the slave convicts to disembark on the grounds that edge and systems of classification, whether as collaborators in there was nowhere secure to detain them. In the end, after much scientific enquiry (as in the case of Marçal de Corria) or as objects time had elapsed and many of the Barbados rebels had perished of study themselves (with research conducted on criminals’ bodies, from rampant disease, the ship was redirected to Sierra Leone.

There, the convicts were received in the intersecting in turn with racialised capital, ‘Freetown’, which the British ideologies). had been developing as a site of forced Readers expecting a starring role (though not punitive) settlement for for early British colonisation of Auspeople of African origin (including tralia are in for a surprise. While penal ‘black loyalists’ – formerly enslaved colonisation in the Australian colonies persons who had become refugees as a certainly figures in the narrative, result of supporting the British against Anderson reveals a system that is far the Americans in the Revolutionary bigger and more interconnected than War), and from which the colonial much of the existing literature has administrators expected ‘civilisation’ allowed (tied, as it so often has been, to spread into west Africa. Anderto the histories of particular national son explains how these Barbados or imperial constellations). Anderson’s slave-convicts and the administrators wide-angle temporal lens also serves who adjudicated over their destinies to unsettle prevalent assumptions in were bound up in networks that conthe history of punishment that tend to nected geographically distant islands, emphasise the ubiquity of the penitenlittorals, ports, and cities. Their lives tiary, the main alternative to convict and experiences highlight the entantransportation. Transportation and gled histories of enslavement, imperial penal colonialism were remarkably governance, and penal transportation. tenacious over the centuries, and the At more than 400 pages, Convicts: logic of containment and correction A global history is a weighty volume. was often subsequently transferred The text is usefully supplemented by onto other, non-convict populations, various tables and maps which illusespecially enslaved and indigenous Sketch of Sir George Arthur by Richard James Allen, 1842 trate the scale and reach of the practice peoples. Expanding on the work (Libraries Tasmania via Wikimedia Commons) – the areas affected by penal transof historian Alan Lester, Anderson portation appear like threads holding shows how ideas about indigenous ‘protection’ and slave ‘amelioration’ became intertwined with phi- the globe together. Unfortunately, the index does not do justice losophies of convict ‘rehabilitation’. In some cases, this interlacing to the richness of the book; it is lacking in comprehensiveness, of thinking and techniques was performed by the same colonial a not insignificant weakness for such a wide-ranging text. The administrators who moved from one colonial space to another, temporal, geographical, and analytical scope of Anderson’s analbringing experiences and practices with them, and applying them ysis is extremely impressive, as is the list of archival collections in new contexts. Among these globe-trotting colonial adminis- she has consulted. Adopting a wide lens can risk obscuring trators was George Arthur, who, prior to becoming governor of specificities and reducing the depth of human experience. AnVan Diemen’s Land in 1823 and lending his name to the noto- derson, however, manages masterfully to avoid such traps. This rious penal settlement of Port Arthur, was a superintendent and is an expansive yet fine-grained exploration of the national, regional and global history of punitive mobility. Weaving together commander of the British settlement in Honduras.

Arthur figures prominently in one of the most compelling a complex array of cases and conditions, Anderson engages the and fascinating cases Anderson discusses: the transportation reader in an analysis of a system that not only affected the lives of enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816. and fates of millions of people, but has shaped ways of thinking Anderson describes this case (known as Bussa’s Revolt) as ‘a slave about and organising the world that endure into the present. g voyage in reverse’. As Britain’s most established sugar colony, Barbados was highly prized by the British and fiercely protected Briony Neilson is a historian of criminal justice and penal renot only against foreign powers eager to get a slice of the sweetest form in the late modern era, particularly in France and its penal of pies, but also against the enslaved peoples who worked on the colony in New Caledonia. She is an honorary associate in the island’s plantations. In the wake of the successful slave revolution Department of History at the University of Sydney. ❖ 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

Politics

Solidarity forever

Two illustrated quests for social justice Bernard Caleo

Our Members Be Unlimited

by Sam Wallman Scribe, $39.99 pb, 256 pp

Orwell

S

by Pierre Christin and Sébastian Verdier, translated by Edward Gauvin Self Made Hero £14.99 pb, 160 pp

it’s legs. We sense the sweet relief of a meal break, or a beer on the footpath outside the John Curtin Hotel.

Wallman takes advantage of the visuality of comics texts by rendering mental states as physical phenomena. He shows his own body extruding extra brains and morphing into the trolley which he pushes along the endless Amazon aisles. Wallman’s approach to cartooning combines physical bodies dancing with embodied metaphors across carefully designed pages: reading his work is like watching an editorial cartoon being animated. It’s freewheeling and furious – political and personal.

A double page spread depicts Walt Disney’s metamorphosis from childhood, as the happy son of a socialist drawing pictures of top-hatted fat cats, into an efficiency-obsessed slave driver, railing against his workers’ ‘communistic’ unionising. The pencil-moustached Disney is depicted febrile with rage, as the world around him transforms into a parody of his animated films: lamps with eyes, lightning bolts from tiny brow-circling storm clouds, white gloves …

If this book has a fault, it is that it can occasionally come across as breathless: there is so much Wallman has to say about

am Wallman’s graphic novel Our Members Be Unlimited – ‘a comic about workers & their unions’ – recalls the past victories and the present importance of unions but is haunted by an increasingly attenuated spirit of collectivism. These ‘good ghosts’ of unionism appear halfway through the book during a conversation between two friends, both union members but engaged at different levels of activism. The sequence ends as they watch a fellow worker, oblivious, push his trolley through the trailing ectoplasm of one of these ghosts of collectivism. The two friends look on, bugeyed, willing him to turn around and notice.

So do the ghosts.

This book is a graphic retelling of the history and triumphs of unionism (eight-hour days, weekends, the battle against child labour), and also a polemic: that in the age of Amazon and Uber and Deliveroo, collective bargaining for pay rates and worker rights is more important than ever. As global capital becomes more globalised (and pays less tax), Wallman asserts that workers banding together and demanding better conditions through strike power is a matter of social justice because it will make working people’s lives better. The other characters haunting the margins of this book are A spread from Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited (Scribe) sweaty, nervous-looking middle managers and the occasional smugly besuited boss.

It is also an autobiographical account of Wallman’s year as unionism as a vital brake to unchecked capitalism; so much he a picker in an Amazon warehouse in Melbourne. Some of the has to say about the need to convey this message. Visually it is most absorbing sequences in the book detail the minutiae of his busy, excitingly so: colour and image bleed to the edge of many Amazon worklife. Wallman’s artistic style (located on the car- of its pages, and Wallman favours visually complex layouts, which tooning spectrum halfway between the Simpsons and Salvador give our darting eyes continual puzzles to untangle and decipher.

Dalí) is well suited to the depiction of subjective experience. With these levels of visual activity, Wallman or his editors have His line is bold and clear, but his willingness to delve into the made a deft choice in making the opening and closing sequences dense physicality of his characters means that his comics are of the book wordless, gently inviting us into and ushering us out always fleshily embodied. For a book focused on physical labour of the dense world of this book.

– pushing trolleys, caring for patients, drawing comics – this is rwell, by Pierre Christin (script) and Sébastian Verdier a great advantage. Wallman’s style means that we feel the work (art), is a graphic biography of George Orwell originally that his workers do, and we feel what is done to them. His line published by the major French bandes-dessinées (comics) insists on the sweat and the strain and the push and the pull. The company Dargaud. Published by English comics outfit Self fatigue. The weariness. It’s skin and it’s bones and it’s arms and

O

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

57

Made Hero, this translation (by Edward Gauvin) appears on the shelves alongside other Orwell graphic novels, including two adaptations of 1984.

As a writer, Christin is a big name in the French comic industry, and in addition to the beautifully realistic black-andwhite artwork by Verdier which tells us the life story of George Orwell, née Eric Arthur Blair, he has called upon other heavyhitters, including André Juillard, Blutch, and Enki Bilal, who provide short colour artwork interludes which represent Orwell’s major works. This is an elegant solution to the problem of inserting Orwell’s famous oeuvre into his life story.

The brevity of the comics form, as in cinema, imposes a requirement that the script writer needs to take up a tight angle on biographical material, and the names of the chapters: ‘Orwell before Orwell’, ‘Blair invents Orwell’, and ‘Orwellian Orwell’ tell us how Christin and Verdier have approached this task: they focus on the point at which Blair becomes Orwell. They are telling us the author’s life story in order to illuminate his writing. Many of the pages feature Orwell’s writing, denoted by a typewriter font in

among the narration and dialogue, another visually elegant solution.

This book is overtly the repayment of an artistic debt that Christin feels to Orwell. But the book is not a hagiography; the ‘heroic’ Orwell is often shown as bull-headed, with unfortunate consequences (getting shot in Spain, contracting pneumonia in England).

For a comic honouring a writer, Orwell features many fine wordless panels to convey Orwell’s feeling for wild England, which was, as per Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, a source of solace and strength for him. This book also deploys wordless panel sequences – the rolling of a cigarette, the shooting of an elephant, a glance at a child’s face in the Underground during the Blitz – each of which imparts an impassive melancholy to the character of George Orwell created in this graphic version of his life. g Bernard Caleo draws and performs, and is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, working on place in Australian comic books.

Theatre

Nationhood on stage

Reassessing the Australian theatrical repertoire Andrew Fuhrmann

Australia in 50 Plays

by Julian Meyrick

F

Currency Press $39.99 pb, 352 pp

or at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920): ‘I’ve got a play,’ commenced Philip, plunging.

Field jumped from his chair, hands spread out in defence.

‘Help!’ he yelped. ‘Anything but that. Not a bloody play, I ask you.’

‘What are you frightened of ?’ he asked, when Field had resumed his seat.

‘I’ll tell you, Lee, on the understanding it goes no further. Australians can’t write plays; there you have it in a nutshell.’

The prejudice was not without foundation. The critic Allan Aldous may have been exaggerating when he complained, in 1947, that Australia had not produced a playwright of consistent competence, let alone greatness, but his exasperation was genuine 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

and had its origin in experience.

This gives a weird fascination to Julian Meyrick’s latest book, in which he tells the history of Australia through an analysis of fifty plays. What sort of reflection should we expect from the cracked looking glass of Australian drama? Meyrick, however, does not dwell on what he calls the professional quality of his chosen plays. What he is interested in are conditions of production and networks of relation.

These fifty plays, therefore, are both emblematic of their moment and have the potential to make the story of Australia more complex and interesting. Relations are established by reading the plays against each other. Descriptions of individual plays accumulate and take on significance where connections to other plays are suggested. It is a kind of quilted tapestry: each play is treated separately but not in isolation, and a larger pattern to which they conform is revealed in differences and repetitions, contrasts and resemblances.

In the early chapters, Meyrick charts the fitful emergence of drama with an Australian setting and mood. The ‘febrile innocence’ of the post-Federation plays evaporates after World War I, and more complex and psychologically troubled characters begin to appear. Gradually, very gradually, the plays become more substantial. Then in 1942, there is a great leap forward, with the première of George Landen Dann’s Fountains Beyond, Dymphna Cusack’s Morning Sacrifice, and the radio version of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly.

Another great leap soon follows, with the première of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955). After the popular success of The Doll, there is a vast increase in the amount of drama in the national repertoire. More than that, there is a greater understanding of how plays might be performed. The quartet of plays by Patrick White that premièred in the 1960s epitomises this turn toward the performative, but the revolution is most often associated with those works lumped under the long

banner of New Wave theatre.

The plays of the late 1970s through to the end of the century have a darker and often angrier mood, which Meyrick connects to impacts of the emergent global free market economy on Australian life. The plays of this era register the passing away of one kind of Australia – while interrogating its legacy – but struggle to imagine a new one. Only in the past few decades have playwrights returned to contemplating the future of the nation.

There is an almost epic quality to the way Meyrick negotiates the parallels between these transformations of Australian drama and the flow of contemporary history. Rapid digests of national and world events sit next to descriptions of plays that are grouped by theme or subject matter. And it is from this assemblage that the story – the grand narrative – of the development of Australia’s national consciousness emerges.

This book, then, is an attempt to reassert the concept of nationhood both as a tool for analysing and ordering cultural products, giving them shape and significance, and as a catalyst for meaningful collective action. According to Meyrick, our contemporary view of the concept of nationhood is too negative. A sense of a national life, if taken seriously, provides an imaginative space in which relations across social strata become possible.

The enthusiasm for relations and connections does produce occasional absurdities. For Meyrick, significant affinities between plays are manifest primarily in their deployment of similar character types rather than similar plots or settings. To highlight the development of these types through the decades, Meyrick makes a show of swapping them around like so many dolls in a toy theatre: The hopeless men in Don’s Party might be younger versions of the hopeless men in Rusty Bugles or, for that matter, in Men Without Wives, now married, but still hopeless. Jane Onslow might have walked out of The Time is Not Yet Ripe, turned serious, and wandered into Crossfire.

which time is suspended and reality is unstable.

This is a book, in other words, that should be in the satchel of every Australian director; it teems with possibilities for an Australian theatre creatively engaged with its repertoire. Even if Meyrick’s primary concern is historiographical, anyone interested in a radical re-engagement with the national drama will understand what he is offering.

Finally, although Australia in 50 Plays is astute about the many

What sort of reflection should we expect from the cracked looking-glass of Australian drama? ways in which the collective experiences of a nation are registered in its dramatic literature, what it does less convincingly is show how that literature can also influence shared attitudes. I wonder if this is in part because Meyrick, focused as he is on the problems

Jim Sharman and Patrick White backstage after the opening-night performance of Big Toys, Parade Theatre, Sydney, 1977 (photograph by William Yang)

For me, at least, the repetition of this device gives an impression of narrowness rather than of depth, as if the repertoire comprised only six characters in search of an Australian who can write drama. But Australia in 50 Plays does not treat the plays only as constituent parts of a modern historical narrative.

The summaries of individual plays are a lot of fun. These are not straightforward descriptions of the means by which playwrights have bodied forth the soul of the nation. They are also capsule texts rich in dramaturgical vitamins. Meyrick has interesting and original things to say about almost all the plays featured here, and he can’t help but encourage his readers to dream of brave new theatrical reassessments.

Take, for example, his account of Norm and Ahmed (1968), Alex Buzo’s play about an encounter between a white Australian man and a Pakistani student. Meyrick’s description suggests the possibility of a more thoroughly gothic production than we have seen before: an eerie half-lit world of ghosts and revenants, in

of text and context, has little to say – with one exception – about the ways in which these fifty plays have been produced and how those productions have been received.

It is in the moment of performance that the social force of theatre, its power to shift perceptions, is realised. And the efficacy of that moment depends on so much more than text. Indeed, for a play to galvanise the present and create new subjectivities in its audience, new currents of understanding, the text must disappear behind the shock of its theatrical formulation. But now I am expressing a desire for another sort of book: Australia in fifty performances, perhaps. And once again Meyrick has revealed the desirability of something new, of something that has yet to be done. g Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. He is currently dance critic for The Age. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

59

Memoir

Eating air

An Australian academic’s ordeal in Iran Hessom Razavi

The Uncaged Sky: My 804 days in an Iranian prison

by Kylie Moore-Gilbert

D

Ultimo Press $34.99 pb, 406 pp

r Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran International Airport on 12 September 2018 as she prepared to return home to Australia. A lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, she had visited Iran for a seminar on Shia Islam. Her captors were the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Sepâh, a powerful militia that protects Iran’s Islamic system. She was bundled into a car and driven to a secret location. As interrogations began, she was also served a large piece of chocolate cake. The nature of this first encounter, terrifying and strange, would typify her coming dealings with the Sepâh, an outfit that seemed as haphazard and amateurish as it was menacing.

Moore-Gilbert was accused of being a Zionist spy, ostensibly due to her husband’s Russian-Jewish heritage and her own travels to Israel. Soon, she found herself in a two-square-metre cell in Evin, Iran’s most notorious political prison. Her panic was overwhelming, giving way, over weeks, to a numbing of her faculties. ‘The terror of being left alone … was greater even than my early fears of physical or sexual assault,’ she wrote. Hauntingly, she tracked time through the morning cries of parrots roosting nearby. When escorted to a small open-air balcony for hava khori (yard time: literally ‘eating air’), she gazed upwards. ‘The sky above our heads was uncaged and unlike us, free.’

In The Uncaged Sky, what ensues is an astonishing account of Moore-Gilbert’s 804 days in prison, first at Evin, then at the remote desert prison of Qarchak. In exquisite detail, she reports the psychological torture and unexpected reprieves of prison life: disgusting toilets and planted informants one day, a lenient warden the next. Along the way, complex relationships develop, not least with her case manager. This man, bizarrely, seems to harbour romantic notions for her, in a kind of reverse-Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s a toxic dynamic where she is both rewarded and punished (think chocolate cake/interrogation). At her trial in June 2019, she was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to ten years in prison. She suspects that the Sepâh accepted her innocence but went on detaining her for ransom. As an inmate explains, ‘It’s not about determining whether you’re innocent or guilty, it’s about determining your price.’

In the face of this trauma, Moore-Gilbert’s resilience is jaw-dropping. In her finest moments, she plays jailyard soccer, pens secret letters, learns Farsi, celebrates Ramadan, and retains her sense of humour (‘Nice legs!’ she yells, clinging to an ambassador’s calves). Despair and exhaustion shadow these high points, as does a gnawing alienation from her husband. Exasperated, she 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

stages hunger strikes, and begins to defy and humiliate her captors. At times she wonders if these protests are counterproductive (as a family member of former political prisoners, I nodded at these concerns). ‘These men have egos – enormous, fragile ones,’ a friend warns her. Crucially, she is supported by other women through an ingenious system of hidden notes and solidarity.

In both Evin and Qarchak, Moore-Gilbert’s manoeuvring, whether tactical or mundane, is critical to her sense of control.

One is reminded of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), an account of surviving Auschwitz. Like Frankl, Moore-Gilbert seeks hope through small actions and personal encounters.

‘What saved me was the sense that I was an active participant in my fate and destiny,’ she has since stated. To the judge who issued her sentence, she wrote, ‘I am still free, because freedom is an attitude, freedom is a state of mind.’

After protracted negotiations between Canberra and Tehran, Moore-Gilbert was released on 25 November 2020. Ironically, her emancipation began in confinement, this time in hotel quarantine.

There, she received a final blow, confirmation of her marriage’s dissolution. In public appearances since, she appears relaxed, psychologically intact, and frank about her well-being. ‘I feel a bit detached from it,’ she has professed, ‘like it happened to someone else.’

Beyond its testimonial value, The Uncaged Sky illuminates broader issues. Moore-Gilbert was released as part of a prisoner exchange, where three Iranians charged with a bomb plot were freed in Thailand. This raises uncomfortable questions about Australia’s participation in, and hence enablement of, hostage-trading practices. (Moore-Gilbert has called for international frameworks to disincentivise these extortions.) Attention is also drawn to the treatment of imprisoned women in Iran. As reported by Amnesty International, and by some Iranian officials themselves, the sexual harassment and rape of prisoners by their interrogators have been alleged, and may be under-reported. This is an international human rights issue of ongoing concern. Western states, meanwhile, are not exonerated. Among developed nations, Australia retains perhaps the cruellest carceral system for refugees. As such, Moore-Gilbert’s work may invite comparisons with Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018). Both memoirs bear witness to the arbitrary detention of civilians, for the political gain of a regime.

As a work of prison literature, The Uncaged Sky is an utterly engrossing book. The repetitiveness of some sections may leave readers feeling exhausted; the effect may be intended to delay the author’s relentless ordeal. Here, the narrative could have benefited from providing summaries or synthesis; Moore-Gilbert’s analyses of hostage negotiations or Iranian politics, for example, are welcome and astute. Authorial integrity is evident in her balanced, three-dimensional portrayals of her captors. ‘I saw the full spectrum of the human character among their ranks,’ she writes.

In doing so, she resists the temptation to demonise all Iranians, instead finding that human decency, depravity, and ambivalence are universal and coexistent. In the prisoners who protect her, or the guards who turn a blind eye, and indeed through her own machinations, we observe people caught in an oppressive system who seek out agency and self-expression – freedoms of a sort. g Hessom Razavi is a Perth-based ophthalmologist. He was the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow in 2020.

True Crime

Busted

A gripping study of police corruption Lyndon Megarrity

Operation Jungle

by John Shobbrook

T

University of Queensland Press $43.99 pb, 231 pp

rue crime books sell. Few of them, however, are as well written as this book. John Shobbrook’s Operation Jungle is one of the most entertaining and gripping memoirs of law enforcement in Queensland that has been published by the University of Queensland Press. It is set during Joh BjelkePetersen’s controversial premiership (1968–87). Nostalgically recalling a time before the internet and mobile phones made the world a smaller place, John Shobbrook’s stories of solid detective work and police corruption are persuasive and well told.

During 1978–79, Shobbrook was second in command of the Northern Region of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, based in Brisbane. During this period, he was in charge of ‘Operation Jungle’, a criminal investigation of a major heroin importation worth $1.5 million, which led to the conviction and jailing of three of the active conspirators. The drugs entered Australia from Asia via Papua New Guinea in a light aircraft in 1977. If the traffickers had hoped to avoid suspicion and complete their questionable mission smoothly, they certainly went about it the wrong way.

The leader of the conspirators, John Milligan, described in the blurb as a ‘criminal mastermind’, comes across in the narrative as alternately over-confident and naïve. Much of the dark comedy of the book comes from Milligan’s fatal last-minute decision to agree with the suggestion of the pilot to drop two heroin packages from the plane at an extremely remote location on Cape York Peninsula, ‘surrounded by threats ranging from mosquitoes and swamps to spiders, snakes and crocodiles’. After three uncomfortable trips through jungle terrain, only one of the two illicit parcels could be found. During the weeks they carried out their plans, the co-conspirators had left a trail of evidence for Shobbrook and his fellow officers to uncover. The author holds the reader’s attention throughout his retelling of the investigation, and ensures that unfamiliar geographical and historical context will be clear to the general reader. An excellent map of relevant parts of North Queensland is a helpful addition to the text.

The alleged personal and financial involvement of former Queensland detective Glen Hallahan in Milligan’s scheme is convincingly presented by the author. It is based on sound evidence largely gathered by Shobbrook during ‘Operation Jungle’, including testimony by Milligan. It would appear that, as far as Milligan’s North Queensland drug importation was concerned, Hallahan was deeply enmeshed. It is strongly implied that Hallahan was protected from criminal prosecution over the matter because

of his close connections to two powerful serving Queensland police officers: Police Commissioner Terry Lewis, who was later convicted of corruption and forgery; and the head of the Criminal Investigation Branch, Tony Murphy. Whatever the case, the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs failed to take Milligan’s allegations against Hallahan seriously. Had it done so, Queensland’s police culture might have begun to change for the better several years prior to the Fitzgerald Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct (1987–89).

The story of the bungled drug operation and the associated investigation is fast-paced and compelling. The subsequent accounts of police misconduct and the details of the royal commission into drugs that unfairly victimised Shobbrook constitute a more serious attempt at exposing the dark underbelly of official corruption: they seem, at times, to belong to a different book altogether. Nevertheless, what holds the narrative together is the strong authorial voice and welcome bursts of humour.

Operation Jungle includes separate written contributions by two prominent journalists. An introduction by novelist and true crime author Matthew Condon provides a contextual narrative on the growth of shady police activity in Queensland from the 1940s to the 1970s, along with brief descriptions of the incidents and milestones of Shobbrook’s formative years.

There is also an afterword written by former ABC reporter Quentin Dempster, famous for his role in exposing corruption in Queensland during the 1980s. Dempster’s words powerfully remind the reader of the importance of strong public attention to integrity and accountability within our official institutions.

While Dempster and Condon write well, both contributors are given too much space in the text, inadvertently threatening to steal Shobbrook’s thunder.

‘Operation Jungle’ had a serious impact on Shobbrook’s career.

After the disbandment of the Narcotics Bureau in 1979, he served briefly in the Australian Federal Police before being ‘superannuated out of the Commonwealth Public Service’ at the age of thirty-two. If Shobbrook’s testimony is correct – and there seems little doubt about it – he was virtually forced into retirement because of the inconvenient truths regarding official corruption that emerged from ‘Operation Jungle’. Fortunately, he eventually enjoyed a new career in astronomy, which may prompt an interesting memoir in its own right.

For anyone interested in Queensland during the BjelkePetersen years, this book is a ‘must read’. It is attractively presented, although a picture section with detailed captions would have been an asset. Some of the themes explored in Operation Jungle, such as the fatal unfamiliarity of ‘southerners’ with the vast expanses of Northern Australia, remain current. The author also usefully highlights the fragility of law and governance in a modern democracy when processes and personal authority are left unquestioned. It is to be hoped that John Shobbrook will continue his new career as a writer. g Lyndon Megarrity is a Queensland historian and tertiary teacher. He is the author of Northern Dreams: The politics of northern development in Australia (2018).

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

61

Interview

(Bloomsbury)

Critic of the Month with Frances Wilson

Frances Wilson lives in London and writes for the TLS and the New York Review of Books. The author of six biographies including Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey and Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence, she is currently working on a life of young Muriel Spark.

When did you first write for ABR?

I was invited onto the ABR Podcast last summer and subsequently asked by Peter Rose to review Dream-Child, a new biography of Charles Lamb.

What makes a fine critic?

A distinction needs to made between the critic and the book reviewer, because not all reviewers are critics. The reviews that run in the literary pages of newspapers – plot synopsis followed by puffery or condemnation – bear little relation to criticism, not least because critics read closely while reviewers tend to speed-read. Criticism is an art, and the finest criticism should be equal to its subject: a good critic should have a distinctive voice, a good ear, and a strong style. I like audacity and eccentricity in criticism, and I particularly admire those critics who are alert not only to the words on the page but to the ‘unconscious’ of the text – what is elided, repressed or not quite expressed in the writing.

Which critics most impress you?

Occasional critics, like D.H. Lawrence, are the ones I am most impressed by. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature was at least two hundred years ahead of its time, because a full century has passed since the book first appeared and we still haven’t come to terms with it. Even the title was outrageous: how could America have a body of classic literature when it was a newly minted country of pioneers?

And how could mad books like Moby-Dick even be called literature? I similarly admire George Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens, which should serve as the introduction to all Dickens’s novels, and Elizabeth Hardwick’s essays on everyone, but especially Jane Carlyle and Dorothy Wordsworth. I revere Camille Paglia’s outrageous masterpiece, Sexual Personae.

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

After years of accepting everything that came my way, I am now selective. W.H. Auden was right that reviewing bad books is bad for the character, not just because a bad book leaves 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

behind a stain but because a bad book takes so much longer to review than a good one, and none of us likes to spend time in poor company.

What do you look for from an editor?

A good match between reviewer and subject and an ability to push the reviewer into saying the thing they are holding back from saying.

Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?

Occasionally. It is nice to hear from authors who are happy with your review, less nice to hear from those who are not.

I received a terrifically grand letter of complaint from the historian Keith Thomas after I reviewed his last book in New Statesman. When I didn’t reply he wrote to me a second time, even more grandly, insisting that I explain myself. I think he wanted an apology.

What do you think of negative reviews?

Obviously I don’t like getting them, but I’m perfectly happy to dole them out. It is not the business of criticism to be polite, and a hatchet job on one of the untouchables, like Michael Hoffman’s recent review of Colm Tóibín’s The Magician in the TLS, makes for a thrilling read. There was a lot to be said for the great age of rough-house, championed by the nineteenth-century magazines like Blackwoods, which Karl Miller described as a journal of squabash, bam, and balaam.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

It’s unwise to review friends, so I review them only when their book is good.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

To position the book, get under its grain, measure its strength, pinpoint its weaknesses, and determine whether the author has said what he or she wanted to say and achieved what they set out to achieve. g

Category

A R T S A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022 63

Film

A tangled knot

The human side of ETA’s violent legacy Ruth McHugh-Dillon

Luis Tosar as Ibon Etxezarreta and Blanca Portillo as Maixabel Lasa in Maixabel (image courtesy of Palace Films)

Y

ou are camping with friends, drinking beer and swimming, celebrating your nineteenth birthday. A car pulls up in the forest. Your aunt emerges, and as she walks towards you she calls out, palms pressed as if in prayer. In Spanish filmmaker Icíar Bollaín’s gripping Maixabel (2021), it is enough for a relative to say your name to know that the worst has happened: your world has ended, your father has finally been slaughtered.

Maixabel (Palace/Spanish Film Festival) opens with the brisk and brutal daylight killing of Juan María Jáuregui, a real-life retired politician who, in July 2000, was murdered by ETA separatists. Although ETA originally formed in resistance to Spanish dictator Franco’s repression of Basque culture and language, the group continued to murder and maim well after the dictatorship’s end in 1975. By 2011, when ETA finally called a ceasefire, more than 850 people had been killed in the name of an independent Basque country. Officially, ETA’s kidnappings, shootings, and car bombs targeted the Spanish state. In reality, many of ETA’s victims were the Basque people it allegedly defended: local businessmen who refused extortion; politicians like Jáuregui who condemned terrorism of all kinds.

In Spain, the 2011 ceasefire has unleashed immense interest in exploring ETA’s violence and legacy. Amid a glut of books, television, and film, Bollaín’s contribution is a standout. Few offer as nuanced and compelling an insight into the crater this violence left in ordinary lives without resorting to stereotypes or trauma-porn. In Maixabel, Bollaín makes a clear decision not to indulge in the spectacle of violence that feeds terror. Initial scenes are powerful but economical; the way the film moves through the murder, funeral, and judge’s verdict leaves the viewer with a faint sense of shock that hints at the victims’ own upheaval.

What Maixabel does linger over is the aftermath of violence, particularly the questions of closure and justice that agonise those ETA leaves behind, such as Jáuregui’s widow, Maixabel Lasa, played with warm intensity and intelligence by Spanish screen veteran Blanca Portillo.

Years after the murder, Maixabel agrees to take part in an innovative but controversial program called the Vía Nanclares, which pairs ETA prisoners with the group’s victims. Her daughter 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

María (María Cerezuela) cannot bear to participate. Cerezuela’s performance captures how live the trauma still is for María – and so many victims – as she yoyos between grounded pragmatism and a hysterical but not unfounded fear for her mother’s safety.

Nanclares is about more than asking forgiveness. In a prison room, the program’s mediator Esther (Tamara Canosa) reminds reformed etarras (members of ETA) that they are uniquely positioned to provide answers to distraught victims’ questions.

When two of Jáuregui’s killers volunteer – Luis Carrasco (Urko Olazabal) and Ibon Etxezarreta (Luis Tosar) – she insists that they must be willing to answer any and every question: you cannot ask a victim into the room and then refuse to talk. Silence has disfigured Basque culture for decades, and fear of speaking out has stunted public discourse. Unlike judicial or journalistic investigations, however, Nanclares offers a private path to healing that relies on individuals committing to dialogue.

This gets to the tangled knot of individual and collective responsibility at the film’s moral heart. The kinds of nationalism, tribalism, and ideology that tore Spanish society apart during the brutal civil war and dictatorship required the individual to submit – body, mind, and spirit – to the collective. Many etarras, though repentant, are initially outraged by Esther’s suggestion that they should personally ask forgiveness for a crime authored by a faceless collective. Tosar manages to explore Ibon’s moral reckoning as he first resists and then yields to this process of healing, without equating his suffering and Maixabel’s. This is a fine line to walk in Spain, as excavating historical atrocities from the civil war, dictatorship, and ETA attacks is still fraught with the pain of survivors and divergent political interests.

Tosar’s rough, gruff portrayal strips back the myth and glamour that ETA relies on to recruit martyrs for the cause, showing instead how ETA chews up and spits out its foot soldiers. His surprise as he learns more about his victim’s own left-wing and anti-fascist activism exposes the ignorance necessary to ETA’s myth. By eliminating nuance and cutting off individuals from their culture and community, ETA creates etarras dumb and numb enough to kill their neighbours.

At several points in the film, characters say ‘it’s over’ or conversely ‘it will never be over’. By opening with Jáuregui’s killing, the film emphasises that it is both a violent climax – the culmination of his loved ones’ worst fears – and only the beginning, a new wound in an apparently endless cycle. The desperate question courses through the film: how can this possibly end?

The crime that haunts Maixabel and Ibon also unites them in a story that, as Maixabel remarks, ‘only ends when one of them dies’. In the loneliness of their daily lives – the ex-etarra in prison and the widow, surrounded by community but robbed of her life partner – their point of connection proves utterly compelling. Bollaín’s unrelenting close-ups on their encounter illuminate the human pain, awkwardness, and fear as Maixabel and Ibon embark on the impossible: attempting to articulate the senselessness of slaughter. They talk. There are no grand gestures.

In a process that remains almost unbearable for both sides, we glimpse a peace that is possible but never inevitable. g Ruth McHugh-Dillon holds a PhD in Spanish and Latin American studies from the University of Melbourne. ❖

Theatre

The rest is silence

Harriet Gordon-Anderson’s humanist Dane Tim Byrne

Jack Crumlin, Eleni Cassimatis, Lucy Bell, Harriet Gordon-Anderson, and Ray Chong Nee in Hamlet (photograph by Brett Boardman)

B

ack in 1991, Bell Shakespeare opened their very first season with Hamlet, starring John Polson and directed by John Bell himself; it deliberately highlighted the Australian vernacular, almost over-emphasising the flat vowel sounds and local cadences over the fruitier delivery we inherited from the British. It had a gritty contemporary setting, and garishly over-the-top costumes. It also wasn’t very good. Polson’s antiheroic bad boy might not have been quite as awful as Brendan Cowell’s turn in 2008, but the attempt to create a specifically Australian playing style ground against the text’s loftier intimations. It seems we, and the company, have come a long way.

Peter Evans took over Bell Shakespeare’s reins in 2016 and has proved to be a workmanlike director. He knows when to pull back aesthetically and let the play breathe. He has set this production (recently seen in Melbourne) in a stylish Denmark, circa 1960, all lounge suits and mid-century modern furniture.

Snow falls almost constantly, drifting elegantly across the actors’ faces before blending into the white shag-pile carpet. It gives proceedings a muted melancholy, although the Cold War espionage theme could have been accentuated, given that Hamlet is a play of eyes and ears, of spies and sparrows. Anna Tregloan’s design is coolly sophisticated and wonderfully integrated, a world away from the shoddy design of the company’s early years.

The other key improvement is the actor playing the Dane.

Harriet Gordon-Anderson is, to my mind, the first professional actress to play the role on a main stage in this country, and she is spectacular. Those first notes of grief hit hard, like a ball of anguish the young prince has been shining to a glint, and he spends considerable portions of the play in a fog of loss and pain. This is Hamlet as existential loner; none of his relationships seems nourishing or sustained, even with Horatio (an excellent Jacob Warner). But then the players arrive, and Rosencrantz ( Jeremi Campese) and Guildenstern ( Jane Mahady) too, and Hamlet seems to rally for a fight. Gordon-Anderson brings a sparkling wit to these scenes, while nursing her bitterness and danger.

She handles the central monologues with an effortlessness and a calm determination, unfussy and all the more moving for it. There is perhaps less a sense of the character’s dazzling breadth of intellect, that feeling that Hamlet’s thought processes could go anywhere, largely because Gordon-Anderson so thoroughly unknots them for us. We know and understand what this prince is thinking, which makes the question of Hamlet’s madness a moot one: far from insane, he feels like the most rational person in this irrational world. The late tilt into the spiritual, when Hamlet defies augury and finds his ‘readiness’, is magnificent.

This is a Hamlet who doesn’t need flights of angels to sing him to his rest: he closes his own play, alone at the front of the stage, and the rest is silence.

The remainder of the small cast is mostly excellent. Ray Chong Nee brings a bone-weary melancholy of his own to Claudius, a sense that this ‘king of shreds and patches’ is harbouring his own existential terrors to mirror Hamlet’s. Lucy Bell is superb as the increasingly ragged Gertrude; she plays her as a woman of considerable moral stature who has paid too little attention to the fox in her own coop. Rose Riley is a spiky, deeply felt Ophelia; she keeps the fire of her love alive long enough to immolate herself on it. Robert Menzies, initially rather subdued as the prating Polonius, develops his antipathies nicely. His ‘very like a whale’ exchange with Hamlet is brilliantly droll and testy.

While Evans brings a powerfully unifying tonal register – a sense of a liminal world poised delicately above the abyss – it must be said he flubs some key dramatic moments, often through poor blocking choices. Ophelia’s admittedly tricky funeral scene is awkwardly staged and doesn’t land emotionally. The closet scene, this time with Gertrude behind the arras and Polonius in full view, feels like an unnecessary experiment gone wrong. And the staging of The Mousetrap, where Hamlet’s play within the play catches the conscience of the king, is a gross misfire, Claudius merely standing and walking out where he really needs to bluster and choke his way across the stage. It is a mark of some fine acting that these stumbles don’t seriously threaten the production’s overall effect.

And what of the gender-blind casting? On one level, Gordon-Anderson’s performance is so natural, even ‘to the manner born’, that her gender feels utterly unremarkable; her mid-length red hair, her stylish black skivvy, and her casually androgynous mannerisms mean the audience can easily forget we are watching a re-gendered role. On another level, the casting subtly reminds us that Hamlet, like all of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, conceals a profound ambivalence towards women, is beholden to outmoded ideals of manhood and masculinity, and has to shed the toxicity he has inherited from his father’s lost world if he is to finally achieve his goal. His journey is, as Harold S. Wilson put it, ‘to recognise his true role as the instrument of justice rather than the dispenser of it’, to not so much wrestle the fates to the ground as have them sweep through him, to ultimately ‘let be’. Gordon-Anderson’s poised, humanist reading of the Dane seems to dispatch the self-indulgent posturing of past Hamlets altogether. On this current road to redemption, as part of Bell Shakespeare’s thirtieth anniversary season, she seems the perfect man for the job. g Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

65

Opera

Music of hypnosis

A new co-production of Lohengrin Peter Rose

Jonas Kaufmann in Lohengrin (photograph by Jeff Busby)

N

ot long before the 1845 première of Tannhäuser, Richard Wagner was holidaying at the spa of Marienbad. He had with him a copy of the anonymous thirteenth-century German epic Lohengrin, and he was possessed. Ever the sensualist, he described the impact in luxurious terms: No sooner had I got into my bath at noon than I felt an overpowering desire to write Lohengrin and this longing so overcame me that I could not wait the prescribed hour of the bath, but when a few minutes elapsed I jumped out and, barely giving myself time to dress, ran home to write down what I had in my mind. I repeated this for several days until the complete sketch for Lohengrin was on paper.

Writing to a friend, Wagner said: ‘I wrote the final words of the libretto yesterday; I have now only the music to compose.’

What other composer would put it so nonchalantly? Neville Cardus has observed: ‘Every sentence in a Wagner libretto was a vein of music waiting to flow as soon as opened.’

The first performance took place in Weimar on 28 August 1850, with Liszt at the podium. Wagner was by then a political refugee from Saxony after the 1849 May revolution in Dresden.

He would not see a performance of Lohengrin until 1861, in Vienna.

Lohengrin stands at the crossroad; Wagner was impatient for change. His art, Michael Tanner has suggested, ‘springs from a radical dissatisfaction with life, but the sources of that dissatisfaction lay so deep that he had the greatest difficulty in finding an adequate situation to embody it.’

Soon after the Weimar première, Wagner wrote to the literary scholar Adolf Stahr: There is a whole world between Lohengrin and my present plans.

What is so terribly embarrassing for me is to see a snakeskin I shed long ago dangled in front of me willy-nilly as if I were still in it. If I could have everything my way, Lohengrin … would be 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

long forgotten in favour of new works that prove, even to me, that I have made progress.

Yet the snakeskin begins with a Prelude of ethereal beauty, based on one of the leitmotifs that begin to infiltrate his music: that of the Holy Grail. Tanner again: ‘As the most intelligent and self-conscious, as well as the most intellectual of artists, he could see that in the prelude he had written a new kind of music, one for which he had a dangerous gift: the music of hypnosis.’

The new production in Melbourne is a co-production of Opera Australia and La Monnaie in Brussels, where it had its première in 2018. It is the work of French director Olivier Py and his regular designer, Pierre-André Weitz. Gone is the River Schedt, the fortress of Antwerp, the bridal chamber – gone is the swan! Instead, on a very effective revolve, we have a ruined theatre in Berlin, bombed during World War II and now gingerly inhabited, despite the debris, by the players of Brabant. The choristers occupy the devastated tiers in the theatre; occasionally they join the principals on stage.

Py, like other European directors, is haunted by the putative (and debatable) link between Richard Wagner (who died in 1883) and the origins of Nazism. In a useful interview, Py states: ‘I believe that the link between German romanticism and National Socialism is most apparent in Lohengrin.’ He contends that Wagner ‘anticipated the possible outcome of an alliance between German metaphysics and German nationalism’. In a woollier passage he argues that, ‘When directing an opera, you always have to try and capture the Zeitgeist. Otherwise you ignore the subversiveness of the work.’

Lohengrin, to some of us, feels too innocent, too elemental – too daft in a way – to qualify as subversive. Ultimately, almost embarrassingly, good does indeed triumph over evil (whatever that means).

The massive set – with its sombre palette, complemented

by Weitz’s black costumes, with occasional bursts of grey and a stylish off-white overcoat for Lohengrin – mostly works. Now and then Py indulges in clichéd effects seemingly designed to satirise the drama. One soon tires of the buckets of postwar debris passed along the row of Trümmerfrauen. During the famous march that precedes the bridal chorus in Act III, Py introduces a sprightly acrobat – a camp throwback à la Leni Riefenstahl.

(The audience duly applauded the acrobat’s one-arm planche: everything is circus after all.)

Apparently, the chalking up of poetry and symbols is a signature trick of Py’s. ‘Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland’ – the graffito on the back of the theatre – comes from Paul Celan’s poem ‘Todesfuge’, or ‘Death Fugue’. Then there are the mysterious symbols patiently daubed by Ortrud. Not random road signs as some may have thought, these are drawn from esoteric Nazi iconography – the Celtic Cross and the Black Sun (Schwarze Sonne), a kind of sun wheel. (Some hint, some note in the welcome program, might have helped Australian audiences.)

Of the six principals, three were Australian: Warwick Fyfe, Daniel Sumegi, and Simon Meadows. Sumegi – Opera Australia’s Wotan in next year’s Ring in Brisbane – brought his usual presence and volume to the king’s role, with its testing high passages. Fyfe, our Herald – fresh from his magnificent Wotan

in Melbourne Opera’s recent Die Walküre – was every bit as good as when he sang the same role in Melbourne twenty years ago. Simon Meadows, an outstanding Alberich in last year’s Das Rheingold from Melbourne Opera, sang with equal power and flair as the nefarious Friedrich von Telramund.

Telramund and his wife, Ortrud, are wonderfully unscrupulous. Theirs is a Macbethian marriage steeped in intrigue and manipulation. Ortrud is certainly the most powerful figure in the opera. Interestingly, Wagner saw her as a politician, a member of a class he abhorred. In 1852 he wrote to Liszt: ‘Ortrud is a woman who does not know love. Her nature is politics. A male politician disgusts us, a female politician appals us.’

Our Ortrud on this occasion was the French-Russian mezzo-soprano Elena Gabouri. We first heard her in Sydney four years ago when she sang Amneris in David Livermore’s LED-happy production of Aida. In her role début as Ortrud, Gabouri – busy, saucy, baleful, mordant – threatened to walk away with the show. Very funny to watch, she played Telramund – that reliable dupe – like a fiddle. This was a creepily filial kind of coupling, brilliantly conveyed by these two young singer–actors.

The sheer scale of Gabouri’s voice is phenomenal: even at the end, when Ortrud pushed her way through the crowd and exulted in her perfidy, the high notes were ringing, as if Gabouri could have sung the role all over again. Gabouri’s Azucena in Opera Australia’s new Il Trovatore in Sydney this coming July will be quite an event.

Emily Magee was Elsa of Brabant – poor vulnerable, vestal Elsa, gullible and masochistic – another of Wagner’s truly silly female characters. Magee – American-born and now in her mid-forties – sings roles such as Eva, Ellen Orford, and Salome.

She and Kaufmann have been performing together for years.

Magee, with her sure technique, fine diction, and high floated notes, was at her best in Elsa’s Dream in Act I and during the long, complex scene in Act II when Ortrud, facing exile and disgrace, oilily beguiles Elsa and persuades her to do the one thing that Lohengrin has enjoined her never to do: to ask about his name, his origins, his ancestry. This is one of the finest scenes in the opera, and both women were at their best.

After the festal opening in Act III, the set for the conjugal scene – hardly the bridal chamber that Wagner had intended – did Magee and Kaufmann no favours. This was a kind of three-tiered set-room, with props of all kinds and busts of Goethe and Beethoven and all. The long love duet that follows – rightly described

by Gustave Kobbé as ‘one of the sweetest and tenderest passages of which the lyric stage can boast’ – is another highlight of this opera, but here it was compromised by the pinched, vertiginous set. Placed high above the stage, Magee had difficulty projecting into the vast State Theatre. Our attention was diverted by the newlyweds’ complicated movements and ascents, a distraction from the drama of Elsa’s stubborn insistence on learning Lohengrin’s name, which shatters their accord.

The chorus, under Paul Fitzsimon, was in mighty form throughout, and how good it was to hear a young Australian at the podium. Tahu Matheson’s subtle and sympathetic conducting should take him far. Orchestra Victoria has rarely sounded better.

Jonas Kaufmann has been a frequent visitor to Australia since 2014 when he gave concerts in Sydney and Melbourne.

We next heard him as Parsifal in 2017 – a concert version – and this was followed in 2019 by Andrea Chénier, also in concert. In a post-lockdown coup, Opera Australia has lured the German tenor back to Australia in one of his most celebrated roles, his first fully staged production in the country.

Kaufmann, who recently added Peter Grimes to his repertoire in Vienna, is now fifty-two, prime time for tenors. Inevitably, the voice has changed since 2002, when I first heard him. This was four years before Kaufmann became internationally famous after singing Alfredo at the Met. The voice now is darker, richer, with unusual baritonal qualities. The high notes are still clarion and utterly secure. Kaufmann knows this role inside out; he moved and sang with complete assurance.

After the third summons by the Herald, the knight normally arrives on a boat drawn by that kitschy swan to some of the greatest music in all opera. Instead, Py has Lohengrin romping around backstage with an otiose boy dressed in white. Then Lohengrin moves onstage and presents himself as Elsa’s champion. All that is left of the Swan is a handful of feathers. Lohengrin farewells the Swan to exquisite music, sung beautifully by Kaufmann, mostly unaccompanied. Then he introduces the requisite steel in his voice as Lohengrin offers Elsa his hand in marriage, on one condition. For Lohengrin, like the Ring that will follow, is an opera about the making and breaking of contracts.

At the end of the opera, after Elsa’s suicidal betrayal (‘O Elsa!

What have you done to me?’), Kaufmann moved front-stage and sang ‘In fernem Land’, the great aria of declaration and extrication, music we know already from the Prelude. Here, Kaufmann was at his most magnetic. Kaufmann’s dynamics are always daring; he is capable of such stillness, such hush. Lohengrin is one of those idealised, lonely heroes who suit Kaufmann temperamentally. He seems most focused, most energised, when alone on stage.

In ‘In fernem Land’, Kaufmann risked much with the inward fervour of his singing of the early passages, especially the description of the Grail and its wondrous power. The aria ended radiantly. The Farewell was similarly poignant. In all, it was a memorable and suspenseful performance from the German tenor.

Py, in the interview mentioned earlier, spoke of the synaesthetic dimension of Wagner’s art. ‘Its effect is such that sometimes I don’t know if it’s my ear that’s watching or my eye that’s listening.’

Despite the absurdities of the story, the sheer silliness of some of the characters, Lohengrin contains music of great beauty and addictiveness. We need to hear this early work every few years to remind us of the revolutionary advances of the music-dramas that would follow over the next three decades, and of what made them possible.

Once again, just weeks after that splendid Die Walküre from Melbourne Opera, Wagner reveals himself – notwithstanding his longueurs, his ambiguity, his seemingly endless thorniness for European directors with their fretful consciences – as indispensable for the health of any serious opera company and its audience. At his best, Wagner stirs us, slays us, seduces us as no other composer can – a unique entrancement. g A longer version of this review appears online.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2022

67

History

From the Archive

With the world’s largest uranium reserves, Australia has long been a strategic and economic partner to the nuclear powers in the northern hemisphere. Much to its shame, however, it has offered up more than just its rich minerals. As Elizabeth Tynan argues in her commentary for this issue, few moments in modern Australian history are as demonstrative of its residual coloniality as the nation’s complicity in British nuclear testing in South Australia between 1952 and 1963. In the October 2007 issue, historian Wayne Reynolds reviewed Alan Parkinson’s book on the Howard government’s cover-up of the botched clean-up operation at Maralinga. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978, all available to subscribers.

T

his is a timely book. Alan Parkinson argues that the Howard government, which is on the verge of committing Australia to a future in which nuclear power will play a major role, cannot be trusted with the implementation of such an undertaking. A key part of a nuclear programme will be the disposal of nuclear waste, including high-level toxic wastes which will have to be encased in safe storage for thousands of years. Yet the government, which advocates this future, has proved to be singularly unsuccessful in cleaning up the more modest problems from the past – the ongoing saga of the clean-up of the Maralinga test site.

Maralinga was the location of seven nuclear tests conducted between September 1956 and October 1957. This was followed by a series of trials using plutonium between 1959 and 1963. The British progressively ran down the use of the site until 1967 and, after a rushed and botched clean-up, left for good. When they departed, they took 900 grams of the deadly plutonium, but 24,000 grams had been used in the Maralinga trials. Despite this, the Australian representative to oversee safety on the atomic project at the time, the nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton, declared that he was ‘extremely satisfied’ with the treatment of the site. Others were not so sure, resulting in the Royal Commission conducted by Jim McClelland in 1984, which started a major investigation into the mess.

This is where the author came in. Alan Parkinson, a mechanical and nuclear engineer, has more than forty years’ experience in the nuclear business. Parkinson advised on a range of options to clean the site. He was particularly impressed by the American scheme, which had been used on less toxic sites than Maralinga, and which reduced nuclear waste using in situ vitrification (ISV). Essentially, the most toxic wastes were melted on site and formed into a rock-like mass that would neutralise the plutonium for thousands of years. The focus of Parkinson’s work was the Taranaki site near Maralinga, where the most toxic wastes were buried in a number of shallow earth pits.

Parkinson was no greenie: he thought that the ISV process was exciting and he looked forward to working on it. He does not say so, but in the event that it proved to be successful and Australia were to host an international nuclear waste dump of the type floated by the Pangea consortium in the late 1990s, this technology might have been appropriate. Parkinson obviously impressed those charged with the clean-up. He was appointed to the Maralinga Rehabilitation Technical Advisory Committee (MARTAC) in late 1993, and in April 1994 was appointed by the government to help oversee the clean-up of the contaminated top soil. In 1996, his role was extended to help oversee the ISV process.

Then things started to go wrong. In August 1997 a company 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2022

called GHD arrived on the scene and was given responsibility for the management of the ISV work. This astounded Parkinson.

The company did not have the reputation for the nuclear cleanup business and was not even shortlisted in the tenders for the job originally. It then decided to limit the number of pits for ISV treatment, adopting a so-called ‘hybrid solution’. Some pits were to be treated and others merely covered in shallow earth, without a satisfactory inventory of their contents. It was at this juncture that Parkinson found himself seriously at odds with the new management. To him it was about quality control and professional standards; to the company it was about working with management. Inevitably, Parkinson found himself isolated from decision making, and it was not long before he was dismissed from the project and from MARTAC. GHD then stopped work on ISV in June 1999, and the remaining pits were covered. Just over a year later, Senator Nick Minchin declared Maralinga safe.

This might have been the end of the story. But Parkinson did not leave it at that. It gradually dawned on him that GHD had been brought in to save money – the ISV process was too expensive. Like so many government projects in the early Howard years, the need for economy and the attendant move to outsource work, torpedoed the Maralinga clean-up. Parkinson took the story to the media and into federal politics. Progressively, he found allies in the Democrat Lyn Allison and Labor’s Kim Carr. He also found an attentive audience in the ABC – starting with an interview with Background Briefing, in April 2000 – which ultimately led to the publication of this book.

The book is something of a hybrid. Parkinson devotes a lot of space to describing his own experiences at Maralinga: his love of the land; his work on a range of things quite unrelated to the thesis of the book; the early details of the clean-up. It reads initially like an official history, with much narrative detail, leaving the reader to wonder where it all leads. What is the great cover-up? There is also much about Parkinson’s reputation as a dedicated and conscientious scientist – which is understandable, given his treatment. He does not, however, have to dwell on this, as the second half of the book amply demonstrates. When he draws together the details of the cover-up – the saving of money, the compromises in public administration, the political misrepresentation by the Howard government – he provides a most compelling critique. It is also clear that his public campaign has contributed to a three-year delay from Senator Nick Minchin’s declaration that Maralinga was safe to the release of the flawed MARTAC final report. In the coming nuclear debate, Alan Parkinson will be an interesting figure to watch. g

ABR’s unique critical archive Subscribe for as little as $10 per month

1978 John McLaren reviews David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life 1979 Gary Catalano on Nourma Abbott-Smith’s profile of Ian Fairweather 1980 Rosemary Creswell reviews Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus 1981 Veronica Brady reviews David Foster’s Moonlite 1982 D.J. O’Hearn on James Joyce in Australia 1983 John Hanrahan reviews Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark 1984 Kerryn Goldsworthy reviews Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach 1985 Margaret Jones reviews Gough Whitlam’s The Whitlam Government 1986 Colin Talbot on the origins of the Melbourne Writers Festival 1987 Gerald Murnane reviews Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance 1988 Manning Clark reviews Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History 1989 Dennis Altman reviews Peter Conrad’s Down Home 1990 Stuart Macintyre reviews Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins 1991 Robert Dessaix on the uses of multiculturalism 1992 Harry Heseltine on the fiction of Thea Astley 1993 Adam Shoemaker’s obituary for Oodgeroo Noonuccal 1994 Rosemary Sorensen interviews Bruce Beaver 1995 John Tranter on bourgeois taste 1996 Inga Clendinnen reviews Robert Manne’s The Culture of Forgetting 1997 Terri-ann White reviews Delia Falconer’s The Service of Clouds 1998 Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews John Forbes’s Damaged Glamour 1999 John Donnelly reviews Kim Scott’s Benang 2000 Morag Fraser reviews Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang 2001 Bernard Smith on Gary Catalano’s The Solitary Watcher 2002 Neal Blewett reviews Don Watson’s biography of Paul Keating 2003 Alan Atkinson reviews Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers 2004 Raimond Gaita reviews Peter Singer on George W. Bush 2005 Gail Jones reviews The Best Australian Stories 2006 Kate McFadyen reviews Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria 2007 Ian Donaldson reviews Edward Said’s On Late Style 2008 Louise Swinn on Name Le’s The Boat 2009 Peter Rose reviews David Malouf ’s Ransom 2010 Alan Frost review John Hirst’s Looking for Australia 2011 Gig Ryan reviews Jaya Savige’s Surface to Air 2012 Melinda Harvey reviews Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel 2013 Patrick McCaughey reviews T.J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth 2014 Lisa Gorton on Ian Donaldson’s Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson 2015 Peter Goldsworthy on the poetry of Clive James 2016 Andrew Fuhrmann reviews Nicolas Rothwell’s Quicksilver 2017 Catherine Noske reviews Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race 2018 Felicity Plunkett reviews Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains 2019 Beejay Silcox reviews Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments 2020 Mykaela Saunders wins the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize 2021 Sara M. Saleh wins the Peter Porter Poetry Prize

CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF EQUITABLE, INCLUSIVE AND PEACEFUL SOCIETIES STUDY A MONASH GRADUATE CERTIFICATE OF GENDER, PEACE AND SECURITY

Develop an enhanced understanding of the gendered politics of conflict, security and peace processes with Monash University’s Graduate Certificate of Gender, Peace and Security. Gain training on the facilitation of women’s participation in peace building and the prevention of conflict, violent extremism and insecurity. Be enabled to better integrate gender perspectives into peace and security policy making at all levels – local, national, regional and global.

Learn more about the Graduate Certificate of Gender, Peace and Security:

monash.edu/arts/study/GCGPS