Australian Book Review - March 2025, no 473

Timothy J. Lynch

Ronald Reagan’s nemesis

Glyn Davis Does leadership matter?

Sheila Fitzpatrick Angela Merkel

Paul Giles Fredric Jameson

Zora Simic Whore stigma

A portrait of the young artist

The diaries of Fred Williams

Advances

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

How good it was – when we presented the five shortlisted poets in this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize on February 18 –to be back at Readings Carlton, rather than speaking via Zoom. Like lockdowns, Zoom ceremonies have really outstayed their welcome.

This year’s judges – Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – shortlisted poems by poets Sarah Day (Tasmania), Jennifer Harrison (Victoria), Audrey Molloy and Claire Potter (both NSW), and Meredith Stricker, who lives in California. This was the first all-women shortlist in the Porter’s twenty-one-year history.

After readings from the work of Peter Porter and by the five poets, Meredith Stricker was named the overall winner. Her poem, ‘The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do’, was chosen from a field of 1,171 entries from twenty-nine countries. She receives $6,000.

Our judges had this to say about ‘The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do’: ‘That this is the most expansive poem on the shortlist seems inevitable, given its titular subject. The five eclectic epigraphs (beginning with Wallace Stevens, who might have conceived the title), and the references throughout, hint at the poet’s impressive range of influences, but this spacious and elegant poem – “stubborn, forlorn, resplendent” – is entirely individual and original.’

they are unchanging, monumental precursors, but because they are renewable like forests, being recreated in our lives. I have spoken about how my poem “The Vastness of What Poetry Can Do” is an encounter with The Iliad as a forever war of displacement, where myth rhymes with the news. This work also echoes my family history – my mother was a refugee in wartime, and members of my father’s family were cleansed from their villages and sent to Siberian labour camps for decades. What I feel in common here with the works of Peter Porter is how the poem can thread through history, myth, nature, the news. Each poem can become an arc or carrier or transformer like a core sample through geologies or sequoia trees – “we live so briefly”, yet are simultaneous with others in other times and places. May all those displaced find homelands. May our brief lives span widely.’

All five shortlisted poems appeared in the January-February issue of ABR. A podcast is available of the poets reading their work.

Prizes galore

When the Calibre Essay Prize closed in late January, it had attracted 648 entries –a record field for Calibre. We had entries from twenty-six countries. Judging is now well underway. We look forward to announcing the shortlist in mid-April. The winning essay will follow in our May issue.

Our winner, who could not attend the ceremony, sent this message: ‘I am so honoured to be part of the stunning and diverse range of poets moving through the pages of ABR. Thank you to all the readers and supporters, illustrious staff and contributors for the depth of your response and respect given to poetry and a wider cultural life. While the writing of a poem may feel solitary, its trajectory and life are communal and inclusive. I want to reflect for a moment on what might connect my work with that of Peter Porter’s. What might we have in common? He had a gift for turning the anachronistic into the simultaneous-present, crossing centuries and diction as one might cross a street. Here is his gorgeous line from “Sun King, Sulking”: “We are classic because we live / so briefly.” We are not drawn to the classics and myth because

Meanwhile, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize opened on February 10. We’ve been impressed by your celerity. Word of ABR’s three international literary prizes is clearly spreading globally.

The Jolley Prize – generously supported by ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM – is worth a total of $12,500, with a first prize of $6,000. The judges this year are Julie Janson, John Kinsella, and past winner Marias Takolander. Entries close on May 5. You’ve got to be in it to win it!

The 2025 ABR Rising Star

The Rising Stars program, conceived in 2019, is intended to encourage younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR has impressed readers and editors alike.

[Advances continues on page 7]

Literature & Pedagogy

Studies in Honour of Bruce Gardiner

Edited by Anthony Cordingley

APRIL 2025

Meredith Stricker

Australian Book Review

March 2025, no. 473

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

Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864

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Image credits and information

Front Cover: You Yang Ponds by Fred Williams, 1963 (courtesy of Lyn Williams and Art Gallery of South Australia)

Page 35: Olga Tokarczuk, Kraków, Poland, 2022 (photograph by Beata Zawrzel, NurPhoto SRL/Alamy)

Page 43: Excerpt from Fred Williams’s diary, c. 1970 (courtesy of Lyn Williams and Melbourne University Press)

ABR March 2025

Misha Ketchell, David Trigger, Mark Finnane, Robyn Arianrhod, Patrick Hockey, Jan Carter

Timothy J. Lynch

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Simon Tormey

Susan Sheridan

Joel Deane

Dominic Kelly

James Walter

Paula Bohince

Niall Campbell

Judith Beveridge

Ebony Nilsson

Andrea Goldsmith

Robyn Arianrhod

Michael Sexton

Beth Kearney

Alison Stieven-Taylor

Glyn Davis

Frank Bongiorno

Marilyn Lake

Jane Sullivan

Jonathan Ricketson

Andrew van der Vlies

Diane Stubbings

Eleanor Spencer-Regan

Harry Windsor

Jordan Prosser

Christopher Allen

Eleanor Spencer-Regan

Paul Giles

Stephen Regan

John Hawke

Zora Simic

Wilfrid Prest

Michael Shmith

Richard Leathem

Felicity Plunkett

Geoff Page

Eileen Chong

Caro Llewellyn

Nicole Hasham

Peter Menkhorst

Reagan by Max Boot

Freedom by Angela Merkel

Unleashed by Boris Johnson

Joan Lindsay by Brenda Niall

Let’s Tax Carbon by Ross Garnaut

Australia by William Maley

The Menzies Ascendency edited by Zachary Gorman

‘Untitled, 1954’ ‘Keep’ ‘The Stone’

The Petrov Affair and the Australian public

My unread books

Einstein in Oxford by Andrew Robinson

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions by Alain Aspect

Ian Barker QC by Stephen L. Walmsley

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

Until Justice Comes by Juno Gemes

Imagining a Real Australia by Stephen Zagala

The Titans of the Twentieth Century by Michael Mandelbaum

The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History edited by Wilfrid Prest

The Migrant’s Jail by Brianna Nofil

The Buried Life by Andrea Goldsmith

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk

Theft by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Twist by Colum McCann

The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

The Brutalist Babygirl

The Diaries of Fred Williams, 1963-1970 edited by Patrick McCaughey

The Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

The Years of Theory by Fredric Jameson

Invention of a Present by Fredric Jameson

On James Baldwin by Colm Tóibín

Code Name Puritan by Greg Barnhisel

Indie Porn by Zahra Stardust Essays That Changed Australia edited by Esther Anatolitis

Carlo Felice Cillario by Stephen Mould

Australia at the Movies by David Stratton

We Speak of Flowers by Eileen Chong WWIII by Jennifer Maiden

Poet of the Month

Open Page

On This Ground edited by Dave Witty

Mr & Mrs Gould by Grantlee Kieza

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ABR Podcast

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

Ronald Reagan

Timothy J. Lynch

My unread books

Andrea Goldsmith

Peter Rose’s poetry ABR contributors

Diaries of Fred Williams Christopher Allen

Writing

to Robert Menzies Ebony Nilsson

‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ S.J. Finn

‘A Body of Water’ Else Fitzgerald

ABR’s partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and is also supported by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Good Business Foundation (an initiative of Peter McMullin AM), the Sidney Myer Fund, Australian Communities Foundation, Sydney Community Foundation, AustLit, Readings, our travel partner Academy Travel, the City of Melbourne; our publicists, Pitch Projects; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

The ABR editors work closely with the Rising Stars, commissioning them often and helping to enhance their critical work and to advance their careers.

Advances is delighted to name the seventh ABR Rising Star, Jonathan Ricketson, who is undertaking a PhD on true crime writing at Monash University, where he is also working on a novel. Jonathan’s research areas are in the genre of true crime writing, and the ethical and aesthetic issues therein. He completed his MA in Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London in 2020.

ABR first encountered Jonathan in August 2024 during the publishing masterclass at Monash University, an annual series which ABR delivers through its partnership with the Faculty of Arts. Like our 2021 Rising Star Anders Villani, Jonathan excelled in the class. ABR promptly invited him to write for

the magazine. He has done so thrice to date, most recently reviewing Helen Garner’s The Season and My Brilliant Friend. He also has a review on page thirty-seven of this issue.

Jonathan, whose short fiction has been published elsewhere, is a versatile writer and critic, with broad interests –just what ABR is always seeking.

On learning of his appointment, Jonathan told Advances: ‘I could not be more thrilled or grateful at the opportunities that ABR has offered me as an emerging critic. As a mentor, Peter Rose is dedicated to supporting the work of newer writers through the Monash Masterclass program. ABR has been a guiding light for me both as a reader and a writer. In ABR, criticism is an art form in and of itself, practised at the very highest levels; it demonstrates how the business of “serious noticing’” can be as pleasurable as it is thought-provoking.’ g

Letters

Citational justice

Dear Editor,

Mark Finnane’s article ‘Citational Justice: A revolution in research practice?’ (ABR, January-February 2025) provides an enlightening discussion of the drawbacks of using an author’s cultural identity as the key decision-making criterion in academia and publishing.

To illustrate his broader point, Finnane provides the example of a pitch to The Conversation that was rejected after an editor learnt that he was not working with an Indigenous co-author. The rejected pitch, on estimates of Indigenous deaths at the hands of colonial police, had clear academic merit. Based on this and questions he was asked by an editor, Finnane suggests that his proposal was rejected because he did not have an Indigenous co-author. However, it is not The Conversation’s policy to make decisions on that basis, for the very good reasons touched on in Mr Finnane’s article. On matters relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, it is desirable to involve Indigenous academics or knowledge holders, and we always seek to establish if this has occurred. But we only accept a tiny sliver of the hundreds of pitches that come in every week, and editorial decisions weigh a large number of considerations, with newsworthiness and relevant author expertise chief among our concerns.

Misha Ketchell, Editor, The Conversation

a piece submitted by myself and Indigenous colleague Michael Aird was rejected in early 2022. Although, in the case of one author, we presumably satisfied the policy ensuring the requisite personal ancestry, the rejection was because an editor did not like the questions we raised. We addressed the risk of naïve assumptions regarding ‘embedding’ Indigenous knowledge across all or part of the academic curriculum, a move now described at times as ‘Indigenising’ or ‘decolonising’ the subject matter, theoretical approaches and methods of academic disciplines. We were unwilling to modify the wording to suit the political preferences of the editor. We were tasked repeatedly with changing the questions we were asking about a debate relevant to ensuring best and enduring outcomes in teaching the history and present of intercultural relations.

One of the requirements was astounding: a repeated insistence that we cite a post from Twitter.

David Trigger

Dear Editor,

Mark Finnane’s discussion of an enthusiasm for ‘citational justice’ among some colleagues in the Humanities and Social Sciences is timely and worrying. His wording about the ‘chilling effect’ of the cultural politics he depicts is apt and, as he says, demands debate. Are we really supposed to support a filtering of authors’ identities to determine what is worthy of being published or cited?

To underscore Finnane’s point that The Conversation’s editors at times practise gatekeeping of a questionable kind,

Mark Finnane replies:

My commentary on the contemporary politics of publishing seeks to bring into public debate the values being exercised when researchers or editors decide that the identity of the author is a relevant criterion in evaluating the worth of matter submitted or pitched for publication.

David Trigger reminds us that the matters being judged may be not identity, but political preference. The rejection of his submission (with Indigenous colleague Michael Aird) addressing ‘the risk of naïve assumptions regarding “embedding” Indigenous knowledge across all or part of the academic curriculum’ replicates other people’s experience. In 2020, The Conversation declined a pitch by Tim Rowse in which he would have explored the difficulty of classifying some topics as ‘Indigenous issues’. In Australia today, as the referendum debate demonstrated, Indigenous Australians are concerned with a range of matters and display a range

of ‘Indigenous perspectives’. That range is expanding unpredictably. In 2024, Tim Rowse and I offered to address these questions in a pitch to The Conversation that was rejected as ‘it would look like navel-gazing and be boring to most readers’.

In this context, Misha Ketchell’s response bears more than a touch of casuistry. Deciding what are ‘matters relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities’ on which ‘it is desirable to involve Indigenous academics or knowledge holders’ is not an exercise in common sense. It is a process that demands political decisions by editors about the scope of ‘matters relevant’, decisions for which they are unaccountable. Such decisions may be masked by appeals to ‘newsworthiness and relevant author expertise’.

At a time when the values of independent research and scholarship are under severe pressure in the world’s leading democracy, it seems timely to engage in debate over what should constitute ‘best practice’ in keeping with those values.

Selling science short

Dear Editor,

Thank you, Diane Stubbings, for showing us, in your review of The Best Australian Science Writing 2024, that much of the so-called ‘best’ Australian science writing has little to do with science (ABR, January-February 2025). It is difficult to make science accessible and inclusive without ceding rigour, which is why I, too, have argued, in earlier issues of ABR, that judges and curators should do better in recognising literary science writing that doesn’t sell science short.

Robyn Arianrhod

Dostoevsky and Robodebt

As I read Eve Vincent’s review of Rick Morton’s book Mean Streak (ABR, January-February 2025), which is about the mendacity of Robodebt, Dostoevsky’s notion that we save our greatest contempt for the weak came to mind.

Patrick Hockey

Hillary Clinton’s intentions

Dear Editor,

Allan Behm’s review of Hillary Clinton’s essays about her life in Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on life, love and liberty made me wonder if he had read the book (ABR, December 2024). A distinguished security analyst, Behm appears to have misunderstood the author’s intentions. Clinton was asked by her publisher to write about her political life in the context of her personal life. As she puts it: ‘It’s about the fight for democracy and also about being a friend, wife, mother and grandmother. It’s about getting older …’ Clinton admits that she found her reflective task difficult and would have preferred to write about policy and politics. My problem with Behm’s review is that he never judges her book in the light of its intentions.

Something Lost, Something Gained is a collection of essays, not a memoir or autobiography. Behm judges Clinton’s supposed ‘autobiography’ harshly. ‘When autobiography morphs into autohagiography the result is always the same

– self-promotion and self-justification become coterminous. Anodyne description masquerades as deep insight, and triviality promotes the Panglossian self-satisfaction that denies the reader any insight.’

Clearly, Behm is not an admirer of Clinton. He barely mentions her achievement in winning the popular vote against Donald Trump at the 2016 presidential election. Since he views Clinton as self-promoting and self-satisfied, he accounts for her lifelong efforts on behalf of disadvantaged women and children around the world as furthering her ambition to be ‘cemented’ into the ‘feminist pantheon’ (whatever that means.) Behm dismisses Clinton’s efforts to describe her human struggles as self-justification: presumably he would regard her efforts to put people and human relationships at the forefront of policy abstractions as attention-seeking. He questions the absence of new revelations that might explain Clinton’s perseverance with her marriage to Bill Clinton, which she discusses obliquely, emphasising her rewarding and longlasting friendship with her husband.

Behm considers that Clinton’s vision of America is simultaneously utopian and narrow, an aggregation of the virtues of small communities of past generations. He complains that she ignores past and present ugly robber barons of capitalist America and has done nothing to counter their dominance. However, Clinton provides a lengthy analysis of that contemporary robber baron Donald Trump. Nor is it clear what Clinton might have done to counter the uglier faces of US capitalism in any of her five public roles: governor’s wife, First Lady, senator, secretary of state, presidential candidate.

Dismissing Clinton’s chapter covering the source, status, and impact of her religious faith, because she belongs to a privileged US élite (Protestantism), Behm states that the Methodist tradition that still inspires her is not of interest to Australians. Presumably this is because of her gender, since senior male politicians of faith, including Protestants, are of great political interest, as noted in the mourning for former President Jimmy Carter and in extensive commentaries about the faith-life of recent Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, and Scott Morrison.

So Behm sees little value in understanding Clinton’s struggles with maintaining work and motherhood, work and lifelong friendships, work and humanity, and the need to put people ahead of policy abstractions. But these are all substantive matters for women who work and also for the many men interested in women’s equality.

Behm’s final, odd insult is to disparage Clinton’s personality: to mark down her conscientiousness, persistence, and self-discipline. For personality theorists, these traits might explain Clinton’s steadiness and reliability, but for Behm they identify her as twee, humourless, and boring. (Would a male leader be so readily discounted?) Despite the substantial difference in their views of society and their disparate political goals and methods, he twins Clinton with the archconservative former British Prime Minister Theresa May – since he considers both to be ‘Goody Two Shoes’. Surely Behm, in this comparison, himself elevates triviality? Jan Carter

Reagan’s nemesis?

The most readable biography of Ronald Reagan

Timothy J. Lynch

WReagan: His life and legend

by Max Boot

Liveright

US$45 hb, 874 pp

hen Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Americans of every kind, ‘in rows three to five deep, thronged Pennsylvania Avenue to catch a glimpse of this melancholy but historic funeral procession’. In a note the presidential historian Richard Norton Smith wrote to Reagan’s widow, Nancy, he assured her that ‘their grief was equalled by their gratitude for a life that had become synonymous in their eyes with the nation itself’.

Max Boot, Reagan’s latest biographer, offers this as a framing anecdote for his impressive, if imperfect, account of the fortieth president (1981-89). To know Ronald Reagan is to know the United States. Boot never quite articulates the inevitable corollary – to hate Reagan is to hate America – but offers a determined rebuke to it. He succeeds and fails in compelling fashion.

This is certainly the most readable biography of President Reagan. Boot writes with clarity, in fifty-four short chapters. He is a journalist and think-tanker, rather than an academic. The weight of the book, its ten-year writing span, its extensive interviews, its adulation from legacy media, all suggest the defining biography of the most important president of my lifetime. And yet, I ended my summer break in Boot’s company unconvinced.

The book indulges a preference for transformation. Author and subject both underwent two key ones. Boot went from being a Russian to being an American; Moscow-born, he emigrated to the United States as a child. The writing of Reagan, over the past ten years, occurred as the author transitioned from a reliably conservative scholar to a left-leaning pundit. Halfway through Reagan, to denounce what Donald Trump 1.0 had wrought, the author detoured to write a confessional book titled The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I left the right (2018). I am sceptical of rightto-left conversions. The other way around is part of the natural order of things. But to go from conservatism to progressivism rarely looks convincing. Boot makes this an animating principle of his book.

Reagan’s two conversions, if we can call them that, were from a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s to a Barry Goldwater Republican by the 1960s; and from a Russophobe, in his first term as president, to a Russophile, making deals with what he had previously called an ‘evil empire’, in his second.

Because of the author’s dispositional switcheroo, he is forgiving, even applauding, of Reagan’s. The book’s introduction is

subtitled ‘The Pragmatist’. The author admires Reagan not for his stringency but for his flexibility: ‘the Great Communicator was also the Great Compromiser’. This depiction undoes the caricature – the titular ‘legend’ – of Reagan ‘as simply an idealist or zealot.’ Sure, he could use ‘coded racism’ to win over voters in the South in 1980. This was a strategic choice rather than a moral conviction, and thus, we presume, not how Boot would describe his own conversion.

Ditto Reagan’s anti-communism. He made his name as a journeyman actor, helping ferret out Hollywood leftists; his task today would be immeasurably greater. He had a hard line on the USSR for three decades. But in the middle 1980s he changed his tactical approach, like Rocky Balboa in the ring with Apollo Creed, to realise strategic advantage.

Boot’s Reagan adapts, parries, ducks, and weaves. When, in 1983, 241 US marines are killed by terrorists in Beirut, Reagan doesn’t declare a war on terror: he runs away, withdrawing the deployment that invited the attack. Despite his reputation as a warmonger, Reagan preferred short, sharp police actions (in places like Grenada and Libya) to sapping wars (of the kind his successors waged).

Ronald Reagan adapts, parries, ducks, and weaves

Boot disdains Donald Trump because the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president does not shapeshift. He has no capacity for transformation, for learning on the job. Reagan did. Boot is not the first biographer to make this his focus. James Mann, for example, claimed in 2009 that ‘the rebellion’ of Reagan against his hardline supporters was the decisive factor in the end of the Cold War. Boot is right to credit Reagan’s pragmatism with the explanatory power he does. But this is not any kind of new revisionism.

The author’s sympathy for his subject is proportionate to Reagan’s embrace of a pragmatic (read: less right-wing) agenda. The fortieth president thus fares badly, in Boot’s retelling, for his ambivalence towards, if not actual connivance in, the AIDS epidemic which began in his first term. This claimed the life of Roy Cohn, the young Trump’s Svengali, Boot reminds us.

Was Ronald Reagan a racist? Boot applies a modish liberal lens to the complicated racial politics of the 1970s. Viewed through it, yes, Reagan has a case to answer. But then, how much larger is the indictment of his Democratic opponents of that era measured against their contemporary priorities? Northern Democrats established a welfare state that devastated the Black family. Southern Democrats held onto segregation for as long as they could.

Professors often chide simplicity (Boot himself overuses ‘simplistic’ in his assessment of Reagan’s style and approach). They see in Reagan not quite an idiot savant but a man out of his depth. But for all his technocratic mastery, Jimmy Carter hardly enjoyed success in comparison to Reagan. Lyndon Johnson was surrounded by the best and brightest Harvard liberals, and he ended up mired in Vietnam.

Reagan understood the world in simple (not simplistic) black

and white, good and evil terms. Details did not much interest him. While this got him into the bother of Iran-Contra (which seems much less scandalous in Boot’s recounting than it felt at the time), it did not negate the effectiveness and flexibility of his diplomacy.

Reagan’s 1987 admonition, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’, appalled liberal professors at the time and doesn’t much impress Boot now. He dismisses the greatest line in all Cold War rhetoric as incidental. Again, this is not fresh revisionism; Edmund Morris makes a similar, dreary claim in Dutch (1999), as does George Schultz, Reagan’s secretary of state at the time. The Washington Post called it a ‘meaningless taunt’. But other accounts, drawing on primary sources in eastern Europe, dispute this. Reagan’s speech gave communists the willies by demanding what eventually came to pass, twenty-eight months later. Boot misses the import and drama of Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. In retrospect, Reagan’s prescience was extraordinary.

In the whole benighted history of the Soviet project, there was not one equivalent line, by even one of its leaders, that sold the benefits of communism as Reagan’s did of liberty. The prominence of ‘We will bury you!’ in Russian rhetoric makes the point. Reagan knew he was on the right side of history. This assessment was more genuinely revisionist than Boot’s professed kind.

When the Berlin Wall fell, during my second month at university, it suggested that the world Reagan made (aided by Margaret Thatcher, consideration of whom is too meagre in the book) would be the one in which Boot and I (we are the same age) would make our way. History ended. Western self-confidence soured. Our universities are today full of conservatives because of him.

Okay, it didn’t quite pan out that way. The vanquished left

soon found more fertile soil in culture and campus than they ever did in politics and economics. Reagan forced them to fight on this alternative terrain. Ironically, he also bequeathed progressives a much-enlarged federal government, and historic levels of spending, to set their sights on.

The president who said ‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” has, named after him, the largest federal building in Washington DC: the Ronald Reagan Building. Reagan gave America big government conservatism, and, in turn, a Democratic politics determined to expand national power into the minutiae of everyday life.

But did he thereby give us Donald Trump and a movement determined to roll back that ‘deep state’? ‘Did Reaganism,’ asks Max Boot, ‘contain the seeds of Trumpism?’ The author abhors Trump. That is a problem in his comparative analysis. Better to imagine yourself a presidential biographer in a hundred years’ time, weighing the connection.

If anything, Boot does not consider the comparisons and contrasts enough. The similarities are several but not profound. Both men were screen stars before they were politicians. Both were divorcees (the only two of the forty-six presidents to be so). Both started with Democratic sympathies before finding a home in the Republican party. Both campaigned to ‘Make America Great Again’. Both were furiously, and ineffectually, hated by the left – they were each blessed with poor opponents. Both avoided foreign wars. Both, Boot insists, ‘mishandled a pandemic’ – AIDS and Covid-19 – and ‘catered to white bigotry to win office’ (though how this squares with the huge swing to Trump from voters of colour in 2024 we are not told, publication preceding the election).

Boot mentions but does not examine perhaps the most important link between Reagan and Trump: the passing, in the final month of Reagan’s term, of the US-Canada trade agreement. This became NAFTA five years later: ‘the worst trade deal ever made,’ said Trump. The defenestration of the US blue-collar worker, which has won Trump two terms as president, was begun by Ronald Reagan. Trump is not a perverse and inevitable fulfilment of Reagan, but his nemesis. It is a conclusion Boot rejects, though he martials much evidence in its defence. g

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

Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, 1987 (White House Photographic Collection via Wikimedia Commons)

Wir schaffen das

Memoirs of an enigmatic chancellor

Sheila Fitzpatrick

JFreedom: Memoirs 1954-2021

by

Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann translated from the German by Alice Tetley-Paul et al. Macmillan

$54.99 pb, 707 pp

ust a few years ago, retiring after sixteen years as Germany’s chancellor (2005-21), Angela Merkel was praised to the skies as a stateswoman who represented all that was admirable in a (semi-)united Europe. Now her reputation has taken a nosedive (‘Angela who?’ The Economist asked, tongue in cheek, last October). That’s an occupational hazard for politicians, and Merkel, as a seasoned professional, knew the score. Still, she deserves to be remembered, if only because in 2015 she did something that seasoned professionals very rarely do: ignoring the risks, she took an important political decision for moral reasons. That decision was to open Germany’s doors to thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East – in the end almost a million – desperately trying to enter Europe via the Mediterranean.

‘Wir schaffen das’ (we can do it), Merkel said of the refugee problem; and so they could, at least operationally, given the Germans’ famous efficiency and penchant for orderly government. Even on the emotional level it seemed at first that they could do it, with crowds of Good Germans gathering at train stations to welcome the refugees with flowers. It was an object lesson that many admired but no other European state chose to emulate. Then came the predictable backlash: a swing of German public opinion against immigration, terrorist attacks both by and against the newly settled refugees, and the ominous rise of the antiimmigration Alternative for Germany (AfD), the first far-right party since the Nazis to win significant votes at German polls, in the process inflicting severe damage on Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU), which had dominated German politics since the late 1940s.

In hindsight, if you add up the pluses and minuses, Merkel’s grand gesture probably wasn’t worth it. Still, it’s hard not to applaud. In her three decades in the CDU leadership and German government, Merkel’s political style had been characterised by mastery of detail, tirelessness as a negotiator, acceptance that both sides needed to compromise to achieve an outcome, and willingness to let others take the credit if the deal got done. Flamboyance of any kind was alien to her, even in the realm of virtue; ostentatious occupation of the moral high ground was not her métier. But for once she came close to breaking her rule. Merkel is often referred to as East German, an Ossi. That is true, in that she lived in East Germany for almost all the first thirty-five years of her life. But it is only part of the truth, since

her parents were from the West: in 1954, when she was six weeks old, her father, Horst Kasner, moved his family from Hamburg to Brandenburg in the East to work there as a Protestant pastor. This was not a political pilgrimage but something closer to missionary work, given the anti-religious bias of the Soviet-bloc German Democratic Republic (GDR). It came as a tremendous shock to the Kasners when the Berlin Wall went up, trapping them in the East and separating them from their extended families. Sevenyear-old Angela learned the value of freedom – enshrined in the title of her memoir – early on through the trauma of losing it, specifically the freedom to move.

At school, Angela and her siblings grew up with the stigma of being children of a pastor. But she was a resilient and competent child who joined the party-sponsored Young Pioneers and at school studied the compulsory Russian well enough to top a national Russian Olympiad in 1969 and win a trip to the Soviet Union. At university, she studied physics, becoming a research scientist at an institute in the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Her marriage to her university boyfriend, Ulrich Merkel, fell apart, and in the mid-1980s she started living with Joachim Sauer, a scientific colleague in Berlin; together, they bought and renovated a country get-away in the rural region of Uckermark in Brandenburg.

When the Wall came down in 1989, Merkel was exhilarated. She welcomed the unification of Germany that followed, and, unlike many in the GDR, never had second thoughts. Of the new freedoms on offer as a result of unification, one she embraced with particular enthusiasm was the freedom to engage in party politics. Although the rest of her family were socialists, she spurned the SPD in favour of a small, Christian party that soon merged with the CDU. This was not just a matter of joining the party; it seems to have been immediately clear to Merkel that she would change her occupation from scientist to politician. Her rise in the CDU was connected not only to her merits and to the patronage of powerful men, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl, but also to the fact that she ticked boxes as an Ossi and a young woman. In fact, if being an Ossi was the launching pad, being an Ossi with a half-Wessi heart surely helped to propel her upwards in a Western-based Federal Republic of Germany that had not so much unified with the East as absorbed it. Living in sin was a minus for a career in the CDU, and Merkel and Sauer duly married, very quietly, in 1998 – but only some time after Merkel had faced down public criticism from a cardinal without apologising.

Merkel’s memoir is full of intriguing detail about her relations with other world leaders, virtually all men at the time, among which her friendships with Presidents Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron stand out. President Trump was, of course, a cross to bear, but as usual she did her best. The other cross, as she tells it in the memoirs, was Vladimir Putin, so full of resentment towards the West and prone to lying that even Russian-speaking Merkel, his natural ally among Western politicians, finally washed her hands of him. That’s probably a harsher portrayal than she would have made earlier: up to 2014, at least, she both understood Putin’s position on Russia’s border security (which led her to oppose Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership in 2008) and supported the construction of a gas pipeline and

other measures strengthening Russia’s and Germany’s economic ties. They did, after all, have two common languages (although Merkel says that, despite her teenage Olympiad victory, her Russian was not as good as his German), and grew up in the same political culture. But one can hardly blame Merkel – excoriated, after Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, for having misjudged the Russian threat – for bearing some retrospective grievance against the man responsible.

When Merkel retired from the chancellorship, she left politics with the same absolute single-mindedness with which she had

All things Boris

Memoirs of a populist leader

BUnleashed by Boris

William

Johnson

Collins

$49.99 pb, 772 pp

oris Johnson is of course one of the most distinctive political leaders of recent times. With his mop of unruly blond hair, plummy Etonian tones, and carefully confected air of bumbling amiability, he seems to have been on the British political scene for decades. In fact, his political career has been relatively short by comparison with many of his peers. This in turn helps explain the timing of Unleashed. As becomes clear, Johnson is in no mood for idle reminiscence or nostalgia for the top table. Far from it. The easily discernible purpose of the text is a lengthy celebration of all things Boris, together with a modest

entered three decades earlier. She had always had a life outside politics, although she and her husband kept their private life remarkably private (Joachim Sauer not only skipped his wife’s inauguration as chancellor but also once declined an invitation for dinner à quatre with the Obamas on the grounds of a prior appointment with a colleague in Chicago – a story Merkel doesn’t tell in her memoir). After leaving the chancellorship, Merkel made herself essentially invisible, living with Sauer, as before, in their small Berlin flat and country house in unglamorous Uckermark, presumably continuing to read widely, follow science, go to the opera, and barrack for her favourite soccer team (which gets its own chapter in the memoir). But who really knows? Merkel and Sauer are not about to break the habit of a lifetime and invite the world media into their living room. If the real Merkel has left the world stage, however, a virtual avatar has emerged to fill the gap. The 2024 German television series Miss Merkel (a nod to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, a longtime German favourite) features a retired Angela and Joachim, who, with time on their hands, have taken to amateur sleuthing, solving a crime a week in the flatlands of Uckermark. g

Sheila Fitzpatrick is a professor at Australian Catholic University. Her most recent book is Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War (2024).

mea culpa for allowing his regime to lose discipline during the Covid pandemic and to open the door for the criticism that he was applying double standards with the British public. What we have here is a generously proportioned aide-mémoire for those who might have forgotten his achievements as mayor of London, foreign secretary, and, latterly, prime minister, as well as a promise to be a better person when duty comes knocking again, as clearly he thinks it should.

As regards the achievements, they are not inconsiderable. Recounting them is undoubtedly a useful corrective to the view that Johnson is a simplistic figure who used his celebrity as a media personality to propel himself to power with the single aim of enhancing his own standing and earning power. Of course, Johnson is interested in power, but what comes across is a sense that he does have a genuine interest in the common good. The chapters on his time as mayor are particularly compelling in this respect. There is a plethora of initiatives and policies aimed at improving the lives of Londoners, such as the eye-catching ‘Boris Bike’ initiative that sought to improve active transportation, as well as reducing dependence on cars. There are some curious fixations as well, notably the determination to bring back the traditional double-decker bus with its open stairwell to ease ingress and egress, a design that had been scrapped due, in his view, to an unnecessary fixation with health and safety. There was also his starring role in drawing the eyes of the world to the 2012

Simon Tormey

Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin, 2020 (Kremlin via Wikimedia commons)

London Olympics. The sight of Boris helplessly dangling from a zip wire waving Union Jack flags became an iconic image of a very ‘Boris’-themed event – good-humoured, tongue in cheek, and welcoming.

Overall, Johnson gives ample evidence to support the view that he was a popular as well as effective mayor. It is also clear that he enjoyed the role – more so than he enjoyed being in government. As someone who pronounced as a child that he would like to be ‘King of the World’, being mayor afforded greater satisfaction than being in charge of a famously unruly party faced with two particularly demanding assignments: Brexit and Covid. Johnson was elected prime minister in 2019 with the mandate to ‘Get Brexit Done’. Theresa May, his immediate predecessor, had left Brexit flapping in the breeze, in danger of being sliced and diced by ‘Remainer’ eurocrats. With half an eye on the rising popularity of Nigel Farage, the other darling of the nationalist right wing of British politics, Johnson teamed up with the shadowy figure of Dominic Cummins to drive through a ‘full English Brexit’. This was achieved through proroguing Parliament, a moment that led commentators (including this one) to wonder aloud whether the amiability for which he was famed was really a front for a more ruthless operator in the Trump/Bannon mould. Johnson passes over this episode with predictable haste, preferring instead to underline his ability to deliver difficult policies rather than fudging around them – like May. But the memories of a flirtation with a more piratical approach to solving complex problems linger and may harm his chances of any political return.

Covid warrants lengthier treatment in the text, understandably so given that Johnson himself spent a considerable amount of time in intensive care, laid low with the virus. Johnson sees that Covid presented a ‘no win’ scenario for leaders and governments. He is usefully candid about his own approach, which was to err on the side of caution when confronted with a novel threat, but to correct back as soon as he thought the general public was able to bear the risks for itself, which he thought it could post vaccine roll-out. On the latter, Johnson is quick to take credit for the United Kingdom’s response through fast tracking the work of key research teams, a bet that paid off in terms of the ability of the United Kingdom to achieve its vaccine rollout. What a pity that the superb performance by British researchers didn’t translate into a more generous settlement for its embattled scientists and universities.

technocratic reasoning. Johnson’s barely concealed bugbear is the ‘blob’, code in British conservative circles for a self-serving civil service and the liberal media, which counsels caution, patience, and a safety-first stance. Johnson, by contrast, sees himself as a man of action, someone in touch with the real needs of the public, a doer as well as thinker (Johnson frequently references Greek and Roman history to add colour to his arguments). But equally, the weakness of such an approach shines off the pages here. There is no analysis. Nowhere in this text of nearly 800 pages do we get a sense of what Britain needs. There is no meditation on the nature of Britain’s economic decline and what can be done to reverse it. There is no account of what a post-industrial future might look like for the United Kingdom. There is very little in the way of vision – just doing, acting, reacting, albeit with a flourish, with vigour and occasionally misplaced humour.

Johnson’s populism may have a very British texture to it, but it is symptomatic of a wider problem we confront here in Australia as well as elsewhere: the lack of consideration for and discussion of the broader macro-economic changes that will in turn shape the choices politicians are presented with. Our politics have become short-termist, simplistic, and populist. We are fascinated by the immediate, the emotive, the visceral – and therefore shun what might be termed ‘slow politics’, the politics that takes the

The vaccine episode illustrates what Johnson feels to be his chief virtue as a politician: the ability to take decisive action when the opportunity affords it. This in turn highlights the nature of Johnson’s populism, which has been the source of much debate and commentary. Populism can be understood in many ways, but more often than not it is associated with an approach to politics that emphasises a divide between what the people want and what is supplied by élites – or between ‘common sense’ and

long view and that considers the complex interplay of forces that shape domestic policy options. As a figure who clearly relishes fast politics, a politics driven by and responsive to every media fixation, Johnson is a politician for our age. Far from marking the end of his political career, Unleashed is more likely to signal the end of the first chapter of Johnson’s continued love of the Westminster limelight. Stand by for Unleashed Again g

Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University.

Boris Johnson adressing a Covid-19 press conference, 2020 (10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons)

‘Tremendous

fun’

First the novel, then the film

Susan Sheridan

PJoan Lindsay:

The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock by Brenda Niall

Text Publishing

$36.99 pb, 248 pp

icnic at Hanging Rock, the 1975 film directed by Peter Weir, has achieved iconic status in Australian cinema, while the story on which it is based has also yielded a television drama series, a ballet, plays, and a musical. Indeed, the fiftieth anniversary of the film is being marked by the Sydney Theatre Company’s revival of Tom Wright’s modern adaptation. The story enjoying this long and varied life was originally published as a mystery novel in 1967. Yet the author of that story, Joan Lindsay (18961984), is herself something of a mystery. Aged seventy-one at the time of her novel’s publication and scarcely known as a writer, she has received little recognition since.

No longer so. Brenda Niall, doyenne of Australian biography, has produced an engaging account of ‘The hidden life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock’. She presents her subject as a woman who, like so many talented women of her generation and class, lived in the shadow of her husband, ‘ebullient Sir Daryl, a high achiever in the art world as gallery director, painter, entrepreneur and expert networker’. For Joan, daughter of eminent Melbourne barrister Theyre à Beckett Weigall, had married into the eminent but bohemian Lindsay family of artists and writers. Daryl Lindsay, knighted for his work as director of the National Gallery of Victoria, was a much younger brother of Percy, Lionel, and the notorious Norman.

Joan and Daryl met at the Gallery Art School, where she had begun her studies in 1916, attending drawing classes with Frederick McCubbin. Daryl, returned from war service in France and England, where he had taken some classes at the Slade School of Fine Art, was trying to establish himself in the art world. Throughout their lives both continued to paint, particularly landscapes, but Daryl had to make a career, and did so very successfully. Joan had no such expectation; she supported his work and entertained colleagues and friends. Visitors to their home, Mulberry Hill, on the Mornington Peninsula, included Prime Minister Robert Menzies, Governor-General Richard Casey and his wife, Maie (a childhood friend of Joan), Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch, visiting British actors Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and opera star Dame Nellie Melba. It was the Murdoch connection (Daryl was godfather to Rupert) which led to his securing the role of NGV director, after a long period of financial uncertainty and moving between Melbourne and London in the 1930s. As director’s wife, Joan acted as unpaid assistant, writing learned notes relating to his acquisitions, encouraging students and young artists, and often dealing with would-be donors to the collection.

Niall presents Joan as an artist manqué, a woman who gave up a possible career as a painter, and who nurtured aspirations as a writer all her life. Certainly, on the few occasions she exhibited, her painting was well received, and she wrote, in various modes, all her life. Yet Joan’s habitual comment about her painting and writing, ‘tremendous fun’, suggests that she did not want to be seen as taking herself too seriously, a not uncommon ploy used by women to deflect any suspicion that they might harbour ambitions of their own.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she published occasional pieces and short reviews, mainly for the Melbourne Herald , and later collaborated on some histories – of the Red Cross, of early Melbourne architecture – and Masterpieces of the NGV (1949). Early evidence of her imaginative writing suggests this really was done for fun. For example, while she and Daryl were living in London (so he could build his reputation as an adviser to the Felton Art Bequest), Joan wrote some plays, apparently not for production, with two Australian sisters, Margot and Ann Goyder, who later became famous

Joan and Daryl Indsay at Mulberry Hill (National Trust of Australia [Victoria], Mulberry Hill [MH4098])

for the crime novels they published under the name ‘Margot Neville’. Following this, her first published book was a comic novel, a spoof on travel writing, Through Darkest Pondelayo by ‘Serena Livingstone-Stanley’ (1936). It had a short shelf life, and it was many years before her second book appeared. Time Without Clocks (1962) was something completely different, a memoir of the Lindsays’ life at Mulberry Hill, and it did well. ‘Written with grace and humour’, the memoir ‘evoked a past most readers would have liked to believe in’. However, another memoir, Facts Soft and Hard , which Niall describes as ‘a quirky account’ of Joan’s experiences visiting galleries in the United States in 1952, when Daryl held a Carnegie fellowship, was dismissed as ‘cheerful chattering’ when it appeared in 1964.

All the more surprising, then, that a mere three years later Joan published Picnic at Hanging Rock, a mystery novel set in 1900, which begins with the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher at the famous monolith, and follows the violent ‘ripple effects’ of this unsolved mystery in the small world they inhabited. The ‘cautiously favourable’ early reviews gave no indication that the book would become a phenomenon. Yet the mystery, the open ending, attracted fan mail from intrigued readers, with questions about what they took to be the real events on which the story was based. Of course, the author declined to solve the mystery for them, but she later described her book in a way that seems to account for its power – as the translation of ‘a long-seen vision into a living reality’, a vision of girls in their summer dresses climbing on the ancient rock. She thought of it as an Australian Impressionist painting, she told an interviewer.

It must surely have been the strong visual images as well as the mystery plot that attracted the extraordinarily successful team assembled by Pat Lovell – Peter Weir as director, Cliff Green as script writer, Russell Boyd as cinematographer – to make the film in 1975. They carved out a sharper, though still mysterious, story from a somewhat overloaded novel, ensuring its enduring power. Joan lived long enough to witness the film’s success. Indeed, she was delighted to be involved in its making, when the team made their headquarters at Mulberry Hill and she was able to learn about the filmmaking process at first hand.

The Picnic film was a commercial as well as an artistic triumph, and Joan was the centre of attention. Giving interviews, seeing more translations of her novel and discussions of its literary qualities, sustained her during the final decade of her life. Daryl’s health had been declining for some time; he died in 1976 at the age of eighty-seven. With the help and loving companionship of artist Rick Amor and his family, Joan was able to stay on at Mulberry Hill until her own death in 1984.

Brenda Niall introduces herself, as well as her subject, in the biography’s opening chapter, ‘Meeting Lady Lindsay’. This occurred in 1984, when she interviewed Joan about her cousin Martin Boyd, Brenda Niall’s first biographical subject. Niall had produced a short study of that novelist and his work in 1974, and later produced the full biography, in 1988. It is a nice return to her own professional point of origin, and she is to be congratulated on another exemplary study. g

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

Dog days

Ross Garnaut’s coda on reform

Joel Deane

FLet’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia by Ross Garnaut

La Trobe University Press

$36.99 pb, 352 pp

ew books are greater than the sum of their parts – many are less. In the case of Ross Garnaut’s latest effort, the parts are greater than the sum. As a book, Let’s Tax Carbon: And other ideas for a better Australia succeeds and fails. It succeeds as a field guide to the past, present, and future of the Australian economy’s three big policy problems: transitioning to a netzero carbon economy; reversing social and economic inequity; and creating new industries that secure the nation’s prosperity. But it fails as a work of non-fiction.

That is not to say that Let’s Tax Carbon should be avoided. Any book by Garnaut, a visionary economist and policymaker, is worth the price of admission. After all, Let’s Tax Carbon is crammed with ideas, arguing for structural reforms designed to tackle climate change, achieve full employment, boost incomes, and turn Australia into an energy powerhouse. It also builds on Garnaut’s three previous books – Dog Days: Australia after the boom (2013), Superpower: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity (2019), and Reset: Restoring Australia after the pandemic recession (2021). Why, then, does Let’s Tax Carbon feel unrealised?

Two possible explanations come to mind. First, the book appears to have been rushed into print before the 2025 federal election campaign. Most of the content in Let’s Tax Carbon is repurposed, with every chapter other than the introduction and conclusion a recycled speech, lecture, essay, or presentation. Four chapters also have co-authors, two with David Vines and one each with Peter Dawkins and Rod Sims. This lack of continuity causes occasional repetitions, as well as an inconsistent editorial voice. In addition, the chapters on China, Japan, and the United States are superfluous, straying too far from the domestic policy concerns of Let’s Tax Carbon. A tough edit would have overcome these shortcomings. So, why the rush? Towards the end of Let’s Tax Carbon, Gar-

naut explains his haste and, in the process, provides the second possible explanation for the unresolved feel of his book: mortality. He notes that, at the time of writing, he was ‘the age of Joe Biden when he became president of the United States’ and that ‘the laws of biology are as insistent as the laws of physics and economics’. Garnaut, then, is a man in a hurry to save Australia’s policymakers from themselves. Small wonder that Let’s Tax Carbon cares more for policy matter than literary manner.

With that in mind, I will put aside literary quibbles and address the crux of Garnaut’s policy argument – taxing carbon. Climate-change policy has been the Excalibur of Australian politics ever since Tony Abbott and his banshees unseated Malcom Turnbull as leader of the Opposition, destroyed the Rudd-GillardRudd governments, then unseated Turnbull as prime minister. Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, and Turnbull each tried to stand up against the vested interests backing Abbott. Gillard came closest to succeeding, but Abbott killed off her emissions trading scheme just as it was about to connect Australia to the European Union. Garnaut, the policy brain behind the ETS, considers Abbott’s decision ‘economic policy vandalism of incomparable cost’, triggering the economic ‘dog days’ of the past decade. He also believes that Australia’s future prosperity depends on righting Abbott’s policy wrong: ‘Dismantling the barrier to carbon pricing eases budget, productivity, incomes growth and income distribution sorrows. That makes other productivity-raising reform possible.’

On current evidence, Anthony Albanese won’t be the one to tax carbon. Rather than a reformer, he is a competent administrator who, as Garnaut notes, leads a ‘cautious and incremental’ government happy to be ‘leaving much of the heavy lifting to future parliaments’:

Albanese said from the early days of the government that his aim was not immediately to do all the things that needed to be done. His aim was to establish a multi-term Labor government that would make necessary reforms over several parliaments. The Albanese Government so far has delivered the beginnings of a reset to restore Australian prosperity within that gradual approach … Of course, there is no certainty that there will be a second Albanese Government.

Garnaut’s right. Albanese’s belief that voters will reward competency is presumptuous, if not arrogant. Still, Garnaut’s view of what awaits Australia on the other side of the federal election – the paralysis of a hung Parliament or the election of a conservative government armed with slogans rather than policies – is very pessimistic. Writing in last November’s Quarterly Essay, economist and author George Megalogenis presented an

Ross Garnaut (courtesy of Black Inc.)

alternative scenario; the possibility that a minority government forced to deal with a teal and Green crossbench might break the spell of vested interests and extract Excalibur from the carbon stone. ‘A volatile minority government,’ Megalogenis wrote, ‘may be the lesser evil when compared to the narrowly cast and ineffectual governments of the past decade.’

Regarding ineffective governments and the social and economic dog days they cause, I think Garnaut misses a trick when raking over the coals of the populist, policy-free era that started with Abbott. Every pundit worth their salt blames social media, algorithms, and artificial intelligence for the rise of populist politics in Australia. Those pontificators are not all wrong, but they’re not all right, either. They fail to appreciate how much the media and the labour movement have changed.

To be blunt, the agora that enabled the reform era – beginning with the Hawke government in 1983 and ending with the Howard government’s decision to freeze the automatic indexation of the fuel excise tax in 2001 – no longer exists because the unions are too weak and the media too homogenised.

For instance, the genesis of the Prices and Incomes Accord – the agreement that underwrote all socio-economic reforms between 1983 and 1996 – came from the Australian Council of Trades Unions, with the initial architects being ACTU secretary

Bill Kelty and Hawke minister and former ACTU official Ralph Willis. The union movement now lacks the capacity to lead and sustain policy debates of that magnitude.

Australia’s media, gutted by culture wars and digital aggregators, also lacks the manpower to vivisect policy ideas. In addition, Australian newsrooms have been homogenised since the Hawke government allowed Rupert Murdoch to purchase the Herald and Weekly Times in 1986, a takeover that gave News Ltd seventy per cent of the nation’s print media. In the decades since, the majority of Australian journalists have either trained or worked in News Ltd newsrooms. Consequently, most newsrooms are now variations of News Ltd’s blokey, knee-jerk, punitive culture.

In other words, fixing Abbott’s mess and taxing carbon, let alone all the other policy conundrums that need to be solved, is easier said than done. To draw Excalibur from the stone, political parties will need to find new ways to listen to, and communicate with, the citizens they represent. They also need to be led by a prime minister with the salesmanship of Bob Hawke, the chutzpah of Paul Keating, and the cunning of John Howard. Unfortunately, Anthony Albanese lacks all three qualities.

Albo is no King Arthur. g

Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet.

Untitled, 1954

After

Mark Rothko

To land within a corona of jonquil, portal to retrospect, with the immanence of insect. A thorax hottens, sensational, in its own yellow canopy. Being, flown via surprise winter (at rest, in instinct)

is diaphanous as a mother in the claw foot, soot-charged, after axing a bureau. Calm comes in fog, on greeny stem, inside the experiment. Blushes do as sunrise does, solvent of having been seen.

Attached, swaying in ruffle. No wonder humans prefer a certainty of square over circle

save a daiquiri’s expansive rim, its lemony, boggling pith. Occultish, any opening that is mouth, ear, canal to the airless underneath. Snow covers what was once most personal. Energetic, was dissipates.

Paula Bohince

Trust corroded

The troubling state of Australian democracy

Dominic Kelly

AAustralia:

The politics of degraded democracy by

William Maley

Australian Scholarly Publishing

$49.95 pb, 285 pp

s I write this review over the Australia Day long weekend, a few items from the national media stand out as exemplary reminders of how poorly Australians are being served by our political class. First, in an embarrassingly transparent nod to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s juvenile Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Opposition Leader Peter Dutton appointed Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the new shadow ministry for government efficiency. Second, Dutton’s deputy Sussan Ley likened the First Fleet’s 1788 arrival in Australia to Musk’s delusional fantasies about occupying Mars. ‘Just like astronauts arriving on Mars,’ she told an Albury church congregation, ‘those first settlers would be confronted with a different and strange world, full of danger, adventure and potential.’ Around the globe, many are increasingly wary of the political trajectory of the United States in its current phase of advanced decadence, but for Australia’s alternative government, now is the time to cling to the sinking ship that is the American empire.

Then, in a rambling counterfactual in The Australian, disgraced former public servant Mike Pezzullo argued that, given that this continent was always going to be occupied by European powers, First Peoples might consider themselves lucky that it was the British who did the colonising and dispossessing, rather than, say, the French, the Dutch, or the Spanish. Here, the problem was not so much the message – Pezzullo’s inane and dull argument is routinely wheeled out by right-wing culture warriors every January – as the medium. This is a man so discredited by his ethical breaches and partisanship as a department head that he

was dismissed and later stripped of his Order of Australia, but whom the national broadsheet considers worthy of a pedestal from which he can lecture the nation.

Mindless mimicry of Trump’s America and tiresome culture war inanity are not the focus of William Maley’s worthy new book, Australia: The politics of degraded democracy, but they are symptoms of the degradation he outlines and dissects. Until recently Maley was Professor of Diplomacy at the Australian National University; the majority of Maley’s scholarship has concerned international relations, with particular emphasis on Afghan politics. He has now turned his attention to the deeply troubling state of Australian democracy.

The problems that Maley identifies will be recognisable to anyone who follows politics: the ineffectiveness of the Commonwealth Parliament as a deliberative body or a method of holding the executive to account; the decline of the major political parties as mass membership organisations responsive to the people they represent; the hollowing out of the public service; élite contempt for the rule of law; media outlets that only serve the interests of their wealthy owners, and their increasing displacement by social media, which may be even worse. Despite this familiarity, Maley performs an admirable service in contextualising the issues into a broader historical argument about how we find ourselves in such an unhappy situation.

Maley’s discussion of political parties is especially valuable. Despite the public’s obvious dissatisfaction with both sides of the traditional political divide, the Labor Party and the LiberalNational Coalition remain disproportionately entrenched in federal and state parliaments. This anomaly can be explained by the combination of three key systemic factors in Australian electoral politics: preferential voting, in which votes usually flow back to the major parties, even when they are manifestly unpopular; compulsory voting, in which growing political discontent is masked by artificially high voter turnout rates; and public funding of political parties, which props up increasingly moribund organisations to the tune of $3.386 per vote (as long as the candidate receives at least four per cent of the vote – another way the major parties reward themselves while disadvantaging newcomers and smaller players).

Alone, each of these policies may have its merits. Preferential voting allows people to vote more strategically and to avoid difficult choices between multiple candidates they would be comfortable electing. Compulsory voting probably leads to more widespread engagement in Australian elections. It discourages

parties from simply ignoring entire segments of the population who don’t vote, as can happen when voting is optional. Maley notes that public funding of political parties was introduced in 1984 with the goal of reducing the risk that they become reliant on rich and powerful donors, who might then force them to adopt policies that favour corporate interests at the expense of the wider public. However, Australia’s political parties are flush with cash from union and corporate donors, as well as that provided by the public. For the major parties it is the best of both worlds, but democracy is the loser.

Despite the remarkable success of independent candidates at the 2022 federal election, these policy settings mean that major party parliamentary dominance continues. The combined Labor and Coalition vote in 2022 was sixty-eight per cent, yet they hold eighty-nine per cent of seats in the House of Representatives. This is plainly undemocratic, but few members of the media seem willing to consider that it might be a problem. In fact, they regard any change that might lead to minority government or a more diverse parliament as a recipe for instability and chaos. It is to Maley’s credit that he has attempted to put the issue on the agenda. Although clearly a political moderate, he is not frightened of genuine political reform, unlike so many of our political class.

Not all of Maley’s chapters are as interesting as this. Some have the stultifying feel of university textbooks, containing too much superfluous contextualisation to appeal to general readers. The most notable weakness of the book, however, concerns the

Constructive tensions

New perspectives on the Liberal founder

James Walter

AThe Menzies Ascendency: Fortune, stability, progress 1954-1961 edited by Zachary Gorman

Melbourne University Press

$50 hb, 318 pp

ustralian liberals and the Liberal Party were once thought laggards in attending to their own history in comparison with the Labor Party. Even so, Robert Menzies’ life and career had been well documented, with multiple biographies and memoirs, including Allan Martin’s masterful two-volume biography (1993-99) and Judith Brett’s influential analysis of Menzies’ ‘Forgotten People’ speech as a key to understanding the ‘public life’ (1992). More recently, liberal political history has become a cottage industry.

Yet, the rewriting of liberalism from a contemporary perspective – John Howard’s The Menzies Era (2014), Troy Bramston’s Menzies biography (2019), David Kemp’s five-volume history of

malign influence of big money in Australian politics. Maley fails to give the mining and resources industry the scathing treatment it deserves with regard to Australia’s decades of failed climate policy. A subject worthy of a chapter – the outsized influence of the industry on politicians through lobbying and a revolving door between Parliament, the public service, and lucrative corporate roles – is brushed off in half a sentence. In a section on the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, Maley blithely dismisses the notion that the regulatory capture found by Justice Kenneth Hayne may have contributed to the degradation of democracy. On the contrary, there is a widespread impression that the super-wealthy can easily avoid serious punishment for their crimes, whereas ordinary people are presumed guilty until proven innocent (as they were under Robodebt, a disgraceful episode to which Maley gives the kind of thorough consideration it deserves).

Overall, despite a tendency to wax nostalgic about a lost Menzian golden age, Maley is refreshingly honest about the failings of Australia’s political culture. Crucially, he has the correct target in his sights: political élites, especially those whose only interest is themselves, such as Mike Pezzullo and Scott Morrison. Too many commentators put Parliament House friendships ahead of their role in holding politicians to account, and are quick to join them in punching down on ordinary people as a way of hiding their own failures. Maley’s book reminds us that this kind of cynicism is corroding what little trust Australians have left in their democratic system. g

Australian liberalism (2018-22) – offers a revisionist history of Menzies, and of liberalism. It downplays the tradition of commitment to individual freedom allied with an expectation of state support for those who cannot help themselves, critically analysed in Keith Hancock’s Australia (1930). Now, a more explicitly individualistic, enterprise-oriented liberalism is favoured.

The Robert Menzies Institute, housed at the University of Melbourne, charged to honour Menzies and promote knowledge of his legacy, has made a significant contribution to this enterprise, hosting a series of conferences, each of which has resulted in a book. This volume is the third of these: a slice history of one phase of Menzies’ administration – 1954 to 1961 – deemed the consolidation of his ascendancy (MUP, please note the correct spelling!).

To their credit, Institute director Georgina Downer and editor of the book series, Zachary Gorman, have consistently drawn in not only committed liberals, academics and party figures, but also others – such as Frank Bongiorno, Judith Brett, and, in this volume, Paul Strangio – not identified with that cohort. Implicitly, this sustains debate over what Isaiah Berlin famously called ‘the two faces’ of liberalism.

Inevitably, there are constructive tensions. Some of those contributing to this series ignore Brett’s reminder in the first volume of Menzies’ debt to Deakinite liberalism and faith in an enabling state. They promote the current more individualistic liberalism. This book opens with a zinger: Anne Henderson, fierce advocate of the liberal right, and Strangio, historian of

the Victorian Labor Party, each dealing with what is commonly thought Menzies’ greatest boon, the Labor Party Split of 1955.

For Henderson, the Split was entirely about leadership –a clash of individuals: Evatt’s ineptitude and psychological oddity against Menzies’ skilful recognition of dangers to be addressed; and his capacity to bait Evatt, capitalising on his weaknesses – in short, Menzies as ringmaster of the Split. Strangio, in contrast,

Liberal political history has become a cottage industry

counters the ‘great man’ theory of history and of Menzies’ agency. He tells a story of institutional failure: the chronic weakness and underperformance of the Victorian Labor Party at that time, making it the epicentre of the ALP Split. Using voting figures and historical records, Strangio argues that the Split was ‘fundamentally a Victorian phenomenon’, with the bastard child of the failed Victorian political project, the Democratic Labor Party, gifting federal and state elections to the Coalition from 1955 to the 1970s, rendering Menzies impregnable.

The challenge to balance the personal and the contextual hangs over subsequent chapters. Most, understandably, seek to capture why Menzies was such a towering figure in each domain discussed. Selwyn Cornish meets the challenge aptly in his impressive chapter on the creation of the Reserve Bank, as do Andrew Norton, discussing higher education, and Sean Jacobs on Indonesia and the West New Guinea dispute (1950-62). Each of them asks: what might have been different, and how, if Menzies had not been there? Their answers shed new light on Menzies’ capacity to accept innovation and willingness, when he saw national interests at stake, to stand up to the contrary urgings of Coalition insiders and ‘great and powerful’ friends.

Others handle it less convincingly. Lyndon Megarrity’s revisiting of Queensland’s contribution to Menzies’ ‘close shave’ in the 1961 election tells us much about that state’s persisting perception of ‘neglect’. But Strangio counters Megarrity’s contention that Queensland determined the election in the first pages of his exposition of Victorian exceptionalism.

David Lee charts the establishment of a unified department of trade, the abolition of import controls, a Commerce Agreement with Japan and the opening of wheat trade with China under Menzies as indicative of the origins of the open economy and prosperity usually attributed to the enterprise of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, and Howard. Yet one cannot help being reminded of Ian McLean’s superb Why Australia Prospered (2013). He warns against overestimating the significance of domestic politics as against the global currents that supported the postwar ‘golden age’. McLean analyses Australia’s fortunes as indicative of an international phenomenon – the emergence of a stable, well-functioning international economic system. Menzies and his colleagues do not appear in this discussion, even in the index.

Then there is the Suez Crisis of 1956. It is often thought to be Menzies’ greatest international blunder. He agreed to act as agent for Anthony Eden and Dwight Eisenhower in negotiations with Egyptian President Nasser in Cairo. Having failed, he attempted to sustain Eden’s wishes while conciliating the furious

disagreement between Britain and the United States over the Anglo-French seizure of the canal following its nationalisation by Nasser. Robert Bowker here exposes Australian attitudes towards the United States through the correspondence and reports of key actors. Menzies’ ideological blinkers are confirmed, but Australia might have fared worse without the fine diplomacy of Richard Casey and James Plimsoll.

No one has yet accurately captured the cultural impact of the Suez Crisis in regenerating support for the ALP, especially among those who later flocked to Whitlam’s cause. Graham Freudenberg’s engaging memoir, A Figure of Speech (2005), calls this out. For Freudenberg, a child before the war, politically aware by the time his parents responded to Menzies’ call to ‘the forgotten people’, and working in England during the Suez crisis, this ‘profoundly immoral’ intervention was his ‘road to Damascus’, prompting him to return home, shift from right to left and join the ALP. There he became a foundational figure in the creative rearticulation of the Labor cause. For Freudenberg, and other children of the ‘forgotten people’, Suez disrupted the ethical contract supposedly binding ‘the moral middle class’ to the Liberal Party.

That said, it is helpful to have new and stimulating contributions in areas less well studied, such as Elizabeth Buchanan’s careful elaboration of Menzies’ and Casey’s success in negotiating the Antarctic Treaty. Michael de Percy’s chapter on Australia in the Atomic Age will be red meat to current liberals. The contemporary Liberal Party must be reminded of its earlier progressive history: see David Furse-Roberts’s chapter on old age and health reform, Paul Brown’s chapter on the relaxation of immigration restrictions (surprisingly, with conservative Alick Downer stepping up to defend Calwell’s intentions when Labor regressed), Damien Freeman’s and Andrew Bragg’s chapter on Hasluck, Wentworth, and Indigenous policy, and Ted Ling’s chapter on federal support for the development of Canberra. All these contributions bear witness to Menzies’ continuing commitment to an enabling state; each of them poses challenges for current Liberal policies on just these issues.

Whatever one’s reservations, this book demolishes Donald Horne’s and Paul Keating’s canard that little of significance was done under Menzies. There were moments of theatre – the attempt to ban the Communist Party, the ALP Split, the Suez Crisis. But, as Paul Kelly argues in an appendix, the wide spread of policy and policy initiative revealed here, and in preceding volumes, shows that Menzies’ gift was to preside over consequential decisions and incremental change while avoiding the appearance that anything dramatic was happening. Would that later prime ministers had this capacity! g

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‘Congratulations Bob’

The Petrov Affair and the Australian public by Ebony Nilsson

On a Tuesday morning in April 1954, Australians awoke to sensational headlines. The wife of Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov, who had recently sought asylum in Australia, was dragged aboard an aircraft in Sydney, as an impassioned, noisy crowd of a thousand tried to prevent her departure. Whether you were a dock worker or a stockbroker, your morning newspaper carried some version of what has become the Petrov Affair’s most iconic image: Evdokia Petrova, shoeless and eyes streaming, flanked by two bulky Soviet couriers, marching her across the tarmac. By all appearances, a terrified Russian woman was dragged, unwillingly, towards a dire fate in the Soviet Union.

The lost shoe is often remembered as red – the colour of communism, or high emotion. In fact, it was blue. Petrova never did yell in Russian that she wanted to stay (as many onlookers would later swear she had); her tears were an allergic reaction to the brandy taken to calm her nerves, and her fear was of the crowd rather than her Soviet minders. But with this black-and-white photograph, the narrative wrote itself. The Cold War, something which happened in far-off cities like Berlin, Washington, or Moscow, had come to Australia. But this wasn’t about political ideology, about nationalising the banks or protecting private property. It was the figure of a lone, pretty, blonde woman struggling against two hulking communist brutes. This was a story of good, evil, and espionage.

The political affair had begun with Vladimir’s defection a fortnight earlier, but it went on to span the rest of 1954 and a good portion of 1955, with the subsequent Royal Commission. The Commission’s revelations about Soviet espionage captivated the public’s imagination and changed Australia’s political landscape. This latter story is well known: H.V. Evatt met his political demise, and the Labor Party fractured. But what did the Affair, with its lengthy public inquiry and sustained media attention, mean for Australians who didn’t generally concern themselves with the Labor Party’s backroom drama?

This is an irresistible question for historians who, like me, want to understand what ‘ordinary’ people thought, felt, and did. Politics meant something different for a metal worker in Geelong or a housewife in Marrickville, say, compared to the activist, lawyer, or politician. Their views often fitted less neatly within boxes such as ‘conservative’ or ‘left’, and need not even be logical. The difficulty lies in finding these views, when their owners weren’t usually the type to write down their political musings. Opinion polling provides some clues. Gallup polls in 1954 showed cost of living looming larger for Australians than espionage. But polling data has its limitations. It shows only answers to the questions posed – not the many and varied, sometimes wild and wacky, opinions which people held.

So what did Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ (whoever they are) make of the Petrov Affair? Some of them wrote about it to him. Letter writers never represent a perfect cross-section of society. We only hear from those who cared enough to take the time. But the letters Menzies received regarding the Petrov Affair and Royal Commission do broaden our gaze, giving us a window into the varied and sometimes unexpected issues which Australians cared about. Searching through boxes of these letters, I was struck by how personal they often were. These letter writers, and presumably others, felt connected to the Petrov story; they felt everything from sympathy for the two Russians to deep suspicion about their motives. Many felt that they themselves might play a role in the drama, whether by assisting the Commission or simply offering Menzies humble (or not so humble) advice.

Migrants from the Soviet Union had a particularly personal connection to this story. Many were recent arrivals displaced by World War II and fleeing communism, so the story of Soviet citizens ‘choosing freedom’ in the West hit home. They wrote to Menzies from Footscray to Fitzroy, Daylesford to Adelaide, and even further afield: Auckland, Paris, San Francisco, and more. Most expressed gratitude and appreciation, placing the prime minister on the right side of history. H. Beukers of Northwood, Sydney, wrote on behalf

of all migrants: ‘We as migrants feel you did the right thing and our opinion is only “get rid of those communist [sic]”. Communisme (sic) is already no good in itself and specially ruins Australia.’ These letters also convey pride in the actions of their new, adopted home.

Australian-born writers also felt proud of Menzies in light of Evdokia’s ‘rescue’. From Adelaide (‘grateful and proud to have you as our leader’) to Brisbane (‘Australia has been right on top of the game throughout the whole play’) to the Sunshine Coast (‘with thankfulness and pride I … express the feelings of many Australians’) they sent best wishes.

Bert Watson of Sydney was delightfully casual, writing: ‘Congratulations Bob you have definitely won the hearts of the people over your splendid handling of the Petrov Case.’

S.S. Robinson, a returned soldier, proclaimed simply, ‘thank God I’m British’. For some, this good feeling extended beyond Menzies: James Hegarty, from a tiny village in the Hunter Valley, asked that his appreciation and best wishes be conveyed also to ASIO and the Petrovs themselves.

Commission hearings, held in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney, went for five months and were almost entirely open to the public. Residents of all three cities turned out in droves to watch this real-life spy drama unfold. Both Petrovs testified publicly, as did several ASIO men. The Commission brought Australia’s intelligence service, established only six years earlier, out of the shadows. At the Royal Commission, one could go and see real spies tell stories about their work. Australians learnt about Russian spies frequenting Sydney bars and nightclubs, clandestine meetings in cemeteries and parking lots, and their own security service running agents on the same streets they themselves walked.

The more information the public received, the more they felt they had to tell Menzies. Letters providing advice to the prime minister began to flood in during the commission hearings. On foreign policy and security, ordinary Australians had thoughts. Cutting diplomatic ties with the Soviet

Many Australians apparently felt connected to the Petrovs, particularly Evdokia. Roy Robe of Orange told Menzies that he and his daughters had been so worried they had ‘united in earnest prayer’ for Evdokia, a gesture that he thought might comfort and inspire her. Several extended spiritual wishes to these presumably godless communists, hoping that, with a new life under capitalism, conversion might follow. Josephine Mitchell, from country Victoria, even enclosed a book on Jesus that she felt sure Evdokia would enjoy, and which, it appears, was indeed delivered to Petrova, care of ASIO. While sympathetic, these missives also conveyed an undercurrent of excitement, the ‘thrill’ the writers felt. These were dramatic events, after all. R. Francis of New Zealand wrote that, despite his advanced age (over forty-five!), he wished he could have been present at the airport ‘to put those two hooligans in their proper place – on the floor. Types of that sort only assimilate lessons through their hides.’

As the Royal Commission on Espionage began in May 1954, however, the tenor of the public’s letters shifted. The

Union risked war but also the economy, they told him. One Sydney-sider was inspired to put his thoughts into rhyming verse while another, A.F. Marshall, warned Menzies that China posed the real threat. It was poised to take control of the Soviet Union and already, he thought, operated an Australian spy ring. Mr Kiernan of Ascot Vale had ideas for ASIO: microfilm all mail sent and received by communists and fellow travellers, before sending it on. Kiernan either overestimated ASIO’s capacity or underestimated the sheer amount of mail involved, but, either way, ASIO was not, it appears, apprised of his thoughts.

Others thought that the Petrovs – Vladimir, particularly –were shifty characters about whom Menzies should be warned. Mrs Melrose of Brisbane was succinct: ‘I do respectfully suggest Do not put faith in traitors.’ R. Thomas of Hawthorn wrote earnestly, concerned that Petrov would be Menzies’ downfall, exclaiming: ‘None of my friends think Petrov is telling the truth. He’s no good!’ Others suspected nefarious Soviet tactics afoot. Fred White of Perth wrote to advise that Petrova might well be ‘under hypnotic influence’, while one C. McCafferty of Sydney suggested it was likely drugs.

Evdokia and Vladimir Petrov, Sydney (courtesy of National Museum Australia)

The other topic that invited criticism was money: the cost of the Commission expanded as its hearings drew out. In a time-honoured tradition, many – particularly trade unions – wrote of the government’s ‘waste of tax-payer funds’. But the causes to which correspondents thought Menzies should divert the money were revealing. A Newcastle railway shop committee suggested it would be better used for ‘prevention of flooding in the Hunter Valley’. Other unions suggested, perhaps optimistically, that the clear path was to invest the cash into improving workers’ conditions.

Women seemed especially galvanised by the subject of money. Sheila Irvine, a war widow from Richmond, described her life on the breadline. ‘The contrast is blatant,’ she told the PM. ‘We want homes and decent living conditions, not war and Petrovs, deport them from the country and allot the money … to housing the war-widow.’ Women, it seems, often thought social policy more pressing than espionage or communism. Zara Mathew of North Carlton called on Menzies to divert commission funds to ‘homes, hospitals and schools’. Doris McRae of Armadale conveyed her alarm at The Age’s report: the Commission would cost at least £65,000 in 1954 alone. Could some, she asked, not be put toward old-age pensions?

Australians felt involved enough in the Royal Commission to offer Menzies advice, often personally – man-to-man (or, less often, woman-to-man). Many went one step further, offering their help. I was surprised, leafing through these files, at how many people thought they might hold the key to this spy inquiry. Some were cryptic, offering a name and a phone number. ‘He is clever. I thought you might be interested,’ wrote D. Fraser of Galston.

Others felt their experiences provided essential information. Miss Saunders, of St Kilda, had worked at Australia-Soviet House for John Rodgers, a person of interest at the Commission. The key to nailing him, she told Menzies, was to track down his former secretaries: they knew all. Alan Reginald Burch, a former Navy man from Noosa, wrote with a tale of a train trip he took in 1927 or 1928, when he learnt from a group of shearers that one could travel undetected by paying off a ship’s chief steward. This, he was sure, was how a missing commission witness had left the country. Some had begun to see spies everywhere. One Victorian man wrote about receiving an anonymous reply to his newspaper opinion letter (on an unrelated topic). This, he felt, ‘reeks with suspicion’ and ‘may add another link in the chain’ of the Petrov inquiry. A woman claiming to be one Miriam Dalrymple, Viscountess Stranraer, offered her services in ‘counter-espionage work’ with the Indigenous peoples of Port Hedland. Menzies’ secretary could find no trace of this viscountess and appeared to write her off as fanciful, but Dalrymple continued to offer her (apparently considerable) skills.

Menzies also received a host of letters from individuals who believed they would make good ASIO officers. There was a standard reply: their offer was gratefully received and passed on. How many actually made it into ASIO’s hands is anyone’s guess. Russian language skills were also commonly offered. Some of these were from new migrants, eager to assist in translating Petrov’s documents and to find more fulfilling work

than the manual labour mandated by their Commonwealthassisted passage. These offers were passed to ASIO but not generally accepted, the security service preferring its own, vetted translators.

Finally, a handful of correspondents wanted to assist the Petrovs. Charles Meeking, a writer and Menzies’ own former press secretary, proffered himself as Petrov’s ghost writer, to help Vladimir tell his story to the world. A.B. Turner of Mudgee wrote that the Petrovs were welcome to a half share of his property and livestock, for the tidy sum of £18,000, after hearing that Petrov desired to be a farmer. Two letter writers took it upon themselves to offer assistance not to Petrov, but to his dog – a German shepherd named Jack. After The Sun published pictures of the dog, abandoned by departing Soviet officials, E. Holland of Hunters Hill wrote to Menzies: ‘I feel sure that picture will have tugged at your heart strings as it did at mine.’ Colin Malcolm Wall, whose letterhead proclaimed him a Sydney ‘Inventor of Products’, offered to look after Jack himself, even at the expense of driving to Canberra to collect him. In a postscript, he assuaged any of Petrov’s anxieties about the plan by underscoring his strong anti-communist credentials.

Jack was eventually returned to the Petrovs at their ASIO safe house, while most of the advice and assistance offered to Menzies went unheeded. At best, the author would receive a stock reply from Menzies’ secretary, acknowledging receipt and noting their representations. Many probably never made it onto Menzies’ desk for review. But they provide a glimpse of the kinds of political concerns shared over kitchen tables or pints at the pub.

The Petrov Affair was about the Cold War for many: it brought the communist threat close but also a feeling of Australia’s importance on the global stage. With the Royal Commission, there was a degree of excitement. An individual member of the community might have their own role to play, because of something they had heard, a person they knew, or a pamphlet they had received. But Menzies’ correspondence also shows that the spy scandal was not front of mind for everyone. There were plenty of other, more immediate concerns: pensions, the economy, schools, and hospitals. Nevertheless, this political scandal felt personal to some. Politics are never detached from circumstance or emotion, and we become personally invested, particularly when there is a good story involved. Australians engaged with the Petrov Affair, like many other political scandals, because of the power of its narrative –whether they perceived it to be about good and evil, freedom and peace, Australia’s place in the world, or simply a dog that needed a home. g

Ebony Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She is a historian of migration and security during the Cold War. Her first book is Displaced Comrades: Politics and surveillance in the lives of Soviet refugees in the West (2023).

This is one of a series of ABR articles being funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Proof of entanglement

Two slim, not slight books on Einstein

Robyn Arianrhod

TEinstein in Oxford by Andrew Robinson

Bodleian Library Publishing

$34.99 hb, 96 pp

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions by Alain Aspect translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan

University of Chicago Press

US$15.99 hb, 94 pp

he most famous blackboard in the world resides in Oxford’s History of Science Museum. It was salvaged from the cleaners after Albert Einstein gave an Oxford lecture in 1931, and I confess to being one of the many visitors to gaze upon it with awe. It is a talisman, its continuing existence a cultural recognition of the thrall, and importance, of genius.

Andrew Robinson, an Oxford chemistry graduate and a prolific author, opens Einstein in Oxford with the blackboard story. Then he shatters our illusions with Einstein’s own view on the matter, for the great physicist took a dim view of ‘personality cults’. As he told his diary, ‘One could easily see the jealousy of distinguished English scholars. So I protested; but this was perceived as false modesty.’

Robinson also points out that Einstein made a mistake in his blackboard calculation. The book shows a photograph of the magical board, with the age of the universe calculated to be ten billion years. (It is currently estimated at 13.8 billion.) This is the kind of simple slip-up mathematicians often make in private, and few would have noticed at the time, for cosmology was in its infancy. Indeed, Robinson shows that in the early 1930s Einstein spent several happy months in Oxford, thanks to the efforts of the German-born Oxford professor of experimental physics, Frederick Lindemann.

When you are an icon of genius in your own time, everyone wants to know how you created your famous theory – and not just Oxford dons. Over the years, Einstein gave numerous lectures in various places. After all, general relativity is one of humanity’s most sublime intellectual achievements. Einstein is famous for ‘thought experiments’ rather than laboratory ones, and for the extraordinary imagination that led him to suggest that gravity seems to act not through some remote, disembodied force, but via the geometrical curving of spacetime. Yet what surprises many commentators is Einstein’s emphasis on mathematics in some of his lectures about making physical theories.

Robinson quotes popular science writer Graham Farmelo, who opines that Einstein ‘downplayed the role of physical reasoning’, elevating the importance of mathematics through ‘distorted recollections of the final month of his search for the correct field equations of gravity’. Robinson quotes an opposing view from Einstein’s colleague Abraham Pais, but his own view is clear in his focus on Einstein’s 1933 Herbert Spencer Lecture, whose mathematical emphasis he then briefly contrasts with

other Einstein talks. I am familiar with all these lectures, and, like Pais, I read them differently. In some of them – especially the Spencer Lecture – Einstein is trying to distil, from his own and other people’s experience, a general method for making physical theories. In others, he focuses on the actual, step-by-step process of his journey to general relativity. Any differences in emphasis, I suggest, are due more to nuances of language or topic than to ‘distorted recollections’. Yet Robinson is right in that not even Einstein had the last word on theoretical method. He intimated as much in his Spencer Lecture when he mentioned quantum theory, which plays by its own bizarre rules, but we now know that his method also failed to deliver his long-sought geometrical unification of electromagnetism and gravity, on which he was working at the time.

Still, spare a thought for poor Einstein, who was often presented with an uncomprehending audience – smart people in their own fields, but without a clue about relativity. At Oxford, this included even the physicists, for they focused on experiment rather than theory. Einstein also presented his Spencer Lecture in English, a great challenge for him in 1933. But these were the least of his problems. This lecture must have been prepared under extreme duress, Robinson tells us, for the Nazis had recently seized all Einstein’s assets, and he and his wife Elsa were refugees in temporary accommodation in Belgium.

Robinson is not the first to explore Einstein’s Oxford connection – others include Oxford historian Robert Fox – but this accessible and beautifully produced little book brings the story to a wider audience. And what a fascinating, poignant tale Robinson tells, briefly encompassing not just Einstein’s lectures, but also eyewitness accounts of his personality (including a marvellous one from the future Nobel literature laureate William Golding), his music (including the professional musician who deemed Einstein’s violin playing ‘relatively good’), his liberal politics, and his flight from Nazi persecution, as well as Lindemann’s remarkable efforts in offering an Oxford haven for him and other German Jewish scholars.

Einstein features (albeit relatively briefly) in another beautifully produced little book, Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions by Alain Aspect. Aspect shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics for his experimental proof of the nature of ‘entanglement’, which was postulated by Einstein and two Princeton colleagues in 1935. (According to Robinson, Einstein chose permanent asylum at Princeton rather than Oxford because it allowed him to focus on research.)

Unlike a cricket ball or spaceship, a subatomic particle’s definite state cannot be predicted in advance; until the particle is observed, quantum theory offers only probabilities. But here is the thing: suppose a researcher prepares two particles together – two electrons, say – and sends one of them to the other side of the world; no matter which property the researcher decides to observe in the lab-based particle, quantum theory says that the faraway particle would immediately manifest the same property. As Aspect puts it, it’s as if every time you randomly toss a coin, a faraway friend’s simultaneous, seemingly random toss gives the same result as yours.

Einstein hoped that entanglement would prove, by its appar-

ent absurdity, that these correlations must have been predetermined in a way that quantum theory had not yet accounted for. Therefore, he argued, quantum mechanics was incomplete. Niels Bohr famously disagreed, but few others cared. After all, the theory worked: as Aspect notes, early applications gave us transistors (the switches and amplifiers underpinning computers and other electronic devices), and lasers (whose uses include fibre-optical telecommunications).

Half a century after the BohrEinstein debate – and inspired by John Bell’s 1964 mathematical paper on those controversial correlations – Aspect’s spectacularly sensitive experiments gave the definitive answer: entangled particles do behave as quantum mechanics suggests, and the theory is not incomplete as Einstein had believed. Rather than proclaiming he had proved Einstein wrong, however, Aspect emphasises that it was Einstein who first identified the concept of entanglement.

Aspect also achieved the amazing feat of producing single photons, quantum ‘particles’ of light. In a brief but thrilling section, he explains how he proved that each photon exhibits both wave and particle behaviours. As for practical applications of entanglement, Aspect notes that it offers hope of energyefficient, environment-friendly quantum computers, and of secure cryptography.

There is more elsewhere, now, about Aspect and his work, but this book was originally published in French three years before his Nobel Prize; perhaps that is why he chose to write an overview of the quantum revolutions, rather than to explain his own work on entanglement in more satisfying detail. Still, the book’s brevity and clear writing does make for an interesting overview of quantum ideas and their history.

Aspect’s and Robinson’s books are slim but not slight. Aficionados will likely want more detail or analysis, but nonetheless, the stories here are beguiling. g

Unarmed combat

A life in litigation

Michael Sexton

IIan Barker QC: Prince of barristers by Stephen L. Walmsley

Australian Scholarly Publishing

$59.99 pb, 394 pp

an Barker was a relative rarity among barristers in that he never used two words when one would suffice. He died in 2021 and is now the subject of a biography by Stephen Walmsley, himself a barrister and then a judge – since retired –of the NSW District Court. This is an unusual exercise in Australia, where judicial biography is a sparse species and the lives of other lawyers are seldom chronicled.

Barker was born in 1935 in Sydney into a family that included both convicts and clergymen among its forebears. His legal career began as an articled clerk in a firm of solicitors. After eight years of study in a non-university course, he qualified for admission as

a solicitor in New South Wales. Soon afterwards he took a post in a firm in Alice Springs, a town where Aboriginals outnumbered Europeans. Within a short time, Barker was running the practice by himself. As the only legal practitioner in the Northern Territory practising outside Darwin, he began conducting trials, including murder trials. After almost ten years in Alice Springs, he joined a Darwin firm but confined himself to court work and was appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 1974.

Four years later, Barker became the Territory’s first Solicitor General and was heavily involved in the negotiations with the Commonwealth that preceded the commencement of selfgovernment for the Territory on 1 July 1978. In 1981, he took up residence in Sydney and started practice at the NSW Bar, but he returned to the Territory in 1982 to prosecute in the trial of Lindy Chamberlain. Chamberlain was, of course, convicted of murdering her infant child but, following a judicial inquiry, where Barker appeared for the Crown, she was later pardoned and acquitted, with compensation of $1.3 million to herself and her husband. The author makes no criticism of Barker’s role in all this and seems to accept that there was forensic evidence – later discredited – on which the prosecution was entitled to proceed at the trial. The case illustrates the difficulty that may face a prosecutor who has to rely on expert evidence in circumstances where that evidence may be the subject of scientific challenge many years later.

The author is skilled at presenting complex legal cases in

Albert Einstein, Pasadena, 1931 (Associated Press via Wikimedia Commons)

a way that makes them readily comprehensible to the general reader, which is no easy task. A good example is the account of the 1983 Royal Commission into the expulsion of Soviet diplomat Valery Ivanov and the blackballing as a lobbyist by the Hawke government of former ALP National Secretary David Combe on the basis of his dealings with Ivanov. Barker acted for Combe, who was found to have engaged in no wrongdoing by the Commission but whose career and business had been effectively destroyed. In the course of the Commission, Barker had to cross-examine Prime Minister Bob Hawke. He was not the first person to find the witness’s aggression rather confronting. One of the other barristers appearing for the Commission remarked: ‘This is about the only occasion I can recall of a really competent cross-examiner being demolished from the witness box.’

With the exception of his prosecution in the Chamberlain case, Barker had essentially been a defence lawyer, and his practice at the NSW Bar often involved appearing for individuals facing serious criminal charges. Many of these were obvious underworld characters, but this is inevitable for members of the criminal Bar with a practice on the defence side. One of Barker’s clients not in this category was High Court Judge Lionel Murphy, who was charged with attempting to influence another judicial officer in his conduct of a case. Murphy was ultimately acquitted, but, like Combe, his reputation never really recovered and he died not long afterwards.

On the civil side of his practice, Barker appeared in two of the longest-running cases heard in the NSW Supreme Court –a dispute over a will by members of the Waterhouse racing dynasty lasting 153 hearing days and lawyer John Marsden’s defamation

‘Just

holding the fort’

Two books on documentary photography

Alison Stieven-Taylor

PUntil Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights. Photographs 1970-2024 by Juno Gemes Upswell, $65 pb, 325 pp

Imagining a Real Australia: The documentary style 1950-1980 by Stephen Zagala NewSouth, $59.99 pb, 197 pp

hotography finds itself at yet another crossroads. In an era of artificial intelligence, the photograph’s role as a document of evidence has again come under the spotlight. Entering this disruptive space are two new documentary photography books: Juno Gemes’s Until Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights. Photographs 1970-2024 and Stephen Zagala’s Imagining a Real Australia: The documentary style 1950-1980. The focus of these books is vastly different. Gemes offers a contemporary history of Australia, whereas Zagala is more concerned with the documentary genre. Their existence affirms that,

case against Channel 7 over allegations of under-aged sex, which lasted 229 hearing days. Again, these complicated pieces of litigation are clearly explained and analysed by the author. The fees from these sagas no doubt contributed to the purchase price of a villa in Tuscany where Barker and his family spent quite a bit of time after 1990.

In 1999, Barker was elected as president of the NSW Bar, a somewhat unusual selection for this role, given his generally unpretentious and down-to-earth character. He remained, however, the first choice for the defence in the case of public figures facing criminal charges, including former judges Jeffrey Shaw and Marcus Einfeld.

In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, Barker became very critical of the counter-terrorism policies of both the Australian and US administrations. In 2005, he acted for Mamdouh Habib, a citizen of both Australia and Egypt, who had been held for a period at Guantanamo Bay before being released to return to Australia. On his return, Habib brought proceedings against the Commonwealth government and a number of its officials for complicity in kidnap, false imprisonment, and torture. After years of preliminary arguments in the Federal Court, the Commonwealth settled the proceedings with Habib in 2011.

This is a book that has an obvious interest for lawyers. It is also valuable reading for nonlawyers, not only because it decodes the legal cases it describes but because it underlines the risks and vagaries of litigation, a form of unarmed combat that a sensible person would do almost anything to avoid. g

Michael Sexton is Solicitor General for New South Wales.

while the truthfulness of photography may be contested, as it has been since the medium’s nascent years, the intrinsic value of documentary photography remains undiminished. In fact, at this juncture, documentary photography may prove even more important as we grapple with notions of what is ‘real’.

In the 1970s, Hungarian-born, Sydney-based photographer Juno Gemes travelled to an Aboriginal camp outside of Alice Springs. As she sat with elders, women, and children, Gemes’s innate curiosity stirred, sparking a deep desire to understand more about the world’s oldest culture. Thus began a collaborative relationship of ‘sharing and learning’ that unfolds across five decades in her Until Justice Comes.

The title comes from a remark made in 1972 by Mum Shirl, an icon of The Movement for justice: ‘I am just holding the fort until justice comes.’ Gemes describes the book as ‘a contemporary history of Indigenous activism’. While I agree, Gemes’s photographs are framed by a larger social and political narrative, which positions the book as a vital contemporary history of Australia. It is also a heartfelt tribute to and celebration of an extraordinary people and their continued optimism in the face of adversity. Resilience, strength, and a fierce sense of identity run through the decades, showing why the fires of hope keep burning. But there are also stories of profound loss and grief.

As a photographer, friend, and campaigner in The Movement since the 1970s, Gemes has been on the frontline, documenting

the most significant historical happenings. These include the 1982 Brisbane land rights protests, the 1985 Uluru handback ceremony, the 2008 Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples (Gemes was one of ten photographers invited to Parliament House), the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Uluru handback (2010), the fiftieth anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra (2022), and the meeting of the Referendum Advisory Committee at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (2023). Gemes has also been there for everyday moments, turning up with her camera through the decades to capture weddings, music festivals, theatre events, and family days. The combination of the political and the personal makes for a rich history.

Selecting the 200-plus images for Until Justice Comes took Gemes more than three years, a collaborative effort echoing her photographic practice. Insights into Gemes’s approach and her analytical mind are also found in her collages, proof sheets, and written testimony. These works reveal her compassion, erudition, and passion for telling and continuing to draw focus on this enduring story.

Gemes’s wide-ranging narrative counters the narrow framing of mainstream media, where the focus is mainly on poverty, crime, and despair. Until Justice Comes conveys joy and strength, grief and rage. One of the book’s standout features is women’s contribution to The Movement. You cannot reach the end of this extraordinary tome without being touched by the profound humanness of this history, Australia’s history, and the fight to see justice served.

I am drawn to many photographs in this collection, but two are notable. These pictures reflect the power of a masterful storyteller. First is a picture taken at the Uluru handback twenty-fifth anniversary (2010). Uluru dominates the background, reaching to the sky as the green/grey scrub and the vibrant ochre earth roll towards the camera. At the front of the frame are two Anangu women dancing the inma, a performance that connects people to the Law and Dreaming of their country. Their traditional body paint and feather headbands contrast with flowing black skirts. They move with their hands open in a gesture of giving and acceptance that exudes generosity and love.

Second is the portrait of Linda Burney, Minister for Indigenous Australians, at a pre-dawn media conference at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in 2023. This picture opens the final chapter in the book: ‘After the Referendum’. Burney is illuminated by an artificial spotlight. In the background, Uluru’s immensity, cloaked in shadow, rises to greet the day. The sun casts a deep, burnished glow on the horizon. This image presents strength, vulnerability, courage, and resolve. An icon of The Movement, Burney is a minor figure in a sweeping vista, yet an integral part of the landscape.

Until Justice Comes provides an unprecedented documentation of our First Nations People and is an essential contribution to Australia’s history. Gemes’s photographs are paired with essays by luminaries in The Movement, politics, and academia; and poetry by Robert Adamson, Gemes’s late husband, and Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Yankunytjatjara woman and Stolen Generations survivor. As Burney observes in the Foreword, ‘After the crushing defeat of the referendum, this country is finally waking up to the importance and power of truth-telling. The truth is in these pages.’

Imagining a Real Australia: The documentary style 1950-1980 celebrates, and critiques, work made over a period that author and curator Stephen Zagala describes as the ‘golden age of documentary photography’, a genre whose origins began in the middle of the nineteenth century. The book is presented in five chapters. The first, ‘Real Style’, canvasses how the genre developed, revealing the stylistic trends and political and societal influences that shaped an ‘Australian’ way of seeing, one that was focused on nation building. It considers the emergence of humanistic photography, photojournalism and street photography, and draws on the work of Max Dupain, Mark Strizic, Lawrence LeGuay, and Maggie Diaz, among others.

‘Real People’ captures the rise of the feminist voice and the power of photography as activism. It reveals the emergence of ‘the personal turn’ explored in the work of Ponch Hawkes, Carol Jerrems, Sue Ford, and Ruth Maddison. The exploration of ‘self’ becomes a cultural metaphor for the experience of women, a way of looking and seeing ourselves beyond the social norms and expectations of the day.

Perhaps the most eclectic section, ‘Real Space’ explores the social spaces that draw photographers. Pictures capture the migrant experience, Aboriginal activism (Gemes’s work features here) and technological advances. There is also personal work by the likes of Max Pam, John Gollings, and Paul Cox.

‘Real Movement’ examines how photographs circulate, a premise established through a brief historical discussion on publications, exhibitions, and printed artefacts, institutional and personal. This chapter also refers to the shifting boundaries of documentary photography and innovations in storytelling. Consider Ruth Maddison’s hand-coloured ‘Christmas Holidays with Bob’s Family’ (1977-78) and Helen Grace’s observational ‘Christmas Dinner’ (1979) as examples of how family is portrayed. William Yang’s exquisitely intimate ‘Joe’ (1979), where the photographer has noted his observations across the image, rounds off a chapter that spans portraiture to photojournalism.

‘Real Futures’ centres on the ‘critical repurposing of the documentary lens by First Nations photographers’, and features work by Ricky Maynard, Polly Sumner-Dodd, and Brenda Croft. This section shows a range of documentary approaches underpinned by intimacy, collaboration, and relationship building. As Croft, a Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra woman, says, ‘By placing myself behind the camera, I am taking control of my self (sic) and images of ourselves.’

Imagining a Real Australia is a welcome addition, given the limited attention so far paid to the documentary form in this country. g

Alison Stieven-Taylor is an international commentator and journalist specialising in photography and specifically social documentary.

Elon Musk?

Sinking into the folds

Annie Ernaux rewrites grand narratives

Beth Kearney

AThe Use of Photography

by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer

Seven Stories Press

$45 pb, 144 pp

chronicler of experience and a scrutineer of memory, Annie Ernaux always tries to express something universal. By recording her experiences – of the working class, social mobility, abortion, death, divorce, jealousy, affairs, desire, and more – she asks her readers to see their lives in her writing.

Photography is often a tool in this project; Ernaux uses it to interrogate the ways we look back at life and preserve memories. She describes images – be they real, imagined, or lost – and writes scenes as though she were a photographer observing the world and snapping it for posterity. As she suggests in the final lines of her chef-d’œuvre, The Years (2017), she strives to ‘[s]ave something from the time where we will never be again’.

Ernaux’s latest release in English, The Use of Photography, co-authored in 2005 with her romantic partner at the time, Marc Marie, and translated by Alison L. Strayer, extends this project. While Ernaux again preserves and records personal, though relatable, experiences, the ‘use’ of photography here is far more plural and incongruous than in her other works. Ernaux and Marie work with the big ideas surrounding photography while complicating and rewriting them.

The Use of Photography has two narrators: a woman, ‘A.’, who is undergoing treatment for breast cancer, and her lover, a man named ‘M.’. All chapters – bar the first and last, which are authored by Ernaux – open with a snapshot of the couple’s clothing crumpled on the floor, discarded in the haste preceding sex. In each chapter, the narrators – A. first, then M. – reflect on the scene and the experiences attached to it. The reader, thrust into the universe of the romantic duo, observes the relationship from two perspectives and grapples with notions as impalpable as death and life, illness and sexuality, vulnerability and vitality, reality and unreality. Ernaux and Marie thus tackle aspects of experience common to us all, while expressing a desire to halt the present moment as it slips away like quicksand.

For some, photographs are melancholy: snapping a scene is like pulling a trigger, because the moment captured will never exist again. Ernaux and Marie inherit this attitude by contemplating A.’s troubling condition and the possibility that she is hurtling toward the grave. When visiting the tombstone of M.’s mother, for instance, A. hallucinates: ‘I imagined my name on the stone instead. I saw it very clearly, but it wasn’t real.’ The photographs, emptied of people, echo the morbid themes of the

text by depicting, or predicting, her future absence: ‘Here there is no more life or time. Here I am dead.’

Ernaux and Marie’s phototext reworks this well-trodden narrative, for these images are just as much about the intensity of life as about its end. Though the passages of text describe A.’s body – hairless and punctured by a catheter, worn for eighteen months – as vulnerable, the photographs testify to another truth: she is full of desire and sexual vitality. A tangled G-string, a lacy bra on the kitchen floor – these scenes don’t fit the script for a sexagenarian battling a life-threatening disease. Contra the grand narratives of feminine sexuality, the images suggest that an ageing and unwell woman can be an erotic subject. This is classic Ernaux: as ever, she deconstructs gender norms and in turn liberates her readers; she tells the kind of story – one by a breast cancer patient – that she believes should be told more often.

The shameless exposure of sexuality echoes the feminist themes so common in Ernaux’s œuvre (think Simple Passion [2021], recently adapted to the cinema). The visceral close-ups of underwear and voyeuristic peeks into the authors’ homes reveal things and spaces that are supposed to remain hidden. Yet while they expose, they also conceal by hinting at the nude figures beyond the frame.

Ernaux and Marie, who do not include images of the sexualised bodies described in the text, refuse an objectifying gaze on the female body. In fact, A. uses writing to objectify M.’s body: ‘I feel a peculiar excitement in handling and adjusting the zoom, as if I had a male member.’ While M.’s erotic descriptions are at times timorous – he writes of ‘the look on her face when she came’, for instance – A. is far more explicit: his ‘sex, seen in profile, is erect. The light from the flash illuminates the veins and makes a drop of sperm glisten at the tip.’ This photograph (not printed in the book) cuts M.’s face from the frame. And when A. writes that a bookcase ‘occupies the entire right part of the photo’, she calls attention to her intimidating status as an internationally renowned author. These detailed descriptions recall the realism (mistakenly) understood to be an inherent feature of photography. But Ernaux and Marie complicate this narrative about the medium, too. While they write that their images are ‘tangible evidence of what [they] had just experienced’, they also consider them to be totally unfixed from reality, ‘as if M. has photographed an abstract canvas’.

Citizens of today’s post-truth era are already suspicious of photography’s claims to veracity, but Ernaux and Marie’s message is more nuanced. Truth, they suggest, can be subjective, plural: ‘The highest degree of reality … will only be attained if these written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.’ The Use of Photography is among only three of Ernaux’s works with printed images (rather than solely ekphrastic descriptions). It thus sits apart from her other literary experiments with photography: though she again transcribes universal experience, she does so by asking readers to create their own meaning from the words and photographs, to imagine themselves colonising the empty interiors, sinking into the folds of the uninhabited garments. g

Beth Kearney is an early-career scholar of contemporary literature based at the University of Queensland.

2025 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of the world’s major prizes for an original short story, with $12,500 in prizes.

The Jolley Prize closes on 5 May 2025. It will be judged by Julie Janson, John Kinsella and Maria Takolander.

The Jolley Prize honours the work of the Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley. It is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. Entries should be original single-authored works of short fiction of between 2,000 and 5,000 words.

First prize: $6,000 • Second prize: $4,000 • Third prize: $2,500

Gregory Day & Carrie Tiffany

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM.

Does leadership matter?

A portrait of eight key figures

Glyn

Davis

IThe Titans of the Twentieth Century: How they made history and the history they made by Michael Mandelbaum

Oxford University Press

£26.99 hb, 347 pp

n his 2015 study of Joseph Stalin, historian Stephen Kotkin suggested that the Bolshevik revolution could have been stopped by just two bullets: one aimed at Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, hiding across the border in Finland but pressing the Bolshevik Party to seize power; a second bullet for Leon Trotsky, on the ground in Petrograd as a determined band of Red Guards, sailors, and soldiers stormed the Winter Palace.

Kotkin was stressing the many contingencies which shaped the outcome. Lenin’s plan was resisted by most Bolshevik leaders. Trotsky had been aligned with the rival Mensheviks. Force of personality decided the outcome. A relentless Lenin cajoled, threatened, and pleaded until his party agreed to risk all. Ahead was a bitter civil war, but eventually a political philosophy and state built on Leninist principles.

How does a historian tell this story? A biographer might stress the single-minded determination and extraordinary self-belief of Lenin. A historian of Russia might note the failure of the Romanov regime to accommodate demands for a more representative government, even after the vivid warning of the 1905 uprising. This left the nation without established institutions or experienced politicians when Tsar Nicholas II fell. A student of global politics might emphasise the consequences of military defeat, which ended several empires and left many states vulnerable to assault from the margins.

In The Titans of the Twentieth Century, Michael Mandelbaum, Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University, offers five levels of analysis for eight key figures from the twentieth century. Each chapter starts with the life, outlines the times, explores the style of leadership, reviews the personal impact of the individual, and closes on their impact after death. So we start with Lenin’s childhood in Simbirsk on the Volga River, then learn about revolutionary movements in tsarist Russia (Lenin’s older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, was executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Alexander III). As a leader, Lenin studied Marx but did not accept the historical inevitability that Marx assigned to the industrial proletariat. Instead, Lenin argued that a disciplined vanguard party could quicken the pace of change and target even largely agricultural Russia for revolution.

Turning to the times, Mandelbaum tells the story of World War I from a Russian perspective, the swift collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the struggle to establish the Provisional

Government, and the resulting vacuum so skilfully exploited by Lenin. Mandelbaum acknowledges Lenin’s charisma – ‘an almost hypnotic effect on those within his personal orbit’ – while stressing an unattractive personality and a propensity to violence. Once in control, Lenin exercised personal power with a ruthlessness rarely seen in human history, an attribute Mandelbaum also assigns to Mao Zedong, complete with the resulting headcount in deaths. The portrait closes with an assessment of legacy – the state Lenin created, the pattern of governing he established, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union nearly seventy-five years later.

This is the basic pattern of the book, repeated in eight portraits of ‘titans’, those individuals who, according to Mandelbaum, shaped the twentieth century’s most significant moments. The schema introduces a degree of repetition since most of the titans lived through the same events. The United States predominates, with Mandelbaum choosing Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt among his key figures of the century. From Europe, Lenin is followed by Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill. India is included through Mahatma Gandhi, China through Mao. Israel is represented by David Ben-Gurion. No Africans or Arabs, no one from Southeast Asia, the Pacific, or South America, and, pointedly, no women. Mandelbaum presents this as a reflection of the times; his choice of titans are all men ‘because no woman had a comparable leadership role in the first half of the twentieth century, the period that this book covers’.

Such choices invite a quarrel. They arise from the design of the project and its starting conceit that individuals make history. Not that Mandelbaum misses the context. To shape global outcomes, nations require an industrial revolution, a role in the world economy, and an organised state. On his account, the titan also needs conflict, so that his subjects can initiate or respond to global events. The titans bring to their roles a world view which guides their actions, and personal attributes which shape their choices – the inability of Wilson to compromise, the arrogance of Hitler in overriding his generals on crucial matters of strategy. Structural differences also matter in this narrative: democratic leaders must persuade, while Mao can impose a catastrophic policy even on his own unwilling party. Mandelbaum describes the Cultural Revolution unleashed by the Chairman in 1966 as ‘one of the most bizarre episodes not just in the long history of China but in the history of any country’.

Events provide openings. The Depression gave Hitler the chance to move from the fringes of German politics, just as it enabled FDR to break decades of Republican wins in presidential elections. Ben-Gurion first benefited from, and was then set back by, great power geopolitical calculations. Gandhi invented new forms of protest, some drawn from Indian tradition and others from the Suffragettes he encountered in London, but his aspiration for Indian independence ultimately depended on a change of government in Westminster. Separating the person from the moment, the context from the opportunity, the inevitable from the chance outcome, can be a matter of viewpoint.

Michael Mandelbaum is a skilled analyst who presents his eight portraits with verve. Many of his findings are compelling – no Hitler, no Holocaust. It is possible to disagree with other conclusions yet still enjoy the argument and learn much about a world already fading as new realities, new configurations of

power, and new leaders come into focus. Mandelbaum has set himself an impossible question: do individuals make history at global scale, or do time and chance determine the outcome? Like many great investigations, the exploration is more interesting than any answer.

There are circumstances, of course, when leadership does matter. Take the sustainment of a distinguished Australian literary journal. It requires an extraordinary breadth of interests and contacts, a skilled editor and chief executive, soother of egos, dedicated fundraiser, and manager of a complex production pro-

Murdoch, Unaipon and OAFs

A timely new reference to South Australia

Frank Bongiorno

TThe Wakefield Companion to South Australian History edited by Wilfrid Prest Second Edition

Wakefield Press $70 pb, 812 pp

he Wakefield Companion to South Australian History announced itself in 2001 as ‘a landmark publication, the first such work of reference for any Australian state or territory’. This new edition, which adds entries, updates others, and lands with a thump at almost 200 pages more than the previous volume, is especially timely in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which magnified awareness of the differences between the histories and cultures of the Australian states.

South Australia is a rather different place almost a quarter of a century on from that first effort. The state’s famous car industry has gone, with Holden’s closure in 2017 (Mitsubishi went in 2008). The Kelvinator factories, having stopped making fridges, limped on under Swedish ownership, turning out air conditioners for just a few years early this century. The Simpson family got out of the washing machine business in the mid1980s, and Hills, creator of the famous clothes hoist, entered voluntary liquidation in 2023. The state’s population growth has been slower, and its population is older and poorer, than that of any other mainland state. If South Australia is ‘exceptional’, as some have argued in praising its virtues, it is now certainly not so in an entirely good way.

The longer essays, on themes ranging from ‘Aboriginal Policy and Administration’ through ‘Health’ and ‘Industrialisation’ to ‘Science’, ‘Social Structure’, ‘Water’, and ‘Wheat’, provide authors with opportunities to stand back a little from the detail, and often to generalise with force and insight. Peter Bell, on ‘Architecture’, does a little gentle myth-busting: ‘There has probably never been a time when Adelaide had more churches than hotels’; Arthur Tideman, on ‘Pests’, is poetic in suggesting that the colonists

cess – all in the shape of a single person. Here we can say with confidence that the individual matters. Since 2001, Peter Rose has made the ABR indispensable. Such a remarkable record may not earn the same treatment as a book on global leaders, but the skill and commitment required have much in common. From the community of readers and writers you have made part of this project, thank you, Peter. g

Glyn Davis is Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

‘viewed wilderness as country that God had forsaken’, but prosaic in reporting that the second law passed by the new Legislative Council in 1851 was the Scotch Thistle Act. It is a pity that there is no entry on slavery, given the research that historians have undertaken in recent years on Australian connections to that oppressive institution. The British government compensation received by the Stirling family from their slave holdings in the wake of abolition is mentioned in the entry on them, but there is only silence on the pioneering Angas family, which also benefited from the scheme.

The editors, in line with the Australian Dictionary of Biography’s practice, include dedicated entries only on the dead, which means that we now have an affectionate portrait from University of Adelaide law professor John Williams on his old friend and colleague John Bannon, long-serving premier and later a political historian, biographer, and university college master. There are also entries on historians such as Eric Richards and Helen Jones but, oddly, not on Jill Roe, the great South Australian social historian and biographer of Miles Franklin, or George Rudé, internationally renowned practitioner of ‘history from below’ (who spent a decade of his career at universities in Adelaide).

The ban on the living means that Rupert Murdoch misses the bus, but he and his crusading editor at the News, Rohan Rivett, appear in the entry on the controversy involving Aboriginal circus worker Rupert Max Stuart, sentenced to death (commuted, after a public campaign) for the murder of a nine-year-old girl. Among the Labor Party’s dead, it is odd that we have an entry on senator Jim Toohey but none on the formidable Clyde Cameron, Murdoch’s regular lunch companion in the 1950s, or on Mick Young, each of whom played a critical role in the making of the Whitlam government.

First Nations peoples are well represented, reflecting shifts in historical research over the past half century. Many entries recognise a deep history stretching over millennia, but there are also compact biographical entries. Coverage includes not only well-known figures such as the ‘Australian Leonardo da Vinci’, David Unaipon, but also others less widely known than the man whose head appears on the $50 note. The celebrated historian and genealogist Doreen Kartinyeri, active in the failed campaign to stop the construction of the Hindmarsh Island Bridge in the 1990s, is among those who appear in this edition. Such entries are brief but taken together, and read alongside the stories of missionaries, anthropologists, ethnographers, and administrators, they disclose much about a First Nations history of suffering, survival, and success.

In such ways, the Companion’s scope ranges beyond the venerable patriarchs from the OAFs (Old Adelaide Families). To be sure, you will find the recurrence of names such as Angas, Barr Smith, Bonython, Downer, Dutton, Elder, Hawker, and Mortlock; their power, wealth, and philanthropy have played a formative role in shaping economic, political, and cultural life. (Bizarrely, even the completion of Parliament House was indebted to a Depression-era donation of £100,000 from John Langdon Bonython.) But the book also captures both the diversity of earlier times, in its exploration of the German presence and influence, as well as something of the transformation of recent decades, which saw a former Vietnamese refugee, Hieu Van Le, become governor in 2014.

The historian Douglas Pike’s 1957 characterisation of South Australia as a ‘paradise of Dissent’ resounds in the Companion Authors do, however, prick some of the conceits about the state’s progressive traditions. Indigenous people were massacred as well as summarily executed. Poverty, crime, unemployment, and inequality have figured from the earliest years, despite the utopian ambitions that drove colonisation. South Australia was ahead of the pack in granting women political rights, but well behind it in actually getting them into Parliament, as late as 1959. It brought up the rear on the introduction of compulsory voting (1942) and full adult suffrage for the Legislative Council (1973), and it maintained a notoriously rigged lower-house electoral system, known as the Playmander (after its main beneficiary, Thomas Playford), from the mid 1930s until the late 1960s. But these same years also saw the South Australian Housing Trust in full flight, a remarkable contribution on the part of government to building homes during a time of ambitious industrialisation and immigration.

Religious pluralism has made an enduring mark on what Jenny Tilby Stock astutely describes as ‘South Australia’s generally sedate and civilised political culture’. Religious affiliation formed a foundation for a rich associational culture; South Australians have been notable joiners and its élites have taken public service seriously. The reputedly heavy influence of Nonconformist Protestantism, and the much lighter imprint of Catholics, receive rein-

forcement here. Still, it is notable that South Australia produced the country’s two most famous Catholic nuns, Mary MacKillop, a saint, and Janet Mead, a singer – the latter nominated for a Grammy for ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ but beaten by Elvis Presley’s ‘How Great Thou Art’. (The Companion’s system of updating entries unfortunately fell down in the case of MacKillop, for it still has her one miracle short of the full sainthood, which was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010.)

Ideas have also mattered, at least to enough people for enough of the time, for a striking number of South Australians to have made a national and sometimes international mark. Its educational institutions, some run by churches and others by government, were strong; several of them, such as the University of Adelaide, were open to the talent of women as well as men. The achievements of professional women, such as early childhood education authority Lillian de Lissa, an internationally renowned figure, and doctor and health reformer Helen Mayo, are notable.

Identities claimed by Australians as national property, such as C.J. Dennis and Roy Rene (‘Mo’), were South Australian natives before their origins became obscured by their fame. The procession of distinguished social reformers, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, actors, musicians, sports stars, aviators, explorers, writers, and academics sometimes threatens to overwhelm. But amid such glittering talent, it still seems remarkable that this small and rather isolated place could produce a father-and-son team of Nobel Prize winners in physics as early as 1915, even allowing that the Braggs had by then moved on to British universities. The national magazine in which this review appears also had its origins in Adelaide in 1961. It is in such subtle and sometimes forgotten ways that South Australia’s particular history has flowed into that of the nation and helped form Australia’s place in the wider world. The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, with its hundreds of contributors drawing on a deep well of expertise, is a grand collective project that allows us better to see these connections. g

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.

The carceral state

A deep history of migrant imprisonment

Marilyn Lake

‘HThe Migrant’s Jail:

An American history of mass incarceration

by Brianna Nofil

Princeton University Press

$57.99 hb, 336 pp

ow can a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants,’ asks Brianna Nofil, the author of The Migrant’s Jail, ‘also be a place that imprisons tens of thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees?’ In answering that question, Nofil, an assistant professor of history at William and Mary, researches the history of the crucial role of local county jails and their widespread deployment by the federal government to build the largest migrant detention and deportation system in the world. Incarceration was the prelude to deportation.

While those who survived the ‘uniquely dire conditions of US local jails’ have insisted that this is their history, and that it should be more widely known, Nofil insists that Americans need to acknowledge this shameful past as part of their national story. But of course it is not yet past. Under the new Trump administration, the system of incarceration and deportation of unwanted migrants has been reinvigorated with a vengeance. Donald Trump made the ‘mass deportation’ of ‘illegal immigrants’ – now conceptualised as ‘enemy aliens’ – a key plank in his nationalist program of ‘Make America Great Again’.

Since the nineteenth century, American federal governments have determined immigration policy, but they paid and depended on local authorities to implement it – there were no federal prisons before 1895 – which prompted the proliferation of local places of immigrant incarceration across the country. In many cases, local communities directly profited from unauthorised migration by locking up new arrivals in local jails; detention became a pillar of their economies. As a federation with extensive land and sea borders, the United States became, in Nofil’s words, ‘an interconnected carceral state’.

Trump’s election promise of mass deportation, though seemingly radical, rests on long-established American practice. For many decades asylum seekers and unauthorised arrivals to the United States have been racialised, demonised, and criminalised – as Asiatics, Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims, Latinos – under ever-changing legislation. Asian exclusion laws in the 1880s were followed by literacy tests and the imposition of national quotas. A 1917 law enabled the deportation of migrants for any criminal activity within five years of arrival. In 1929 the Undesirable Aliens Act criminalised unlawful entry; henceforth illegal entry became a federal crime and detention became state-sponsored punishment. Now Trump intends to invoke the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, not used since World War II, to deploy the mil-

itary to detain and deport all arrivals at the southern border, the so-called ‘invasion’ now declared a ‘state of emergency’.

Settler-colonial nations such as the United States and Australia emerged from the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, while creating national border controls (Australia once had a dictation test) and immigration detention to engineer desired, racially homogeneous, national populations. In such self-styled ‘white men’s countries’, sovereignty was defined in terms of the right to control national borders, the right to say who might come, who might stay, and who must leave. As John Howard famously declared: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ In his inauguration address, Trump restated the theme: ‘Our sovereignty will be reclaimed.’ Immigration controls, detention, and deportation have been century-long population strategies in both Australia and the United States. The Commonwealth of Australia was inaugurated in 1901 in a founding act of racial expulsion, as Pacific Islanders were rounded up and systematically deported to random islands in the Pacific. In the United States, a key focus of authorities, as again exemplified by Trump, has been the land borders with Canada and Mexico.

The focus on the Canadian border might seem surprising, but Nofil’s deeply researched history opens with an account of the incarceration of hundreds of Chinese migrants, who entered the United States from Canada in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. ‘The four-thousand mile northern border was an immense expanse of land,’ she writes. ‘Those who passed into Northern New York entered the ancestral lands of Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples. The four counties that built Chinese jails were primarily Mohawk territory, bisected by the US-Canadian border.’

At sites such as Franklin County Jail, in Malone, New York, hundreds of Chinese languished in squalid, dangerous conditions. Many claimed to be returning US citizens, but forced into prison they became the responsibility of the local sheriff who, in one three-year period, pocketed $20,000 from their incarceration. New York border towns viewed Chinese migrants as a low-risk, high-reward population who brought federal money into rural communities. Meanwhile, many of the Chinese prisoners invoked habeas corpus and went to court to establish their citizenship. Nofil’s account details the history of resistance to incarceration and individuals’ navigation of the US legal system to establish their rights to residency.

By 1926, about 1,100 local jails across the United States housed some 63,000 federal prisoners. In New York, twenty-three per cent of state convicts were non-citizens or ‘border crossers’, but the federal government had neither the money nor the means to deport them. By 1929, most state of New York prisoners were held for violation of immigration law. There was increased pressure for more severe penalties for border crossing and for the building of new federal prisons.

In World War II, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), created in 1933, dealt with ‘enemy aliens’ from German, Italian, and Japanese backgrounds. Two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, INS detained one thousand foreign nationals. Global conflict made incarceration a national security imperative that intensified during the Cold War period.

United States

At the same time, Mexican workers crossing the southern border, though increasingly vital to agriculture, became a new ‘racialized collective’; camps that once held enemy Germans became hubs for incarcerating Mexican farmworkers. Aircraft that deployed paratroopers became planes to airlift deportees. Increasingly, federal anxieties focused on the southern border – as they still do.

But the twenty-first century brought new disruptions. The attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 heightened security concerns. In 2003, with the creation of a new agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), under the Department of Homeland Security, migrants became conflated with terrorists, with shattering consequences ‘for both citizens and noncitizens perceived to be Arab or Muslim’. The agency’s budget doubled and ICE was required to maintain 34,000 detention beds per night, acquired through a proliferation of ‘intergovernmental service agreements’, increasingly with private as well as local and state partners.

‘The enduring idea that deportation and border control are federal powers,’ Nofil concludes, ‘has obscured the ways in which the detention and removal of migrants has always been a local project.’ The arrival of thousands of undocumented migrants over the southern border became a local issue to northern cities in new ways in 2022, when Republican Texan Governor Greg Abbott began bussing thousands of these new arrivals to northern, largely

Democrat cities. Texas sent nearly 46,000 migrants to New York; 37,000 to Chicago; more than 12,000 to Washington DC. They arrived in winter late at night without proper clothing or food, to be housed in hotels. Between 2022 and 2024, more than 120,000 southern border crossers arrived in northern neighbourhoods, which increasingly began to turn on the newcomers. The Democrat mayor of New York infamously claimed the arrivals would destroy New York City. Opposition to migration became more widespread. Trump’s promise to deport millions of unauthorised migrants clearly resonated with millions of voters, despite their vital role as workers in aged care and child care, in domestic work and in hospitals and on farms, and much else. The consequences are yet to be seen.

Written before Trump’s election victory, The Migrant’s Jail is essential reading for those who seek to understand his seemingly radical immigration policies. They rest on a deep history of migrant incarceration and deportation in the United States from the late nineteenth century. This is history at its best: it aids our understanding. Brianna Nofil’s book offers original scholarship informed by deep and wide-ranging research. It is an engrossing read and essential to understanding our world today. g

Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne.

What lasts as well as this illustration of the ark kept over since childhood? The closed cabin,

that dark indoors, huge and somehow private, like all homes of love. The shake of the storm

asking, what difference between saved and preserved, the crates of birds, the snug-penned animals, and Noah at his table at his rest, my mother blanching jars

as the brambles of August 1997 are boiled into velvetness, forever themselves,

so summer could be poured, checked, and made airtight with a lid, stacked and ordered on a shelf.

The scent reaching us outside at the fence, all of us watching on impressed

as my father dips the paintbrush into varnish, laying on the ambering thick, like this.

Niall Campbell ❖

The river of life

A subterranean novel

Jane Sullivan

AThe Buried Life by

Andrea Goldsmith

Transit Lounge

$34.99 pb, 318 pp

drian is a professor at a top Australian university and his specialty is death. He lectures on it, writes books on it. Both his parents died when he was a child, one by suicide, but those are long-forgotten events that have nothing to do with his life’s work.

A pretty strong level of denial is going on here, you might think. It is what lies beneath denial that is Andrea Goldsmith’s theme. She takes the title of her novel from a Matthew Arnold poem of the same name that explores fundamental thoughts and emotions that we keep hidden away from others and from ourselves. Apt in the repressed world of nineteenth-century England – and, it would seem, no less apt in the post-Freudian, comparatively liberated world of twenty-first-century Australia.

Goldsmith specialises in ensemble novels, bringing contrasting characters together so the reader can observe all the small collisions and the sparks and bruises that result. In this story, most of the colliding characters are denizens of well-educated, middle-class, middle-to-older-aged Melbourne, a world where people quote poetry and compare gourmet cheeses, a world familiar to anyone who has been to a social gathering where the guests are academics whingeing about the terrible state of academia. These are people of privilege, but there is an underlying air of discontent or confusion that promises drama.

In the manner of George Eliot, Goldsmith introduces each of her three main characters with a summary of character, history, and situation. So we meet Adrian, ‘a temperate sort of man’; Laura, an exotic Nefertiti-like beauty with a successful career as a social scientist; and Adrian’s friend Kezi, a young lesbian who supports herself with call centre work, while her real passion is making craft paper. (Nobody has children, which seems a lost opportunity: but maybe that would add too complicated a layer.)

This summing-up breaks the classic rule of creative writing: show, don’t tell. But rules are made to be broken, and if that was good enough for George Eliot, it’s certainly good enough for Goldsmith.

Another parallel with Eliot, which Goldsmith acknowledges, is Laura’s marriage to Tony, with its echoes of Dorothea’s disastrous marriage to Casaubon in Middlemarch. But whereas Casaubon is a glum, dry stick of a man, Tony is loud, charming, controlling, and nasty. He is the one truly insufferable character in a story where people are generally observed with a satirical yet affectionate eye. Laura doesn’t just suffer Tony gladly, she

worships him. He strode into her life when she was a young, vulnerable student hungry for intellectual heft; he was her genius and mentor. She has never seen beyond that, and any small doubts are buried under the utter terror of facing a life without him.

Goldsmith specialises in ensemble novels, bringing contrasting characters together

Goldsmith constructs her scenes with a skill that enables the reader to see the characters’ shortcomings, denials, and evasions long before the characters themselves become aware of them. There is a gleeful feel to this double vision: we are like children at a pantomime watching the villain creep up behind the oblivious hero as we shout ‘Behind you!’. But there are also surprises and poignant moments as Adrian, Laura, and Kezi all face the most disturbing aspects of the buried life.

Music, novels, and poetry are important in this densely allusive story, particularly at a moment where we are told Adrian is about to fall in love. He is driving back from Adelaide and stops at a roadside café. I am guessing that he will fall for the checkout chick behind the counter, but something much more improbable and magical happens: a beautiful voice emerges from the café’s sound system, and Adrian (the temperate man, not particularly fond of classical music) is transfixed. He finds out that it is Kathleen Ferrier singing The Farewell, the last part of Mahler’s The Song of the Earth. This revelation leads the way to him falling in love with a living woman.

For Matthew Arnold, love offers a way to revive the buried life: this is true also in Goldsmith’s story, but with the added complication that love can confuse, distract, and lead to dead ends. My favourite character is Kezi, and love brings her much grief and fear. She has broken ties with Crossroads, the cult-like church that formed her as a child, but her parents, still within the church, have disowned her and her sexuality. While rejecting Crossroad’s control, she misses its comfort and certainty and the ecstatic singing. She has had plenty of girlfriends but can’t bear to let any of them get too close.

After a dead woman singing her way into Adrian’s heart in the roadside café, my second favourite scene is when Laura’s sister and her husband, long derided by Tony as boring nonentities, finally get up the courage to tell him where to get off, despite Laura’s frantic attempts to keep the peace.

In a novel where death plays such a prominent part, it is no surprise that one of the characters dies, and the tale ends with an imaginary journey into an Antarctica of the mind and spirit. Part of me was thinking that surely nobody is ever collected or eloquent enough to improvise such a tale at a deathbed. Another part of me was feeling: All right, I will suspend my disbelief and I might yet be moved.

Matthew Arnold ends his poem with another metaphor, the river of life: ‘And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes.’ In showing us the inner world and interactions of her trio of characters, Goldsmith offers us the gift of the hills and the sea and what runs between. g

Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne author and literary columnist.

Patriarchal horror

A bizarre curio from the Nobel laureate

Jonathan Ricketson

TThe Empusium: A health report horror story by Olga Tokarczuk

translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Text Publishing

$34.99 pb, 320 pp

he title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.

Like its concocted title, The Empusium is a bizarre curio, a strange and uncategorisable novel that melds disparate elements into a satisfying whole. The set-up is a riff on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924): it follows an engineering student, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, who, in 1913, seeks treatment for tuberculosis at an expensive sanatorium in Görbersdorf (now Sokołowsko) in Western Poland. A traumatised young man, Wojnicz hopes that the clear mountain air and the tortuous bathing regimes will cure his affliction. He enters a gentleman’s guesthouse, filled with pompous pseudo-intellectuals who can be difficult to distinguish from one another: Walter Frommer (‘theosophist’ and ‘privy counsellor’), August August (‘socialist-humanist’ and ‘classical philologist’), and Longin Lukas (‘Catholic traditionalist’ and ‘gymnasium teacher’). Wojnicz sees a kindred spirit in Thilo von Hahn, a sensitive young painter who is dying. A large part of the novel consists of dull and vexatious conversations between the men in the guesthouse. The topics traverse art, philosophy, science, and religion. As Wojnicz listens, he notes that the subject always returns to their negative perceptions of women. The vile Longin Lukas, opining on symbolism in Renaissance art, argues that the Mona Lisa’s smile represents ‘a woman’s entire evolutionary strategy for coping with life [which] is to seduce and manipulate’.

To construct these discussions, Tokarczuk has ventriloquised the misogynistic views of important writers of the past (in her Author’s Note, she states that she drew upon Freud, Darwin, Shakespeare, Sartre, Ovid, Swift, and Plato, among others). That the modern reader finds them alienating and abhorrent is part of Tokarczuk’s design; she wants to startle the reader, to brutalise them with the reality of misogyny that is all-pervasive as the respiratory illness that permeates the mountain resort.

Here, Tokarczuk departs from a popular trend in recent historical fiction, which is the retelling of familiar stories with a feminist revisionist slant. In novels such as Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), the focus is on moving marginalised voices to the centre of the story, and on the restoration of female agency and dignity. The

novels are as reflective of current political discourse as they are of historical research. Emma Herdman, editor of Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), argues that the appeal of these novels is their appeal to current concerns: that ‘the comfort of a story that’s already known’ has the effect of ‘mak[ing] contemporary debates more accessible’.

In The Empusium, by contrast, the marginalised voices remain hidden in darkness, and the past Tokarczuk depicts is discomfiting and utterly strange. Though her approach to narrative voice and characterisation is different, what Tokarczuk shares with her contemporaries is an outrage at current injustices; she admits that the novel germinated out of ‘anger and spite’. It is impossible to read The Empusium without the current Polish context in mind. The Vice-Chair of a recent UN report stated that, due to the country’s restrictive abortion laws, the situation in Poland ‘constitutes gender-based violence and may rise to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’.

The Empusium is also a mystery. It draws on the conventions of gothic literature and weird fiction. In between appointments with doctors and sessions of hydrotherapy, the men of the guesthouse imbibe Schwärmerei, a liqueur that is brewed from hallucinogenic hooded mushrooms. Wojnicz grows increasingly paranoid: there are deaths at the resort that cannot be accounted for by tuberculosis alone, the men seemingly growing sicker rather than improving. Then there are the charcoal burners, the near-wild men that live in the Stone Mountains and worship the tuntschi, the primordial female spirits of the forest.

As the horrors mount, Tokarczuk creates an atmosphere of dread and suspense, a turning of the screw. The translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, does not have the agile, nimble quality that Jennifer Croft, the other principal interpreter of Tokarczuk’s work, brought to her magisterial translations of Flights (2017) and The Books of Jacob (2021) But Lloyd-Jones’s prose is sensuous and lush, the Görbersdorf sanatorium and its surroundings conveyed with unsettling imagery. Describing the soot-faced charcoal burners’ settlement in the woods, Lloyd Jones suggests that ‘the skin of the forest had been ripped off, leaving the wound inflamed’.

Moreover, our nervous protagonist Wojnicz is a synaesthetic, highly sensitised to an environment that hums with mystery. As the men of the guesthouse pose for a photograph in the forest, it seems as if ‘they are standing on a stage’, and the ‘spectators are the trees, the blueberry bushes, the moss-covered stones and some fluid, ill-defined presence that is moving like streams of warmer air among the mighty trunks, boughs and branches’.

The novel builds to a hallucinatory and bloody climax. In the final few pages, the dark spell that Tokarczuk has so expertly cast is almost undone by an astounding, regressive twist. It is an unfortunate authorial decision and one that creates confusion for the sake of shock.

With her ‘story of patriarchal horror’, Tokarczuk embraces a genre that gives form to her outrage and disgust. The misogynistic ideas that shape the sensibilities of her characters remain widespread in today’s world. The Empusium is a cry in the dark, a primal scream; an unleashing of anger against male writers long dead. g

Jonathan Ricketson is the 2025 ABR Rising Star.

Chance

A novel with a Conradian debt

Andrew van der Vlies

WTheft

by Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury

$32.99 pb, 351 pp

hat’s in a novel’s epigraph – this one for example: ‘In a general way it’s very difficult for one to become remarkable’? We might read these words as an elliptical suggestion that the narrative we are about to encounter will raise the question of character. Perhaps we will witness one or more characters struggling to achieve something out of the ordinary – or struggling in entirely unremarkable ways, remaining unremarkable. Such is the stuff of much of the best fiction, after all, as well as the course of most lives.

The provenance of this epigraph, which stands at the head of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s new novel, confirms that both readings are appropriate (and to both novels). It comes from Joseph Conrad’s 1913 novel Chance, which might have been his most commercially successful book (aimed, cynics might say, at the middlebrow reader), but which was no less concerned with his perennial themes: fidelity to principle – whether craft or a general sense of the good over the expedient – in the face of the indifference of the universe, before which the smallness of human actions, plans, and desires are revealed to be merely variations in a minor key of some dimly apprehended theme.

These Conradian preoccupations seem entirely germane to Theft, which unfolds chiefly in coastal Tanzania in the later 1990s, though we see something of the youths of the novel’s three chief characters – Karim, Fauzia, and Badar – over the preceding two decades. Gurnah’s text is concerned with cycles of behaviour repeating themselves and with the question of character in the face of what is understood by these young people themselves to be the operation of fate; each rises to the challenge differently, and not always in ways that their upbringing might have led them to believe likely (as is often the case for Conrad’s characters, too).

Karim is the child of a wilful young mother, Raya, married off by her family in haste to an apparently ‘amiable man in his forties’ when they discover she is being courted by a freedom fighter. Bakari Abbas might seem ready to ‘save everyone from humiliation and disgrace’, but the personal cost is too high for Raya, who abandons the abusive relationship, taking their toddler to her parents in Zanzibar, and later leaving the boy there as she makes a new life for herself in Dar es Salaam, marrying a well-meaning and moderately well-to-do pharmacist, Haji. ‘Karim was not completely surprised by her departure,’ we learn. He spends the remainder of his school years with his elder

half-brother and his sister-in-law, who helps broker a marriage, in due course, to schoolteacher Fauzia.

Fauzia has overcome her childhood epilepsy, excelled at school, and committed herself to public service as a teacher, much to her closest friend Hawa’s world-weary bemusement. ‘In an ideal world, you might be instructing intelligent, hardworking youths who are destined to become responsible citizens of the world,’ she berates her friend. ‘But you are not living in an ideal world, and the crowd you’ll be teaching will be like the herd that we were schooled with, or something like them, rude, uninterested, bored and uninformed.’ In a Conradian universe, these would be the naïve or the unlettered, either blessed with a lack of consciousness of the real state of the world or spared the cynicism that comes with a refined sense of obligations to a vocation, or a noble ideal. They are often spared the tragic fate that befalls Conrad’s more complex main characters – think the robust Singleton in Narcissus, Stevie in The Secret Agent, or the eponymous ‘hero’ of Nostromo, versus the latter’s Martin Decoud.

Gurnah’s Karim is more Decoud than Nostromo, growing from a ‘lanky, soft-spoken, self-possessed boy whose unwavering gaze sometimes disconcerted grownups’ to a handsome university scholarship student and subsequently a civil servant, destined, everyone says, to be a cabinet minister. As a child, Karim had ‘at times wondered why parents like his, who were neglectful and unloving, bothered to have children’. Entirely unsuited for fatherhood’s demands – narcissism replaces, or emerges from, what is earlier called his self-possession – he takes decisions that recapitulate those of his parents. Some readers might feel the gradual removal of readerly affection for Karim to be Theft’s great heist, though that would be to miss the complex accounting for chance, self-consciousness, and agency that acquit the novel’s Conradian debt fittingly.

In this economy, it is the third chief character, Badar, who emerges as Gurnah’s champion of moral attention, remarkable in his refusal to see himself as such and thus not make claims on others that cannot be repaid. Raised in the country by a foster family without affection, Badar is brought to Raya and Haji’s house as a servant, removed from school and all he has known, forced to navigate a simmering contempt directed at him by Haji’s father, Othman, who had, it turns out, suffered a crime at the hands of Badar’s father, a distant kinsman (whom Badar has never known). Othman forces Badar’s ejection from the house, which allows Karim to present himself as the teenager’s saviour (as his own father had saved his mother from dishonour).

Karim’s exacting of Badar’s apparent debt, and its eventual frustration, provides much of the pleasure of the novel’s final section, in which Zanzibar’s complex insertion into Western economies of charity and indebtedness comes to echo Theft’s interpersonal politics. It is here that the title reveals its metaphorical charge, for each actual ‘theft’ in the novel, bar Badar’s father’s, turns out a red herring. What other thefts are at stake in an age of mass tourism that reduces complex societies to exotic backdrops for holiday drama – or volunteering? These play their own part in the novel’s denouement, which leaves two of the three chief characters daring to steal their own happiness from the jaws of fate. It is a happier ending than Joseph Conrad might have countenanced. g

Horror time

A contemplative and confounding novel

Diane Stubbings

CTwist: A novel

by Colum McCann Bloomsbury $32.99

pb, 239 pp

onnections made across time and space have long been a focal point of Irish writer Colum McCann’s oeuvre. From the construction of the first railway tunnels under New York (This Side of Brightness, 1998) to his singular portrayal of the history and emotional toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Apeirogon (2020), McCann has weighed what it means to tether oneself to another person, another place, another moment in history. Even his recent foray into non-fiction – American Mother (2024), written with Diane Foley, whose journalist son James was brutally murdered by ISIS – concerns itself with Foley’s attempt to find some sort of bridge between herself and her son’s killers.

McCann has built these novels around some stunning metaphors: sandhogs burrowing through the mud of the Hudson River, a hair’s breadth from drowning; a man walking a tightrope between two New York skyscrapers (Let the Great World Spin, 2009); and the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic (TransAtlantic, 2013; a reflection of Irish-American McCann’s own transatlantic trajectory).

Twist also concerns itself with connections, McCann’s metaphor here the cables that run beneath the oceans, carrying much of the world’s internet traffic. The configuration of these cables, ‘neat concentric rings. Like the inner workings of a tree’, mirrors a narrative structure that figures in much of McCann’s writing, that of stories within stories, ‘[t]ime within time … History within history.’ What emerges is a contemplative and occasionally confounding novel that examines breakdown, repair, and, vitally, the fictions we create to weld together shattered truths.

Anthony Fennell, our narrator, is ruminating on the death of John Conway. He is uncertain ‘that anybody, anywhere, is truly aware of what lay at the core of Conway and the era he, and we, lived through’. Conway was chief of mission on the Georges Lecointe, a cable repair ship running out of Cape Town. Fennell, a ‘struggling novelist and occasional playwright’, inveigles his way onboard to write an article about the ship’s operations. From their first meeting, Fennell is consumed by Conway, a man who seems ‘troubled and angelic all at once … there and not there at the same time’.

The George Lecointe sets sail along the west coast of Africa, towards the Democratic Republic of Congo, searching for a broken cable that has left much of western Africa in a communications blackout. As the ship sails north, Fennell probes Conway’s

attitude towards the moral dilemma of repairing a system that distorts, damages, and traumatises: ‘We’re just fixing wires, man. Not the internet. I’m not responsible for the shit that happens out there. That’s someone else’s job.’ When Conway goes AWOL from the ship, Fennell obsesses over where he has gone, and why.

The cable-break was the result of floodwaters pushing seaward from the upper reaches of the Congo River. McCann’s rendering of these floods is both fierce and majestic. The rush and turmoil of muddy waters carry the river’s entire history: ‘it was as if the Congo was purging itself’.

Twist’s allusions to Heart of Darkness are clear, although this is by no means a retelling of Joseph Conrad’s novel: Conway is no Kurtz. McCann seems more concerned with the colonialism that lingers in this supposedly postcolonial age. As seating arrangements at Donald Trump’s recent inauguration forcefully demonstrated, there is a new breed of potentate claiming sovereignty – via undersea cables and satellites in the sky – over how we think, feel, and, by extension, act.

The surge running from river to ocean, overwhelming the internet cables and allowing their flow of information – ‘the flotsam of our longings, the jetsam of our truths’ – to commingle with the detritus of Conrad’s mythologised river, carries with it an intimation that the ‘heart of darkness’, its ‘horror’, is no longer confined to the innermost reaches of an unknowable continent; is no longer embodied in the single figure of Kurtz. Rather, it is an ocean which surrounds us and into which we, every day, willingly venture, entrusting to it our identities and our futures. Where Conrad blurred the boundaries between the civilised and the savage, McCann gestures instead towards the internet’s blurring – its twisting together – of the profound and the inane. As Fennell observes, the internet is ‘that great conundrum that holds us together and apart at the same time’.

In addition to cables and the Congo, McCann utilises a crush of surplus metaphors and references – time, turbulence, free diving, climate change, Waiting for Godot – which tend to suffocate the novel’s core ideas. As urgent as Twist’s preoccupations are, the novel’s intellectual heft outweighs its emotional force, something not helped by the three unappealing characters around whom the story revolves, nor by the muted rendering of what is at stake for each of them. The effect is a novel whose moral imperative is substantially blunted. Fennell’s shrug of a conclusion that ‘[e]verything is made to be disassembled. Not all of it can be repaired. All there is is the trying’ is hardly the ‘heart of an immense darkness’ that oppresses the conclusion of Conrad’s novel.

One indelible note in Twist stems from Fennell’s musings on the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining of Heart of Darkness. Documentaries about the making of the film reveal that, as the cameras rolled, Martin Sheen attempted to capture something of his character’s state of mind by pushing himself towards physical and mental breakdown. Fennell recognises in this scene and its real-life counterpart the torsion between fact and fiction, illusion and truth, that contemporary media and communications magnifies; the torsion that is at the heart of McCann’s novel and that might read as an epitaph for our own times: ‘One sequence, the invented, gets shown down the tube. The other, the real, gets lost in the haze.’ g

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‘Your body, my chow’

Two novels about female appetite

Eleanor Spencer-Regan

IThe Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim

Brazen

$34.99 pb, 289 pp

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary

Scribe

$29.99 pb, 256 pp

n 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word ‘hangry’, defined as ‘bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger’. Incidentally, the word ‘mansplain’ was also added in 2018. If you are not familiar with this one, I am sure there is a man nearby who will be happy to enlighten you. Reading Monika Kim’s début novel, The Eyes Are the Best Part, I began to wonder whether we may now need a word to describe the inverse state of being ‘hungry as a result of being bad-tempered or irritable’. Some onomatopoeic portmanteau of ‘rage’ and ‘ravening’, perhaps?

Kim’s protagonist, Korean-American eldest daughter Ji-won, has a lot to be bad tempered about. Her Appa has left the family’s apartment after an extramarital affair, her Umma is feverishly cooking traditional Korean dishes in the vain hope of luring him home, and she is daily subjected to racist and misogynistic

micro-aggressions by the frat boys on campus: ‘Once you go Asian, you never go Caucasian.’

Both George, her Umma’s new boyfriend, and Geoffrey, her performatively woke classmate, are veritable semaphore displays of red flags. George is a middle-aged white man who shamelessly ogles young waitresses and drives a truck decorated with GOP bumper stickers. His loudly self-professed appreciation of ‘Asian’ culture begins and ends with Kung Pao chicken and Lolicon pornography.

The eyes that constantly stray to Ji-won’s breasts are ‘a pale, icy blue that reminds [her] of the Niagara Falls’. Soon she begins to dream vividly about eating these eyes: ‘My hand darts out and snatches the eye from the plate, and before I can think, I shove the entire thing into my mouth. The cartilage is thick and tough. I bite down until it pops, bursting open, its salty liquid oozing down my throat.’ This is no more an act of violence than George’s self-satisfied butchering of her family’s mother tongue, his lascivious visual dissection of Asian female bodies, and his unwillingness to pronounce the sisters’ names correctly (‘pronunciation isn’t my strong suit. If it bothers you that much, I can give you both nicknames’).

Admittedly, it is hardly a subtle metaphor, especially to any reader familiar with John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) or Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975). It is the unremittingly toxic masculinity of every man in this novel that is the true source of horror, rather than the gruesome appetites of the protagonist, perhaps because, as with Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), we begin to question the reliability of our ‘unravelling’ first-person narrator. The too-frequent dream

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sequences and the sudden, almost offhand neurological diagnosis at the end of the novel leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole thing was a murder spree or merely an impotent feminist revenge fantasy.

That said, it is the uneven pacing rather than the premise of Kim’s novel that sticks in the throat. The entirely predictable climax of the novel feels strangely perfunctory, especially compared to the somewhat sluggish earlier chapters, and Ji-won’s parting vow (a little patricide is on the menu) feels strangely bloodless.

It is not hunger but thirst that drives the vampiric protagonist of Marina Yuszczuk’s novel Thirst, originally published in Spanish as La Sed (2020). Comprising two converging first-person narratives, it is set in Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth century and the years immediately post-Covid. The novel has been described as a ‘queer vampire novel’, but, given the inherent queerness of the genre since the days of John William Polidori, this seems almost tautological.

With her cadaverous pallor, ‘Maria’ initially seems more akin to Max Schreck’s Nosferatu than Stephanie Meyer’s sparklingly sanitary and well-socialised Cullen clan. In fact, Yuszczuk draws on a wide range of source texts. Her vampire is variously a Gothic seductress who calls to mind Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla; the kind of tortured soul familiar to readers of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire; a vigilante in sunglasses reminiscent of Blade; and an almost moral monster who bemoans her own violent existence in the mode of the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The humanised or feeling vampire is hardly new. Despite her superhuman strength, it is Maria’s vulnerabilities that allow the reader to identify with her. Sold by her starving mother to a shadowy ‘Master’ in a high castle, she recalls that ‘there were many other like me, little girls and boys held captive in freezing rooms, steeped in our own filth; we would occasionally be thrown scraps of food to keep us alive’. Such inhumane treatment leads her to grow up ‘mad with fear and suppressed rage’, and we readily understand that she is more sinned against than sinning, even as she drains a young priest of his blood in a makeshift black mass.

If Maria’s orgiastic feeding on the city’s underclass holds a mirror to the violence and danger of life in late nineteenthcentury Buenos Aires, it is societal anomie and personal ennui that we see reflected in the modern-day Alma’s numbed alienation, not only from those around her but from her own once urgent needs and desires. The vampire thirsts for blood, but Alma, recently divorced and struggling to comprehend her mother’s terminal illness, has lost her appetite for life. While it is Maria

who is inadvertently freed from her coffin, it is Alma who is truly awakened by their encounter.

The historical portion of the narrative is more successful than that set in the present. Alma reflects, ‘[Maria] doesn’t seem to belong … how can I explain it … in this reality’. Indeed, Yuszczuk’s vampire seems to be stripped of all allure in a Buenos Aires of neon signs and overpriced wine bars. Moments that were surely intended to evoke pathos – for example, when the centuries-old vampire walks blithely into traffic (‘I explained how traffic lights worked and realised I was going to have to explain everything to her: traffic, cars, the city as it was now’) – seem instead mildly comic.

Yuszczuk’s prose style is to tell rather than show, particularly in this second half of the novel where her narrative signposting becomes entirely superfluous. The reader could probably intuit without the author’s help that, having descended into the family crypt and unlocked a coffin, Alma has lived ‘her last day in a familiar world’.

Despite the graphic descriptions of murder and sex throughout the novel, it is Alma’s decision to desert her young son and join Maria in the mausoleum (thus bookending the narratives with a pair of abandoned children) that arouses the most visceral reaction. This perhaps reveals a set of traditionalist assumptions about the sanctity of motherhood, but it is also because the decision is not so much a delicious plot twist as entirely unsupported by the narrative thus far. That a young woman should be in thrall to a vampire is an accepted generic convention, yet Yuszczuk fails entirely to flesh out Alma’s sudden but powerful obsession with Maria, suggesting neither a supernatural influence at work nor the unhinging effects of grief. As T.S. Eliot might say, there is no objective correlative, and it leaves the reader feeling unsatisfied, despite the seeming richness of the fare.

Despite their weaknesses, both novels speak powerfully to the fact that women have appetites, and not just those that can be suppressed with Ozempic. In a post- and now also pre-Trump age, the continuing assaults, both physical and political, on female bodies and freedoms will lead authors like Kim and Yuszczuk to create imaginative spaces in which women can defend themselves. While men like Nick Fuentes crow ‘your body, my choice’, we need protagonists like Ji-won and Maria who will sharpen their knives, lick their lips, and retort with ‘your body, my chow’. g

Eleanor Spencer-Regan is an Honorary Senior Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Principal of Janet Clarke Hall. ❖

Milk break

A docile erotic thriller

Jordan Prosser

Right now on the website for A24, you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination. The T-shirt suggests untold lasciviousness; this glass of milk, they wish to tell us, is but the tip of the iceberg in the erotic spectacle of the season.

Babygirl the film, much like the T-shirt, is full of promise, with little payoff; that glass of milk is an all-too-early high point in an otherwise disappointingly restrained character drama. When a movie loudly proclaims that it has something to say about sexual taboos, one wishes the finished product had half as much curiosity or conviction as its own characters.

Romy is CEO of a warehouse robotics company, screenwriting shorthand for an ambitious, career-focused woman whose life is built upon order and predictability. She lives in a Manhattan penthouse with her picture-perfect family, including her theatre director husband, Jacob (a refreshingly against-type Antonio Banderas). Before we see a frame of footage in Babygirl, we hear the sounds of Romy and Jacob’s sexual congress; theirs is by no means a loveless marriage. Moments later, Romy sneaks off to a spare room to pleasure herself while watching submission fetish porn. So far, so standard for the classic erotic thriller formula. Even though our high-powered heroine has it all, she is driven by the search for something different – something more.

That something more, in Romy’s case, arrives in the form of Samuel, one of a batch of new office interns and the only one brave enough (or foolish enough) to ask Romy direct questions about her company’s ethics and to point out the post-Botox bruises on her cheeks. Their workplace banter quickly escalates into a full-blown affair, with Romy seemingly having found an outlet for her ‘deviancy’, which involves not merely domination but outright degradation. Babygirl’s most compelling moments

involve Kidman showing us Romy grappling with, then finally giving over to, these long-repressed desires. But as anyone wellversed in erotic thrillers ought to know, getting what you want is only half the story. The other half is trying to put the genie back in the bottle, a unique challenge in this case, given that Romy admits that the risk of ‘losing everything’ is her biggest turn-on.

Fair Play (2023), written and directed by Chloe Domont, was a vivid collision of sexual and corporate power dynamics set at a high-stakes Manhattan investment firm, earning its genre stripes through the mutually assured destruction of its two horny, ambitious leads. In the modern erotic thriller pantheon, Babygirl feels docile by comparison, retreating to the safety of pop psychology whenever it threatens to do anything truly transgressive. Each of its individual elements – from Kidman’s go-for-broke performance to the wonderfully bacchanalian score from Cristobal Tapia de Veer – hints at a more daring and subversive film. For the most part, Reijn’s stylistic naturalism is at odds with her story’s genre roots, and the end result feels frustratingly tentative: a film unwilling to fully commit to its own anthropological enquiries and unwilling to make its characters pay any meaningful price.

Babygirl suffers further by inevitable comparison to two other Kidman films: Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), in which another high-powered New York professional (Kidman’s husband-at-the-time, Tom Cruise) teeters on the brink of a sexual abyss (at Christmastime no less); and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), an infinitely thornier age-gap drama in which a New York widow (Kidman) entertains the notion that a ten-year-old boy might be her reincarnated husband. Kidman has never shied away from provocative material; her courage and flexibility as a performer is key to these films’ legacies. Decades on, however, Kidman’s projects often struggle to match her talent.

Meanwhile, Harris Dickinson – so fully realised and compelling in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022) – is underutilised in the role of Samuel, the latest in a long line of sexy cinematic interlopers with the power to burn their lovers’ carefully curated worlds to the ground. Samuel is a cipher with a non-existent backstory; seductive when he needs to be, threatening as the plot demands, and conveniently absent otherwise. This would appear to contradict one of his own early dictums to Romy: ‘I’m not a toy you can pick up and play with.’ Reijn’s script treats him exactly as such.

The most radical thing about Babygirl might be the way it spins the forbidden fruit of its central relationship into a genuinely heartfelt treatise on sex positivity and intergenerational acceptance. Romy’s attraction to Samuel is not merely because of his youthful good looks, but because of the world view that youth grants him. While Jacob is quick to dismiss ‘female masochism’ as a wholly ‘male fantasy’, Samuel disagrees, and treats Romy’s kinks with the respect he believes they deserve. Similarly, once the cat is out of the bag, it is Romy’s teenage daughter Isabel (Esther McGregor) who reassures her that infidelity is not the cardinal sin it used to be. Even Romy’s ambitious young EA, Esme (Sophie Wilde), chooses to leverage the scandal not to ruin her boss’s career but to help get that storied career back on track. When this generation takes over corporate America, could that be the end of workplace drama as we know it? Great news for employees; a great loss for the genre. g

Nicole Kidman as Romy (photograph by Niko Tavernise, courtesy of A24)

László Tóth in America

Brady Corbet’s pursuit of historical hinge points

Harry Windsor

Brady Corbet made his first film, The Childhood of a Leader, when he was twenty-four. A former child actor, he came to directing after years as the Zelig of the arthouse, acting in films by auteurs such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. When The Childhood of a Leader premièred at the Venice Film Festival in 2015, Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), serving as the president of the Orizzonti jury, likened Corbet to Orson Welles, an invocation so sacrilegious it was sure to provoke the ire of certain American critics, who have had Corbet in the gun ever since.

If not quite Citizen Kane, Corbet’s début was certainly bold, and it established the director’s interest in mapping historical hinge points. The film posits a diplomat shepherding the Treaty of Versailles as the father of fascism; his unbiddable little boy grows up to become a Stalinesque dictator. Corbet’s point was blunt and not exactly ground-breaking, and his characters felt representational rather than human. The same was true of his next film, Vox Lux (2018), which examined the commodification of trauma through the survivor of a school shooting, who is catapulted to pop stardom after singing at a televised memorial for her classmates.

His first and – to date – only film shot largely in America, Vox Lux was an unhappy experience for Corbet. He has spoken about a moneyman forbidding the use of a slider (a lightweight and inexpensive piece of kit that lets filmmakers dolly the camera without the time-consuming laying of tracks) because the budget supposedly wouldn’t allow it.

Corbet writes his scripts with his wife, Norwegian director Mona Fastvold. The couple started working on a film about the relationship between an architect and the man holding the purse strings – as with filmmakers, an architect’s work is contingent on considerable money and manpower. After making two films in short order, this one took six years to get made, but the interregnum seems to have been beneficial: among many other things, The Brutalist represents posthumous vindication for Demme, who clearly saw something the rest of us missed.

Like The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist begins in the immediate aftermath of global cataclysm. An architect trained at the Bauhaus and responsible for several public buildings at home in Budapest, László Tóth (Adrien Brody) survives his internment in Buchenwald and books passage to America. When he arrives, Tóth jumps on a bus to Philadelphia to stay with a cousin; in a lovely grace note, the camera lingers on the shipmate he will never see again as the bus pulls away. In Philly, he catches the eye of magnate Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who made his fortune in the wartime supply business and commissions him to build a community centre – a shining city upon a hill, if you will, in the cradle of American liberty.

No prizes for guessing where this is going. Pearce has been doing louche villainy better than anyone since The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), and he manages to sell Van Buren’s intellectual pretension without tipping too far into outright buffoonery, while Brody conveys the kind of unadorned directness and selfpossession that draws people in, making Tóth an object of desire as well as resentment – sometimes both at once.

But Corbet isn’t just exploding the myth of the American dream in The Brutalist, as so many filmmakers have done before him: he is interrogating the idea of liberty itself. What does that mean, and is it even possible? Tóth is reborn in America: we meet him climbing out of the dark belly of what turns out to be a ship. His ascent is overlaid with voice-over – a letter from the wife he doesn’t know is still alive, who ominously quotes Goethe just before her husband bursts into the new dawn: ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.’

The sequence ends with the camera whip-panning upwards to find an inverted Statue of Liberty. The filmmaking in The Brutalist is exhilarating – Orson Welles also loved a canted angle, just saying! – and punch-drunk with the possibilities of

the medium. Though it spans two hundred and fifteen minutes, there is a hurtling momentum to it, and not only in the sequences in which the camera speeds down roads and train tracks like a loosed arrow. Rushing headlong into the future is a theme, and Corbet splices in archival footage of Pennsylvania industry and radio broadcasts on the formation of Israel.

[This review continues on page 47]

Adrien Brody as László Tóth in The Brutalist

The Brutalist

The painted word

The logic of an artist’s life

Christopher Allen

TThe Diaries of Fred Williams, 1963-1970

edited by Patrick McCaughey with John Timlin

Miegunyah Press

$120 hb, 658 pp

he diaries of Fred Williams (1927-82) invite the inevitable, unfair, but instructive comparison with those of Donald Friend; unlike the latter, they are not a masterpiece of witty and incisive prose, filled with insightful and indiscreet comments about contemporaries, the life of the artist, and the social and cultural world of the author’s time. They are plainly written observations on the day-to-day life of a hard-working painter, with an emphasis on the practical; it would be wrong to describe them as modest or self-effacing, for manifestly they were not written with any thought of publication. Friend, steeped in the culture of past centuries, was well aware of composing a literary work like the great diarists of earlier generations; Williams was jotting down, especially at the outset, largely professional notes in a standard page-to-a-day business diary.

In this selection, suavely edited by Patrick McCaughey, there are entries about ordering materials, the difficulty of resolving compositions, dealing with collectors, fellow artists, and especially with art dealers, preparing works for exhibition or publication. We learn much about Williams’s painting practice, including his habit of hanging pictures around the house to see them objectively, out of the studio, and leaving them to dry properly before returning to paint on them, or about his process in etching and editioning prints. But there are almost no general reflections about art or attempts to express his own aesthetic in words. In his remarks on the work of other artists, he is quite clear in his judgement as to whether an exhibition is successful or not, and yet there is seldom any discussion about choices of artistic style; his judgement is based on an intuitive sense of formal resolution and quality of execution.

In the age of what Tom Wolfe lampooned as ‘the painted word’, when the art world was ringing with the cacophony of vociferous and doctrinaire arguments about style, Williams stayed aloof from partisan debates, remaining friends with artists of different inspirations and rarely quarrelling with anyone. His own work was still based on a traditional practice of sketching in nature, and yet what he saw was transformed, by an imaginative alchemy that he perhaps wisely never sought to explain, into some of the most memorable images of the Australian landscape in his generation. He left it to others to reflect on the way his particular and even idiosyncratic style evoked the scat-

tered sparseness, subtly bounded by the lines of roads and fences, of rural farmland and paddocks.

Technical matters thus take up much of his attention, but there are other concerns, especially about his career, his personal life, and his family. He is something of a hypochondriac, referring several times to ‘feeling his age’ when barely forty years old, complaining about sore legs and ankles, and, as an asthmatic, sometimes breathlessness or chest pains. Above all he is worried about his weight. Williams was very fat at a time when it was relatively rare to be overweight, and he knows he feels better when less heavy; he tries diets and fails to follow them until he is eventually hospitalised on his doctor’s orders and put on a draconian regime.

Meanwhile, he is establishing himself as an important artist: in 1964 he wins the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship and sets off for Europe again with his wife, Lyn; in 1966 he is awarded the Wynne Prize for landscape, which he notes was the only prize he really coveted; in 1967 he has a first sell-out exhibition. The family grows from one daughter at the beginning of the volume to three; we hear about pregnancies, births, and infancies. They move first to Upwey near Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges, and then later to the comfortable suburb of Hawthorn in Melbourne. As his earnings from exhibitions increase, they rent beach houses for family holidays in summer. His mother grows older and has a series of strokes and heart attacks, until, quite suddenly, she dies.

There is of course much too about his artist friends, who include, notably, John Brack and Clifton Pugh, but also Ian Armstrong, George Baldessin, Harry Rosengrave, Leonard French, and Jan Senbergs. There are endless openings and lunches and dinners, especially with Williams’s dealer Rudy Komon, who did so much to promote his career and was a legendary figure in Australian art in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of food is eaten and a great deal of wine imbibed; everyone gets drunk – the diary is punctuated by complaints about monumental hangovers – and most of the men, except for Williams, seem to get into terrible quarrels at one point or another; occasionally they even attack Williams, but he seems not to take the bait.

Through all of this there is a deep pathos, as we watch what feels like a slow-motion film of people’s lives disintegrating, artists growing estranged from their wives and falling out with friends, dealers, or institutional employers. Gradually it becomes apparent, even through a text that is never self-aggrandising, that Williams is emerging as a leading artist of his time, while some of his friends are stalling or losing their way. This is particularly painful in the case of Armstrong, whose work seems to get more and more disoriented and unresolved. Another friend, Stacha Halpern, returns to Melbourne after some years in Paris, is unable to establish himself, and then unexpectedly dies; it is largely thanks to Williams’s efforts on his behalf that the National Gallery of Victoria holds a retrospective of his work in 1970.

At the same time, almost imperceptibly, we feel Williams’s own confidence growing. He may still suffer from nerves before an exhibition, when he can doubt the quality and validity of everything he has done, but this seems to grow less pronounced within a few years. In discussing the work of other artists, institutions, and practical matters in the world, his tone is poised and

decisive, yet never malicious. He is astonished and disapproving when a new generation of teachers takes over at the National Gallery School and decides to dispense with life drawing and the teaching of draughtsmanship, skills which he well understood to be foundations of his own work.

This book which its author never conceived as a book thus turns out, in spite of its considerable length, to be surprisingly hard to put down: Williams writes well and is articulate, even in casually composed notes, and the story unfolds with the organic logic of life itself, so that we find ourselves naturally wanting to know what happens tomorrow and the day after. It is beautifully produced, illustrated not only with some of the artist’s finest paintings and etchings, but with reproductions of many pages from the diaries, filled with thumbnail sketches of works in progress. The diary entries themselves are usefully annotated throughout, elucidating oblique remarks and identifying many otherwise forgotten people and events,

and greatly enhancing the value of this book as an important document for the history of Australian art in the 1960s. g

[Continued from page 45]

The film’s script reportedly included photographs in the manner of W.G. Sebald, and its first half (before an intermission) takes its title from V.S. Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987). Corbet has spoken of the influence both writers have had on his work, and it’s evident in his preoccupation with history as a cycle that repeats, in the porousness between past and present. That extends to the film’s own construction. Corbet and his cinematographer, Lol Crawley, decided to shoot in VistaVision, a format engineered in the 1950s with a higher-than-usual field of view. Corbet sought to summons the mid-century by emulating Hitchcock’s blocking of actors.

The film’s second half (‘The Hard Core of Beauty’) marks the arrival of Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), confined to a wheelchair after malnutrition-induced osteoporosis, and the couple’s niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). Jones is shrewdly cast, bird-like but with a convincing intelligence and steel. Zsófia, meanwhile, has been rendered mute by her wartime experiences. The first time we hear her speak, years after her arrival in America, she announces her

intention to move to Israel – to the horror of her adoptive parents.

Zsófia takes centre stage in the film’s epilogue, as Daniel Blumberg’s lush and blanketing score shifts from sepulchral horns to chimes and into a synth beat – all the better to celebrate the first retrospective of Tóth’s work, recontextualised by his niece as the means by which he transmuted trauma into art. This is the artist as smuggler, embedding hidden meanings in his own construction.

Given how closely The Brutalist attempts to mimic the scale, ambition, and intricacy of its protagonist’s work in the film’s own design, it is worth asking if Corbet has engineered a similar trick. Zsófia is the first person we see in The Brutalist, under interrogation by border guards. ‘What is your true home?’ they ask her. The girl’s inability to answer means that the question hangs over the film. Three decades later, she has found both her voice and her homeland. The final destination is what matters, she says. But a cross-fade to the girl she was – the prisoner she was – hints that Zsófia’s freedom is illusory, provisional, and that her aunt’s Goethe warning has been forgotten. g

Lyn and Fred Williams, 1966 (photograph by Mark Strizic)

Telling it slant

Emily

Dickinson

in the world

Eleanor Spencer-Regan

IThe Letters of Emily Dickinson edited by Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell

Harvard University Press

US$49.95 hb, 965 pp

n his introduction to The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), Thomas H. Johnson asserted that Dickinson ‘did not live in history and held no view of it, past or current’ and that her ‘rejection of society … shows itself to have been total, not only physically but psychically’. This paternalistic miscasting of Dickinson as the fey ‘Myth’ of Amherst, clad in her snow-white dress, began in the poet’s own lifetime (1830-86) and persisted well into the twentieth century. Ironically, Dickinson was aware of her inadvertent mystique, writing to her cousin, ‘Won’t you tell “the public” that at present I wear a brown dress with a cape if possible browner, and carry a parasol of the same!’

That Dickinson has long been portrayed as existing and writing at a remove from her historical setting has allowed subsequent generations to imaginatively project upon her, remaking her in their own image. The Apple TV+ series Dickinson (2019), for example, gives us a spirited young woman who frustrates her family’s attempts to secure her marriage, cross-dresses to attend a lecture open only to men, and begins a passionate lesbian affair with her best friend, Susan Gilbert. Despite the series’ deliberate visual, lexical, and musical anachronisms, it may be that this decidedly Generation X incarnation of Dickinson is closer to the truth than Johnson’s virginal recluse, whose ‘acute sensitivity’ was ‘a handicap that she bore as one who lives with a disability’.

Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell’s new edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson certainly suggests so. Collating all 1,049 letters in the 1958 edition, together with at least eight newly discovered or radically re-edited letters, this ambitious volume also includes over two hundred letter-poems (poems accompanied by a signature, the name of an addressee, or both). While nearly all the correspondence sent to Dickinson during her lifetime was destroyed by her sister, Lavinia, immediately after her death, what little survives is also included here.

The editors have taken a forensic approach, redating hundreds of letters by painstakingly cross-referencing meteorological and horticultural records from Amherst, databases such as America’s Historical Newspapers, and diaries belonging to Dickinson’s two siblings. This ‘holistic redating’, together with their meticulous annotations, affords the reader a new appreciation of the ways in which Dickinson registers and responds to community and world events.

Letters offering congratulations on a marriage or condolences for a loss are evidence that Dickinson was engaged with the Amherst community and an extended social network across

Massachusetts. She also initiated and maintained correspondences with a range of notable public intellectuals, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Reverend Charles Wadsworth, and Thomas Niles.

Though Johnson maintained that Dickinson was oblivious to the events of the US Civil War, many letters reveal that she thought often and deeply about the conflict. After the death (or ‘murder’, as Dickinson puts it) of Frazar Stearns, son of the president of Amherst College, at the Battle of New Bern in 1862, she penned the poem ‘It feels a shame to be alive’ (1863), clearly a response to Stearns’s death and potentially an oblique condemnation of her brother, Austin, who had avoided conscription by paying a commutation fee. Like much of Dickinson’s poetry, this slight verse ‘Tell[s] all the truth but tell[s] it slant’.

The early editorial handling of Dickinson’s letters says much not only about nineteenth-century notions of privacy and propriety, but also about the enmity within Dickinson’s extended family. The editors note that while there is surprisingly little accidental or age-related damage to the letters, they represent a ‘spectacular instance’ of intentional mutilation at the hands of others. The erasures or removals, likely the work of Austin or his lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, are generally found in letters written to, or those which mention, Susan Gilbert, Dickinson’s closest friend and later sister-in-law, with whom many critics believe she had an intimate if not physical relationship. Often, ‘Sue’ or ‘Susie’ has been at least partially erased, or there has been an attempt to change pronouns; ‘she’ has been changed to ‘he’ by the erasure of the ‘s’ and ‘her’ is overwritten to read ‘him’. These erasures largely stop in letters written after Austin and Susan’s marriage in 1856; however, there are sporadic later instances, for example in an 1865 letter to Lavinia where an innocuous question about Susan’s health is erased.

While even this new volume does not confirm the nature of their relationship, the poet’s ardent declarations of love in letters sent prior to Susan’s marriage go far beyond the quasi-romantic prosaicisms common in female correspondence of the midnineteenth century. The passionate missives of her youth may evolve into the letter-poems sent next door to the Evergreens, but in a letter of 1873 Dickinson appears to compare herself with other frustrated literary lovers: ‘We remind her we love her –Unimportant fact, though Dante did’nt [sic] think so nor Swift, nor Mirabeau.’

We see similar expressions of ardour in Dickinson’s letters to Otis Lord in the early 1880s: ‘I do – do want you tenderly –The Air is soft as Italy, but when it touches me, I spurn it with a Sigh, because it is not you.’ In the past, critics have used this body of correspondence to argue that the poet’s relationship with Susan was purely platonic. Modern readers will surely have no difficulties with the possibility that Dickinson was romantically attracted to, or involved with, both Susan and Lord.

Dickinson’s early correspondence with girlhood friend Abiah Root is another example of Todd’s editorial violence. While Root’s side of their correspondence is lost, the twenty-two extant letters sent by Dickinson between 1845 and 1854 were transcribed by Todd, who silently omitted large sections of text, physically cutting them and pasting only the sections she wished to retain onto blank sheets. The cut sections of this correspondence have

been recovered and are now housed at Amherst College, whereas Todd’s transcription is at Yale. A painstaking process of reconstructing the letters was begun by Ralph W. Franklin in 1995; Miller and Mitchell have proofed his reconstructions against the materials at both libraries. The reconstructed correspondence reveals a puckishly irreverent teenage Dickinson, who details life in Amherst with a sharp eye and sharper tongue, acidly aping her elders and making plain her impatience with many of the social mores of the day: ‘Mrs Jones and Mrs S Mack have both of them a little daughter. Very promising Children I understand. I dont [sic] doubt if they live they will be ornaments to society. I think they are both to be considered as embryos of future usefulness.’

Even in these very early letters, we see the germination of the mature poet’s chief imaginative preoccupations, namely death and the possibilities of the hereafter. Less than four years separates the first letter in the volume, in which an eleven-year-old Dickinson gleefully (and ungrammatically) describes to Austin the visit of a ‘skonk’ to the family’s hen house, and the 1846 letter to Abiah Root in which she writes: ‘Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that

The Stone

i.m. Dorothy Porter

I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be.’

That ‘Death’ and ‘Eternity’ should feature so prominently in Dickinson’s poetry is hardly surprising, as her letters reveal that ‘the supple suitor’ was a regular visitor to Amherst, carrying off the young and old alike. As an unmarried woman, Dickinson was often responsible for the care of the invalided and dying within the family, including her own mother, who was largely bedbound for the last seven years of her life. Indeed, Dickinson reflects in an 1863 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ‘Perhaps Death, gave me awe for friends, striking sharp and early, for I held them since, In a brittle love, of more alarm, than peace.’

Dickinson’s final letter, written a few days before her own death, is a fitting conclusion to this unique body of correspondence, in which a recipe for ‘Kate’s Doughnuts’ sits alongside drafts of ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’. While at first glance it is quintessentially hers in its brevity and strangeness (‘Little Cousins, “Called back”. Emily.’), it is also an allusion to Hugh Conway’s popular mystery novel, Called Back (1883). As ever, the poet is firmly anchored in the material world, even as she journeys towards her ‘Immortality’. g

A motorboat’s propellor chops like a machete across the tide sending a swift, breaking wave to the shore. I walk slowly over rocks that are scored, overhung by a low, acned cliff. In one of the rockpools an octopus stretches away like a kitchen glove pulled from a hand. Soon dusk will arrive with its shadows and mood lighting, but I’ll stay and walk to the jetty’s end where a few fishermen compete for fish –hauling them in or tossing the small ones back like tarnished cutlery. I remember our last visit here – we hid a special stone under the pier, gave it potency with our thanks and blessings, our hopes for the future. I can still see you on the sand looking for the right stone, grey and anonymous until you gathered it up in the evening light and found the words to turn it into a talisman. Now, a darter takes flight like a vapor trail, and I wonder what we might have done that day had we known time would be a snakebird drowning its wings. We might have put a feather under the wharf and watched the tide carry it onto the blister-lines of foam. I wonder if it’s still there, our wish-bearing stone, or has the water’s drag taken it elsewhere. It wouldn’t be right to look. It would be like riddling the past with unanswerable questions, entrusting our hopes to different prayers ... Still, I mourn you dear friend. You would have loved the eagle flying overhead: its circles of flight – ripples from a well-laid stone.

Judith Beveridge

Highways and byways

Fredric Jameson in a more informal vein

Paul Giles

FThe Years of Theory: Postwar French thought to the present by Fredric Jameson

Verso

$68.99 pb, 458 pp

Inventions of a Present: The novel in its crisis of globalization by Fredric Jameson

Verso

$42.99 hb, 264pp

redric Jameson, who died in September 2024 at the age of ninety, was one of the great literary and cultural critics of our time. He spent most of his academic career at Duke University in North Carolina and published two books around the time of his death: Inventions of a Present just before, The Years of Theory just after. The first is a collection of essays on the novel originally written between 1972 and 2022, mostly for the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. The second is a transcript of a seminar series on French cultural thought between 1945 and the 1990s that Jameson taught at Duke in the first semester of 2021, at the age of eighty-six. These classes were recorded for posterity because they took place during the Covid era and were captured on the video technology he was using for teaching.

These books are very welcome additions to the Jameson critical canon, not least because both are mediated through an idiom of informality that makes his work easier to assimilate for the non-specialist. Jameson’s early style of criticism tended to be dense and synthesising, influenced by austere linguistic theory and Marxist architectonics. Both books from 2024 are, for different reasons, driven by a more casual narrative voice, with the editor of Years of Theory, Carson Welch, admitting the preservation here of Jameson’s ‘colloquial’ and ‘extemporaneous speech’ from his lectures ‘may come as a relief even to admirers of his written works’. Jameson the pedagogue takes care to explain differences between terms such as the transcendent and the transcendental, and he throws a few bones of empathy to his audience, beginning his final class, in a brief nod to student feedback, by saying he ‘much appreciated your comments’, even though ‘it is a little too late to use them’.

At the end of Years of Theory, Jameson says that he has been teaching ‘a history course’, and one thing that emerges most clearly from these lectures is a sense of historical relativism. He tracks back through the key figures of postwar French culture –Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, and others – but he is always concerned to read their work in relation to the specific historical matrix that informs it. He is more interested in the conceptual framework within which any given writer is working, and in its aesthetic formations, than in the work’s philosophical validity. Of Gilles Deleuze, for instance, Jameson asserts: ‘He is a great writer … I don’t care how true or false it is.’ This fits with Jameson’s explicit rejection of truth-telling as a concept and his

insistence that it is the use of a term, not its lexical definition, which is significant. He argues that we need to understand ‘the truths’ of ‘other systems – these other moments of time, of history’, and not simply to discard earlier thinkers for what we might now think of as their incorrect assumptions. ‘It is irrelevant what mistakes Hobbes or Hume or Plato made,’ he says. Rather than quasi-religious notions of truth, Jameson prefers Sartre’s term ‘facticity’, saying there are ‘facts that I can’t get around. I can’t change the fact that I was born in that year. I can’t change the fact that I was born in this country.’ But any given hypothesis also involves a choice to include some facts and exclude others, which is why Jameson, for all his interest in social affairs, avoids political preconceptions in his treatment of particular authors, assessing as he does their textual range rather than their factional affiliations. All of this contributes in the Duke classes to a tone of agreeable informality, rather than didacticism. He revels in gossipy observations about how ‘Foucault and Derrida hated each other’, how nobody ‘had so many enemies as Derrida’, and so on. Jameson was an active participant in the intellectual circles he describes; this gives his lectures the kind of liveliness that comes from this work’s semi-autobiographical provenance. Sartre, on whom Jameson wrote his dissertation at Yale and who was the subject of his first book, is the foundational figure here, but Jameson’s awareness of the highways and byways of French culture enables him to make unusual connections that would not have been available to a critic less engaged with this cultural scene. Many of his most illuminating comments are thrown in casually, as when he remarks in passing how the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was ‘a great Wagnerian’ while linking Lévi-Strauss’s writings on geology to Wagner’s translation of time into space in Parsifal. It must have been a treat for the students at Duke to participate in this class. Nevertheless, there are a few indications that Jameson’s approach was beginning to look a little dated in his final years. He is generally not so interested in women writers, though he does address Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva in this course; and he admits to finding the concept of the Anthropocene ‘a little puzzling’, even though, diligent pedagogue that he was, he directs students ‘who are interested in this idea’ to relevant primary sources. But Jameson’s own view, that ‘nothing is natural in nature’, is predicated on ways in which all political systems are based around discursive constructions rather than primal realities. ‘All language is an alienation,’ he says, remarking that, although James Joyce acknowledged that he spoke ‘the language of the conquerors’, this did not mean that he wanted to turn ‘back to produce a Gaelic literature’. Such a rigorous rejection of authenticity as a category has interesting implications for critical work in Australia today, not least in the context of Indigenous writing, where the status of linguistic constructivism continues to be a vexed question.

Jameson’s shorter book, Inventions of a Present, focuses more on literary analysis than cultural theory, featuring as it does a collection of essays on particular writers produced in his journalistic idiom. Again, many of the brilliant insights emerge through casual aperçus, such as the observation that Samuel Beckett’s plays come out of a period, concomitant with ‘the breakdown of the modern’, which ‘was certainly also a glorious moment in the theatre, across the world’. Jameson’s journalism has an aphoristic

quality that made it attractive to readers of the London Review of Books, even if his contention, in a discussion of William Gibson, that ‘eBay is certainly the right word for our current collective unconscious’ might be stretching a point. This is the sort of quip Oscar Wilde might have made at a dinner party had he been alive in 2003, but it takes a passing reference in Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition and builds it up into a claim that seems too hyperbolic.

More systematically, though, Jameson in this book mounts a consistent argument for the enduring value of great literature. He is not shy about using such terms of critical discrimination, calling American novelist Robert Stone ‘a very great artist indeed’ and Don DeLillo ‘the most interesting and talented of American postmodernist novelists’. Part of this respect for ‘the function of genuine art’ comes from Jameson’s own reverence as a young scholar in the middle years of the twentieth century for the work of Henry James, Ezra Pound, and William Faulkner, whom he recognises as the ‘three American writers who meant something to me in my intellectual formation’. But part of it comes from the Marxist notion promoted by György Lukács, cited on the first page of this book, that it is great writers who reveal social conditions most fully and precisely through the multidimensional qualities of their work. Though he did not share Lukács’s hostility towards modernism, Jameson follows the Hungarian critic’s theoretical model through his positive evaluation of the fiction of Norman Mailer and corresponding castigation of the ‘cheapness’ and ‘meretriciousness’ of James Dickey’s ‘imagination’. Mailer today is deeply unfashionable because of his overt misogyny, but Jameson’s point is that Mailer’s treatment of violence and egocentricity can illuminate how embedded structures of competition in American life are operating: ‘His social and historical value for us, and his greatness and integrity as an artist, can thus be measured by the degree to which he has actualized everything which in and around us is only potential.’ Although this essay was originally published in 1972, the importance for Jameson of aesthetic criteria runs through to this book’s final essay from 2022 on Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk.

The ‘great writer’, in Jameson’s eyes, is thus the one who can ‘thematize their ideological raw material’, allowing us ‘to walk all around these otherwise latent and implicit unconscious attitudes which govern our actions’. In this reading, the writer’s own attitude to such ‘ideological material’ is of little or no importance. This is the very antithesis of contemporary cancel culture, since it explicitly argues that ‘it does not matter whether Balzac was a reactionary, or whether Mailer is a sexist, a dupe of the myths of American business, and so forth’, with ‘his essential task as a writer’ being ‘to bring such materials to artistic thematization and thus to make them an object of aesthetic consciousness’. Jameson is particularly convincing in his analysis of the ‘fundamental uncertainties and hesitations’ in Joseph Conrad’s fiction, discussing ways in which Conrad’s complex negotiation of Polish, French, and English cultural pressures led him to a suspicion of all local jurisdictions. ‘To call all this “Toryism”,’ argued Jameson in a late essay from 2020, ‘is a gross oversimplication of a complicated existential situation, which obscures the political as well as the historical meaning of Conrad’s texts.’

Despite Jameson’s pre-eminence as a critic, it could be argued

that in general terms he is less convincing in his treatment of abstract patterns than in analysis of particular writers and situations. There are shaping influences throughout his work from the structuralist (and Christian) typologies of Northrop Frye, as well as from more obvious Marxist sources such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Lucien Goldmann, all cited here. Inventions of a Present also

Jameson

mounts a consistent argument

for the enduring value of great literature

contains an interesting essay originally published in the New Left Review about the literature of East Germany, whose concern to produce novels of collective society is sympathetically explored in the critical account of Uwe Tellhamp’s ‘massive novel Der Turn (The Tower)’. Jameson draws here on Sartre’s notion of ‘a slumbering and unconscious freedom’ that needs to break through ‘layers of inauthenticity’ to find creative expression, with Hegel’s version of progressive teleology, which helped to shape utopian thought of the 1960s, evident in the conceptual background.

This more polemical side of Jameson might now seem a bit dated, but it was one of the great merits of his critical oeuvre that it encompassed such a wide variety of intellectual and cultural resources. Inventions of a Present includes pieces on the television series The Wire as well as knowledgeable accounts of literary work from Japan and the Soviet Union, with the author drawing on his professional training in Comparative Literature to expand his analytical range in unprecedented ways. In a 1992 review of Jameson’s famous Postmodernism book, Malcolm Bradbury suggested that the author was too immersed in the ‘postmodern labyrinth’ to obtain the kind of proper critical distance on this term appropriate to an interpretation governed by his own avowed priority of ‘Marxist history’. Perhaps this was so, but it was one of Jameson’s strengths as a critic that his work embodied the kind of supersession of an individual author’s consciousness and authority that he attributed to the likes of Norman Mailer. Mailer’s work, like Jameson’s, embodies a vast range of material and critical insights that swamp any move to classify it reductively within a singular framework.

In this sense, Jameson might in future years appear a critic more in the mould of C.S. Lewis rather than Northrop Frye, since Lewis is still appreciated today for his canny and sometimes idiosyncratic readings of medieval texts, even though the superstructure that informed his view of a Christian world order has generally been discarded. Jameson, similarly, is attracted to some of the structuralist typologies of Frye, but the more striking qualities of his work derive, unlike Frye’s, from its unexpected twists and turns. Jameson’s special skill involved finding juxtapositions and resonances between social and aesthetic forms, thereby enabling the kind of critical insights that would not have been available to a less learned reader. Both of these works, in their magisterial scope but also in their genial informality, contribute in valuable ways to the intellectual force of Jameson’s continuing critical legacy. g

Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University

Paris, Harlem

In search of James Baldwin

Stephen Regan

COn James Baldwin

by Colm Tóibín

Brandeis University Press

US$19.95 hb, 147 pp

olm Tóibín has that special distinction among contemporary writers of being both a first-rate novelist and an acutely discerning critic. In recent years, as well as publishing some magnificent novels, among them Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014), and Long Island (2024), he has written searching critical studies of other writers, including Elizabeth Bishop (2015). His latest critical work, On James Baldwin, was published in 2024 to coincide with the centenary of Baldwin’s birth. It grew out of the Mandel Lectures in the Humanities that Tóibín delivered at Brandeis University, but it also draws on a long and passionate engagement with Baldwin’s work, including an essay on Baldwin and Barack Obama published in the New York Review of Books in 2008.

On James Baldwin opens not, as might be expected, in Harlem, but in Dublin. In a confiding autobiographical prose that has become a hallmark of his criticism, Tóibín recounts how his reading of Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), coincided with the end of his Catholic schooling in Ireland and his first year of university study. Having served as an altar boy in Enniscorthy Cathedral, he was alert in his reading of Baldwin to ‘the way in which the heightened emotion around ritual and religious belief strayed into same-sex desire’. He had encountered complex feelings to do with conscience and sin in his reading of James Joyce, of course. It must have been highly satisfying for him, then, to discover that Baldwin had read Joyce in 1950, while working on his novel, and that in Paris he had felt sustained by the artistic ideals of ‘silence, exile and cunning’ in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Baldwin also acquired from his reading of Joyce a readiness to experiment with different and competing styles, which Tóibín regards as a fundamental and persistent feature of the African American writer’s work.

In Baldwin’s novels, perhaps most obviously in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the language of hymns and prayers and sermons vies with the language of the Western literary tradition. Tóibín notes with approval how Baldwin ‘will not settle for a single style’. He goes on to show how a ‘plain, placid style’, akin to that of a folk tale or a psalm, can co-exist in his fiction with a ‘bravura style’ inspired by Charles Dickens. There is also in Baldwin’s writing an especially eloquent style that Tóibín associates with the operations of the mind and the search for truth. The influence this time derives from Henry James, another of Tóibín’s own great literary progenitors. Baldwin, he claims, ‘carried in his temperament a sense of Henry James’s interest in consciousness as shifting and unconfined, hidden and secretive, and he shared James’s concern with language as both pure revelation and mask’.

Some of Baldwin’s contemporaries were disapproving of what they saw as an overly flamboyant style. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man (1952), who was among the first readers of Go Tell It on the Mountain, objected to the ‘Jamesian prose’ of the book and complained in a letter to a friend, ‘As for Baldwin, he doesn’t know the difference between getting religion and going homo.’ Tóibín shows admirable discretion as he recounts Baldwin’s sometimes difficult relationships with other Black writers, such as Richard Wright, and with fellow members of the civil rights movement who were apt to slight him for his sexuality. He also shows great critical adventurousness in his reading of Baldwin’s first novel, sensitively exploring the principal themes of religious conversion and self-realisation, and revealing how the displacement caused by the Great Migration from South to North shapes the inner life and the social relationships of Baldwin’s characters.

Geographical displacement was also the catalyst for Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), set in Paris. Tóibín writes superbly well about the Harlem-Paris axis, about the ambiguous freedom of African American writers and musicians in a cosmopolitan European city, and about the extent to which the city prompts heightened thoughts and feelings to do with sexuality, both proposing liberation and inducing panic and emptiness. He finds the genesis of Giovanni’s Room in Baldwin’s short story ‘The Outing’ (1951),

James Baldwin (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy)

his first dramatisation of homoerotic desire, but he also connects it to a tradition of American novels set in Paris, including The Ambassadors by Henry James, about which he writes with brilliant insight. Above all, though, he sees Giovanni’s Room as a novel characterised by the complicated confessional rhetoric of its narrator, David. Once again, the book is lifted by Tóibín’s personal narrative, as he embarks on his own confessional recounting of ‘the silence, the invisibility, the strangeness’ of being a gay man on the streets of Barcelona in the years that he lived there. A powerful comparison is drawn between Baldwin’s technique and Oscar Wilde’s confessional style in his prison letter, De Profundis (written in 1897), with both the novel and the letter possessing ‘a beautiful calm eloquence in the writing’ as well as a ‘a sense of urgency, of matters newly realized’. ‘All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique,’ Baldwin memorably declared.

As Tóibín notes, Baldwin’s reputation as a novelist and essayist rests mainly on the work he produced between 1953 and 1963. In that period, he published the three volumes of essays that would give him a powerful public presence in American political life: Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963). Tóibín greatly admires Baldwin’s non-fictional writings, especially the two long pieces that constitute the 1963 volume: ‘The essays are personal and passionate and angry. The tone can also be wise, analytical, knowing, clued-in and ironic, relishing nuance, ambiguity and paradox.’ He offers some sharp insights into Baldwin’s television interviews and occasional journalism, including a little-known piece on boxing, prompted

H.D.’s chief confidant

Biography of a groupie

John Hawke

ICode Name Puritan:

Norman Holmes Pearson at the nexus of poetry, espionage, and American power

by Greg Barnhisel

University of Chicago Press

US$32.50 hb, 386 pp

n his brief Foreword to H.D.’s posthumous collection, Hermetic Definition (1974), Yale Professor Norman Holmes Pearson (1909-75) provides an authoritatively crystalline summary of the poet’s life’s work. Asserting the primacy of her later poetry, the ‘war trilogy’ (1942-44) and Helen in Egypt (1961), Pearson recovers H.D. from her accepted but ‘inadequate’ typecasting as an Imagist, identifying her deployment of Freud as ‘a great mythologist’ in her highly personal engagement with hermetic and kabbalistic sources.

As Greg Barnhisel’s revealing biography explains, Pearson was an unusually qualified commentator: as H.D.’s chief amanuensis and confidant, he not only assisted in the publication of

by the fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston for the undisputed heavyweight championship in 1962. In the process, Tóibín lands a swift uppercut on Norman Mailer, whose ideas about men and masculinity were very different from those of Baldwin, and knocks him out with a single sentence: ‘The worst writer about boxing was Norman Mailer.’

Mailer had complained that Baldwin’s novel Another Country (1962) was ‘abominably written’, and Tóibín spends the final pages of his study on an impassioned defence. As he contemplates the fate of Rufus, the young musician from Harlem who dares to live in Greenwich Village, he dwells on the connecting cityscape of Riverside Drive, where Tóibín himself is living at the time. The George Washington Bridge looms overhead, linking him to the novel. In a poignant interlude, he turns on himself with a humbling self-critique, wondering what Baldwin might make of his literary musings: ‘I can’t imagine the scorn he would pour on some Irishman sitting helplessly in some apartment on Riverside Drive …’ What comes across most clearly in this marvellously engaging short book, however, is Tóibín’s indubitable sense of writerly solidarity and his readiness to admit his own vulnerability, as Baldwin bravely did. The book closes abruptly, but fittingly, with Baldwin dreaming of ‘a region where there were no definitions of any kind, neither of color nor of male or female’. g

Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University and also a research associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

her later works, but also chose the poems for the Selected Poems (1957), which brought her renewed attention as a central figure in the modernist canon. He then introduced her to the younger poet Robert Duncan, inspiring his major critical work, The H.D. Book (1984); Duncan’s engagement with Hermetic Definition is evident throughout his breakthrough volume, Roots and Branches (1964). But the influence of Pearson’s assistance was not restricted to H.D.: he also chose the poems for William Carlos Williams’s New Directions Selected Poems (1949), and was one of only four mourners from the literary world to attend Wallace Stevens’s business-oriented funeral.

It is unusual for a biographer to suggest that the following terms might apply to his subject: ‘a sycophant, a groupie, a name-dropper, a suck-up, a hanger-on’. Barnhisel’s ambivalence, in part political, is apparent throughout his study, but he also provides the reader with evidence for a more sympathetic impression. Pearson’s lifelong advocacy for modernism was sparked by Mark van Doren’s 1928 Anthology of World Poetry (also where Kenneth Slessor encountered key US modernists Ezra Pound, Williams, and H.D.); he was further ‘modernised’ by Gertrude Stein’s celebrity lecture tour of 1934-35. As the young editor of the Oxford Anthology of American Literature (1938), Pearson was responsible for placing experimental poetry firmly at the centre of the newly emerging field of American Studies. With his appointment in 1947 as the foundational undergraduate director of the Yale American Studies program, he would play a key role in shaping the discipline. This included the first university class

devoted to the study of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, eliciting some of the earliest scholarship on the poet, at a time when Pound was at his most controversial. Pearson’s students included future New Journalist Tom Wolfe, who responded with a 105-page analysis of ‘Canto 47’.

As Barnhisel rather pejoratively notes, Pearson produced no major publications of his own, preferring instead to cultivate direct relationships with the leading American writers of his time through a busy correspondence. This approach was quite contrary to the prevailing New Critical academic orthodoxy of the postwar years, in which authors were subsumed beneath ‘intentional fallacy’, and the sprawling collage epics of modernism (such as The Cantos and Williams’s Paterson) were ignored by a criticism which preferred the closed model of the poem as ‘well-wrought urn’. Pearson was equally out of place in the subsequent wave of Yale Deconstructionism, which mainly adopted a studious blindness to the explosion in experimental American literature burgeoning beyond the campus. Pearson, by contrast, was quick to pick up on developments in the San Francisco underground of the late-1950s, forming links with Duncan and Gary Snyder. Most remarkably, he provided personal funding for Ed Sanders’ seminal countercultural journal, Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts (1962-65), with Sanders explaining to his readers that the journal was sponsored ‘by a leading Ezra Pound scholar at Yale’.

The political dimension of Barnhisel’s study focuses on Pearson’s wartime recruitment, along with other leading humanities scholars, as a spy for the Office for Strategic Services. This was

Whore stigma

An unapologetic dive into pornography

Zora Simic

ZIndie Porn: Revolution, regulation and resistance by Zahra Stardust

Duke University Press

$49.50 pb 328 pp

ahra Stardust is, in her own words, ‘a sex worker in the academy’ who champions the ‘epistemology of whores’, a term she coined to describe the ‘unique lens through which sex workers know about the world’. As she impressively models in her first book, Indie Porn: Revolution, regulation and resistance, published in Duke University Press’s innovative Camera Obscura series, this epistemology is multifaceted and multi-purpose. Stardust, a research fellow at Queensland University of Technology, takes us behind the scenes, while expanding what a book about pornography can be. Against enduring ‘whore stigma’, which functions to keep sex workers at society’s margins and ‘sex’ within heteronormative bounds, Stardust flips the script.

not in itself unusual: Graham Greene was among the fellow spies Pearson encountered in London, and the biography of his contemporary, the Poundian poet Basil Bunting, remains suspiciously mysterious. The implication is that Pearson retained his CIA connections through the postwar period, though there is little evidence that he was involved in recruitment. Barnhisel connects this with the Cold War cultural diplomacy of the United States (sponsored by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie foundations), with American Studies programs deployed to ‘put a positive face on American civilization to generate goodwill for US policies among intellectuals and opinion makers’.

As American cultural ambassador to the Pacific, Pearson made two trips to Australia, in 1968 and 1970, to advance the Cold War cause in literary studies. Viewed from an Australian perspective, these visits seem to have been entirely ineffectual – especially compared with the influence of US critic Clement Greenberg on Australian artists: 1968 was the year of the notorious Field Exhibition, which virtually extirpated the Antipodean School in favour of American models.

By the time of Pearson’s visit, younger Australian poets had already absorbed the new American poetry through Donald Allen’s 1960 Grove Press anthology. Barnhisel seems unaware of a more direct CIA involvement in Australian literature: the funding of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom to assist in the production of Quadrant g

John Hawke is Poetry Editor of ABR.

Sex workers, and in particular porn performers like herself and the many others whom she interviews and cites, have much to tell the rest of us about the algorithmic, gig economy world we all live in.

As Stardust writes, ‘the majority of books about pornography are written by people who do not make, watch or create pornography’. Some of the best-known titles are firmly in the anti-porn camp, and while there is a flourishing field of porn studies, with its own dedicated journal, research has tended to focus on consumption rather than on labour or the political economy of porn. Cognisant that ‘pornography’ has historically been and continues to be a deliberately hazy and politicised category subject to ‘state, tech, and administrative power and control’, Stardust takes as her focus ‘indie porn’. As she and others define it, ‘indie porn’ is both here and now, as practice and community, and a political and creative aspiration or horizon, currently constrained by ‘erotophobic regulatory paranoia’. With queer and feminist performers at the vanguard, indie porn aspires to ‘independence from hegemonic values and processes’, while having to navigate big tech, competing regulatory regimes, and a capacious porn industry ever ready to co-opt and exploit their labour and product. Under these conditions, Stardust stresses that political organising and coalition building is more urgent and necessary than ever, but also more difficult. Still, as she highlights in her opening chapters, indie pornographers have found imaginative ways not only to stay viable but also to extend the parameters of porn, as well as of political activism and community building. Examples

include eco-sexual porn, queercrip porn, sex-education initiatives, and the development of ethical codes and protocols designed to protect workers and educate consumers.

Vignettes from Stardust’s life in porn are threaded throughout, showcasing ‘indie porn’ as a varied and global scene: making ‘old-school DIY porn’ in Australia and then skill-sharing at a ‘Pornocamp’ for independent feminist pornographers; the 2014 Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, where the highlight for Stardust is the Feminist Porn Conference held alongside it; the 2015 Berlin Porn Film Festival, where Stardust takes part in a live-fisting and squirting demonstration alongside ‘pleasure activists’; the Australian launches of the ground-breaking anthology Coming Out Like a Porn Star (2015), edited by American porn performer Jiz Lee, in which Stardust’s essay featured alongside contributions from iconic performers such as Annie Sprinkle; the inaugural 2020 San Francisco PornFilmFestival, which, due to Covid restrictions, is held entirely online; and most recently, shooting an ‘explicit documentary about porn star parents’, when she was six months pregnant.

Porn being the precarious job that it is, not all of Stardust’s gigs can be labelled ‘indie’ (her shoots for Picture and People magazines were censored to meet Australian classification requirements). What separates ‘indie’ from ‘mainstream’ porn can get fuzzy, the paradigmatic example being SuicideGirls, the ‘global adult community’ which has successfully commodified the indie-girl-with-tattoos aesthetic. In 2016, Stardust is excited ‘to shoot for a site which celebrates alternative beauty’, but quickly adapts to their extractive business model, where performers pay for access to their brand. Throughout, Stardust offers a robust critique of how the various pornographies that often fall under the banner of ‘indie’ – ‘DIY’, ‘ethical’, ‘real’, or ‘amateur’, and, yes, even ‘feminist’ and ‘queer’ – are not necessarily so. The ‘authenticity delusion’, as Stardust nimbly describes it, refers to how ‘amateur porn’ – often celebrated as the ‘good’ alternative to mainstream porn – can be as highly manufactured and staged as its supposed antithesis, including by valorising slim, white bodies and a narrow range of femininities.

understandable as ‘a response to porn stigma’ and anti-porn activism, can be mistaken for ‘stating that pornography is always empowering and rarely work’. Stardust reorients sex-worker activism back to its foundational claim that ‘sex work is work’, bringing it up to date for a twenty-first-century audience and context. She maintains a consistent focus on porn workers over porn producers and business owners. Sometimes performers are also producers, especially in feminist and queer circles – Stardust offers plenty of examples, herself included – but not always, and the interests of porn workers and business owners in particular often diverge and conflict. PornHub, the Amazon of internet porn sharing websites, is an obvious example, and Stardust gives them due and illuminating attention. Astutely, she also scrutinises industry lobby groups, among them Australia’s Eros Association, whose political strategy of campaigning for the new classification category ‘Non-Violent Erotica’ (NVE), so that porn could be legally sold, spectacularly backfired late last century when conservative Senator Brian Harradine held a parliamentary screening of a ‘private collection of sex films’ that reportedly so disgusted Prime Minister John Howard that the sale of X18+ content remained illegal. The new classification was even narrower than the previous, with a ban on fetish content that remains in place.

The same government, Stardust reminds us, initiated the ongoing Northern Territory Intervention, where the ‘criminalization of porn possession played a role in the Australian government’s theft of Aboriginal land’. Stardust’s scope is international, but Australia is what she knows best, including as an advocate for sex worker rights (in addition to her PhD, she has a law degree). As well as providing thought-provoking sex-worker perspectives on recent developments such as the Online Safety Act, introduced in Australia in 2021, in Indie Porn Stardust traces a rich history of local sexual subcultures which continue to thrive despite a comparatively restrictive legislative environment.

All of the firsthand experiences Stardust shares in Indie Porn document a wider history and serve a larger purpose, whether it be emphasising indie porn content creation, community and politics, and/or demonstrating the conditions of labour under late capitalism and multiple regulatory regimes. Hers is no celebratory memoir, and Stardust is critical of the ‘wider cultural imperative for sex workers to describe their work as a kind of personal identity, a form of self-expression, a gratifying, rewarding, fulfilling experience or an altruistic endeavour with worthwhile social benefit’. This kind of special pleading, argues Stardust, while

A product of more than a decade of research, Indie Porn is at once deeply scholarly, unapologetically political, and joyously sex positive. Dense with detail and insight, it was also at times a demanding read, insofar as the material it contains could feasibly fill three books. Yet Stardust is a compelling writer who somehow balances sensible suggestions with utopian aspirations in a consistently convincing manner. She probably won’t win over readers hostile to the very existence of pornography, but for the rest of us – regardless of whether we consume porn or not – Indie Porn will reward close engagement. g

Zora Simic is an Associate Professor in History and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales

Zahra Stardust (courtesy of Queensland University of Technology)

Eight

decades on Clem Christesen’s ‘well established’ quarterly

Wilfrid Prest

JEssays That Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to today edited by Esther Anatolitis

Melbourne University Press

$34.99 pb, 268 pp

ohn Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.

In keeping with the Christesen tradition, the editorial introduction to this ambitiously titled anthology maintains that over the past eight decades ‘no literary project has matched Meanjin’s impact on Australian culture’. Some Sydneysiders might contest that claim on Southerly’s behalf. At all events, the biographies of essayists featured in the current collection and the helpful list of past editors appended to the back gatefold suggest that Meanjin is at least as much a Melbourne icon as an all-Australian institution.

Esther Anatolis has picked twenty pieces from issues published between 1942 (Vance Palmer’s call to arms in ‘Battle’) and 2023, when she herself became editor (Jane Howard on the state of arts criticism and Gaja Kerry Carlton on the Brisbanecentered Wulara-Nguru historical language mapping project). Indeed, no fewer than six of her chosen texts date from the current decade. The other four are Michael Mohammed Ahmed’s ‘It’s shit to be White’, Naheed Elrayes’s ‘Gaza and the twenty-year War on Terror’, Amy McQuire ‘The act of disappearing: On the silences that shroud the disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls’ and Chelsea Watego’s ‘Always bet on Black (power)’. Taken together with Marcia Langton’s 2011 ‘Reading the constitution out loud’ and the 2016 contribution by Jenny Hocking and Nell Reidy arguing for an ‘inescapable link between marngrook and Australian [rules] football’, nearly half the works included were first published within the past fifteen years.

Of the dozen original twentieth-century essays, six first appeared between 1940 and 1979, with a further six from the 1980s and 1990s (the 2000s is a blank decade so far as this anthology is concerned). Since only one of the current century’s contributions runs to fewer than ten pages, the more numerous and generally shorter twentieth-century works occupy slightly less of the book’s total extent. A more balanced chronological distribution would surely have produced an overwhelming preponderance of male authors, rather than an actual bare majority of female essayists,

and certainly fewer Indigenous authors, since Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers did not appear in Meanjin before 1977.

Meanjin is as much a Melbourne icon as an all-Australian institution

As for changing Australia, it seems a bit premature to claim much recent writing, however important and interesting, has been a catalyst, let alone a cause of, Australian change, cultural or otherwise. It would be more plausible to present all these essays as reflecting significant currents of thought and feeling, past and present, which is essentially the fallback position enunciated towards the end of Anatolitis’s introduction. Whether Meanjin’s essays do or did adequately ‘map the multiple trajectories that make up our culture ... and clash in our politics’ is another question altogether. To take but one example, republishing an eloquent and moving 2021 denunciation of Israeli actions in Gaza with editorial reference to ‘the atrocities the world is witnessing in Gaza today’ but no mention of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack seems insensitive at best, at worst anti-Semitic.

One might also ask how far or fundamentally has Australia changed over the past eighty years? We have exchanged formal dominion status in the British empire for cultural and military dependence on the United States. This country remains a geographically isolated, demographically and diplomatically insignificant offshoot of European settlement, a federated constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, heavily reliant on primary industry and struggling to come to terms with the descendants of the continent’s original inhabitants. Among other things, the result of the Voice referendum and the current state of Australian universities hardly suggest the demise of ‘colonialist’ racial prejudice and utilitarian anti-intellectualism. Plus ça change ...

Yet marketing hype and editorial idiosyncracies notwithstanding, this collection contains a wealth of outstanding material, not least what is now evidently and perhaps unsurprisingly the most cited of all Meanjin essays, A.A. Phillips on ‘The Cultural Cringe’ (1950). Other brief pieces which I much enjoyed, for various reasons, are Thea Astley’s 1968 musings on ‘The temperament of generations: The Monstrous accent on youth’, Manning Clark’s jeremiad ‘Are we a nation of bastards?’ composed in the immediate aftermath of the 1975 dismissal, and Gerald Murnane’s 1986 ‘Why I write what I write’.

Among the longer pieces still well worth reading are: Tim Rowse’s ‘Heaven and a Hills Hoist: Australian critics on suburbia’ (1978, with Rowse’s updated ‘more positive’ assessment of the public policy work of Hugh Stretton); David Yencken’s 1988 ‘Creative City’; Tony Birch’s hard-hitting 1989 account of the ‘making and unmaking of Koori culture’, with particular reference to the naming and renaming of Victoria’s Western District (most notably ‘The Grampians’ by Mitchell’s survey party in 1836, renamed, more recently, ‘Gariwerd’ by the state Place Names Committee); and, finally, Hilary Charlesworth’s meticulous 1992 dissection of feminist perspectives on equality and the law. g

Wilfrid Prest edited the new edition of The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (2024).

My unread books

by Andrea Goldsmith

Reading fiction is an intimate business. For ten, fifteen, twenty hours of glorious solitude, you engage with ideas, events, and, most especially, characters located in periods and places not your own. The connection with fictional characters can sometimes feel more real and enduring than relationships with real people. For a few years in my youth, I was so deeply attached to the young Hurtle Duffield in Patrick White’s The Vivisector that I wrote a short story in which Hurtle and I lived with Patrick White and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury.

Some novels stay with you for a lifetime. It’s a permanent relationship, one without the petty arguments, the smelly feet, that irritating jiggle that your beloved has made no attempt to control. These books become part of you; they become my books

Then there are the books you should have read and have always wanted to read – but haven’t. These are my unread books Back in 2007, Pierre Bayard published How to Talk about Books

You Haven’t Read. Not surprisingly, it was a bestseller. I read this clever, witty book with great enjoyment. But Bayard’s mood of inspired and intelligent levity did not stay with me, and I remained haunted by those books I should have read but haven’t. I’m still haunted – and accused as well.

I came of age in the 1970s. At that time there was a canon of fiction that one should read – the moral imperative was deeply felt. It included Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Sartre and Beauvoir, Camus and Orwell, James and Wharton, Austen and the Brontës, Lawrence and Huxley, Woolf and Proust, and, of course, Joyce. Given that I preferred reading to sleeping, eating, and socialising, acquiring the canon was a pleasurable and easy task, except for Joyce.

Bloody James Joyce.

I managed the stories collected in Dubliners – I actually enjoyed them, particularly ‘The Dead’ – but I limped through my mother’s stained yellow, cloth-covered copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have just checked that copy, a 1934

‘flexible’ edition from Jonathan Cape. Stamped on the inside front and back covers are the words ‘The Athenaeum Club’, in old English lettering. How had it come into the possession of my mother? She was not the type to steal books, nor was she a member of The Athenaeum, or, indeed, any other club. My mother, like her daughter, was not the clubbable type. And I am reminded again how books hold so many stories, inside and outside the pages.

Back to Joyce. I first attempted Ulysses at the age of twenty-one. It was a birthday gift from my sister’s boyfriend, who fancied himself an intellectual. I struggled to page 150 before giving up. I have tried to read it several times since. My Penguin modern classics edition runs to 703 pages, my copy falls open at page 252. My failure, measured in 451 pages, is pronounced and bleak.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I happened to be in New York City on Bloomsday. I was staying on the Upper West Side. Just a few blocks away, a twenty-four-hour reading of Ulysses was to occur. I took myself along, hoping that exposure to a performance of this great work would assist me in tackling it on the page. The room was dark and smoky, with a small stage at one end; there was wine and a crush of bodies, and there must have been chairs, though in my mind everyone is standing. What I do recall clearly is the melody of the readers’ voices, that Irish lilt, but the rest is a blur; indeed, it was a blur soon after the event. Were there drugs? Did I drink too much? I can’t be sure, but what I do know for certain is that the experience did not help me read Ulysses

Another of my unread books is Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. While I’ve long been aware of this omission, in recent years it seems that nearly all the non-fiction writers I admire refer to Grossman’s novel. And I am suffering, as I have suffered over Ulysses. I have tried reading Life and Fate three or

four times, and with each attempt I have failed.

In my Vintage paperback edition, translated from the Russian by Robert Chandler, Life and Fate is 855 pages. It is a novel with a cast so large that there is a seven-and-a-half-page appendix listing the main characters. My copy falls open at page sixty-two. It’s pathetic: so many attempts and only sixty-two pages read. I have taken it down from the Russian shelf in my library because this morning, over breakfast, I read a chapter devoted to Grossman in Tzvetan Todorov’s Hope and Memory. Todorov is a brilliant political and moral philosopher; I not only admire Todorov, I’m grateful for all he has given me. Todorov is championing Grossman, and I simply cannot, must not ignore this.

I will go to my grave having not finished Ulysses, but even in my failure I am far from ignorant about the book. Indeed, with Bayard as a guide and because Ulysses is part of our cultural capital, I could converse about Ulysses more than adequately. It is quite another matter with Life and Fate, purportedly a great – some, like Todorov, would say the greatest – novel about totalitarianism.

Life and Fate was completed by Grossman in 1960, but even in the Khrushchev thaw, the novel was never going to be published in the Soviet Union. Interestingly, instead of arresting the author, the KGB arrested the book: the copies, the drafts, the notes, the carbon paper, even the typewriter ribbon was banished. Unknown to the KGB, Grossman had made two other copies that he had entrusted to friends. Grossman died in 1964, and sixteen years later, Life and Fate was finally published, in Lausanne, under the title of L’Age d’Homme. Robert Chandler’s English translation appeared in 1985.

In our contemporary era, there are lurchings towards authoritarianism across the globe. While there can be authoritarianism without totalitarianism, all totalitarianisms have authoritarian leaders. Life and Fate, the little I know of it, seems to speak to the times in which we live. Perhaps it is one of those rare novels that speaks to all times. I’m about to find out.

Yes, I am going to start the book again and I will not give up. I cannot give up. I need to read Life and Fate not only to learn more about the felt experience of living under Hitler’s totalitarianism and Stalin’s Soviet version, but perhaps more urgently to make sense of the times in which we now live. This novel calls to me as a citizen in a world that has run amok. This novel must be removed from my list of unread books. g

Andrea Goldsmith’s new novel is The Buried Life (Transit Lounge, 2025).

Vasily Grossman at Pushkin House (Album/Alamy)

Ageless maestro

One thousand nights at the opera

Michael Shmith

MCarlo Felice Cillario:

Italian maestro of the Australian Opera by Stephen Mould Connors Court Publishing $59.95 hb, 543 pp

y first experience of Carlo Felice Cillario was in March 1969, when he conducted the Elizabethan Trust Opera’s production of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Melbourne. I had never seen the opera; nor had I heard of its conductor, whose triple-barrelled name was more indicative of a musical marking than something that belonged to an active musician. ‘Active’ was certainly the word: Cillario rushed into the pit and, afterwards, practically danced on to the stage, baton still in hand, to rapturous applause. In between, the actual performance was the first time I really connected to the compelling vivacity and innate drama of live opera. It helped immeasurably that the cast included the great Australian tenor Donald Smith as King Gustavus III. That night, all of it, still resounds in my mind.

Many years later, I interviewed Cillario as part of a Sunday Age series on creative figures aged seventy-plus. My first question, ‘Exactly how old are you?’, was almost the last. A crescendo of anguish was followed by a cadenza, delivered in Cillario’s trademark haphazard English in a gravel voice that sounded like a cross between Don Corleone and Lee Marvin (the italics are his, as spoken):

Oh, don’t speak about that because I run away. This has nothing to do with my enthusiasm for music. Don’t touch this question. It is like you are trying to hurt me. My mother was the same. She never talked about her age, her birthday, and she lived until she was eighty-six I know myself, and I know if you remember how old I am I will be immediately fifty years older. That kills me. There are much more important things in life than that.

I speculated that Cillario must be seventy-five or more. I was out by a good ten years. Cillario was ninety-two when he died in Bologna on 11 December 2007, but he hadn’t planned on leaving quite so soon. As Stephen Mould notes in his exhaustive analysis of Cillario’s distinguished Antipodean career, the maestro, late in life, told his doctor he intended to live until he was one hundred. Moreover, he wished his centenary to be marked by a gala concert at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, after which he would be ‘very glad’ to die. (Cillario was born in Argentina in 1915, of Italian émigré parents.)

Cillario spent more than a third of his allotted span conducting in Australia for the national company: from its titular Elizabethan beginnings, through its years as the Australian

Opera, and into the Opera Australia age. He held at least seven successive titles and, between 1968 and 2002, conducted 1,020 performances of forty-one operas. These included Verdi, Puccini, and Rossini, his beloved Mozart, much Wagner, and such verismo pieces as Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci. Curiously, considering how many times he conducted ‘Cav & Pag’ across the world, the works were anathema to him: ‘If I was minister for culture in Italy … I’d like to burn the scores of all those verismo operas.’

The essential thing about Cillario, and what Mould’s book captures with admirable honesty and precision, is that for someone so professionally disciplined and exacting, his general approach to life was riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. This duality affected him as man and musician; the two Cillarios resounding almost as one. He was, to be sure, a difficult man, and the book bristles with eccentricities and more than a few flashes of autocratic temperament. If a singer displeased him, Cillario, from the pit, would mime pulling a lavatory chain while holding his nose. The company’s longtime artistic director, Moffatt Oxenbould, described his old friend and occasional adversary as ‘a chameleon-like character … Sometimes he seems to be a wise old patriarch but the next moment he is like a mischievous little boy.’

Somehow, Cillario’s innate musicianship and scholarship always triumphed over personal peccadilloes. Certainly, as anyone who played for him in the pit or witnessed his performances from

Carlo Felice Cillario and Renata Tebaldi in Munich, 1960 (Keystone Press/Alamy)

further back would attest, his performances possessed what was known as ‘the Cillario sound’. As Mould says:

Cillario brought all the facets of his personality to bear on his conducting: the wild ‘otherness’ of Argentina, the iron will and discipline of Toscanini; the rebellious streak, somehow governed by a higher authority of his own making: he would switch between these

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modes as the need arose, from one phrase to another sometimes back and forth over just a few bars. Discipline – wildness; authority – freedom; structure – extemporisation. Above all, Cillario made the orchestra sing.

There is no doubt that Cillario so loved Australia that he was more than willing, from his mid-fifties, to commit himself to a still-fledgling company far away from the international opera circuit in which he was already firmly established. Mould suggests this commitment reflected ‘the sense of adventure and restlessness which came to underpin [Cillario’s] life’.

His enthusiasm, while it represented contentment and continuity, also included a streak of adventurous curiosity about his new-found land that manifested itself in various intriguing ways. For example, his ‘Pasta Cillario’, which included a sizeable dollop of Vegemite, was frequently served to friends, who largely did their best to avoid eating it. Of greater cultural worth was Cillario’s fascination with First Nations music that led him to spend a few weeks in 1979 on research trips to various Indigenous settlements. Somewhere in the family archives is his lengthy written account, Gli Aborigeni e loro bel canto (‘The Aborigines and their beautiful song’).

It is now almost a quarter of a century since Cillario last conducted in Australia: a farewell concert in his honour, at the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House, on 23 March 2003, after which he never returned to this country. Cillario’s story, particularly his crucial role in Opera Australia’s history, is well worth telling, and Mould, with his personal and professional knowledge of his subject and his milieu, is possibly the only person able to do it proper justice. As with Wotan, crossing into Valhalla, Mould can now proclaim, ‘Vollendet das ewige Werk! ’.

While admirably thorough, the Cillario chronicle rivals Der Ring in length. There are thickets of footnotes, many of them containing full cast lists, which could easily have been combined into the list published later in the book. There are rather too many extracts from reviews. There are also ten appendices, including lists of Cillario’s Australian performances, his compositions, with music examples, his recordings as conductor and violinist, and an essay on legato. Something for everyone.

To balance the ledger, there are irresistibly vivid extracts (translated by Mould) from Cillario’s unpublished memoirs. Here, the Cillario voice is pre-eminent, offering wicked witticisms and warm recollections in equal measure on a variety of colleagues and subjects. Where else would you find in relatively close proximity Eva Perón, Benito Mussolini, Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballé, and Joan Sutherland, the latter referring to herself as ‘Io sono una vacca placida’ (‘I’m a placid old cow’). Later, Cillario takes us on a fantastic voyage through the interior of his original instrument, the violin. Let Cillario have the last word:

… it is simply a space destined to create impalpable sounds, a box that has not changed its shape for more than 300 years. It was created with minute precision to generate sound that emerges freely and is projected into space as soon as it is born.

Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. His latest book, Merlyn (Hardie Grant 2021), is a biography of the widow of Sidney Myer.

The great curmudgeon

A critic’s labour of love

Richard Leathem

IAustralia at the Movies:

The ultimate guide to modern Australian cinema 1990-2020

by David Stratton

Allen & Unwin

$39.99 pb, 557 pp

n this much-delayed final instalment of David Stratton’s trilogy on Australian cinema, the use of the word ‘ultimate’ in the book’s subtitle is no hyperbole. Stratton has been a film critic, television presenter, historian, and lecturer for sixty years, and during that time he has been assiduously recording information on the countless home-grown films he has seen. His knowledge of the local film industry is formidable and possibly peerless.

The ‘modern’ of the subtitle refers to the years 1990-2020. Originally, the intention was to follow the pattern of his preceding two books on Australian cinema, The Last New Wave: The Australian film revival (1980) and The Avocado Plantation: Boom or bust in the Australian film industry (1990). The former covered local films from the 1970s and the latter the 1980s. Stratton’s intention to continue with a third edition covering the 1990s was stymied by his commitments as co-presenter of The Movie Show on SBS TV.

That delay has resulted in a broader period to encompass and the exhaustive attempt to include every accessible fiction feature-length production has induced a more cursory encyclopedic listing of the films listed. There is little room for the deeper analysis into select titles we found in the previous volumes.

Stratton provides a synopsis and brief critique of each film, and lists the cast, significant craft contributions, and any significant awards or accolades. Films are divided into themes, such as sexual relationships and multicultural stories. This allows a certain continuity. For example, Van Diemen’s Land (2009) is followed by The Nightingale (2018), films set in the same period and place and dealing with similar issues. To this point, the book differs from other film reference guides, like the Leonard Maltin film capsule reviews. Stratton’s entries are not always reviewed in isolation. For example, on Rolf de Heer’s Epsilon (1995) he observes that the tale of an intelligent alien thrown into a world of stupidity contrasts with de Heer’s previous Bad Boy Bubby (1993) in which a simple, uneducated man is released into a cruel world.

Stratton’s status in the local film industry and his high profile for a film critic means that sometimes he is a part of a film’s history; quite rightly, he includes himself in some entries. He was on the Venice Film Festival jury the year that Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017) was awarded the jury prize, which he personally presented to Thornton. He also recounts the time that Andrew Bolt, a Stolen Generations denier, lambasted

him for his praise of Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002).

He mentions the ‘celebrated scandal’ encouraged by Geoffrey Wright, director of Romper Stomper (1992), when Stratton, on The Movie Show, refused to rate the film, ‘a decision prompted by the fear that the film would unwittingly lead to violent racism’. Stratton admits his actions were perhaps naïve.

At the height of his television career, Stratton’s reputation for championing local films began to backfire. Many considered that he was too generous and that a high rating from him was so commonplace that it lost its cachet. There is no evidence of misplaced generosity in Australia at the Movies. He finds fault with plenty of the 645 titles listed.

Despite Stratton’s clear enthusiasm for cinema and respect for filmmakers, the most entertaining passages are during his rather clipped, derogatory remarks about films he doesn’t like. Tunnel Vision (1994) is ‘as offensive as it is dim-witted’, Swinging Safari (2017) is ‘a laughless lump of a film’, and of Men’s Group (2008) he says, ‘This grim little film is compromised by tiresome photography (unnecessarily unsteady camerawork) that detracts from the drama by needlessly drawing attention to itself.’

Stratton’s abhorrence for ‘shaky cam’ is well known, and he never misses an opportunity here to take a cinematographer to task for their use of handheld camerawork. Being a reference guide, Australia at the Movies is not designed to be read from cover to cover. If you were to do so, references to camerawork that is ‘wobbly’, ‘shaky’, ‘jerky’, ‘queasy’, ‘unsteady’, or ‘atrociously ugly’ would be laughably repetitive.

Another Stratton peeve is almost as omnipresent. He is reluctant to find fault with Australian actors, but often seems resentful of imported actors when not playing specifically foreign roles. Of Sweet Talker (1990) he says, ‘Karen Allen seems ill at ease and out of place in a cast otherwise composed of excellent Australian-based actors.’ ‘Miscast’ elsewhere are Christina Ricci, Kelly McDonald, Garrett Hedlund, and Jimmy Smits. Giovanni Ribisi is ‘whiny’, George McKay ‘dire’, and Brenda Blethyn accused of ‘overplaying’. Stratton does praise a few, but the brickbats far outweigh the bouquets.

Even Kate Winslet incurs his contempt in The Dressmaker (2015), although the gripe concerns her age rather than her nationality. In this respect, Stratton belongs to a group of people that Alfred Hitchcock coined ‘The Plausibles’, people who nitpick about practical things like Kate Winslet being too old to be Liam Hemsworth’s high-school sweetheart, or that Keisha Castle-Hughes is the wrong dress size in Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueberger (2008) to lend the titular character her school uniform. Regarding Proof (1991) he asks, ‘Wouldn’t a woman as attractive as Celia have other friends? How does Martin support himself?’ Stratton is equally irritated that there is no explanation offered for Rosanna Arquette’s American accent in Wendy Cracked a Walnut (1990).

Stratton is entitled to his bugbears; all critics have them. His stern countenance is part of his appeal, and there is a certain enjoyment to imagining his disparaging tone of voice when reading his quibbles.

Despite the carps, Australia at the Movies is clearly a labour of love and a testament to David Stratton’s lifelong dedication to Australian cinema. g

Words still rise

An adroit and moving collection

Felicity Plunkett

IWe Speak of Flowers

by Eileen Chong

University of Queensland Press

$24.99 pb, 113 pp

n Li-Young Lee’s ‘Furious Versions’, a poem reckoning with his family’s exile, there is a question: ‘How then, may I / speak of flowers / here, where / a world of forms convulses.’ Eileen Chong draws these lines into her sixth book of poetry as an epigraph, reorienting them to find her title, expanding Lee’s first-person singular into the plural ‘we’, its question into statement. This drawing-into-connection and shifting is central to Chong’s poetics, established in her striking début collection, Burning Rice (2011), which includes an image linking women, flowers, and power. ‘The Flower of Forgetting’ ends: ‘Women can be strong. Flowers too.’

When Chong speaks of flowers through the act of writing poetry, she is conscious of the ethical question, like Lee’s, of poetry’s place alongside violence and grief. This question has its own lineage, and Chong shares the ambivalence of many poets. Two examples: Pablo Neruda refused metaphor but insisted on poetry in a poem about the Spanish Civil War, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’: ‘and the blood of children ran through the streets / without fuss, like children’s blood’. Yet in the same poem (translated by Nathaniel Tarn), he evokes Madrid before the war and speaks of flowers: ‘My house was called / the house of flowers, because in every cranny / geraniums burst.’ W.B. Yeats, in ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ (1915), argued: ‘ I think it better that in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent’. Yet within a year he described the ‘terrible beauty’ of Ireland’s struggle for liberty in ‘Easter 1916’.

Lineage, connection, and ambivalence are all themes in Chong’s work, but they are more than themes. They are essential to her poetic method. Through Chong’s work runs an exploration of what poetry is and can do. ‘If Your Poem’ from Rainforest (2018) begins ‘wants to be about horses, / let it be about horses’.

The more perfunctory, taxonomical approach to poetry of listing its themes is misaligned with poetry as deftly woven, allusive, and layered as Chong’s. Yes, flowers recur, dreams recur, hunger and the preparation and sharing of meals recur, the lives of women and the life of the body. Yet metaphor draws these together in combinations that shape and shade each idea. A poem may begin with horses, but with them will arrive ‘the trees, / the sky, the earth, you standing there, / me watching’.

The making and breaking of connections, central to Chong’s work, is enacted through her meticulous work with the line. The first four words of the collection – ‘a singular, cracked voice’ – are placed at the top right of the page, followed, after the pause of an empty page, low and to the left, by ‘words matter, can still

rise’. A time of silent reflection, which the reader is invited to share, is followed by words’ return. Silence is part of the Buddhist mourning practices that Chong outlines in a prefatory note.

A liminal space akin to one the soul inhabits for the forty-nine days after death, silence is the pause before and after words, an aspect of dignity and creative necessity. Echoing Claude Debussy, Miles Davis described music as ‘the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t play.’

The lines of any poem are connected to time, as well as to silence and speaking. The beauty of a flower, and of life, writes Chong in her preface, ‘lies precisely in its transience’. Chong’s lines work to express the movement of time. A line break can suspend an image, hold it still the way memory does. Kazim Ali, in his inventive essay ‘On the Line’, writes: ‘Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.’

Chong uses the line to augment her poems’ music, such as the onomatopoeic balance of phrases opening ‘11’: ‘Another summer. Insects thrum.’ An end-line pause can create tension, such as the opening of ‘51’: ‘The children searched for the skeletons’, an image sustained for its eerie moment before its continuation in the next line, ‘of leaves in dead matter.’ The closeness of life and death, part of the experience of mourning, is weighed in the couplet. A broken line can let one note be held, as when the harmony of the music and image ‘even leaves’ is held in its own line before the harsher following line ‘have teeth’ (‘33’).

Occasionally, there is the jolt of a dark joke, as in ‘75’, when the speaker remembers that it was her grandfather ‘who ate the first meal I prepared. He died.’ The next line continues ‘that same year’, but the mordant moment cannot be dispelled. Whether lithe, sinuous, or clipped, turning back on itself, snapped, or stretched, Chong’s line has never been more restive and varied than in this adroit and moving collection.

I relish this expertise so much that I miss the line breaks in the prose poems, of which there are more in We Speak of Flowers than in previous collections. In the place of line breaks, velocity and looseness suit these poems’ impressionistic mode. These limber assemblages gather flickering images of dreams and memories with impressions of the present: a locked gate, a braceleted arm, oysters tussling with grit, the first Chinese people arriving in Australia.

In a series of prose poems (‘36’ to ‘47’), line breaks are indicated in all but the two shorter framing poems. By gesturing towards line breaks with a symbol ‘/’, Chong creates a tension between their absence and presence. This aligns neatly with the collection’s motifs: spectral presences, memory, speaking to and with the dead.

The conceit of We Speak of Flowers is that this is one broken poem, an extended fractured elegy to the poet’s ancestors, in ‘101 layered fragments that can be read in any order’. The more anarchic reader may not wait for nor require such an invitation to read and reread, dip in and out of this work, when so many lines are exquisitely measured and emotional resonant.

What is it to speak of flowers? Terri Ann Quan Sing has described the way Chong’s ‘sensual language draws us back to the pleasures of living’. To speak of flowers is to acknowledge that after hunger (‘my only inheritance’, Chong writes in ‘27’), there may be feasting. To affirm that after necessary or imposed silence there may be fearless and joyful words and, as the preface reminds us, ‘an end is also a beginning’. g

‘Patient for human eyes’

The maverick poetry of Jennifer Maiden

Geoff Page

IWWIII: New poems

by Jennifer Maiden Quemar Press

$19 pb, 76 pp

t is worth noting that Jennifer Maiden, along with the present reviewer, seems to be one of the few Australian poets born in the 1940s who is still writing. Each of us has to be careful now (as Peter Goldsworthy wrote long ago) that we are not ‘Carving this same face / out of soap, each morning / slightly less perfectly’.

The solution of Jennifer Maiden (b. 1949) to this eternal problem has been to publish a new book every year or so focusing on the changing – and, so far, endless – hypocrisies and double standards exhibited by local and international politicians, particularly those admired by the left, the side of politics which Maiden also seems to support, albeit it in a sometimes uncomfortable manner.

The main way she has of doing this, but not the only one, is via the continuing adventures of George Jeffreys and his girlfriend, Clare, who first appeared in Maiden’s collection Friendly Fire in 2005 and have resurfaced in all her books since. Clare, it is important to remember, as a nine-year-old, murdered all her younger siblings. Her partner, George Jeffreys, a lineal descendant of his namesake, the hanging judge at the Monmouth Assizes, is also, like her, a human rights investigator.

Another of Maiden’s often-used strategies is to have a notable politician of the left ‘wake up’ beside his or her famous mentor e.g. Kevin Rudd beside Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Hillary Clinton beside Eleanor Roosevelt. The ensuing conversations are always morally bracing and politically illuminating.

A short but indicative sample of this can be found in her poem ‘The Harbour and the Sea’, which begins: ‘Tom Uren woke up in an empty clifftop house on the Central Coast / surrounded by windows full of ocean and sometimes rainforest.’ The poem’s protagonist is thus reminded of ‘his own small house on the harbour, created by an architect / especially for him, the labour often in kind and the cost / at first carried by a tenant. He rented all of the top / while Uren lived in the basement.’

As readers begin to wonder why a Labor icon such as Uren is living by the harbour or visiting a big house with ‘windows full of ocean’, they are reminded (without warning) that Australia has been treated by the United States ‘not, as Keating warned, as the 51st state but worse, / to be used for a leech like Ukraine and spat out’. There can be no justification for footnotes in poetry, but most of us will feel the absence of one here. I don’t imagine that Volodymyr Zelenskyy considers himself a ‘leech’, even if the possibility of being ‘spat out’ is, at the time of writing, looking increasingly likely. Luckily, and typically, Maiden does find her way back to the original theme and finishes with Uren sitting

down ‘in the house’ and waiting ‘for its guest, although he knew it was already Anthony’s purchase’.

As can be sensed here, Maiden’s poetry is never without risk, perhaps increasingly so. Not all her readers will remember Tom Uren or his place in the Labor pantheon. Many more will be disinclined to see Ukraine’s existential struggle against Putin as ‘leech-like’, though it is clearly weakening him. Still others of Maiden’s readers may have had a few days gap in their media, or social media, attention and thus not have registered the shortlived scandal about the Labor PM’s expensive Central Coast real estate purchase.

Further examples can be seen in ‘Conscription’, where Maiden again employs a somewhat scatter-gun approach. ‘There are many forms of conscription, not just the one / hoped for by any neocon in Australia. There was the plan / to provoke Russia irresistibly in Ukraine, and again / the teared up tiered up incitements against Iran, / against the patient streets and hills of Lebanon, / or by the latest German warship cruising one ocean / too close to China. Conscription has never just been / of the enemy into battle but also of the pawn / country which proxies for the master.’

As in earlier books in the series, Maiden also includes ‘standalone’ poems which make their contribution in a less direct way. One of these, towards the end, is ‘Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS’, which ‘pulls back’ to take a more cosmic view of what has preoccupied Maiden in the earlier poems. ‘I didn’t expect what it was: / a brilliant bauble for a Christmas tree, bright points down either edge / descending slowly to the western mountains, as ancient as ice / but as visually accommodating as some new toy in the marketplace / of comet memory.’ Considering the content of most of the book’s poems, it is something of a relief when the poet personifies the comet directly, concluding: ‘you are as innocent as an animal thriving on being admired. / You have 80,000 years to circle and need no apotheosis, / a luxurious long comet holding its place in its orbit, impatient / and patient for human eyes.’

On WWIII’s back cover the late John Tranter declares that ‘[h]er name will be remembered in a 100 year’s time’. To some this might seem extravagant, but to those interested in international politics and moral complexity (and, sadly, the subset of them with the patience for poetry) Jennifer Maiden’s books since Friendly Fire will long continue to be essential reading. g

‘Her name will be remembered in a 100 years ’John Tranter

Eileen Chong Poet of the Month

Eileen Chong is an award-winning poet of Hakka, Hokkien and Peranakan descent. She is the author of eleven books. Her most recent book is We Speak of Flowers, reviewed on page 52. She lives and works on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Philip Levine, Li Young-Lee, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alice Oswald, Li Qingzhao.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Poems can and often do arise from inspiration, but for me it is in the crafting that they inch towards the truest versions of themselves.

What prompts a new poem?

A hunger, a humming, a desire for wholeness, or for breaking something open.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

When the bills are paid, food is on the table, and the housework done. When the days and nights are quiet and filled with peace and contentment. Conversely, some of the best poetry is written when one is thrust into uncertain territory and must write to make sense of it.

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

It depends on the poem. Some of my poems have come into being fully formed and seemingly in a flash; others have needed as many as thirty drafts over a number of years.

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

Gabriela Mistral, because of what she saw and lived through, and how she made an incredible life despite very poor odds.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Currently, it’s a three-way tie between Judith Beveridge’s Tintinnabulum, Jordie Albiston’s Fifteeners, and Boey Kim Cheng’s The Singer

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude – but maybe enjoyed alongside one’s beloved, and several cats.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

She is more of a cultural critic than a poetry critic, but I always learn something new from reading the thoughtful essays of Eda Gunaydin. I also feel most immersed in my craft reading the essays and lectures of poet-teachers Jane Hirshfield, Mary Oliver, Eavan Boland, Linda Gregg, and Mary Ruefle.

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

One book? I can’t choose. It’s an impossible task. Do you go deep or go wide? I’d probably say the Norton Anthology of Poetry, because it was the first broad anthology of poetry I ever owned. I loved being able to read many different poets across the centuries in the one book, and it helped me to understand tone, voice, and perspective, and to form my own ideas on what kind of poetry might remain eternal (which is to say, none of it).

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

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, Part 1 (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

As a poet-teacher: I think we grow them! We can infect others with our love and enthusiasm for poetry. Normalise sharing poetry with friends, family, colleagues, and strangers; talk about poetry with your doctors and plumbers, with students and children. Poetry is for everybody!

Scorched

Acts of resistance and faith

Nicole Hasham

FOn This Ground:

Best Australian nature writing edited by Dave Witty

Monash University Publishing

$34.99 pb, 327 pp

or a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.

In the introduction to the anthology On This Ground: Best Australian nature writing, editor Dave Witty writes that if one thread connects all these essays, beyond the natural world, it is a ‘tenebrous pulse of anxiety’ about Earth’s fate. ‘Black Summer came first, followed by the floods of January 2020, cyclones off the West Australian coast, and then those first destabilising months of Covid,’ Witty writes. ‘We saw, in a short period of time, how quickly things we took for granted could be lost.’

The anthology can be read as a group response to these existential threats. It brings together voices established and new, through essays published in the past two years. Each excavates the human relationship with nature, and what it means to live in, and write about, the natural world at a time of ecological emergency. It is also a celebration of Australia’s wondrous landscapes; despite more than two centuries of white defacement, the land remains, to borrow the words of the colonisers, one of ‘beauty rich and rare’.

The collection opens with a sharp, evocative piece by Bigambul and Wakka Wakka woman Melanie Saward. It sets the tone and signals that the collection is no rhapsodic romp

through fields of flannel flowers. It is one of several contributions from First Nations people, to whom non-Indigenous Australians must increasingly look for new ways of surviving in our devastated landscapes. Saward describes a visceral internal experience of nature, accessed through her ancestral connection to native birds. ‘There’s something in the way their voices echo across the sky that hits me in the place where all this grief has been living,’ she writes. ‘It doesn’t leave – the grief never ends – but we’re the same, the birds and me, and that’s all I need to not feel alone.’

Connor Tomas O’Brien, Gregory Day, and James Valentine also probe the lessons imparted by birds in three standout essays. Through his pursuit of the rare plains-wanderer, O’Brien laments the loss of habitat to urban creep, and the parts of nature we choose to ignore. Day recalls a startling dream in which he falls in love with a royal spoonbill, and argues that, even in these days of information overload, the true nature of birds escapes human knowing. Valentine, in a laugh-out-loud eco-horror, imagines a future in which barbarous brush turkeys take over Sydney. Once they developed a taste for flesh, the birds ‘went from house to house and when everyone was dead or gone, they went back and started to rip our flesh away to get to our luscious organs’.

The collection contains too many notables to mention them all. Among the most persuasive are Louise Omer’s spiritualfeminist exploration of nature writing as a devotional practice, Drew Rooke’s finely wrought meditation on ocean swimming, and Emily Mowat’s poignant recollections of working as a biologist on wind-wracked Macquarie Island. Bruce Pascoe writes searingly of Indigenous dispossession from not just the land, but the flowers upon it; the realisation that ‘no young black lovers would ever wander through the plains of orchids and pass the ice-clear tubers of lilies between their lovers’ lips …’ Mark Tredinnick turns

Bushfires on Kangaroo Island, 2019 (photograph by New Matilda via Wikimedia commons)

his poetic sensibilities to his friendship with the late American nature writer Barry Lopez. And James Bradley renders compellingly the plight of islanders in the Torres Strait, where rising seas have gouged out beachside graves and left human bones bobbing in the surf.

Some essays dance at the intersection of lyricism and science, though they are not, strictly speaking, science stories. If there is any criticism to be levelled at this anthology, it is the omission of explicitly science-based essays. Its absence is deliberate, Witty explains – other anthologies in Australia already recognise such work. However, science writing, done well, can speak as powerfully as poetry to our experience of nature, and exemplars of the tradition should arguably be included in any ‘best’ nature writing collection.

Nonetheless, On This Ground exalts and entertains, informs and convinces. Some essays seethe with contagious anger. The skin stings after reading Joëlle Gergis, who cannot excise her emotions from her work as a climate scientist. ‘When complete exhaustion sets in,’ she writes, ‘I stare out the window, weeping at the enormity of the challenge we face.’

This is the first Australian nature writing anthology since 2003. It is one of several recent initiatives to elevate the form and does much to correct the historical myth that Australia does not have a serious nature-writing tradition. The collection closes

Pulcherrimus, most beautiful

The legacies of John and Elizabeth Gould

Peter Menkhorst

FMr & Mrs Gould by

Grantlee Kieza

ABC Books

$49.99 hb, 428 pp

or much of the nineteenth century, John Gould (1804-81) was known internationally as ‘the bird man’. His fame derived from two main sources: first, as the author and publisher of a series of sumptuous, folio-sized books featuring beautiful, hand-coloured lithographs of birds from particular regions or spectacular bird families; secondly, by using his position as an ornithologist at the Zoological Society of London to amass an unequalled collection of stuffed birds to use as reference material. Such was his fame that collectors and natural scientists from Charles Darwin down sought his advice about species identities and relationships. In a local context, Gould is rightfully regarded as a giant of Australian ornithology. He described and named over 400 species of birds and mammals collected in Australia.

Gould’s drive and productivity were remarkable. He and his publishing team, including his artist wife, Elizabeth (1804-41),

with writer Tim Winton, a masterful practician of Australian place-based narrative. A host of Australian writers, he notes, now refuse to avert their gaze from the natural world, the latter being an impulse that Winton describes as ‘psychologically perilous’. The scientific data is depressing. Fossil fuel interests control and confuse. ‘And the inertia of our politics on the biggest moral and material issue of our time is heartbreaking,’ Winton writes. ‘So yes, I feel scorched. And I’m angry. But I am still hopeful.’

When a bird mob gathers to fight off a predator, particular species are often the first to sound the alarm. Those that perch high, for instance, are skilled at detecting threats. Others might be loud and gregarious, so their alarm call travels further. These scouts are taking on great risk. Rather than hide, they make themselves conspicuous. They alert others to the peril so the flock may unite and endure.

Similarly, nature writing is a dangerous moral endeavour. It is an act of resistance and of faith, a steadfast resolve to make oneself a target and hold one’s ground in the presence of grave threats; to send an alarm burbling through the treetops until backup arrives.

Nicole Hasham is a writer, journalist, and editor based in Canberra. Her essay, ‘Bloodstone’, came third in the 2024 Calibre Essay Prize. g

produced twenty-one lavishly illustrated books in six decades, from 1830. Fifteen of those books are folio-sized with a combined total of almost 3,000 lithographic plates. Each copy of each plate was individually hand-coloured by a team of colourists tasked with mimicking the original painted by Elizabeth Gould or, after her death, by Henry Constantine Richter. Based on print runs, it is estimated that over 350,000 plates were handcoloured by Gould’s team.

Equally remarkable was the fact that Elizabeth bore eight children in twelve years while working full-time as the primary artist, including more than two years accompanying John on a collecting expedition to Australia. Elizabeth’s critical contribution ended tragically when she died of puerperal fever a few days after giving birth to her eighth child in August 1841.

Grantlee Kieza has produced a detailed and engaging account of the lives and times of John and Elizabeth Gould. He also provides fascinating insights into the lives of key people in the Gould publishing team and their relationships with their demanding boss. For almost half a century, Gould had multiple books in production at any given time. Each volume was released in multiple parts, as finances and the artistic schedule allowed. Entrepreneurial, ambitious, and a ruthless businessman, Gould lost no opportunity to promote and sell his wares to the wealthy classes across the Western world. He also cruelly exploited his staff and crushed potential competitors, notably a young and naïve Edward Lear, later to achieve fame as the author of nonsense poetry such as ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. From a young age Lear showed great potential as a bird artist; he dreamt of producing a work illustrating all the world’s parrots. However, he could not compete for sponsors with the avaricious Gould and was forced

to quit the project after publishing the first volume. He then suffered the humiliation of having to work for a pittance as an artist on Gould’s projects, and even tutored Elizabeth in some finer points of drawing feathers.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Australia was considered one of the most exotic and unexplored places on earth. Gould knew that Australia’s bird fauna was poorly known but that it included numerous curious and colourful forms. He judged that Australia provided a perfect opportunity to produce the most desirable bird book yet published, and to make a handsome profit. To ensure success, Gould realised that he needed to visit Australia to see and collect as many species as possible. He also deemed it necessary for Elizabeth to travel with him to make sketches of natural history objects that would later be utilised in the final plates. This, in turn, required their three youngest children to be left in London with a nanny for more than two years.

Paradise

Parrot (Psephotus pulcherrimus) (Marku Murto/Art/Alamy)

Gould’s name was such that he and Elizabeth received many favours when travelling in Australia, including accommodation, staff, and transportation provided by colonial governors and wealthy pastoralists. Not so for Gould’s tough and dogged collector, John Gilbert, whose contribution to Australian zoology deserves greater recognition. Following Gould’s instructions, and despite inadequate financial and moral support, Gilbert ventured beyond the limits of European occupation in south-western and northern Australia and collected the first specimens of many species of birds and mammals, including some that rapidly declined to extinction. Among his discoveries was the glorious, but now sadly extinct, Paradise Parrot. Gilbert wrote to Gould in 1844 with the not unreasonable suggestion that the species be named in his honour. Gould callously ignored Gilbert’s request, instead applying the rather mundane species name of pulcherrimus, meaning ‘the most beautiful’. Gilbert’s unfortunate death during Ludwig Leichhardt’s expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington, while still collecting for Gould, cut short a major contribution to Australian zoology.

Gould’s Australian expedition was a great success, resulting in three magnificent compendiums of the Australian fauna. First came a comprehensive seven-volume, folio-sized book with superb, hand-coloured lithographs of all known Austral-

ian bird species, published between 1840 and 1848. The Birds of Australia remained a primary reference for over a century, and the original plates are still highly valued as decorative artworks. Less well known, but arguably of greater scientific importance, is Gould’s similarly magnificent, three-volume Mammals of Australia, completed between 1845 and 1863, and a single-volume monograph on the Macropodidae (kangaroos, wallabies, and bettongs).

Kieza makes some interesting points about John Gould’s relationship with Charles Darwin during the latter’s twenty-year rumination on how best to put forward his theory of evolution by natural selection. As ‘the bird man’ of the Zoological Society, Gould was the obvious choice to identify the birds Darwin had collected during the voyage of the Beagle , including the pivotal Galapagos finches and mockingbirds. Further, Gould’s huge private museum of bird and mammal specimens from around the globe helped Darwin to understand the vast radiation of forms, for example, in the hummingbirds. However, Gould remained mute during the controversy that followed publication of Darwin’s momentous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Kieza implies that Gould, ever the astute businessman, did not want to risk losing potential sales by supporting one side or the other.

There can be no doubting the depth of research that supports Kieza’s text, as evidenced by the detailed endnotes and bibliography. However, I missed a map indicating the extent of Gould’s and Gilbert’s travels in Australia. Gould’s Australian expedition was the only extensive field work that he conducted. To my knowledge, his travels have not been documented in any detail. Nevertheless, Kieza has provided an important and engaging book that illuminates the life, times, and considerable legacies of John and Elizabeth Gould. While there have been several books on John Gould and his contribution to ornithology, Kieza has provided the most comprehensive coverage of the scientific, business, and familial milieu in which he operated.

Peter Menkhorst is primary author of field guides to both the mammals and the birds of Australia, most recently The Compact Australian Bird Guide (CSIRO Publishing, 2022). g

Caro Llewellyn

Open Page

Caro Llewellyn is the author of four works of non-fiction, including her Stella Prizeshortlisted memoir, Diving into Glass (2019).  For more than three decades, she has worked with writers variously in publishing and as a festival director and human rights advocate in Australia, France, and the United States, where she lives. Love Unedited, her first novel, is published this month.

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

Somewhere where people are put above profits and greed, and where those fleeing persecution are welcomed and supported, not treated like criminals.

What’s your idea of hell?

The United States in 2025 and the many other countries dangerously following the playbook that got us here.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Sentimentality. As a practical person, I dislike sentimentality’s ability to crowd out reason.

What’s your favourite film?

A French movie from 2012 called De rouille et d’os or Rust and Bone in English, directed by Jacques Audiard. The script combined two unconnected short stories by Canadian author Craig Davidson: ‘Rust and Bone’ and ‘Rocket Ride’

And your favourite book?

I find it impossible to walk to a shelf, pick one out of so many and say, ‘This is it, this is my favourite!’ Gilead by Marilynne Robinson would be one, What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt another, Tiger’s Eye by Inga Clendinnen, Bel Canto by Ann Patchett …

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

In 2011, I was invited to the White House as the guest of Philip Roth, who was being awarded the National Humanities Medal by then President Barack Obama. Unfortunately, I was overseas and couldn’t attend, but I would really have liked to be at that dinner with Philip, and Barack and Michelle Obama. Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

The word ‘that’ has quietly crept into overuse. When we say it in a spoken sentence, it’s not so annoying, but nine times out of ten when you read the word that in a sentence, you could lose it and lose none of the meaning. Once you start looking for it, you see it’s everywhere and, in most cases, superfluous and supremely annoying. I’m all for a little cussing every now and then.

Who is your favourite author?

S ince I first read her astonishing book Nine Parts of Desire many decades ago now, Geraldine Brooks has been a writer whose next book I await eagerly. I’m very much looking forward to her new memoir. Like Joan Didion, Geraldine will make something beautiful and lasting from loss and pain. And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Scout and her father Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird

Which qualities do you most admire in a writer?

An unflinching view of the world, plus deep empathy for human frailty.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

My father had polio, so reading Alan Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles was something of a revelation. No one much talked about polio back then; reading a book whose protaganist had polio was wonderful.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I have been very disturbed to learn about what happened to Alice Munro’s daughter and find myself unable to reconcile the choices Alice made. I won’t be rereading any of her stories again.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I confess I am not an avid podcast listener – apologies to the devotees!

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Work! Last year, I received a grant from Creative Australia, which enabled me to leave my role as CEO of the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas and focus on finishing my first novel, Love Unedited. It was the greatest gift!

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Fierce intelligence and brutal honesty.

How do you find working with editors?

Editors are the magic makers. I often feel my editors should be acknowledged on the front cover with me. A good editor makes everything I write so much better – clearer, cleaner, more accurate.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

As a former festival director, I’m an avid fan of well-curated and thoughtful programs that free writers to talk about their work. As a writer, I’m also a fan because a festival allows you to speak to and meet a lot of readers all in one place!

Are artists valued in our society?

No, not nearly enough. We often measure worth by monetary remuneration. Most writers in Australia earn less than $20,000 a year for their work, which speaks volumes about how much we value writers and their contribution.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just started toying with a seed of an idea about tyrants, but it’s no more than a sketch right now. Although I think I have a title: The Party.

ABR Archive

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