In late March, one of our larger Porter Prize audiences gathered at Collected Works Bookshop for readings of the seven shortlisted poems and the naming of the winner. This year our three judges – Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett – split the Prize, as happened in 2011.
The co-winners of this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize are Louis Klee (Victoria) and Damen O’Brien (Queensland). They were chosen from a record field of almost 1,000 entries, from twenty-two countries (the USA was represented by two poets on the shortlist, one of whom, Michael Lee Phillips, attended the ceremony).
Louis Klee, currently studying in the UK, was represented by 2012 winner, Michael Farrell, who read his poem ‘Sentence to Lilacs’. Klee told Advances: ‘What an honour, shock, and delight to share this award with Damen O’Brien, and indeed all the past winners. I am immensely grateful to the judges and to Australian Book Review. Finally, transgressing temporal boundaries and cultural milieux, I wish to express an infinite gratitude to Aimé Césaire, for it was only in returning to Cahier d’un retour that what began as a draft in 2009 became the present poem.’
These are great poems by great poets I respect, and I feel humbled to have my poem join that list.’
We look forward to presenting the fourteenth Porter Prize in 2018.
Joy to the world
The Porter Prize is one of several lucrative poetry competitions in this prize-happy land. The Australian Catholic University (ACU) Prize for Poetry is worth a total of $18,000, with a first prize of $10,000. There is
Prize, we had received about 1,150 entries, from forty-one countries. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue, ahead of the Jolley Prize ceremony in Sydney later that month.
ernest scott Prize
Damen O’Brien, whose poem is titled ‘pH’, alliterated thus: ‘There are few competitions in Australia that have the prestige and profile of the PPPP. I have read and reread the shortlists of the Prize for years.
a happy caveat, though: entries must be joyous. Fr Anthony Casamento, the Prize’s sponsor, has commented: ‘At a time of uncertainty across the world, we need to be joy-filled people. Poetry is a powerful medium on how joy can be manifested, or how its absence can be damaging.’ Entries close on 3 July. Visit the ACU website for details.
Jolley Prize
When entries closed for the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story
It’s not all joy and skittles amid this plethora of prizes. History is not overlooked. Four scholarly works were shortlisted in the 2017 Ernest Scott Prize, presumably the country’s oldest history book prize (it was first awarded in 1952). The shortlisted titles were: A History of New Zealand Women (Barbara Brookes, Bridget Williams Books); Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier violence, affective performances, and imaginative refoundings (Penelope Edmonds, Palgrave Macmillan); The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Tom Griffiths, Black Inc.); and Paved with Good Intentions: Terra Nullius, Aboriginal land rights and settler-colonial law (Hannah Robert, Halstead Press).
Professor Tom Griffiths was named the winner in early April; he receives $13,000. Few Australian histories have been so widely lauded; even fewer wear their scholarship so lightly. The judges – Professors Fiona Paisley (Griffith University) and Judith Bennett (Otago) – described The Art of Time Travel as a ‘wonderful meditation for historians and a beautifully written homage to the craft of writing history’.
Shortlisted poets Michael Lee Phillips, Anthony Lawrence, Jessie Tu, Damen O’Brien, and Jen Saunders at the Porter Prize ceremony
Scurvy
Dear Editor,
All authors are perhaps oversensitive to reviews of their books, but I have never been tempted to quarrel with a reviewer until now. Alan Atkinson’s review of Scurvy: The disease of discovery (April 2017) contains a broad assault on the place of literature in an historical understanding of the past, and specifically its place in the history of medicine, that is astonishing for its peremptory and illiberal tone. Professor Atkinson’s defence of the factual basis of history is also remarkable for its contempt of facts themselves. So I’ll cite some examples.
The picture of icebergs William Hodges over-painted with the pastoral view of Cook’s encampment at Dusky Bay is too trivial to be proposed as an example, says Atkinson. Yet the optical illusion of a sea turned green is an attested condition of photic damage called calenture, often allied with scorbutic reveries of delightful green vegetation – see the physician Thomas Trotter, Observations on Scurvy; the scientist Erasmus Darwin (‘Calenture’, in Zoonomia) and the trivial examples of this condition explored by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick and William Wordsworth in The Brothers. François Péron’s sudden passion for collecting seashells on the South Australian shore ‘does not prove he had scurvy’. Yet Péron records that, before scurvy became really bad on Baudin’s expedition, he was suffering from swollen and bleeding gums, and Baudin accounts for Péron’s distracted behavior as a result of scurvy growing widespread on the ship. He adds that Péron has just improbably laid claim to the discovery of a river fringed with abundant vegetation of an exquisite green.
More serious is the charge that I confuse the dates of scurvy in the Australian colony as a whole with the time-frame I apply solely to the penal settlements, particularly Port
Letters
Arthur. Atkinson laughs at my using Saxby Pridmore as my authority, but the facts I was using I garnered from Select Committee Reports, John Gold’s correspondence, the Tasmanian State Archives, James Backhouse’s eyewitness accounts, and that ‘banal distraction’ Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life. If fruit was growing in luscious abundance in Tasmania in 1834, why were there nineteen patients dying of scurvy in the Port Arthur hospital? That is a question I tried seriously to answer. If Atkinson wants to dispute any of the judgements about a delinquent governing class I extract from my facts, he need go no farther for their sources than the 1837 Select Committee Report on Transportation, Jeremy Bentham’s A Plea for the Constitution and William Bligh’s An Account of the Rebellion. Then he might have a few of his own with which to buttress his absurd demand, ‘What does a more detailed understanding of scurvy really add to our appreciation of literature as literature? … From an historical point of view it is a triviality, and from a literary point of view it is a banal distraction.’ That is language I never thought to read from the pen of anyone even pretending to an interest in the humanities.
Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, USA
Alan Atkinson replies:
that those who do are thus affected? The same sort of logic applies, though less conclusively, I agree, to what Professor Lamb says in his letter about Péron and Baudin.
If nineteen patients in Port Arthur hospital had scurvy, I really can’t see what that indicates about Australian colonial culture in general.
As for the character of the colonial governing class, the reliability of Bligh, of Bentham, and of the 1837 Select Committee has been discussed at length by Australian historians since the 1960s. I am sure that Professor Lamb knows about that discussion. I have been part of it, and while the subject is certainly not exhausted there is no room here to go over it again in anything like a useful way.
I am very sorry to be accused of laughing at scholarship. I was certainly not laughing at this book.
Condescending spin
Dear Editor, I found Dennis Altman’s critical comments on my book Disposable Leaders (April 2017) condescending and vacuous. He lists a few books that I did not cite, without any indication that they would have changed any of the interpretations or arguments I put forward. He criticises the fact that I frequently cite leading journalists from the press gallery, without any indication of how using unspecified others would have changed or improved any understandings. He criticises the lack of attention to blogs, posts, tweets, and YouTube, without any indication of how these might have played an important role in the leadership coups I have examined.
I am very sorry that Jonathan Lamb has been so seriously offended by my review of his book. Anyone who has read any of my work, as I am sure Professor Lamb has done, will know that I am the last person in the world to attempt ‘a broad assault on the place of literature in an historical understanding of the past’. It may well be that scurvy makes a blue sea seem green, and yet I see a green sea every day and I have never had scurvy. I am sure that’s true of large numbers of people, so how is it possible to argue [Letters continue on page 5]
In the chapter on Iatrogenic Spin Doctoring, I argue how the concern with spin is often self-defeating and further contributes to leadership instability. I titled one section the West Wing delusion, but, according to Altman, I do not say what this is.
May 2017
James McNamara
Jan McGuinness
Colin Nettelbeck
Frank Bongiorno
Lucas Grainger-Brown
Jill Jones
Nicole Abadee
Beejay Silcox
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Letters
Jonathan Lamb, Alan Atkinson, Rodney Tiffen, Dennis Altman, Kym Houghton,
Alison Broinowski, Joseph Fernandez, C.V. Williams, Neil MacNeil
Anthology
Michael Green et al. (eds): They Cannot Take the Sky
Madeline Gleeson
Poems
Bronwyn Lea
Christopher DeWeese
Politics
James Boyce: Losing Streak
Michael Winkler
Australian History & Law
Rebe Taylor: Into the Heart of Tasmania
Philip Jones
Miranda Johnson: The Land Is Our History
Kevin Bell
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David McCooey
Literary Studies
David Bellos: The Novel of the Century Paul Kildea
Marjorie Perloff: Edge of Irony
Shannon Burns
Lies and conspiracies in Trump’s administration
A critical guide to Helen Garner
The enigmatic life of Irène Némirovsky
Australia’s fear of abandonment
The role of Pauline Hanson in Australian politics
Jennifer Maiden’s new poetry collection
Louis Nowra in Woolloomooloo
Elif Batuman and the MFA
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Fiction
Catherine McKinnon: Storyland Doug Wallen
Heather Taylor Johnson: Jean Harley Was Here
Anna Spargo-Ryan
Ashley Hay: A Hundred Small Lessons Tessa Lunney
Peter Polites: Down the Hume Crusader Hillis
Cassandra Austin: All Fall Down Benjamin Chandler
Sarah Schmidt: See What I Have Done Anna MacDonald
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Ron Geering (ed.): Christina Stead Graeme Powell
Poetry
Luke Fischer: A Personal History of Vision
Susan Fealy: Flute of Milk
Judy Johnson: Dark Convicts Geoff Page
Stephen Burt: The Poem Is You Benjamin Madden
Memoir & Biography
Brett Pierce: Beyond the Vapour Trail Katy Gerner
Jamie James: The Glamour of Strangeness Paul Giles
Noel Tovey: And Then I Found Me Dennis Altman
Bill Hayes: Insomniac City Suzy Freeman-Greene
Carol Baxter: The Fabulous Flying Mrs Miller Simon Caterson
Philosophy
Anthony Gottlieb: The Dream of Enlightenment Tim Smartt
Interviews
Publisher of the Month Phillipa McGuinness
Open Page Louis Nowra
ABR Arts
Morag Fraser
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Ian Dickson
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Jake Wilson
Andrea Goldsmith
James Dunk
Chris Flynn
Jane Clark
A tribute to John Clarke
Jaynie Anderson et al. (eds): The Legacies of Bernard Smith
Andrew McMillan: Strict Rules
The Bleeding Tree
Berlin Syndrome
Trainspotting
Molly Haskell: Steven Spielberg
Denial
Land of Mine
Horizon Zero Dawn and The Walking Dead
Not as the Songs of Other Lands
THANKING OUR PARTNERS
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, our partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Sydney Ideas
I begin by saying how I tired of the television show because it depicted a small group around a benign leader as the epicentre of political virtue and wisdom. In real life also, political leaders are increasingly surrounded by personally appointed staff. The way concern with spin leads to centralisation and control adds to this cocooning of the leader. However, in real life, the leader’s relations with the inner coterie cut across and complicate other political relationships, with ministers and MPs often feeling excluded, and hostage to the political judgements of the leader’s circle. I argue at some length that this factor was particularly important in the failures of Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. I can only think that these pages were missing from the copy of the book Altman had.
Rodney Tiffen, Tascott, NSW
Dennis Altman replies:
Rodney Tiffen is a distinguished political analyst, and I am sorry he is disappointed in my review. But I did expect him to pay more attention to the changing nature of the media landscape. As I wrote: ‘Tiberius’s telephone is now a smart device, and political leaders have full time staffers employed to engage with the virtual world.’ Are we to assume these staffers played no role in the intrigues that led to the downfall of our last three prime ministers?
Peeved
moments
Dear Editor, I’m puzzled by Alison Broinowski’s review of Bruce Grant’s memoir, Subtle Moments (April 2017). Broinowski essentially lists the events covered by Grant’s memoir. Throughout the page, her tone is rather terse – acidic – and I read on expecting an opinion or fact that would explain this tone, but it never comes. Broinowski seems peeved by Grant’s memoir, but she limits her reasons for it to her final brief sentence, ‘He still hasn’t.’
I would have been interested to know what it is about Bruce Grant’s book that annoys her so much.
Kym Houghton, Carisbrook, Vic.
Alison Broinowski replies:
In my review of Subtle Moments, far from being ‘peevish’ I paid Bruce Grant several well-deserved compliments as a man and as a writer. He invited readers to judge his claim that his life represented a biography of Australia, and I did so, pointing to what was missing. It was disappointing that such an authority could not resolve the ‘Australian dilemma’ which he himself identifies.
Trumpacious times
Dear Editor,
The April issue, in its article on that Elegant Fowl, Henry James, remarks that ‘We need all the humour and solace we can get in these trumpacious times.’ Too true. I’ll offer the following:
Susan Lever, in her review of the Bell Shakespeare production of Richard III, quotes ‘the famous speech’, Richard’s opening lines. She uses a spelling of ‘son’ that gives away Shakespeare’s pun and makes it clear that Richard is referring to Edward IV, rather than to the celestial body. Does this give the Trumpians a new argument that anthropogenic climate change is not of relatively recent origin in human history?
Joseph Fernandez, Mosman, NSW
Minefield
Dear Editor,
Martin Zandvliet’s film Land of Mine (reviewed in ABR Arts, and on page 55) is not only about a disgrace – it is disgraceful. For a director to play with suspense of this type and degree is barbaric. I walked out, and I am surprised more people in James Dunk’s viewing didn’t do the same. One reviewer has even used the word ‘humane’. But despite a claim that the film might deter viewers from engaging in war, it is a monstrous experience to watch re-enactments of young boys picking away at landmines in order to defuse them, terrified that they will set them off, which is exactly what happens every so often. After two healthy bodies were blown to smithereens, I couldn’t believe that so-called civilised audience members
would continue to subject themselves to such horror.
I’ll spend my time on anti-landmine projects instead.
C.V. Williams (online comment)
Beejay Silcox
Dear Editor, I find Beejay Silcox’s writing refreshingly honest and very poignant, and look forward in anticipation to each of her articles and reviews. Her ‘Letter from America’ (September 2016) was outstanding and very prophetic. As with all literary critics, getting the right flavour in a response to a writer’s efforts is not an easy task, but the ease with which she dissects a text and provides an analysis of its content and context is exemplary. Accordingly, I look forward to more of her efforts.
Neil MacNeil (online comment)
Resist the beginnings
‘Four men in my family were executed by the Nazis, [including] theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, brother of my mother, my godfather. I know today he would be extremely unhappy observing a tendency of religious intolerance in the country he once admired so much for its freedom and acceptance. He never could have imagined that this strong, great nation would find itself in the political and ethical crisis it now faces … What kind of world are we living in? A world of ‘Texas first!’, ‘California first!’, Asia, Africa, America, Europe or Australia ‘first!’? Or do we live in a world that puts human dignity, humanity, fearlessness and compassion above everything else? In its great days our much-loved USA was such a country.’
From a blog written by Maestro Christoph von Dohnányi, ‘Principiis Obsta – Resist the Beginnings’, 6 February 2017
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May 2017, no. 391
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‘Some weird shit’
Lies and conspiracies in the nascent Trump administration
James McNamara
INSANE CLOWN PRESIDENT: DISPATCHES FROM THE 2016 CIRCUS by Matt Taibbi Penguin, $35 pb, 352 pp, 9780753548400
HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN? THE ELECTION OF 2016 by P.J. O’Rourke
Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781611855227
Beneath a frantic veneer of normalcy, American politics is not okay. It is as if Punch and Judy have careened out of a dive bar, tripped down the rabbit hole, smashed head-first through the looking glass, and found themselves running all three branches of government. Core to this is that unlikely combination of words, President Donald Trump.
As I write in April, Trump’s administration has been a chaos of incompetence and cruelty. That began with his inauguration, a patchily attended event, reportedly described by George W. Bush as ‘some weird shit’. Declared a ‘National Day of Patriotic Devotion’ by Trump, America disagreed and photographs of small crowds prompted a robust White House response. It was, Press Secretary Sean Spicer screamed, ‘the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period!’ While the nation mouthed a collective ‘what the?’, presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s easily disproved lie: he gave, she said, ‘alternative facts’.
Lies and conspiracies have become the hallmark of Trump’s young presidency. Since taking office, Trump has blamed his massive popular vote loss on three to five million illegal votes, a claim based on the racist story of a friend of a golfer. Conway made up the
‘Bowling Green Massacre’ to justify Trump’s extreme anti-immigrant policies, and Trump referred to a nonexistent terror attack in Sweden, prompting former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt to ask ‘what has he been smoking?’ Most egregiously, Trump restated a cable news conspiracy that President Barack Obama used British intelligence to wiretap then-candidate Trump, a claim denied by Obama, Britain’s GCHQ, and Trump’s own intelligence officials. And the press has to write this up as presidential politics. (Imagine a group of journalists writing soberly about a hangry five-year-old smashing a teapot with a bat. It feels a bit like that.)
The wiretap lie was a failed distraction from the federal investigation into Trump’s potential collusion with Russia to influence the 2016 election. So far, the Trump team’s entanglement with Russian questions has seen two former campaign officials and his National Security Advisor leave office, and the recusals of his Attorney General and House Intelligence Committee Chair. Which, to put it mildly, doesn’t look great.
Neither does his cabinet. With notable exceptions, Trump’s cabinet is a mix of the cartoonishly rich and bizarrely unsuited. Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was considered too racist to be a judge in the 1980s; EducaREVIEW
tion Secretary Betsy DeVos claimed that schools should have guns because of ‘grizzly bears’; and Energy Secretary Rick Perry once forgot the name of his department while calling for its abolition. To clarify, Perry oversees America’s nuclear weapons program. In terms of diversity, the cabinet weighs in around ‘1950s country club’.
White House senior staff include alt-right propagandist Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, an alleged member of Nazi-linked Hungarian group, Vitezi Rend. I am sure he is charming at state dinners. Trump’s daughter, fashion designer Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, real estate developer Jared Kushner, hold high-ranking White House positions, and are reportedly consulted on national security matters. Who wouldn’t get Jared and Ivanka’s take before launching missiles?
This blend of family and government make the Trumps walking conflicts of interest. Trump’s sons fly the world plugging Trump-branded developments, and Trump partly runs the United States from his hotels. He supervised a missile strike on Syria from his golf club, Mar-a-Lago (as you do), and responded to a North Korean missile launch between courses in Mara-Lago’s restaurant. Diners watched and Facebooked pictures of the nuclear codes bag. Later, Trump photo-bombed a wedding.
In foreign policy, Trump has threatened to invade Mexico, hung up on Australia’s ‘President Trumble’, and had the Geneva Conventions explained to him by the president of Germany. He reversed the One China policy then re-reversed it when China ‘threatened to take the gloves off’, said he was cool with whatever on the notoriously chillaxed Israel–Palestine question, and sought (twice) to ban Muslims from the United States, a despicable plan swiftly overruled by ‘so-called’ federal judges. Trump still plans to build a useless, multi-billion dollar border wall that he has maintained Mexico will pay for. As former President Vincente Fox tweeted, ‘Mexico is not going to pay for that fucking wall! #FuckingWall’.
from the Holocaust memorial statement, gutting science, attacking women’s health, and creating headlines like ‘Trump Organization Settles Restaurant Lawsuit with Second Celebrity Chef’, and you see where we’re at. If America was a Facebook friend, they would be posting about how ‘fine’ everything is after the divorce, while sucking down tequila and screaming into a balled-up towel.
In fairness, none of this was unexpected after the 2016 presidential election, which, put charitably, made a bar fight between clowns look like Swan Lake The election pitted Hillary Clinton – former first lady, senator, and secretary of state – against The Donald, a reality TV star and casino tycoon with no government experience. During his campaign, Trump called Mexicans ‘rapists’, insulted the parents of a dead veteran, mocked prisoners of war, mimicked a disabled reporter, made sexist comments, tweeted about a Miss Universe sex tape, supported torture and killing suspects’ families, pledged to ban Muslims, threatened to jail Clinton, invited Russia to hack her, and appeared to suggest that his ‘Second Amendment’ supporters shoot her – something made more chilling still by his encouragement of violence at rallies. Then, it seemed, his campaign detonated: Trump bragged about not paying taxes, and – in a leaked tape – gloated about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’.
So how the hell did he win?
Two early books on that question are Matt Taibbi’s Insane Clown President and P. J. O’Rourke’s How The Hell Did This Happen? In a campaign where television satire boomed to prominence – offering a vicious sense of objectivity amid the hyperpartisan lies – it is welcome to have collections of campaign writing by two leading print satirists.
In domestic policy, Trump has tried but failed to pass his party’s signature campaign promise – repealing Obamacare – despite controlling all three branches of government. Add celebrity Twitter wars, beating up the press, repealing protections for female workers just before Equal Pay Day, trolling civil rights hero John Lewis, omitting Jews
Taibbi’s collected Rolling Stone pieces argue that systemic flaws in America’s political culture prompted Trump’s unlikely win. While believing Trump would lose throughout the campaign, Taibbi’s real-time commentary is nevertheless sharply prescient. He argues that, in addition to ‘a triumph of the hideous racism, sexism and xenophobia that has always run through American society’, Trump’s victory was spurred by a rebellion against a ‘lazy and profligate’ oligarchy, a ‘triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties’ that kept constituents as far
from the political process as possible. The political media had become ‘one geek in a suit interviewing another geek in a suit about the behaviours of pipe fitters and store clerks and cops in Florida, Wisconsin’. Politicians and journalists developed a feedback loop, heightened in presidential campaigns, where – trapped together on buses and planes – they relied on each other for what the people thought. This ‘insular arrogance’ led to an ‘astonishing cultural blindness’. Meanwhile in Congress, politicians were focused on the Washington ‘power game’, not their voters. Increasingly flushed with cash after Citizens United allowed unfettered corporate donations, US Representatives too often became fronts for corporate interests. An ‘ideal’ bill allowed ‘the sponsoring pol to keep as many bigmoney donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt’.
Trump’s cabinet is a mix of the cartoonishly rich and bizarrely unsuited
companies, Trump’s reality TV act was ‘good for business’ and while ‘[e]ditorially the press denounced him’, they ‘never turned the cameras off’. Trump also benefited from the first truly social media election, where fake internet news swirled into cable’s hyperpartisan bloodstream, leaving ‘us without any real forum for a national conversation’. As Twitter rose in political prominence, Trump’s ‘fortune-cookie mind – restless, confrontational, completely lacking the shame/ veracity filter – [was] perfectly engineered for the medium’. Trump used Twitter and his saturation-coverage rallies to tell the political and media establishment to go to hell ‘at a time when Americans on both sides of
The ‘People’, Taibbi writes, were ‘sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances’, ignored, patronised, and used as ‘props’ by ‘robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors’. Added to this was the Republican strategy of pushing laissez-faire capitalist policies that hurt their constituents, while distracting them with ‘an ever-increasing list of villains responsible for the lack of work: communists, bra-burning feminists, black “race hustlers,” climatechange activists, Muslims, Hollywood, horned owls …’ This, combined with cable news, fuelled a toxic hatred of media élites and a current of xenophobia that – with the alt-right’s rise and Trump’s ‘rage rallies’ – was whipped into something still darker: the unwinding of the post-Civil Rights era multicultural consensus. These ‘movements took place against the backdrop of a splintering and collapsing of the media landscape’, where the commercialisation of news had emphasised not only partisanship but the business need for live events. The two-year presidential election campaign was ideal live television. Trump’s innovation ‘was to recognize what a bad TV show the campaign was’ and play ‘a better and more magnetic’ character. For media
President Donald Trump speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on 28 January 2017 (photograph by Sean Spicer/ White House)
the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class’. The more the press criticised Trump for behaving like ‘a drunken stockbroker who fell of the end of a bar into a presidential race’, the better he did. The press power to destroy a candidate had ended. ‘Trump understands,’ Taibbi says, ‘that NASCAR America, WWE America, always loves seeing the preening self-proclaimed good guy get whacked with a chair.’ He gave his supporters permission to howl ‘Fuck everything, fuck everyone’ and ‘Republican voters ate it up’, spending the ‘primary season howling for blood as
Art and passion in Paris
In 1903, the artist Gwen John travels from London to France with her companion Dorelia. Surviving on their wits and Gwen’s raw talent, the young women walk from Calais to Paris seeking out the great painter and sculptor Auguste Rodin.
‘startling and beautiful’
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife
‘a ravishing achievement’
Dominic Smith, author of the New York Times bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Trump shredded one party-approved hack after another’. Clinton and Trump’s ‘historically weak field’ of Republican rivals were fighting with outdated rules while Trump chainsawed the rule-book on live TV. ‘The irony,’ Taibbi laments, ‘is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole’.
While I think Taibbi is too hard on Clinton, Insane Clown President is an exceptional real-time analysis of the
This blend of family and government make the Trumps walking conflicts of interest
failings of the US political and media system, freshened by Taibbi’s wit and experience on the campaign trail.
Where Taibbi emphasises the political, O’Rourke accentuates the satire. O’Rourke wasn’t on the trail much, so How The Hell Did This Happen? is armchair banter –but the good stuff. Unlike Taibbi, O’Rourke doesn’t deliver a consistent quality of analysis. His thinkier pieces are too often straw-man arguments striving for humour that fall flat as political writing. And his deep dives into the policy positions of also-rans seem irrelevant now. There is a laziness in the book’s ‘hopelessly jumbled’ structure, and O’Rourke admits to it being thrown together with his editor at a cocktail party. It shows.
Still, when O’Rourke is on song he is savagely funny: while watching the Republican candidates’ debate, he writes of refilling his glass ‘with the special vitamin that makes Jeb Bush interesting’, and of Chris Christie, that he ‘could pop a waistband button outside the Trenton state house and break a window in Newark’. O’Rourke is, as he himself wrily notes, ‘an elderly and unhinged Republican’ who thinks ‘most popular music sounds like angry potty mouths falling down a flight of stairs while carrying a drum set’. That presents in certain country club attitudes, particularly his wince-inducing take on Clinton as a ‘lying old fishwife’.
That leads to my broader comment on both books: there should be more on the vicious sexism Clinton endured – from the ‘bitch’ signs and Trump’s ‘nasty woman’ sneer on live television, to the fact that Trump – an old, white, ‘pussy grabbing’ billionaire – won the presidency over his vastly more qualified female rival. The just fury resulting from that crowning sexism, together with horror at Trump’s cruelty to minorities, is already redefining American politics, spurring the biggest US protest in the Women’s March and grass-roots activism that is already influencing Congressional special elections in traditionally Republican districts. More must be written on it. g
James McNamara was the third ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow for his work on American culture. He lives in Los Angeles, and writes for television.
Into the labyrinth
The searching, anguished style of Helen Garner
Jan McGuinness
A WRITING LIFE: HELEN GARNER AND HER WORK
by Bernadette Brennan
Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 334 pp, 9781925498035
Who is the I in Helen Garner’s work? This is the question Bernadette Brennan probes by canvassing more than forty years of Garner’s writing and her seventy-fouryear existence. It is the proposition Garner’s fans and critics are most exercised by, although some presume to know the answer by reading her fiction as autobiography and her non-fiction as personal opinion.
Brennan examines both assumptions by tracing Garner’s steps to becoming a full-time writer in a style that is both thoughtful and readable. The framework is Garner’s lived experience and lifealtering influences; the focus is Garner’s self-doubt and self-questioning, extensive reading, research, and journal keeping. Her personal life is sketchy at best; details are selected chiefly for their impact on her work and states of mind. And yet they are sufficient to orient the reader in time and place, and to sustain a biographical thread through chapters delineated by Garner’s various writings. As it turns out, a detailed biographical account is hardly necessary; Garner’s output so closely reflects the high and low points of her life. Furthermore, everything Garner has written is interrelated, says Brennan. Garner has revisited themes, relationships, situations, characters, and questions in a body of work encompassing fiction and nonfiction, essays, screenplays, short stories, and journalism.
Brennan relies chiefly on an examination of published works, letters, and diaries, the thoughts of a few significant players, including Garner’s long-time publisher Hilary McPhee, and conversations with Garner herself. The result is a literary portrait of a writer who has suffered for her art. Don’t they all! But
Garner seems particularly susceptible. She is the sort of writer who writes to understand herself and what she thinks Possibly this is because she learned to be self-questioning from a young age.
Garner’s first clash was with her father. Born in Geelong in November 1942 to Gwen and Bruce Ford, she is the eldest of their six children of five daughters and one son. She escaped the chaos of family life by losing herself in books, a point of contention met with admonishments to ‘go outside’ and ‘get your nose out of that book’. Parental responses of anger and dismissal were, according to Garner, the chorus of her childhood. Bruce was a wool merchant who had never read a book, a ‘vivid, obstreperous character’, an ‘impatient, rivalrous, scornful’ man who dominated his timid, depressive wife and bullied his children, as described by Garner in ‘Dreams of Her True Self’ from her latest book of essays, Everywhere I Look (2016). Her extended battle with him has been one of the defining features of Garner’s adult life, and a central drama of her writing, writes Brennan.
Enrolment in Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1961 spelt freedom, new friends from vastly different backgrounds (Axel Clark, son of Manning first among them), and further disquiet over what she now views as self-destructive, youthful behaviour, including her poor academic showing. At The Hermitage in Geelong, Helen was dux and head prefect. Brennan describes it as a prestigious (a word used also to describe McPhee Gribble Publishing and Ormond College) school for girls. University was a rude awakening for Garner. She proved a desultory student and emerged with a third class degree, the experience creating a lasting unease
with academia and institutional authority that, Brennan suggests, influenced her handling of The First Stone (1995). A post-graduation altercation with her father, who now viewed her as an immoral radical, created a break lasting many years; he even vetoed contact with other family members. This drove Garner into the cheap and cheerful Melbourne inner city sharehouse scene of the late 1960s. There she immersed herself in a different style of family life based on friendship and shared counter-culture values, taught at school, married actor and academic Bill Garner, gave birth to her daughter, Alice, and within three years was on her own again. The first of her three marriages seems to have foundered amid the creative, sexually free, but weirdly controlling and all-consuming allure of the Carlton-based Australian Performing Group (APG) of actors and playwrights in which Bill Garner immersed himself.
Nevertheless, it was as a member of the APG’s women’s collective that Garner developed her writing chops, working on an experimental feminist theatre piece called Betty Can Jump It played to packed houses (of mostly wildly enthusiastic women) for seven weeks in late 1971, caused upset among the male-dominated APG, and coincided with the end of her marriage. The production and the audience’s response helped to shape Garner’s early writing, says Brennan.
Through the ensuing weeks of performances, she learned about the capacity of diary entries to capture mood and
experience. She discovered that brevity and structure were powerful tools of communication. Garner also appreciated the need for women to record their experiences or risk remaining forever silenced ... the APG strove to produce Australian theatre true to the Australian vernacular, accents and experience. Garner does something similar in her writing.
Garner’s teaching career ended in controversy over her forthright responses to questions about sex raised by her Year Seven Fitzroy High School students. She was already writing features,
were divided as to whether it was ‘tremendous’ and ‘truthful’ or ‘immoral’ and ‘sordid’, depending on their own social attitudes. The main point of contention, however, was that Garner had simply published her diaries. This accusation has dogged her fiction ever since. Now that she is even better known for her non-fiction renderings of morally complex and controversial issues and crimes (The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation [2004], This House of Grief [2014]), it has spilled over into what critics claim is her egocentric placing of self at the centre. In so far as novels and short
book and film reviews for the radical paper Digger, in which the issue was aired. Sacked by the Education Department, she survived for a while on benefits with help from Bill Garner and her parents, and began shaping her diary into what she thought might become a novel. The result was Monkey Grip, published in September 1977.
Based on her own experience of being trapped in an addictive love affair with a heroin addict and set around Carlton and Fitzroy, the book aroused interest and sold well, though critics
stories are concerned, such criticism ignores the creative process of shaping and crafting story, Garner’s muscular use of language and evocative imagery. It also ignores how and why diarised entries contribute to a novel’s meaning says Brennan. Quoting Anaïs Nin, she highlights how they record what is strongly felt in the moment and thus reveal ‘the power of recreation to lie in the sensibilities’.
As for the non-fiction books, following Brennan into the labyrinth of anguish and uncertainty Garner suf-
fers over them makes for remorseless reading. Accusations of bias, feminist revisionism, and the controversy, debate, and unrelenting publicity that followed publication of The First Stone fed into the breakdown of Garner’s marriage to fellow novelist Murray Bail and led to depression, a period of analysis, and refuge in religion. A ‘persistent, aching, leaking sadness’ weighed on her during the seven years it took to finally convict Robert Farquharson of drowning his three sons, his trials and appeals being the subject of This House of Grief. Critic James Ley judged it the best of Garner’s three non-fiction books, saying that she ‘has perfected a kind of negative capability in which she acts as a focal point for the book’s themes, which are channelled through her reactions but resonate far beyond them’.
According to Brennan, Garner’s front and fall-back position is that of the observer who wrestles and agonises over all before her, but whose ponderings and conclusions are informed by a tsunami of research, reading, interviewing, and anguishing over questions of morality, personal responsibility, style and voice, and the profound and often unpleasant examination of her own reactions. The craft lies in her ability to weave it all into a compelling narrative while maintaining the stance of the personally immersed, questing everyman. The ‘me’ character, she admits, is in all her work and is a carefully constructed self.
Garner puts her real self out there. Her writing invites controversy and confrontation, but also applause and acclaim. Despite her evident vulnerability and the personal cost of her writings, one is left with a sense that Garner thrives on the whole package. Consider the stern, assertive hands-on-hips frontcover image of Brennan’s book. Garner’s expression is apprehensive, defensive, bring-it-on. Is she still alert to that chorus of anger and dismissal, wondering what fresh hell awaits her, or is she asking, given so much formative disapproval, ‘Am I there yet?’ g
Jan McGuinness teaches advanced writing in the School of Journalism at Monash University and is writing a biography of Shirley Hazzard.
Tim Winton and Helen Garner at the 1986 Adelaide Arts Festival (photograph by Cathryn Tremain/Fairfax Images, first published in The Age, 10 May 1986, from the book under review)
‘Sad faces and dark skies’
Enigmas and puzzles in the life of Irène Némirovsky
Colin Nettelbeck
THE NÉMIROVSKY QUESTION: THE LIFE, DEATH AND LEGACY OF A JEWISH WRITER IN 20TH-CENTURY FRANCE
by Susan Rubin Suleiman
Yale University Press (Footprint), $53.99 hb, 364 pp, 9780300171969
When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française appeared in 2004, it was a huge success, in France and throughout the Englishspeaking world as well. Its account of France’s collapse at the beginning of World War II, and its portrayal of the early part of the German Occupation, are now acknowledged as profoundly insightful and of an epic scope matched by few other writers. In addition, the story of the quasi-miraculous survival of the uncompleted manuscript, purportedly kept for fifty years in a suitcase by the daughter of the author who had perished in Auschwitz, provided an almost mythical aura to the Némirovsky phenomenon.
The enthusiasm generated by what appeared to be the discovery of a ‘new’ major author was soon to be tempered by other revelations. Némirovsky, between the wars, had been not just a recognised novelist, but a commercially successful and critically fêted star. The problems were that many of the author’s closest literary associates were later tarnished by collaborationist activities or tendencies, and that much of her work, including her most famous novel, David Golder (1929), was intensely critical of Jews and Jewishness. This provoked a still-heated debate about whether Némirovsky – a Russian Jewish immigrant in France, and a Shoah victim – was anti-Semitic, a Jew-hating Jew. Nobody could be more qualified to bring balanced understanding to this debate than Susan Rubin Suleiman. Harvard professor, and author of many books on topics including women’s writing, the place of ideology in fiction, issues concerned with Jewishness
(including her own), and the literature, politics, and memory of World War II in France, Suleiman harnesses all her expertise and experience to reflect on what she calls the ‘Némirovsky question’. This is an authoritative work, beautifully written, though not without its moments of uncertainty.
For the Némirovsky question, far from being a single one, turns out to be a multitude of interlocking enigmas, puzzles, and complexities, few of which make for easy resolution. Some of them have to do with the many paradoxes in Némirovsky’s own character: for example, the fearlessness and skill with which, as a foreign woman in France’s snobbish and maledominated literary field, she built her career as a writer – as against the apparent blindness and passivity with which she failed to secure her own and her family’s safety when the need to do so had become obvious. Why did she not apply earlier for French citizenship? Was her 1939 conversion to Catholicism merely a tardy attempt to escape discrimination, or was she genuinely seeking a greater sense of spiritual belonging? How could she have declared
her admiration for Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s first and most violent antiSemitic tract, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937)? Did she really think that a personal appeal to Pétain to exempt her and her family from Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws could succeed? Suleiman does not provide definitive answers to such questions, but she examines them with the patience and rigour characteristic of the best scholarship.
Another strand of investigation illuminates the social and political history of France in the 1920s and 1930s, when the rise of totalitarianism in both the east and the west drove hundreds of thousands into France to seek refuge, reigniting traditional anti-Semitism, and provoking a broader surge in xenophobic and racist sentiment, not least among the well-to-do and established French Jewish community. How this situation evolved into France’s shameful and willing wartime deportation of so many of its Jews to the Nazi death camps is documented and analysed with lucidity, but also in a way that suggests disturbing analogies between the forces at work
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States of Poetry
Australian Book Review’s ‘States of Poetry’ anthology demonstrates the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry.
The state anthologies appear on our website with introductions from the state editor, biographies, and remarks from the individual poets, recordings, and other features.
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ACT
◆ Jen Webb (State Editor)
◆ Merlinda Bobis
◆ John Foulcher
◆ Geoff Page
◆ Kerry Reed-Gilbert
◆ Melinda Smith
◆ Isi Unikowski
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◆ Sarah Day (State Editor)
◆ Adrienne Eberhard
◆ Graeme Hetherington
◆ Karen Knight
◆ Louise Oxley
◆ Tim Thorne
◆ Jane Williams
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in Némirovsky’s world and those confronting present-day readers.
Pulsing beneath these individual and socio-political dimensions is the deepest question of all for Suleiman, that of Jewish identity and destiny. Through Némirovsky, Suleiman probes at the experience of Jewishness as race, culture, and religion, proposing the disquieting view that no Jew can ever really cease to be a foreigner or a stranger in the country where he or she chooses to live: ingrained anxiety and fear from the long experience of persecution and ongoing discrimination, exponentially sharpened by the horrors of the Shoah, have become inescapable and unerasable facts of Jewish life. Is this indeed the case? As a non-Jewish reader, I do not feel competent to judge; but I do not doubt the authenticity of Suleiman’s testimony.
While neither a biography nor a literary study in itself, The Némirovsky Question contains enough about Némirovsky’s life and work to provide a sound introduction for those who do not yet know her. There are also many useful clarifications and corrections to commonly held misapprehensions, including the intriguing but false story of the manuscript in the suitcase. Like her character Ada in Les chiens et les loups (1940, translation
The Dogs and the Wolves, 2009), Némirovsky searched endlessly for ‘the secrets hidden beneath sad faces and dark skies’, and this search, as Suleiman shows, produced a body of work that, whatever its problematic aspects, has enduring literary merit. But Suleiman’s most compelling contribution is her positioning of Némirovsky as an emblematic figure in the context of much of the last century
of French cultural life. The personal trajectory of the female writer – famed, forgotten, rediscovered; her tragic fate as a foreign Jew; her legacy as the mother of two daughters who both became writers and founded families that now appear to be successfully integrated into the tapestry of contemporary French society: these themes are developed against the background of a France that struggled unsuccessfully to rebuild itself after World War I, and tried to bury the shame and guilt of its official collaborationism in World War II by excising the Vichy period from its history. With impressive erudition, Suleiman demonstrates that the re-emergence of Némirovsky as a writer to be reckoned with is integral to the process by which the French – novelists and historians first, then more slowly the politicians, educators, and public – have finally begun to come to more truthful terms with their past. g
Colin Nettelbeck is an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisolm Chair of French.
Irène Némirovsky, 1938 (photograph by Roger-Viollet, the Roger-Violett Archive)
‘On the receiving end’
Australia as a global citizen
Frank Bongiorno
FEAR OF ABANDONMENT: AUSTRALIA IN THE WORLD SINCE 1942
by Allan Gyngell
La Trobe University Press/Black Inc, $34.99 pb, 419 pp, 9781863959186
In 2004 the Indonesian foreign minister, Nur Hassan Wirajuda, learned that Australia had established a 1000-mile maritime exclusion zone as part of its asylum-seeker policy. It had not consulted Jakarta. ‘You are blessed with a country that is rich in ideas and initiatives, declared Wirajuda. ‘Unfortunately, we seem to be on the receiving end of most of them.’
Allan Gyngell’s new history of Australian foreign policy since 1942 provides a strong flavour of the richness of the ideas that have emanated from the fertile minds of Australian policymakers and diplomats over the last seventy-five years. He also shows that these ideas have on occasion been bad ones, and that they have not always been well received by those with whom Australia has done its business.
Still, Gyngell is mainly positive about the Australian foreign policy legacy. Australia, he points out, ‘is peaceful, prosperous, well-regarded’. It increasingly has a seat at the table when the rules are being made about matters such as arms control and the environment. To borrow a concept favoured by Gareth Evans, one of Australia’s most distinguished foreign ministers, it has done its best to be a good international citizen.
Gyngell, a former Keating staffer, has headed the Office of National Assessments and was founding executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. This was never going to be a dissident history. As even a glance at the acknowledgments page reveals, it is very much the work of a policy insider, one who has been involved in many of the debates, episodes, and issues being surveyed. This involvement is rarely signalled directly; apart from a disclosure in the chapter on the 1990s that he
was Paul Keating’s senior international adviser, Gyngell is silent on his own role. This is dispassionate history, not memoir or advocacy.
Nevertheless, reticence is not the same as neutrality, and there are inevitably places where the emphasis is not as critical as a less involved author might have managed. Keating’s 1995 security treaty with Indonesia is the most obvious case in point. Even if one tries to put aside hindsight, it is hard to see how anyone could have imagined that this was a good idea in the light of growing domestic concern about East Timor in the wake of the Dili massacre. The treaty, which ultimately failed to weather the East Timor crisis of 1999, looks like just another example of the problem that dogged the Keating era: the prime minister’s ambitious top-down repositioning of Australia’s identity and place in the world attracted either the indifference or hostility of ordinary punters.
Gyngell’s time-scale allows him to trace continuities in Australian foreign policy that would otherwise be easy to miss. Australia’s active and successful role through the United Nations in Indonesian independence had later echoes in its admirable Cambodian diplomacy under Evans. Australia has also worked through the Commonwealth in dealing with problems beyond its immediate region, such as white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. In these instances, Australia drew on the trust and goodwill that it could muster as an active and independent but not major power. It had just enough clout to get a hearing, but not enough to be seriously threatening to the key players. Here was Australia, the good global citizen. But Gyngell also shows that Australian diplomacy has sometimes
been ‘graceless and self-absorbed’, such as in the response to Britain’s ambition to join the European Economic Community. His account of the Whitlam government’s policy on East Timor’s incorporation into Indonesia reveals its cynicism, confusion, and shoddiness: the conclusion that it was ‘wishful thinking disguised as foreign policy’ is accurate enough, but also generous. Gyngell merely mentions in passing Hawke’s belief that, as the great conciliator, ‘he was
This was never going to be a dissident history; it is very much the work of a policy insider
one of the few world leaders who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict’. Further comment would be as superfluous as detailed assessment of Kevin Rudd’s hope that he might ‘fashion’ US–China relations.
Gyngell also mainly narrates rather than offering his opinion about Australia’s official response to asylum seekers, and to global warming. It has at times been difficult to discern the good international citizen in the country’s often narrowly self-serving policies in these fields. In terms of its deeds rather than its words, Australia was also, to put it politely, a measured supporter of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in Iraq, but this did not stop John Howard from milking Australia’s modest commitment for all that it was worth, both at home and in Australia’s dealings with the United States more generally. Gyngell’s typically restrained criticism of the Howard government’s policy is that it followed the United States not ‘blindly’ but ‘unthoughtfully’.
The book’s principal argument – that a fear of abandonment has decisively shaped Australian foreign policy since 1942 – is possibly overstated. No doubt this helps along our understanding of Australian behaviour in World War II and the Cold War that followed, but it seems rather less useful for the 1970s and 1980s, and perhaps even for our own times. In the Trump era, a fear of entanglement might be more significant than fear of abandonment. Public disengagement from foreign policy, Gyngell suggests, might also be breaking down, as voters’ disillusionment grows with so much that has been central to Australia’s foreign policy agenda for the last several decades.
Gyngell explains that he is writing as a practitioner rather than a scholar, yet he combines these roles capably, if not flawlessly. In the early portions of the book, he does not in every case draw on the most significant historical scholarship in the field; in the latter, the period covered by his own career, he occasionally threatens to overwhelm us with detail. Inevitably, there are questionable conclusions. Was Australia’s support of the United States in the Vietnam War ‘politically vital’, as Gyngell claims, or merely useful?
Nonetheless, Fear of Abandonment is convincing in its key judgements. Gyngell’s word-portraits of the major political figures in the making of foreign policy – from H.V. Evatt and Ben Chifley to Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull – are astute, balanced, and engaging. And while it is not easy to turn policy history into popular entertainment, there is sufficient dry wit to charm the patient reader. The visit of Romania’s Ceauşescu to Australia in 1988, engineered by Western Australian premier Brian Burke and mining magnate Lang Hancock, ‘may have represented the nadir of the Hawke Government’s foreign policy’. More recently, he suggests, it ‘was not at all clear the Chinese wanted Rudd’s sort of friendship’.
The book is animated by an insider’s belief in the worth of foreign policy and by a conviction that to understand it properly one needs to engage seriously with the past. These are important claims at a time when almost everyone
acknowledges that Australia underinvests in its diplomacy, and when so many of the issues that policy-makers face – such as China’s rising power and ambition, and its economic and strategic importance to Australia – appear so novel as to have moved beyond the power of history’s role as helper and guide. Fear of Abandonment deserves a wide
readership, and should be of particular interest and value to those currently responsible for piloting Australia’s voyage through treacherous waters. g
Frank Bongiorno teaches at the Australian National University. His most recent book is The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia (2015).
IMAs and UMAs and SAMs
A powerful anthology about asylum seekers
Madeline Gleeson
THEY CANNOT TAKE THE SKY: STORIES FROM DETENTION edited by Michael Green et al. Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781760292805
‘Only in literary language can people understand our life and our condition.’
Refugee law and policies are subject to vociferous debate the world over as governments and societies grapple with the challenges of almost unprecedented global displacement. Yet the most relevant voices – those of refugees and asylum seekers themselves – are usually missing from these debates. We speak about refugees, perhaps even for refugees. Rarely are they afforded the opportunity to speak for themselves. Locked away in isolated detention facilities, or on remote Pacific islands, lives and experiences are reduced to a string of pernicious acronyms. People become IMAs (illegal maritime arrivals) and UMAs (unauthorised maritime arrivals). Children separated from their families are UAMs (unaccompanied minors). Adult men travelling alone are SAMs (single adult males), regardless of whether they have wives and children waiting for them elsewhere.
In They Cannot Take the Sky, thirtyfive courageous authors reclaim their voices, reveal their lived experiences of Australia’s detention policies, and invite readers to recognise their humanity. In this powerful anthology, refugees and asylum seekers tell their stories, refusing to be silenced in the face of enormous
physical and political pressures.
The book opens with a prologue by Behrouz Boochani: a Kurdish journalist from Iran, detained on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea since 2013, and by now well-known among journalists and the refugee sector in Australia. Boochani is an obvious choice as first author in the collection. He draws the reader in, narrating life inside the detention centre on Manus Island with an unsettling frankness and intensity. Although he begins in direct prose, a rapid descent into madness soon follows, interspersed with sudden moments of startling lucidity. At one point Boochani finds himself up a tree, half naked in the rain, threatening to jump, and demanding cigarettes and Beethoven. In that moment, he realises that he has become ‘a crazy poet’. ‘Yeah’, he writes, ‘I am a poet now … completely crazy, but philosophical crazy.’ It is a deeply confronting prologue, and sets the tone perfectly for the chapters that follow.
In three parts, They Cannot Take the Sky presents a skilfully curated collection of personal stories from within, and looking back on, detention. The collection is representative of a broad range of experiences.The contributors arrived in Australia at various times since the 1990s. Some came as children, others as adults. They spent time in a range
of detention centres across the Australian mainland, on Christmas Island, and in Nauru and Papua New Guinea – some for as little as a few weeks, others for several years (and counting).
Despite this diversity of experience, common themes recur: hopelessness and helplessness within the detention environment, trauma and self-harm, confusion about visa processes, a sense of being stripped of all control over even the most basic aspects of life, frustration at not being understood. The authors who have been released describe the moment they learned of their freedom with mixed emotions – for some joy, others sorrow. But many shared common sentiments after their release, including a sense of guilt and of not belonging, anger, depression, and anxiety. The consistency with which these enduring symptoms are cited, even by people who were detained for relatively short periods, raises the question whether any amount of time in such conditions is acceptable, especially for children.
For some contributors, their homelands and the circumstances that caused them to flee assume a central role in their narratives, while others pass over this time relatively quickly. All share a common horror about the time spent in detention. Their trauma bleeds through the prose, even on reflection years later. A number of contributors write with remarkable candour about their darkest moments, and innermost fears.
Some stories, like Aran’s recollection of the aftermath of a bombing, when he found his brother ‘chopped in half’ and a friend ‘hanging on the tamarind tree, and all his intestines and everything had come out’, are graphic. Perhaps even more powerful are the gaps in the stories: the parts which, even in this most revealing of texts, are too traumatic to articulate. ‘I remember a lot of things vividly that I can’t even describe,’ writes Donna, while Hal-Hal ‘wants you to know that there is so much about her experiences she wasn’t able to talk about, because those things are too painful’.
Greatest credit goes to the contributors themselves, but the book’s editors – Michael Green, André Dao, Angelica Neville, Dana Affleck, and Sienna Merope – also deserve recogni-
tion for the care they have taken with the stories entrusted to them. Each story has been deftly crafted to fit within the overall flow of the book, while maintaining and capturing the nuances of each narrator’s voice.
They Cannot Take the Sky is rare and essential reading. Above all, it offers a different perspective – and perhaps the most important perspective – on the impacts of detention and Australia’s broader immigration policies. We learn that five-year-old Jamila, detained at Woomera in 2001, admired the boys who self-harmed in protest against their detention, regarding them as bold,
Zeitgeist
brave, and fearless for standing up for themselves in such hopeless times. We come to understand why something as simple as changing the number of apples available on a given day can drive a person to madness. We see the logic behind the protests, the resistance, the panic, the breakdowns. We share the confusion and frustration with arbitrary processes and unnecessarily harsh policies. All that is left is to do something about it. g
Madeline Gleeson’s most recent book is Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru (2016).❖
We admire it because it disdains to destroy us: beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
Chagall’s falling man, a grandfather clock, a yellow cow with a blue violin populate an allegory of terror
‘To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive is cruelty,’ said le Père de la Grande Terreur
And an angel of the Lord stood by them, the glory of the Lord shone round, and they were bathed in terror
Spiders the size of bears, the waking dead, the lights go out, something claws your arm: the terror
He was a wrist-twister, shin-kicker, a gifted smasher of cherished things, Verlaine’s pale-eyed holy terror
Dear Mr Speaker: I hereby designate all funding for Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terror
He burns yet doesn’t flinch a muscle, doesn’t utter a sound, unlike those who wail and circle him in terror
O say can you see by the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air the cowardly stern of the HMS Terror
Late morning in a climate-controlled trailer a pilot yawns, scratches his head, and resumes his armchair terror
And an angel of the sword stands by me, the glory of the force shines round, and I am bathed in terror
Bronwyn Lea
Bronwyn Lea’s most recent collection is The Deep North: Selected poems (2013).
Derring-do
Michael Winkler
LOSING STREAK: HOW TASMANIA WAS GAMED BY THE GAMBLING INDUSTRY
by James Boyce Redback
$22.99 pb, 248 pp, 9781863959100
Gambling is part of Australia’s self-definition. The way we like to tell the story, lads at Gallipoli went over the top with a two-up kip in one hand and a rifle in the other, while exchanging tips for the Melbourne Cup. This national myth of betting derring-do, full of heroic punts and back-slapping celebrations, bears scant resemblance to the modern reality of Australian gambling. Our monumental annual gambling losses ($22.7 billion in 2014–15) flow, in large part, from solitary poker machine addicts feeding preposterous amounts of money into cacophonous machines.
In truth, ‘gambling’ is a misleading term for interaction with pokies. The machines keep a set percentage of money gambled, averaged over time. Use them long enough and it is guaranteed that all of your money will be taken. This is not just a safe bet, but a mathematically sure thing.
Gambling involves decisions about risk and reward based on calculated odds. Similarly, business is based on analysis of opportunities and threats, and backing the best plan necessary for growth. That is the theory. Operating a private enterprise effectively underwritten by public subsidy, benefiting from a mono-poly, and paying low rates of tax is a pipedream for most businesspeople. This, however, is the startling scenario in Tasmania, where Federal Hotels has made several hundred million dollars in profits through its pokie monopoly. In Losing Streak, historian James Boyce provides a vast amount of evidence to demonstrate that the company has been the recipient of outrageously favourable treatment for almost half a century. His language is never loose, and he leaves the reader to decide just how strong
the stench of corruption is, but asserts, ‘The relationship between successive Tasmanian governments and Federal Hotels became a cornerstone of a system of crony capitalism that has distorted public policy for decades.’
Losing Streak is remorseless in its accretion of evidence. The repeated coincidence of government decisions with Federal Hotels’ wishes is damning. Boyce argues that the Labor government’s awarding a licence for the Wrest Point Casino to the Farrell family (owners of Federal Hotels) in 1968 was irregular if not improper. When that government was replaced the following year by a minority Liberal government, with the balance of power held by Kevin Lyons (son of Joseph and Enid Lyons), moves were made to introduce competition to the gambling industry. Lyons’s surprise resignation forced the government to collapse and the ALP was returned to power. Lyons received a sum of money from Federal Hotels prior to resigning, plus $25,000 from British Tobacco as an advance for never-to-bepublished memoirs. Both companies were well looked after by the incoming government, and the gambling monopoly was maintained.
Since that time, Liberal governments have been as favourably disposed to the New South Wales-based Farrell family as were their Labor rivals. Federal Hotels has been a major donor to both parties. (Why? According to Farrell Group Managing Director Greg Farrell, this was to enable politicians to ‘better articulate their philosophies to the public’ at election time.) Tasmanian governments of both stripes have presided over a shocking litany of concessions to the company. For almost fifty years there has been a direct funnelling of money from the ragged pockets of Tasmania’s problem gamblers into the coffers of the Farrells. Almost all of this comes from pokie addicts who ‘are not just customers of Tasmania’s gambling industry; they are its core business’.
Federal Hotels not only has the sole licence for pokies in Tasmania, but is also allowed to decide where machines are situated. Boyce calls this a ‘unique competitive advantage’ that has devastated ‘Australia’s poorest, sickest, least
educated and most disadvantaged state’. Tasmania has one of the highest levels of gambling expenditure in the nation, but also one of the lowest levels of gambling taxation returns. Only eighteen per cent of Tasmanians ever play the pokies; almost all revenue comes from addicts. Recent research has shown a link between pokie addiction and crime, suicide, family violence, mental illness, and other negative social outcomes.
While the greed of the pokie operators is repugnant, moral culpability must be shared by several generations of Tasmanian politicians. Boyce writes of ‘the pervasive existence of unacknowledged conflicts of interest’ in a ‘broken democracy’. He has an eye for the telling detail: when Farrell testified to official parliamentary committees, he addressed MPs by their first names. The book’s supporting cast includes such notable Apple Islers as David Walsh, Richard Flanagan, Andrew Wilkie, and Edmund Rouse.
Several questions arise. Where was the media scrutiny? After fifty years of dodgy deals, there is sufficient information on the public record for Boyce to construct a book-length prosecution. Why wasn’t this high-priority local news for decades? Why are Australians permissive about ‘high intensity’ pokies, a local invention banned in various foreign jurisdictions as being too addictive and dangerous? About eighty-five per cent of money lost by problem gamblers in Australia is through addiction to these machines.
Another unresolved issue is why a third party (the Greens, or any other) has not been able to capitalise on what Boyce portrays as widespread hatred of pokies and disillusionment with Liberal–Labor acceptance of Federal Hotels’ money. This is especially surprising given the broader representation facilitated by the Hare–Clark voting system.
Boyce’s book is muckraking in the original sense of the term, an important broadside against entrenched interests capitalising on a social scourge. But will it precipitate meaningful change? Sadly, you wouldn’t bet on it. g
Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.
Big-league little lives
The role of Pauline Hanson in Australian politics
Lucas Grainger-Brown
THE WHITE QUEEN: ONE NATION AND THE POLITICS OF RACE (QUARTERLY ESSAY 65)
by
David Marr
Black Inc., $22.99 pb, 139 pp, 9781863959070
David Marr’s interlocking identities as consummate essayist, journalist of forty-five years, ferocious biographer, and staunch cosmopolitan increasingly eclipse his subject. He wears the condition honestly and inelegantly. ‘I’m a grumpy old guy who hasn’t found in twenty years another big life worth writing’, he remarked in his 2016 Seymour Biography Lecture. Instead, ‘I write little lives these days, of priests and politicians.’ After his magnum opus, Patrick White: A life (1991), Marr adapted his biographical skill to mapping the littleness of a powerful few – each in the brevity of a Quarterly Essay Pauline Hanson is his latest ‘little life’ In The White Queen: One Nation and the politics of race, the two themes of his oeuvre – frustrated biographer of an ex parte national life and forensic reporter of political controversy – entwine as he sets out to prove that Australia is better than our irrepressible white queen.
Marr asks three questions: what are Hanson’s politics; what is her constituency; and who are we as a nation? In a departure from his usual style, he interleaves the story of her nine political lives with copious survey data gathered from longitudinal and electoral studies. His aim is to construct ‘a floor of fact under speculation about Hanson’s people and her political appeal’, because, overawed by her second coming, ‘we are not facing the facts about Hanson and One Nation. What’s driving them is the same as last time: race.’ No one is more persuasive in proving this thesis than Hanson herself. Vile rhetoric runs like an oil spill throughout, from 1996 as Liberal candidate for Oxley to today as Senate power broker. Reproducing Hanson’s
words verbatim without the small-town patois, Marr makes their ugliness unavoidable. Hanson is a spoken-word magician: somehow her voice, uncritically relayed by the broadcast media, deafens us to what she is clearly saying.
Marr uses the phrase ‘cameras swarmed’ repeatedly when portraying Hanson’s stunts, pratfalls, mischaracterisations; her stint in prison (2003), and her turn on Dancing with the Stars the following year. The obvious racism and her status as a simulacrum of a mythic hidden Australia are conjoined. One Nation’s power derives from thoroughly postmodern performances in which confronting the taboo of racism is misconstrued as courage. Likewise, the act of broadcasting Hanson perpetuates the myth that she speaks for some great unheard. Her party won four per cent of the national vote in the 2016 election; support has since climbed to ten per cent. More than half her constituency derives from newsworthiness. The problem that Marr grapples with is parsing what her cypher reproduces: ‘Is she a party of policy or protest? Hanson is a puzzle with consequences.’
One Nation 2.0 is intriguingly undifferentiated from the strata of either major party. The 2016 Australian Electoral Study shows that two-thirds of One Nation respondents identify as working-class. Contra received wisdom, seventy-three per cent reside in big towns and cities. A third are under forty-five, indicating rejuvenation in the base since the 1990s. Most of Hanson’s original supporters were siphoned off the right flank of the Coalition. Yet contemporary supporters split evenly –forty per cent apiece – between former
Coalition and Labor voters. Present-day Hansonism, it seems, is an unpredictable state of mind. An observation Marr makes of Hanson at a town hall
Broadcasting Hanson perpetuates the myth that she speaks for some great unheard
in Tasmania, circa 1998, is illuminating: ‘Race was the chilli in the mix. She won ovations every time she brought money and race together.’ Add to this potent stew a pun-itive law-and-order streak –eighty-eight per cent of her supporters want to bring back the death penalty –and season with libertarian disdain for big business, welfare programs, and the political establishment.
The nexus of this complex allegiance is a militant form of moralism. Friedrich Nietzsche termed such a phenomenon ressentiment: the externalisation of envy and inferiority onto symbolic causes of all social wrongs. For One Nation supporters, migrants, dole bludgers, irredeemable criminals, ad nauseum, prevent the realisation of some Australian utopia based on the blueprint of a halcyon cultural past. Thus Hanson can say, with a straight face, ‘I challenge anyone to tell me one thing that I’ve said that is racist.’ Of course: she and her voters are articulating the politics of morality. Their moral category of
the good just happens to exclude most races.
Marr, too, is concerned with the good life. The dynamics and histrionics of Australia’s public morality are the subtext of his near-faultless investigative works: Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson, 2003), Panic (2011), The High Price of Heaven (1999), and The Henson Case (2008). The White Queen feels more personal. Marr needs to prove Hanson is not as ‘big league’ as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, because ‘this is a better country’. He summons yet more survey data – Mapping Social Cohesion by
The nexus of this complex allegiance is a militant form of moralism
the Scanlon Foundation – to illustrate a happy, satisfied, optimistic Australia supportive of multi-culturalism and imbued with a sense of belonging. ‘Nearly all of us are somewhere else’, he concludes, ‘scattered around the centre, waiting for a government that will take this good, prosperous, generous country into the future.’ Perhaps.
The salience of One Nation is a failure of representation. Of course it is. As are many non sequiturs in our national life. Of course, One Nation only exists because of the fractured nature of the Coalition. To defeat its first incarnation, John Howard had to co-opt One Nation’s policies and institute a tradition of preferencing Hanson last. Her renaissance is a product of Malcolm Turnbull’s Senate voting reform, the double dissolution in 2016, fear of terrorism, Islamophobia, and hostility to boat people. But there is more to the Hanson phenomenon than is suggested by Marr’s classic liberalism, his constriction of politics and all its civic consequence to politicians. In a Nietzschean sense, there must first be some inner abyss into which one stares before something like One Nation can stare back.
Alan Atkinson wrote in last year’s Australian Book Review RAFT Fellowship Essay on the Australian national conscience: ‘A nation could not know that it was really a nation, that it was fit to be a nation with its own place in
the world, without knowing what it owed to human groups beyond its edges’ (ABR, September 2016), Hanson is the antithesis of a national conscience so conceived. Seen as the long-lived, spiteful repudiation of inclusive and ethical nationalism, she and her party are not just an indictment on politicians angling after the racist vote. They are more than a handbrake on the majority will. Hansonism is symptomatic of a nation that has submitted to being hemmed
in by exclusions because it has lost, or perhaps never fully found, a principled and emancipated place in the world. Politics matters for all the reasons that David Marr outlines in this masterful essay – but also in many more ways besides. g
Lucas Grainger-Brown is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. His research comprises populist politics and democratic theory.
Boundary work
Using eoliths to establish chronologies
Philip Jones
INTO THE HEART OF TASMANIA: A SEARCH FOR HUMAN ANTIQUITY by Rebe Taylor Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 270 pp, 9780522867961
The historian Rebe Taylor has a fascination with Australia’s southern islands and their capacity to contain or magnify issues of identity for their indigenous inhabitants, if not for their broader populations. Her first book, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (2012), traced the forgotten story of the Tasmanian Aboriginal women taken there by British and American sealers during the early nineteenth century and the subsequent history of their families. Taylor was able to weave her journey of detection together with the islanders’ own hunches and clues as to their families’ misty origins. She was well aware that behind this remarkable story of retrieval loomed a darker tale of loss, violence, and guilt, centred on the island of Tasmania itself. Into the heart of Tasmania would be her next assignment.
To characterise Tasmanian Aboriginal and colonial history as fraught is a clear understatement, for even expressions of anguish at the devastating effects of colonial violence can draw sharp responses from Aboriginal descendants resentful of the implica-
tion that, like their ancestors, they also have been made to disappear through the ‘device’ of extinction. This potent element of identity formation and the identification of research-based enquiry with colonialism have become framing concerns in recent Tasmanian historiography. It accounts for the particular style of this book, and one has to admire Taylor’s intrepid and creative research methodology, which sees her combine the biography of a high eccentric with an exploration of contemporary Tasmanian identity politics. She achieves this neatly enough by displacing the role of problematic interrogator to the anachronistic figure of Ernest Westlake himself, but perhaps not without cost.
The book centres on Westlake’s 1908 Tasmanian expedition in search of ancient stone tools known as eoliths, apparently once used by Aborigines of the island. Ernest Westlake belonged to a particular British sub-species of antiquarian whose enquiries into human origins emerged from a blend of socialist ideals and reaction against the alienating effects of industrialisation. William Morris and the Fabians, Leo Tolstoy,
illustration depicting eoliths
and a raft of like-minded societies and individuals were standard bearers for this utopian movement, harking back to a golden age in which regard for nature and one’s fellows took precedence over the accumulation of capital. The shadow zone between such an outlook and more empirically grounded fields of archaeological enquiry was wide enough to contain hard-edged Darwinian research and the idealistic speculations of eolithhunters. The son of a cleric, Westlake would eventually return to his utopian project after his Tasmanian adventures, establishing the slightly wacky Order of Woodcraft Chivalry in 1916. Oddly, Taylor overlooks the fact that these two projects were intimately linked; to grasp a stone tool formed at the dawn of time was to commune with humankind’s pristine past, untarnished by mammon or machine.
The mania for identifying and collecting eoliths emerged during the 1880s in France and Belgium and soon spread to Britain, where it lingered on, increasingly ridiculed, until the 1930s. As late as 1934, the geologist Walter Howchin (who combined itinerant preaching with stone tool collecting) maintained that he had discovered eoliths in the Central Australian deserts, crossing swords with Norman Tindale. In the history of archaeology as a discipline, ‘eolithism’ nicely illustrates what the sociologist Thomas Gieryn has called ‘boundary work’, helping to delineate the border between what is science and what is not. By the 1870s European scientists had identified the Paleolithic
(Old Stone Age) and the Neolithic (New Stone Age), based on identification of stone tool types within stratigraphic sequences. With their chipped edges, eoliths appeared to be fashioned by humans but were found too deep in geological deposits for accepted chronologies. The standard reaction was to dismiss eoliths out of hand, but several scientists were prepared to extend the Old Stone Age boundary to accommodate them. Soon eoliths were located on the surface as well, opening the field for collectors such as Westlake, exploiting the expanding railway networks to gather extraordinary quantities of what are now regarded as nondescript rocks. By 1907, on the eve of his Tasmanian journey, Westlake had accumulated close to 14,000 examples – in most cases untouched by human hands other than his own. Westlake was no ordinary amateur though. As Taylor indicates, he had geological training and made useful connections with several leading professionals in British museums attracted to the radical, paradigm-shattering potential of these ‘dawn stones’.
Westlake went to Tasmania in the belief that he might gather sufficient numbers of eoliths associated with the island’s Aboriginal stone tool users to counter European sceptics. Having gathered many tons of Tasmanian eoliths, he recognised that he still needed one additional element of proof – the link between these objects and the Tasmanians themselves. A single chance remark from a descendant might provide that link; the prospect led him to undertake
a unique series of interviews across the island and Bass Strait, on a trajectory closely followed by the author. Unsurprisingly, Westlake did not locate that link. Nor did he undergo any epiphany or appreciation of the way in which Tasmanian Aboriginal descendants had retained vital elements of their traditional ‘lifeworld’, against the odds. Taylor judges Westlake on this score with considerable hindsight; few outsiders would reach such conclusions until decades after his departure.
Taylor’s account is gripping, but the manuscript did require more considered editing: a scattering of typos, malapropisms, and inconsequential quotations
To
characterise Tasmanian colonial history as fraught is a clear understatement
tend to distract the reader. The reader also deserves to know quite early how it was that Westlake never really comprehended the difference between a tool and a rock. But as Taylor makes clear, once he directed his enquiries to the Tasmanians themselves, his delusion brought tangible results, an invaluable set of insights into their colonial history and survival. g
Philip Jones is a historian and museum ethnographer specialising in the historical trajectories of objects and images across cultural boundaries. Based at the South Australian Museum, he is writing histories of the Yuendumu Men’s Museum and of the artist-naturalist George French Angas.
An
from the The Quarterly journal of the Geological Society of London, 1898 (Smithsonian Libraries via Wikimedia Commons)
Encounters and dialogues
Jill Jones
THE
METRONOME
by Jennifer Maiden Giramondo
$24 pb, 96 pp, 9781925336214
Jennifer Maiden’s latest book, The Metronome, is essentially part of a series that could be dated to the appearance of Friendly Fire in 2005, if not further back. While it may not be a series in the sense of a life-poem, Maiden’s ongoing production of this sequence of books carries an impression of vocation or serious commitment, rather than simply poems-as-project.
There are continuing characters in Maiden’s work, recurring structures (the dialogue between characters of the past and the present being chief among these, such as the ongoing one between Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt), and a fearless interrogation of the moral complexities of our age, which allows the books to hinge on a dialectic of voicings, between dialogic/plural, and a more singular individual voice.
Of course, a reader, especially a reader new to Maiden’s work, might question the validity of her approach, especially with respect to the dialogue poems. We cannot know what any of these current or historical figures really think. Yet, our histories and thinking, and the current media, are full of presumptions, falsities, rushes to judgement, so it is more than simply refreshing to encounter another way of speaking about and through such
personae. Maiden sets up a place for an ethical as well as aesthetic encounter; sets up a way of learning how to think about these issues. And that way is through poetry, through lines, stanzas, description, tropes, sonic effects, through dialogue and event.
Maiden’s poems, in this book as in her others, are unsentimental, as they inhabit our media-shaped, seemingly ordinary or evil, ‘wild or gentle’, obviously complex world that we would know and feel as real. Therefore, one of the things I have always appreciated in her work is that she is intensely interested in the way things work in the world – all kinds of things including politics, phones, and poetry. It is a kind of realism that not only recognises that the way things work actually matters, but that the details of this matter. Thus: ‘His / own “Love you” bounced back with a speed / and lack of echo only CIA technology / could probably have provided …’ In other words, one of Maiden’s characters in this poem, George Jeffreys, ironically recognises that his phone is being bugged.
I am particularly glad that Maiden has space for birds in her work. Some grumpy reviewers have taken poets to task for including birds in poems. Pos-sibly it is a set against some assumed gesture to an outdated ‘pastoral’. Goodness. Australian urban places teem with birds. I have had offices on major roads in two cities for many years, and there are always the ubiquitous lorikeets around, let alone everything from kookaburras to high-flying pelicans and the odd raptor. And there are other places such as the less-than-pastoral Nauru, the setting for Maiden’s moving poem ‘Clare and Nauru’, containing the reference to the phone mentioned above, wherein she mentions the Nauru Reed Warbler, which warbles in ‘a long fine treble’ and is, according to her character Clare Collins, ‘the only / native species the locals don’t eat’. I don’t take this bird in the poem as a symbol, or only a symbol – it is as real a bird as a writer can make. It survives as itself as well as a figure.
As for the poetry, Maiden draws attention, as I have suggested, to how poetry works, among many other things –
‘… Binary metre belongs / to life’s basic history, alone / reassuring continuity …’ – and her books are particular in their forms though a casual observer – and I have heard this said – may feel that they seem or look ‘the same’, or, the poems seem ‘to sprawl’. Maiden’s attention to form is, however, neither casual nor unpremeditated nor technically loose. Her use of enjambment is key to making the poems, particularly the longer dialogic or narrative poems, turn (literally) in a way that keeps the flow and tension uppermost. Although not strictly metrical, they tend to four- or five-stress (or beat) lines with, obviously, more than a hint of pentameter or tetrameter. This allows these poems to move easily, for the reader, through their complex conversational manoeuvres.
Maiden also uses rhyme effortlessly in a number of ways. There is the book’s title poem, ‘Metronome’, with its mix of perfect and slant rhyme, and even some sight rhyme. Given it is the first poem in a book called The Metronome, it is significant that it adopts a sound structure that mimics, to an extent, the metronome it speaks of. Another poem, ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Catalonia’, moves in and out of rhyme, at times using single, often double, often slant or identical rhyme. But the rhymed line endings do not thud or become predictable. These are poems that turn on their sonic effects, their lineation, their movement within language.
I have not said much that is specific about the ‘aboutness’ of the poems. Enough reviewers, including myself in a previous review, have noted and explicated Maiden’s ongoing political and cultural concerns. Not that this book is a repetition of those. As Gertrude Stein would say, there is no such thing as repetition, rather there is insistence. Everything changes; Maiden knows this and shows this. She does so, however, through complex yet engaging poetry structures and rhythms. She is ever the masterful technician as much as a poet of intelligence, wit, integrity, and the senses. g
Jill Jones’s poetry collection The Beautiful Anxiety (2014) won the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry.
CLASSICAL
Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique
Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony has such intense beauty it never fails to delight audiences. Latvian violinist Baiba Skride plays Prokofiev’s brilliant first Violin Concerto.
WAGNER Rienzi: Overture
PROKOFIEV Violin Concerto No.1
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.6, Pathétique
Andris Poga conductor Baiba Skride violin [PICTURED]
APT MASTER SERIES
Wed 10 May 8pm
Fri 12 May 8pm
Sat 13 May 8pm
MONDAYS @ 7
Mon 15 May 7pm
Nobuyuki Tsujii plays Chopin
Outstanding pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, winner of the 2009 Van Cliburn prize will perform Chopin’s aristocratic Piano Concerto No.2. Expect rippling virtuosity, Polish dance rhythms, and beautiful lyricism.
BERLIOZ Le Corsaire - Overture
CHOPIN Piano Concerto No.2
DVOŘÁK Symphony No.8
Bramwell Tovey conductor
Nobuyuki Tsujii piano [PICTURED]
EMIRATES METRO SERIES
Fri 19 May 8pm
Sat 20 May 8pm BMW SEASON HIGHLIGHT
Nobuyuki Tsujii in Recital
Nobuyuki Tsujii makes his Sydney recital debut with a program of piano favourites including two of Beethoven’s greatest sonatas.
JS BACH Italian Concerto, BWV 971
MOZART Sonata in B flat, K570 BEETHOVEN
Moonlight Sonata, Op.27 No.2
Appassionata Sonata, Op.57
Mon 22 May 7pm City Recital Hall
Light reading and heavy equipment
David McCooey
THE PLEASURES OF LEISURE
by Robert Dessaix Knopf
$29.99 pb, 218 pp, 978 014378004 5.
The Last Resort (1986), a photobook by Martin Parr, includes a photograph of a woman sunbaking in the English seaside resort of New Brighton. The woman is lying, facedown and topless, on a concrete ramp, directly in front of the caterpillar tracks of a gigantic excavator. Beside her, a young girl plays with a red plastic bucket. As with so many of Parr’s images, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Certainly, one can note the woman’s faith in the vehicle’s brakes.
I was haunted by this picture of English recreation as I read Robert Dessaix’s stylish contemplation on leisure, The Pleasures of Leisure. The seemingly redundant title of Dessaix’s book implies the oxymoronic possibility of unpleasurable leisure, but – unlike Parr – Dessaix does not dwell on that possibility. Dessaix’s work is for ‘general readers’, and while it makes passing references to some late-model theorists of leisure (such as ‘humourless’ Theodor Adorno), it largely bypasses the field of Leisure Studies that emerged in the 1970s. Nevertheless, Dessaix isn’t blind to the workings of class, gender, capital, and race (ideology, in other words) in the production and consumption of leisure.
Dessaix’s framing of his project in terms of a cultural crisis (‘There is disquiet spreading rapidly across the globe about empty time’) strikes me, however, as half-hearted and largely evidence-free. Happily, this polemical framework is largely ignored, and Dessaix tends more profitably towards autobiography and cultural history. In the latter mode, for instance, he touches on the idea of walking for reasons other
than travel, trade, or conquest. William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Dessaix notes, were intent ‘on enjoying being in nature, not on traversing it’. While not uninterested in the material causes of leisure culture, Dessaix tends to ignore one of its key drivers: children. As anyone with small children knows, countless leisure activities stem from having children. For parents, the weekend – that temporal headquarters of leisure-time – is especially fraught because, as Rachel Cusk puts it in A Life’s Work (2001), ‘Weekends are when children don’t go to school.’ But Dessaix doesn’t ignore children, or at least childhood, altogether. He reminisces on his own childhood, and his memory of playing Monopoly is characteristically amusing: ‘I loved its strong appeal to the baser instincts, naturally, its snobbery, its genteel viciousness and the piles of brightly coloured cash.’ Such a sentence demonstrates Dessaix’s skilful deployment of a camp style, appropriately enough given that leisure – like camp –is performative, self-conscious, and strategically confuses the serious and the frivolous. And like leisure itself, camp is a response to boredom. ‘The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated,’ Susan Sontag wrote in her 1964 essay on camp. As Sontag also noted, camp (again like leisure) is the product of affluent societies. One must have both money and time – things always dyadically structured in capitalist societies – to avoid labour, a point Dessaix repeatedly returns to.
Of course, some forms of leisure are cheaper or more expensive than others. While Dessaix attends to that barbaric and costly sport of the ‘leisured class’, hunting, the examples of pleasurable leisure detailed in the first half of the book are mostly comfortably domestic and generally cheap: drinking tea; meditating; looking; and conversing. The examples in the second half are similarly quotidian and potentially humble, but they can also be pursued with ‘brightly coloured cash’: walking; gardening; eating; shopping; and engaging in a hobby. Having sex, the book’s penultimate leisure activity, remains for most people putatively free.
But sex, like camp style and leisure,
can become routine, devoid of the spontaneity of play. One of the strengths of The Pleasures of Leisure is its emphasis on leisure as a form of play. Here, Dessaix’s own playful nature makes itself felt. For instance, riffing on the idea that all cultural activities can be theorised as play, he produces a droll catalogue to demonstrate his point: ‘High Mass in St Peter’s, Pushkin’s poetry, paintball, Plato’s Symposium, the slanderous drumming contests of Eskimos, Monopoly … a game of marbles, Mozart, Monet, the Mahabharata, The Book of Mormon (as well as the Book of Mormon), Madonna, and Maori tattoos’.
Dessaix’s book is in part pleasurable because of its love of digression and apparent spontaneity. These things sometimes lead to redundancy, but redundancy is a feature of conversation, that leisurely communing with someone for the sake of it. Dessaix’s style, then, is central to this book, and his tastes –bourgeois and bookish as they are –strike the right note for this kind of work. For those familiar with his earlier books, we also see him in a slightly new light. His love of French and Russian language and literature is evident, but we see it à la maison. We encounter the author, for instance, reading an Algerian novel in French – some light reading –while in his home, which is surrounded by Tasmanian bushland.
Dessaix is at his best when talking about such linguistic-domestic pleasures, but he can also be entertaining when discussing things to which he is antipathetic, such as organised sport. At any rate, I find such writing pleasurable, since pleasure (like leisure) is a profoundly personal thing – a sense of style or taste, as Dessaix implies. But, as Parr’s photograph reminds me (and Dessaix too, if more gently), the opportunities for leisure afforded to us are not wholly ours to choose or create. The fun available to us could be reading a French novel before a bucolic view, or it could be lying on a concrete ramp beside a piece of heavy equipment. g
David McCooey’s latest collection of poems is Star Struck (UWA Publishing, 2016). He has a Personal Chair at Deakin University in Geelong.
In his most recent book, Woolloomooloo: A biography, author and playwright Louis Nowra sets out to discover why the word ‘Woolloomooloo’ is still ‘a shorthand for notoriety, social despair and criminality’. Eschewing conventional historical method, he undertakes his research from the ground up, walking the sixty-three streets of that much-maligned suburb just east of the Sydney CBD. With a nod to Baudelaire, he describes himself as a flâneur, someone who observes the life of a city while exploring it on foot. It proves to be a very effective method.
The narrative is divided into four strands: memoir, history, the suburb’s major streets, and recurring themes. This structure, with chapters alternating between the present and the past, highlights one of Nowra’s main themes, namely, the indelible impact of Woolloomooloo’s past upon its present.
Nowra, who lives on the border of Woolloomooloo and Kings Cross, developed a personal interest in the former (he has already written about the latter in Kings Cross: A biography [2013]) due to his association with the Old Fitzroy Hotel, which he stumbled upon eight years ago while out walking his beloved Chihuahua, Coco. Since then he has been a regular, and his interest in the pub’s history prompted him to learn more about the history of the suburb. The Old Fitzroy, he explains, is ‘a living portal into Woolloomooloo’s past and present’. When it opened, in the 1860s, pubs played an essential role in the community as the ‘hub[s] of social life’; there were no other entertainment venues. Nowra argues that the Old Fitzroy plays the same role today. It is also, he says, a symbol of the area’s ‘flawed and fascinating character’. In a sense, given its central role, the Old Fitzroy
is the main character in this story, with chapters lovingly devoted to its history, customers, and staff.
The chapters about the regulars, known as the ‘Motley Crew’, a ragtag group which includes a house painter, a sculptor, an ex-male model doing a PhD in robotics, and a debt collector, are particularly entertaining. Nowra has a sharp eye for telling detail; he is a self-confessed admirer of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. His vivid, empathetic portrayals of this group of people from all walks of life owes something to that work. It is clear that Nowra has a deep affection for these locals, many of whom are quite unforgettable, such as Chemical Frank, the pharmacist turned meth chemist, Ayesha, the glamorous, seventyyear-old drag queen famous for her flamboyant outfits, and the kind-hearted Woolley, who leads Nowra to places and people he would never have otherwise discovered (earning for himself the epithet ‘Virgil’ from Nowra).
What is striking is that, despite the fact that most of these people have had dysfunctional childhoods and run-ins with the law, many of them are whipsmart. Conversations range from the esoteric (Byzantine art) to the deeply philosophical (Kierkegaard), and everything in between. Most are autodidacts with a deep thirst for knowledge. That includes Nowra himself, who grew up on a Housing Commission estate in a house with no books and parents who on occasion threatened to kill him, and might explain why he feels so at home in their company.
Perhaps the most important thing that Nowra learns is that Woolloomooloo is a place of inherent contradictions. One obvious illustration is the juxtaposition of the ugliness of much of the urban environment with the ‘pockets of beauty and charm and small enclaves redolent of the past’ Nowra discovers as he wanders the streets. He finds verdant courtyards and secret gardens, and lovingly restored terraces side-byside with the derelict houses for which the suburb is better known. ‘Unless you know where to look,’ he observes, ‘Woolloomooloo’s beauty is unseen.’
He points also to the stark contrast
between the rich history of the Finger Wharf and how it looks today. It is difficult to reconcile its history as a working wharf, where wharfies struggled under brutal working conditions, with its reincarnation in the 1990s as an uberglamorous destination, complete with exclusive apartments, fancy restaurants, and a stylish hotel. A former wharfie tells Nowra that ‘if those bludgers only saw the filth and the rats we had to deal with, they’d be sick’. Nowra sees the Finger Wharf today as ‘a quarantine station for the wealthy, preventing them being contaminated by what lies on the shore’.
Perhaps the most profound juxtaposition is between the drugs, violence, illegal gambling, and prostitution for which Woolloomooloo is renowned and the many kind people Nowra encounters. He concedes that ‘this is a place of … criminals, drug dealers … addicts … and the underclass’, but points to the fact that it is also a tightknit community, where ‘acts of … kindness and charity towards the less fortunate [were] common’. The best example of this is Nowra’s erstwhile companion, Woolley, who helps anyone in need, filling in forms, tending to the ill and making medical appointments.
Nowra has painted a compelling portrait of Woolloomooloo, showing a side to the suburb not seen before – a place with beauty for those with the patience to look for it, and a tight community where people look out for one another. There is a handy map at the beginning of the book – perhaps Woolloomooloo might expect an influx of flâneurs g
Nicole Abadee is the books writer for The Australian Financial Review Magazine ❖
Lifting carts
Paul Kildea
THE NOVEL OF THE CENTURY: THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE OF LES MISÉRABLES
by David Bellos
Particular Books
$39.99 hb, 329 pp, 9781846144707
Visiting the actor Simon Gleeson in 2014 a few months after he was cast as Jean Valjean in a new production of Les Misérables , I was startled by the bulked-up friend who met me from the train. ‘What the hell?’ I asked. ‘I have to lift a cart,’ he replied. It is not a bad exegesis of Victor Hugo’s sprawling novel and the musical it gave rise to. And it is an anecdote that would probably delight David Bellos. ‘Muscular strength,’ Bellos writes of Valjean, ‘acrobatic skills learned in prison and an ability to tolerate pain allow him to release Fauchelevent from under his cart, to climb the convent wall, to escape from the hold-up and to carry Marius through the sewers.’ Each of these events is pivotal to Hugo’s story (though there is no episode at the convent wall in the musical) and requires of Valjean the sort of muscularity that is immediately evident to both readers and audiences –hence Simon’s physical transformation. Bellos has not written a volume of literary criticism, or at least not a conventional one. Instead he paints in fine lines and great splashes of colour a backdrop to what he calls the novel of the century. Hugo began Les Misérables in 1845 in Paris and completed it seventeen years and 1,500 pages later in Guernsey, where he had found exile, far from the autocratic Napoleon III. Any French schoolchild could recite the book’s list of characters: the ill-starred Fantine, who loses her job and then her life, leaving her daughter Cosette an orphan; the repellent Thénardiers, hucksters both of them, creating and living off the misfortune of others; the ex-con Valjean, who breaks parole and reinvents himself as a virtuous and respected man, hunted by the zealous police inspector Javert, who recognises
him when he lifts the cart to rescue Fauchelevent; the rebel and revolutionary Marius, who falls in love with the adult Cosette, whom Valjean raised after her mother’s death. But Hugo sought to do something more ambitious than merely thread together these individual stories (a daunting task in any case). His novel, in essence, is a history of France from the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign to the June Rebellion of 1832, replete with long discourses on philosophy and morality, on water and war, on street urchins and King Louis-Philippe – essays that do not service the plot in any ostensible manner, but which nonetheless illustrate the tectonic shifts in French politics and society in these years.
Taking his cue from Hugo (though more tersely), Bellos writes about the change in meaning of the word misérable – from someone afflicted by ill fortune to someone without money. He explains the etymology of galérien, the word Valjean uses to describe himself to the kindly Bishop Myriel: though galley-slaves had not existed on warships since the 1740s, when new, heavy cannons were invented and needed to be fitted below decks in the space oarsmen traditionally occupied, the word retained its non-literal meaning. He writes beautifully about the drab palette of everyday life in France in the first half of the century – fabrics, paints, and flags coloured from vegetable, mineral, or animal extracts – which would change only in the 1860s when a young English student discovered that aniline, a coal extract, could be used to make a rich purple dye; other colours soon followed, inaugurating a new, technicolor France. He dissects French coinage (‘The sets of words that people used for the coins they exchanged or kept in their purses reflected the class to which they belonged and the kind of transaction they were engaged in’) and the character names Hugo invented with such tender wit. He writes about paper and printing: how the supply of the former was dependent on the amount of silk and cotton clothing cast off by Parisians, which was then pulped and turned into (expensive) paper; and how before 1860 presses were made from wood, capable only of a run of 3,000 copies before the
whole book needed to be typeset once more from scratch. (‘Around 1860, steel, stereotype, steam and cheap paper all converged to lower the cost of reading at long last.’) And he lists the obsolete words Hugo rescued and employed with such delight: chiragre (‘suffering gout in the wrist or hand’), cacolet (‘a chair fitted to the back of a mule for carrying travellers in mountainous districts’), maringotte (‘a small horse-drawn vehicle used by travelling clowns and players’).
The effect is a little like the piecework Fantine undertakes as a seamstress in Valjean’s factory: patches of fabric sewn together to form a beautiful object. Bellos is a strikingly modest writer, though his knowledge is immense. (An uncharacteristic slip: France’s first passenger railway ran between Paris and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, not Paris and Versailles as Bellos twice asserts.) Does he (and Les Misérables) live up to his title? It’s impossible to say. Hugo’s novel is breathtakingly far-reaching – simultaneously a taut drama and a careful analysis of the unrest and rebellion that forged modern France. Bellos is grateful (he writes in the preface) to the country that gave us the Rights of Man, photography, cinema, pasteurised milk, the Statue of Liberty, great authors and composers, painters and poets; this genial saunter through the writing, publishing, and reading of Les Misérables is his way of saying thank you. g
Paul Kildea, an Australian conductor and author, is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013). He holds a doctorate from Oxford University.
From the edges
Shannon Burns
EDGE OF IRONY: MODERNISM IN THE SHADOW OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE
by Marjorie Perloff
University of Chicago Press (Footprint)
$54.99 hb, 220 pp, 9780226054421
In her introduction to Edge of Irony, Marjorie Perloff claims that in order to ‘understand Modernism … we have to read, more closely than we have, the deeply ironic war literature of the defunct, multicultural, and polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire’. To that end, she compiles a series of essays that focus on writers who lived through and were lastingly influenced by, the final throes of the Habsburg Empire, in each case fusing biographical detail, historical context, and close textual readings.
Perloff’s selection criteria has as much to do with literary advocacy as with her subject’s cultural significance: she has selected writers who, she says, have either been marginalised or misread by English- and German-language readers and scholars. She notes that ‘Outside of German departments … I find that as major a literary figure as Karl Kraus is virtually unknown.’ The same can be said for Joseph Roth, and while Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1943) ‘is known by name as a long and difficult novel … few people have actually read Musil’. That cannot be said about Paul Celan, but Perloff argues, convincingly, that Celan is too narrowly construed as a Holocaust poet by his admirers. She therefore reads him ‘against the grain … as a love poet, whose lyrics … can best be understood in the context of the lost empire’.
Perloff argues that, while Canetti won the Nobel Prize in 1981, ‘primarily for his famous sociological treatise Crowds and Power [1960]’, he too is in need of attention because the English translations of his memoirs ‘are all out of print’. As for Ludwig Wittgenstein, Perloff notes that he ‘is primarily known to his readers (most of whom are Anglophone) in English translation, although
his aphoristic writings, from the Tractatus [1921] to On Certainty [1969], were all composed in German’. But this detail hardly places Wittgenstein in the same category of obscurity as Kraus. Perloff notes that: ‘The writers I discuss belong not only to the historical edge (the end of the Habsburg Monarchy brought on by the Great War) but also to its geographical edges: the distant provinces of Galicia (Roth), Bukovina (Celan and Gregor von Rezzori), what is now Bulgaria (Canetti), and so on … [T]he only one of my authors born in Vienna itself was Wittgenstein, and he, like most of the others in my narrative, was Jewish and hence never a real insider in the fin-de-siècle Vienna of its aftermath.’
Again, Perloff seems to me to be overreaching when she attempts to include Wittgenstein in such company: the wealthy, assimilated, and renowned Viennese philosopher simply doesn’t fit into a grouping of writers who hail from ‘mutiethnic towns … hundred of miles from Vienna’ and whose works are hard to come by in the Englishspeaking world. It seems that the philosopher must be included in this company since Perloff relies on a handful of his assertions and aphorisms to reinforce the key concepts explored throughout her book, whether Wittgenstein is properly from the ‘edges’ or not.
Perloff’s close reading of Kraus’s play The Last Days of Mankind (1918) – the least known, in English, of all the texts Perloff considers – amounts to a convincing argument for its contemporary relevance. Kraus’s play is, Perloff says, ‘part tragedy, part operetta, part carnival, part political tract’.As with Kraus’s other works, Last Days dramatises ‘How information is disseminated in a world where truth is subject to the daily news cycle.’
Her analysis of The Man Without Qualities – ‘a fable whose moral is by no means clear’ as narrated by ‘an ironic and disillusioned observer who attributes to his characters motives that may or may not be conscious or even genuine’ – is cogent and engaging, but fails, strangely, to address the book’s key concern with geographical or cultural ‘edges’.
The essay on Celan is among the strongest. Perloff focuses on his distinctly regional ‘Austrian German, with its own
much softer accent, its dialectic variations, idioms, neologisms, and compounds’, and argues that his wordplay is more comprehensible to an Austrian sensibility. Perloff’s interpretation of Canetti’s memoirs is comparatively strained: the textual evidence doesn’t always support her larger claims, and the insights gleaned through close reading often seem too tangential to the book’s core theses.
Perloff insists that ‘Closure was the enemy’ of Austro-Modernist artworks. Accordingly, Edge of Irony features a coda, but no conclusion; her primary method of argument is reiteration, rather than development. The book’s key assertion is that Austro-Modernist literature is distinct from its German contemporaries. In this, Perloff takes her cues from Ingeborg Bachmann, whose 1955 interview is quoted near the end of Edge of Irony: ‘The political and cultural uniqueness of Austria – which cannot be understood in terms of its geography because its borders are not really geographical ones – has been much too little understood. Poets like Grillparzer and von Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Robert Musil could never have been Germans.The Austrians participated in so many cultures and developed a different sense of the world from the Germans.’ According to Perloff, neither the revolutionary Marxism of Bertolt Brecht or Martin Heidegger’s ‘posttranscendental philosophy … had much appeal to the ironic, satiric, darkly humorous, erotic –and often slightly mystical – world of post-imperial Austria’.
Since Weimar and Vienna are vastly different worlds, Perloff is surely right to argue that the habit of drawing false connections between them obscures the distinctive qualities of a literature that ‘developed in another direction, its hallmark being a profound scepticism about the power of government – any government or, for that matter, economic system – to reform human life’. Such scepticism is responsible for some of the richest literature, and certainly some of the funniest, of the earlyto-mid-twentieth century. g
Shannon Burns is an Adelaide writer and critic.
Revealing ourselves Beejay Silcox
THE IDIOT
by Elif Batuman
Jonathan Cape
$32.99 pb, 432 pp, 9781910702703
Email is a chimeric beast, an uneasy mix of intimacy and distance – unlimited time and space to say precisely what we mean, coupled with the unnerving promise of instant delivery. When it first arrived, email seemed to invite a new kind of writing – deliberate, earnest, vulnerable. We tried to sound smarter and wittier than we were, and it showed. The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s début novel, inhabits those gloriously pretentious early days, before email became a burden, when we used it to craft elaborate musings and manifestos, and to disguise our love letters as musings and manifestos.
The eponymous twit of The Idiot is Selin Karadağ, a New Jersey-born daughter of Turkish immigrants, who dreams of becoming a writer, or rather, believes that she is already a writer, a conviction ‘completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read’. When Selin arrives at Harvard in 1995, an email address is waiting for her, with all of its shiny possibilities and pitfalls. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world ... And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you. All the words you threw out, they came back.’
Readers familiar with Batuman’s assured collection of essays, The Possessed (2010), will notice the resemblance between Selin and her author; but it is more interesting to consider The Idiot as a brazen stylistic rebellion, than it is to sift truth from fiction. Batuman dislikes the hermetic neatness of much of contem-
porary American fiction, and its solipsistic obsession with personal identity. The increasingly robust American culture of MFA programs (graduate degrees in creative writing) is often blamed – fairly and unfairly – with fuelling this kind of work, and Batuman is a vocal critic.
While Batuman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is an accomplished nonfiction author. The Idiot is a bold invitation to be judged by her own literary standards. Batuman has long entreated young writers to: ‘Write long novels, pointless novels’ and to write fiction that ‘redraw[s] the boundaries of life itself’, by integrating and redeeming the ‘irrelevant garbage’. The Idiot makes good on such threats – it is indeed a long, pointless novel full of irrelevant garbage – but in the best possible way. A leaky balloon of a book, sputtering, airy, and bright.
As her purloined title implies, Batuman is looking to the defiantly unwieldy Russians for inspiration. Selin, an admirer of the Russians, approaches her life as she approaches these behemoths, sure that meaning can be captured and pinned to the page like some silverwinged insect. She enrols in linguistics courses in the hope that she will find the tools she needs, but the more Selin learns, the more elusive meaning becomes. As much as she yearns to be ‘a courageous person, uncowed by other people’s dumb opinions’, she cannot summon any of her own – dumb or otherwise. ‘I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history and nothing happened.’
In the absence of opinions, Selin tenders observations, which are astute, sardonic, absurd, and often incandescently funny (‘Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.’)
The Idiot follows Selin as she stumbles, existentially mute, through her freshman year and summer abroad teaching English to idiosyncratic Hungarians. Selin has quirky roommates, an adversarial friendship with an impulsive Serbian, and a crush on an inscrutable grad student with whom she exchanges equally inscrutable emails. The stage is set: awkward sex and heartbreak, mild drug use, a European adventure, and an epiphany or two. We know the script,
but Batuman refuses to oblige. No sex, no drugs, no reckoning. Rather, she delivers a playfully deadpan and intelligent anti-bildungsroman about the slipperiness of language. Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, with bite.
At times, Selin does seem too deliciously cruel for someone so insistently naïve. Encountering her first Ethernet cord, Selin asks her roommate: ‘What do we do with this, hang ourselves?’ It is a wryly prescient question, and just a little too knowing, too perfect. At other times, her wilful interiority frustrates. We want to shake her out of herself – into speech, into action, into her body, into life.
For a novelist who decries cleanliness, The Idiot is also too conscientious in its chaos. There is an intellectual mess, but no heat – no lust, grief, fury, or joy. We ache, like Selin’s art professor, to see behind the scenes at the museum, to venture past Batuman’s curation. We want to see the ‘blood and guts in the back room’, rather than pause sedately to admire a breakfast pastry, or meet yet another Hungarian.
The price of ambition is imperfection. It takes guts to nail your writerly colours to the mast, and skill to anchor a novel in an historical moment. For the last generation of Australians who grew up without email, Batuman’s moment will feel tenderly familiar. We agonised over our emails, because we wanted our words to say more than they ever could – to reveal ourselves. The Idiot is a love letter to our inadequacies, and just like those carefully crafted 1990s emails, it is smart, funny, and ever so slightly overthought. g
Beejay Silcox, an Australian writer and literary critic, recently completed her MFA in the United States.
Forever land
Doug Wallen
STORYLAND
by Catherine McKinnon
Fourth Estate
$27.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781460752326
‘Iwrite best from place,’ Catherine McKinnon told Fairfax newspapers in a recent interview. Her second novel, which concerns centuries of human interaction with the New South Wales coast region between Wollongong and Lake Illawarra, makes this abundantly clear.
Storyland ’s tendrils extend as far back as 1796 and as far forward as 2033 and 2717, though the latter is glimpsed mostly in the subtext. Four different settings are established in chronological order and then revisited in the reverse order following the centrepiece section. Through these enormous leaps in time, McKinnon observes what is fleeting in people’s lives and enduring in the landscape that surrounds (and sustains) them: ‘We’re part of their story, not the other way around,’ one character remarks of the longevity of the nearby lake and trees.
Founded on McKinnon’s obvious passion for research, the book entwines real history with her own imaginings. Storyland opens with narrator Will Martin, the fifteen-year-old cabin boy aboard Matthew Flinders and George Bass’s exploratory sailboat Tom Thumb in 1796. McKinnon sets the scene with atmospheric language but also records details from the expeditions: Flinders cannot swim, and all three men fear that the
local Aborigines might be cannibals. Without glossing over their follies, McKinnon presents these historical figures as multifaceted people lodged in – and limited by – the prejudices of their time.
From there we move on to Hawker, an alcoholic former convict in 1822 who is haunted yet ruthless. Again, the character is based on a historical account, though only loosely. Next it is 1900: a young woman named Lola is running a dairy farm with her siblings while repressing the trauma of her lost baby and its conception. When tragedy strikes a neighbour, she is reminded of the suppression and physical danger that women must endure. Then, in 1998, the idiosyncratic ten-year-old Bel is thrust into close encounters with savage violence and the region’s Aboriginal history – two of the book’s recurring themes. This quartet of scenarios can be difficult to connect with until we revisit them later. Initially, it is unclear why we are being told these stories, aside from the author’s own interest in local history, and we don’t spend enough time with each set of characters to truly connect with them on the first visitation. A few of the period trappings feel clichéd at first, like the Chinese character in Lola’s section, but they are increasingly fleshed out. The scenarios themselves make more sense when they have all been completed, even if McKinnon leaves each one unresolved to some degree.
The book’s centrepiece is a single section where a woman named Nada recounts her quest to escape murderous looters in the year 2033 after a storm has submerged Port Kembla and cut off the virus-stricken area from the outside world. This section shares a humane, ground-level detailing of post-apocalyptic survival with David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) and Mark Smith’s The Road to Winter (2016), and it is here that McKinnon underscores the book’s environmental message, depicting a degraded land that is increasingly uninhabitable for its abusers. ‘We’ve always felt at peace at this place,’ says one character by way of reassurance, while another doubts whether this sense of sanctuary can continue.
It is this middle section that pro-
vides the book’s title, thanks to a project functioning like the narrative equivalent of a seed bank. In the face of a starkly altered planet, such oral history collects cautionary advice from mankind’s fraught past in the hope that humans might change their ways. One character hints at how this kind of perennial adaptability has sustained the human race despite itself: ‘Our concept of what is real is always changing.’
The reader must remain adaptive too in order to follow each new setting and time period in the book. McKinnon does merge the end and start of each section with a device grounded in the natural world, and certain characters and artefacts carry over between sections to bridge the distinct time periods. She also provides two maps at the back of the book, including Aboriginal and colonial place names.
Storyland does more than trace the impact of Western civilisation on this particular stretch of land: The book shows us how settlers have treated Aborigines, other majorities, and the land itself. Beyond the reverberating actions of individuals, we witness ancient rock formations and waterways transformed overnight by man-made climate change.
McKinnon, a playwright, theatre director, and senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong, has written an imperfect but deeply invested variation on Australian historical fiction. The landscape looms large in every section, and there is a pronounced resonance when she highlights human violence. The lack of resolution can leave the sections feeling more like loosely linked stories than a fully realised novel, but the individual sections still offer valuable insights. While McKinnon attempts to press home the power of storytelling too bluntly at the end, the book has undeniable cumulative power.
English native Will Martin may start out calling Australia an ‘upturn of the natural world’ for all its foreign elements, but he eventually sees a profound positive side to that distinction. ‘This land is a forever land,’ he muses. ‘Here, the clock ticks to a different time.’ g
Doug Wallen is a freelance arts journalist based in country Victoria.
Fabric of grief
Anna Spargo-Ryan
JEAN HARLEY WAS HERE
by Heather Taylor Johnson
University of Queensland Press
$29.95 pb, 242 pp, 9780702259548
There is much to like about a wellexecuted set of short stories, and this is true of Jean Harley Was Here. While the book presents itself as a novel, it has more in common with Elizabeth Strout’s multi-narrator linked collection Olive Kitteridge (2008). This structural choice gives Heather Taylor Johnson enormous opportunity to explore the many aspects of grief.
Jean Harley hasn’t died – yet. Although the cover blurb refers to ‘the people [Jean] leaves behind’, her death remains a mere possibility until a third of the way through the book. There is a resignation to these early chapters: although Jean might wake up, her friends and family seem to regard her demise as inevitable and are going through the motions until it happens. We are introduced to her husband, Stan, and their son, Orion. We meet Jean’s best friends, two women who have only known one another in the context of Jean; Stan’s mother; and Charley, an ex-con who has set the whole fiasco in motion with his van.
As the story goes on, more and more characters are introduced, many through their own point of view chapters. There is plenty to follow here. With so many character perspectives, at times the book doesn’t seem to quite know what it is. It is novel-like, in that it moves chronologically forward, and the characters develop over time. But it also resembles a collection: each chapter is titled, and there are too many different points of view for it to form one narrative. This confusion, at times, makes it challenging to orient oneself in the story. At 242 pages, it is already a short work; the inclusion of so many stories means not all of them have enough time to develop fully.
What Jean Harley Was Here lacks in depth, it exploits in breadth. What
is nice about this structure is that it clearly illustrates just how many people are affected by one death. This is not a story about a widower, his young son, and their profound mourning, but an exploration of the way life has to go on for everyone in a community. For a book about grief, it is surprisingly upbeat, and mostly avoids sentimentality. Taylor Johnson’s accomplished writing moves freely between the poetic and commercial, creating a compelling rhythm: ‘What she wanted to say was that she was bluer than the ocean outside her window because she was bleeding the red, heavy discard of her what-if.’
Having said that, there is no real through-line beyond ‘how will everyone cope?’ The subplots of the many narrating characters, therefore, have been given their own complications. In some ways, it is made more moving by its individual consideration of those affected, even where their perspectives are less robust. The experiences of the women are fervently explored, covering love, loss, friendship, infidelity, abortion, infertility, childlessness, and ageing.
To Taylor Johnson’s credit, she manages these many different threads skilfully. The chronology is sound, and the characters develop in realistic and interesting ways. Stan’s chapters offer the most insight into the period after a loss. He is resolute but heartbroken. The magnitude of their love is frequently reinforced, never more so than in ‘The List’, a wonderful testament to the one who remains. Though the voice of Orion – five at the time of Jean’s death – is not as convincing, the naïveté of his experience is sincere and touching. Later, the addition of Jean’s American niece adds a cross-generational story that adds texture, perspective, and, crucially, youth.
Inevitably, some stories are more successful than others. The introduction of Jean’s old professor in ‘Baumgartner’s Jump’, for example, occupies a lot of space for a comparatively small tradeoff. ‘Licking the Wound’, told from the perspective of the family dog, adds little. It would be remiss not to mention Charley, who fits neither of these categories. He is given considerable coverage to reflect on his feelings about the accident, and how his history led him
to that moment. His relationship with an offscreen pen pal feels overworked, and forms part of an ending that ever so slightly misses its mark. But he is also the flip side of Jean’s many mourners: the guilt he bears rounds out the story, which would be worse off without him. What ties these many threads together is the clear autobiographical element. Like Jean, Taylor Johnson herself moved from America to Australia, and the book is dedicated to a late friend. Her lived experience comes through in a way that is unlaboured and that highlights the minutiae of what it is like to
There is no real throughline beyond ‘how will everyone cope?’
carry on without someone. This is not a deep musing on the futility of life, nor does it try to unravel every element that makes up the complex fabric of grief. It is just people getting on with things, and finding – or not finding –what they need in their shared loss.
Unlike the recently released Barking Dogs (Affirm Press, 2017), these are not stand-alone stories: they rely on one another. But unlike Olive Kitteridge , nor do they make a ‘novel’. Jean Harley’s story is one in vignettes, à la Love Actually (2003). It brings out only what needs to be told, and the main characters come together for a satisfying – if occasionally sentimental – ending. g
Anna Spargo-Ryan, the author of The Paper House (2016) and the forthcoming The Gulf, won the 2016 Horne Prize. ❖
Now and then
Tessa Lunney
A HUNDRED SMALL LESSONS
by Ashley Hay Allen & Unwin
$32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781760293208
AHundred Small Lessons holds powerful truths, simply told. It is a story of parenthood and place, where small domestic moments, rather than dramatic public displays, are the links between people, the present and the past. Each moment occurs in and around a familiar, ordinary Brisbane house, and the book begins when Elsie, the nonagenarian resident, leaves this house for a nursing home, and Lucy and Ben move in with their son Tom. To summarise the plot would not explain this novel. One domestic moment is layered on the next, exploring the ways in which parenthood works on identity through time – that parenthood is not created through the drama of birth but through the small domestic actions of daily care. That a crow dies, that a phone is lost, is not the point. How Lucy and Elsie, and their respective husbands Ben and Clem, choose to behave in these moments, is. These moments are woven through the book’s different time periods, of Lucy’s ‘now’ and Elsie’s ‘then’.
Their Brisbane house stands for home which stands for motherhood, as though neither Lucy nor Elsie can understand how to be a mother without this house: ‘In their new house – Elsie’s house – the back door faced almost due east and Lucy loved that. One sure point in a floating world.’ The house, situated near a swamp that leads to the river, is vulnerable to flooding and wildlife, as well as to the transformations wrought
by the occupants. Since more than one character proclaims how much they love Brisbane, the way it changes through the wet and dry, it is as though parenthood is so amorphous and consuming that Lucy and Elsie cannot simply love the role. Instead they must love the jacarandas and brown water, the crows and the tropical moods of the city. ‘This astonishing place: sit still long enough and the wildlife took such liberties, like there was only ever a porous border, at best, between what was outside and what was in.’
The doors to the house, the verandah, the garden fence, the river, the city, become the porous borders of a life transformed through parenthood. When they are open they are exciting yet dangerous; when closed they are safe but constricting. These borders are also between the past and the present. Elsie often notes how coincidence has shaped her life, and wonders how her present self grew from her past self, while Lucy wonders where her old self went. These questions are not easily resolved but hold much of the narrative tension.
Elsie and Lucy are explored, Ben and Clem are explained, but for a novel about parenthood, their children deserve more attention. Elsie’s daughter Elaine is always on the verge of becoming an exciting, dramatic character, especially because of her fraught relationship with her own daughter, Gloria. The novel suggests that Elaine’s and Gloria’s knowledge of the filial relationship would not be composed of a hundred small lessons but rather of a few startling ones, a dark counterpoint to Elsie’s and Lucy’s constant striving to be good. Tom is too young to be capable of such startling decisions, but there is little sense of him beyond Lucy and Ben’s anxieties.
The writing is clear and lyrical. Some passages achieve a subtle beauty, but often they become too explicit. A final sentence robs a paragraph of its power by straightening out the image’s ambiguities rather than letting the reader linger over the possibilities. As with Hay’s previous book, The Railwayman’s Wife (2013), a poem embedded in the text is the focal point; here, from Michael Ondaatje: ‘For his first forty days a child / Is given dreams of previous lives. / Journeys, winding paths,
/ A hundred small lessons / And then the past is erased.’ The eponymous poem becomes the pretext for an argument between Ben and Lucy. The fight holds all of the book’s ideas – memory, parenthood, identity, place – and the action is pacey, but the poem compels the reader to stop and linger, to bring the idea of porous borders into the sentences. Hay employs powerful ideas; for example, that small instinctive actions have huge consequences.
‘I want to see, Mum. I want to know what’s there.’
They were the only words Elsie heard, and she over-my-dead-bodied them at once. And Lainey slipped away, leaving Elsie, scared and beset in her own kitchen. Afraid for the world and her daughter all at once. Send her a small, quiet world and keep her safe. As close to a prayer as she might get.
It is not the world that is dangerous, but Elsie’s desire to protect Elaine. The line between intention and effect is traversed without fanfare, and some ideas float away like the tidal river that borders the characters’ world. There is no definitive moment; instead, ideas are layered, one small action at a time, until the whole is revealed. Only then can we see the intricacy of the story, in which the river’s flowing quality is present within each sentence, the moods and tides reflective of the transformative power of parenthood. g
Tessa Lunney has a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the Western Sydney University. She works as the Editorial Assistant for Southerly ❖
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North
by Kerryn Goldsworthy
When Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it was not the first time that he had won an international fiction prize; his third novel, Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002. Nor was it the first time that one of his novels had caused deep division among readers and critics; the influential Australian critic and reviewer Peter Craven had savaged Gould’s Book of Fish in a review for The Age. But that novel had also been Flanagan’s most successful until his Booker win, garnering two major national awards as well the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North scooped an even bigger pool of prizes, winning the Man Booker and several national prizes and being shortlisted for several more, including the fiction section of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. There, it initially lost out to Steven Carroll’s novel A World of Other People, until the personal intervention of the then prime minister, Tony Abbott, who ruled that the two novels should share the fiction prize. As with Gould’s Book of Fish, there were ructions within the Australian literary community; critics and prize judges were again deeply divided over the literary merit of Flanagan’s work, their differences showing how broad a spectrum the term ‘literary merit’ can cover. The Narrow Road to the Deep North also attracted highly negative reviews in two heavyweight British journals, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. On the other side of the Atlantic, the literary editor of the Washington Post was saying ‘Nothing since Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has shaken me like this … this is a classic work of war fiction from a worldclass writer.’
Richard Flanagan was born into a large family in Tasmania in 1961, son of a World War II veteran and the fifth of six children. In his Man Booker Prize acceptance speech in London, he said: ‘I do not come out of a literary tradition. I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate. And I never expected
to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer being so honoured.’ Not only was he honoured by the award, he was also saved from the fate he had been contemplating: when asked what he would do with the prize money, he replied that he would use it to live on and support his family while he continued to write: ‘A year-and-a-half ago when I finished this book, I was contemplating going to get what work I could in the mines in far northern Australia because things had come to such a pass with my writing. I had spent so long on this book.’
His father, Arch, was one of the Australian prisoners of war who were put to work by the Japanese Army on the infamous Burma–Thailand Railway or ‘Death Railway’, built in 1943 to supply Japan’s campaign against the Allies in Burma. On the Australian War Memorial’s website is a brief, stark summary account of the building of the railway, which caused the deaths of over 2,000 Australian POWs and many more Allied and Asian prisoners:
The railway was to run 420 kilometres through rugged jungle. It was to be built by a captive labour force of about 60,000 Allied prisoners of war and 200,000 romusha, or Asian labourers. They built the track with hand tools and muscle power, working through the monsoon … Relentless labour on inadequate rations in a deadly tropical environment caused huge losses … The railway camps produced many victims, but also heroes who helped others to endure, to survive, or to die with dignity.
These victims and heroes – many soldiers were both – and the building of the railway, lie at the centre of Flanagan’s novel, both figuratively and literally: among the frequent chronological flashbacks that cover most of the twentieth century, its central section is a sustained and searing account of the camps and of the daily labour, abuse, injuries, and sickness that the prisoners endured. The main character, army doctor Dorrigo Evans, somewhat resembles the Australian war hero Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, who before the war had attained his
degree in medicine and had played rugby for Australia: a man of extraordinary social, intellectual, and physical gifts. Dunlop was a lieutenant-colonel and became a legendary figure on the railway and afterwards; as a doctor and a natural leader, he was both an inspiration and a consolation to the Australian POWs he worked alongside. But The Narrow Road to the Deep North is fiction and Dorrigo Evans is a fictional character, not to be taken as a portrait of Dunlop. Flanagan gives Evans some of Dunlop’s abstract qualities and strengths, as well as his relationship with his fellow-prisoners and with the Japanese, but in other important respects the character is quite different.
On the other hand, the description of the railway itself and the conditions under which the prisoners worked is closely based on factual firsthand accounts, most of all on the stories that Flanagan grew up listening to his father tell. The question of the relationship between history and fiction is a rich and difficult one, often erupting into complex disagreements; a novelist who tackles a period of history must toggle constantly between accuracy in matters of historical fact and feats of imagination in the creation of individual characters and their personalities and fates. Flanagan’s brother Martin, himself a journalist of great integrity and emotional intelligence, has said
and is not without its disasters. But great love stories, says Flanagan, ‘seek to demonstrate the great truth about love: that we discover eternity in a moment that dies immediately after’. His lover is called Amy, an allegorical name that makes her the very personification of love.
The fact that Amy is his uncle’s young wife gives the story a faint whiff of the incestuous: it feels like a forbidden love not only because they are both formally committed to other people, but because it crosses generational and familial boundaries. It exists outside family structures, outside the bonds of marriage, outside the war, outside of death itself: having long believed Amy to be dead, Dorrigo lives the rest of his life as a sexual and emotional vagabond and cheat, floundering in the shadow of his loss. The scene in which, many years later, the two come face to face while crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge may seem a Dickensian contrivance beyond the limits of realism, but in fact, like so much else about this book, it is an imaginative reworking of a true story once told to Flanagan by his father.
… what we are talking about here today is a novel. A work of fiction. What that means to me is that it must have a life independent of any external events … Richard’s book succeeds in doing this and that is its triumph. This book teems with stories I’ve heard before but it is not those stories, partly because he has dismantled them and redeployed their various parts …
The book’s central section is framed by a broader story that encompasses Evans’s whole life, and by the love story that transcends or exists on a different plane both from the horrors of the jungle and, after the war, from the realities of his daily life: a dull and fundamentally dishonest marriage, and a career that looks glittering from the outside but to him seems hollow,
Flanagan’s treatment of the question of race is among the most impressive things, and among the most important things, about this novel. In a war novel focusing on citizens of one country, the other side is unavoidably simplified and demonised as ‘the enemy’, especially if that enemy is of another race, but Flanagan goes to great lengths to illuminate the behaviour of the Japanese officers and guards and to explore what lies behind it. He defuses the problem of representing ‘the enemy’ in racist terms partly by presenting the Japanese officers and guards as individual characters with varying motivations and sensibilities (one of them is actually Korean). He also suffuses his novel, and the mind not only of his main character but also those of more than one Japanese officer and guard, with the poetry of both cultures; the book’s title itself comes from a Japanese classic, as Flanagan has explained:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the most famous books of all Japanese literature. Written in 1689 by Matsuo Basho, arguably the greatest of all haiku poets, it takes the form of … a nature journey made by the poet
Richard Flanagan (photograph by Ulf Andersen)
… If Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is one of the high points of Japanese culture, the experience of my father and his mates is one of its low points.
Flanagan’s account of the building of the railway and the kind of life led by the prisoners who built it is detailed and unflinching; at its meaty, beating heart is an account of the savage punishment and subsequent death of Dorrigo’s mate and fellow-prisoner, Frank ‘Darky’ Gardiner. This is clearly some sort of touchstone for Dorrigo; we meet Gardiner very early in the book, when Dorrigo, now in his late seventies, is brooding on his wartime past: ‘Darky Gardiner died and there was no point to it at all.’
By the time Gardiner is hauled up in front of a Japanese officer to take a murderous beating for something he didn’t do, we know him quite well: mercurial, fatalistic, dry-humoured, good-hearted, ‘a man who pitied wet monkeys’, someone who sings to stay sane, and steals and swaps to survive. While the nickname is an obvious clue and his other nickname, the Black Prince, might be another (even though he acquires it through his skills in the black market of the camps), no direct allusion to his ethnicity is made until well into the book. The person who eventually mentions it is the open racist and Hitler-admirer Rooster MacNeice: ‘Rooster MacNeice hated bolshies but on balance he hated Darky Gardiner more. He was a common and dirty man, and like most half-castes not to be trusted.’
But who is Darky Gardiner really? One of the most frequently quoted pieces of advice to writers about structuring a narrative comes from the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov, who said ‘If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.’ Flanagan’s pistol on the wall appears in the opening pages, in two paired vignettes of adult intensity as seen through the eyes of the uncomprehending Dorrigo, who is still only a little boy:
he had seen a week before Mrs Jackie Maguire vanished: his brother with his hand reaching up inside her skirt, as she – a small, intense woman of exotic darkness – leaned up against the chicken shed behind the coaching house. Tom’s face was turned in on her neck.
This small and momentary mystery is left hanging until near the end of the book, when the pistol is fired in a devastating fashion. In a conversation between the Evans brothers, now both old men, it is revealed that Darky Gardiner was the illegitimate, secret son of Tom and Mrs Jackie Maguire – ‘His wife was a blackfella, you know?’ – and was therefore Dorrigo’s own nephew. ‘A family called Gardiner was bringing the kid up … After the last war I ran into a Hobart bloke who knew the family. They called the boy Frank, apparently. He died during the war. My only son, and I never even met him.’
Jackie Maguire was sitting in the Evanses’ small dark kitchen, crying …
Jackie Maguire was an old man, maybe forty, perhaps older …
He heard Jackie Maguire say –
She’s vanished off the face of the earth, Mrs Evans.
… And Dorrigo didn’t say to [his brother] Tom what
Although Darky Gardiner shares his name with one of Australia’s more mysterious bushrangers (this may be a coincidence, though the original Frank Gardiner – a Scot – had a horse called ‘Darkie’, so perhaps not), it would not be too much of a stretch to read this character as a kind of allegory or personification of the history of Australian race relations: he is treated brutally by the authoritarian race in charge, and he then dies an ugly, abject, tragic death. He also personifies the rejection of ‘black and white’ as a clear opposition or dichotomy: the story of Australia, going centuries back, is a story of a population many of whom who have both Indigenous and Caucasian relatives and family, acknowledged or otherwise, by marriage, birth, or adoption. In the way he writes the character of Gardiner, Flanagan is unobtrusively dissolving the boundaries in the way we think about racial difference. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a novel about a grim episode in wartime Australian – and Japanese – history, but it is also a landmark in our literary representations of Indigenous Australians, in war and in peace. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of the magazine, first wrote for ABR in 1985.
This is one of many Reading Australia essays published by Australian Book Review. The online versions are fully referenced and freely available. Reading Australia is funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
‘The sheet that perishes’
Christina Stead’s paper conversations Graeme Powell
CHRISTINA STEAD: A WEB OF FRIENDSHIP, SELECTED LETTERS (1928–1973) edited by Ron Geering Miegunyah Press, $32.99 pb, 552 pp, 9780522862041
In her novel Jacob’s Room (1922), Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘For centuries the writing-desk has contained sheets fit precisely for the communication of friends. Masters of language have turned from the sheet that endures to the sheet that perishes ... and addressed themselves to the task of reaching, touching, penetrating the individual heart.’
Christina Stead’s desk contained not only sheets of typing paper but also ‘a stack of airletters’ which she used to reach out to relatives, friends, and
acquaintances in distant countries. The first letters reproduced in A Web of Friendship were written in 1928, soon after she arrived in England. It was then that she met Bill Blake, who was to be her companion for almost forty years. The volume ends in 1973, a few years after Blake died and shortly before Stead returned to Australia. In 1964 she wrote, ‘I have lived in so many places, met so many people and lived in other people’s worlds.’ Her letters document her friendships with many of those people and her observations of places ranging from Paris, New York, and London to Santa Fe, Canberra, and Lausanne.
As Woolf implied, most letters necessarily have short lifespans. The bulk of Stead’s correspondence has probably not survived. Although she typed her letters, she seldom kept copies. Late in life, she destroyed many of her papers. In her early expatriate years, some of her Sydney relatives, as well as the writer Nettie Palmer, kept her letters. The American poets Stanley Burnshaw and Ettore Rella, whom she met after
moving to New York in 1935, were both assiduous in preserving her letters over long periods. There are only scanty epistolary remains from the 1940s, the decade in which Stead wrote four novels, including The Man Who Loved
‘I have lived in so many places, met so many people and lived in other people’s worlds.’
Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944). From 1950 onwards, however, the volume of surviving letters increases steadily and a few Australian correspondents appear, such as Walter Stone and Clem Christesen. By the 1960s the growing recognition of Stead as a major writer led to correspondence with more Australian writers, especially after she spent four months in Canberra in 1969. More than half the letters in A Web of Friendship were written in the ten years immediately preceding her return to Australia.
As a result of this unavoidable chronological imbalance, there is little or no record in the book of the process of writing most of the novels, apart from some retrospective comments. Cotter’s England (1967), one of her last books, is an exception, as Stead did sometimes write about her progress with the work and also the critical reactions that followed its publication. The most detailed accounts of her early novel writing can be found in her letters to Blake, especially during the 1940s, when they were often apart. They were omitted from A Web of Friendship, but were later published in Dearest Munx, the Letters of Chris-
Christina Stead (National Library of Australia)
tina Stead and William J. Blake, edited by Margaret Harris (2005).
In 1969 Stead said of Malcolm Lowry: ‘he was not a letter-writer; many good writers are poor at it: they put their real life into their writing’. Stead, in contrast, was a skilled letter-writer. Even when writing to people whom she hardly knew, she was generous with her time, she answered letters promptly and she responded in detail to their queries. In 1934 she wrote, ‘I have become a terrible talker, on paper’, and, as the years passed, her letters became more conversational. There were long paragraphs and numerous dashes, parentheses, and question marks. At various times she could be amusing, witty, acerbic, or self-deprecating. In her later years, she occasionally referred to loneliness, illnesses, and her grief following the death of Blake, but she quickly moved on to the lives and activities of her friends. Her letters were primarily concerned with people, places, and books, but she touched on many subjects: communism, finances, architecture, music, theatre, the ‘cultural cringe’, even a boxing match that she witnessed in Paris in 1931.
A Web of Friendship was the first of two volumes of letters originally published by Angus & Robertson in 1992. They were edited by Stead’s friend and literary executor Ron Geering, who played a major role in locating many of the letters and persuading the owners to place them in the National Library. The book has now been reissued by Miegunyah Press, with an introduction by Hilary McPhee, as well as the original preface by Geering. (Surprisingly, Geering’s name has been dropped from the title page.) In recent years, far more researchers have been writing about Stead than ever before, and many of them, as well as general readers, will be grateful that A Web of Friendship is again in print.
The work, however, has some obvious deficiencies when compared to other selections of letters, such as David Marr’s Patrick White: Letters (1994). Geering and McPhee give interesting assessments of Stead as a letter-writer, and the footnotes are useful in identifying the recipients of letters, some of whom were the models for characters
in the novels. However, the footnotes are too succinct and there is too little contextual information, especially in relation to Stead’s American correspondents, who are hardly household names. Australian readers may need to turn to the biographies by Hazel Rowley and Chris Williams to make some sense of certain passages in these letters. The greatest weakness of the book is the lack of an index or even a list of the recipi-
ents. Consequently, only a close reading of the entire book will reveal Christina Stead’s views on Emily Dickinson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mervyn Peake, Robert Lowell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or Patrick White, or her ideas on other writers and other subjects. g
Graeme Powell was formerly Manuscripts Librarian at the National Library of Australia.
Starting points
Poetry from UWA Publishing
Geoff Page
The UWAP Poetry imprint began in late 2016, and there are already fourteen titles available. To judge from the quality of the three reviewed here, UWAP’s energy and ambition is well-placed.
In the first of these books, A Personal History of Vision ($22.99 pb, 100 pp, 9781742589381), Luke Fischer, in his poem ‘Why I Write’, provides a useful starting point. After rejecting a number of familiar reasons for writing poetry –each with a short, ambivalent mea culpa – Fischer eventually offers us the line: ‘I write for the expansion of the present.’
A Personal History of Vision, Fischer’s second collection, goes on to ‘expand the present’ in many different ways, some of them highly poetic and others more philosophical. As many people, including the publishers, have pointed out,
the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke is a considerable influence on Fischer, especially on the latter’s brand of metaphysics, which is vivid, persuasive, and non-doctrinal. Often these moments or epiphanies are ‘expanded’ from the present – sometimes from landscapes or personal encounters, sometimes ekphrastically from well-known paintings.
A glimpse of all this can be enjoyed in ‘Anonymous’, a poem short enough to quote in full: ‘What about the chestnut tree in the cemetery, / replete with foliage, erecting / countless steeples of blossoms – / each consisting of images / that capture the essence in a couple of strokes, / a dash of red and yellow on white – / and the perfect fragments / blown to the grass? / Does anyone else / come here to see them, / the displays of this artist / unknown even to herself.’
Though ‘Anonymous’ is a less ‘ambitious’ poem than many in the collection, it is also characteristic. Typically, it poses a kind of philosophical problem and then, based on close observation, goes on to ‘expand the present’ via a series of images, each with its own implications. The settings of the poems in A Personal History of Vision range widely, with a particular focus on Switzerland, Sicily, and Sydney. All of them combine to embody the coherent aesthetic that Fischer’s title implies.
Robert Adamson’s endorsement of Susan Fealy’s first full-scale collection, Flute of Milk (, $22.99 pb, 76 pp, 9781742589398), is rather grand but not far off the mark. ‘Delicate, tough, sensual, spiked with ideas and lines that create the deep music of real poetry.’ The poems are indeed compressed, worldly, often oblique (told on the ‘slant’, as Emily Dickinson recommended) and sometimes risking the opaque. Fealy’s loose and brief take on Baudelaire’s ‘La Voix’ is an index to at least one of her inspirations.
A few lines from the title poem, ‘Flute of Milk’, may be a more reasonable guide to the book as a whole. ‘I remember the butter churn – / the handle I never turned. / Memory prefers to hold things still, / but the past, present and future / are a long flute of milk.’ We start in the real world of a childhood dairy; then move to a generalisation about memory and time, culminating in an illustrative image. The ‘flute of milk’ is a bold metaphor but also a risky one. We have to assume the poet is referring to a champagne flute, yet the musical instrument also comes to mind, rather messily. Fealy describes her poem, in a note, as ‘a conversation with John Banville’s The Sea’, but this reader of both the novel and the poem found the link
obscure. These are the sorts of risks the French symbolists were willing to take but which Fealy may well retreat from in future collections.
In the book’s second half there are other poems where Fealy’s compression is matched by a directness that cleverly stops short of the obvious. ‘Instructions for Weaning a Baby’ is a good example with its almost brutal opening line (‘Tell her it’s overrated’) and the rich succession of later images such as ‘Tell her, in the morning the sea is milk’ and ‘Tell her, in full summer, naked on a beach, / the sun drenching her skin is not unlike / a flood of milk’.
Another no less memorable poem is ‘Metamorphosis’, Fealy’s tribute to Franz Kafka. It is a villanelle, one of the key lines being ‘A jackdaw is kavka in Czech’. The poem’s rough but insistent music remains a disturbing evocation of what happened to the Jews of Central Europe under the Nazis. ‘His sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla / died in forty-one, two and three.’
Judy Johnson’s Dark Convicts : Ex-slaves on the First Fleet ($22.99 pb,139 pp,9781742589183) is a livre composé focused on two of her convict ancestors, both ex-slaves who were
freed by the British when they escaped their masters and joined the Loyalist army during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, that was the end of British generosity and they were both transported to New South Wales for petty larceny in the First Fleet. John Martin married Mary, the daughter of his friend and fellow ex-slave, John Randall. Judy Johnson, estimates there are now roughly 25,000 Australian descendants of her two black ancestors.
The poems mainly concern Johnson’s two forebears, Martin and Randall, but gradually widen out to include Australia’s first bushranger, Black Caesar, and a more general portrait of the brutality (and hypocrisies) of convictism. Nearly all the poems are written in a thirteen-syllable line which works surprisingly well considering poets in English over the centuries have generally preferred the pentameter to the hexameter. At times, Johnson also employs a kind of anapaestic metre within this format. She frequently uses rhyme schemes which (like Jordie Albiston’s) place the rhyming words mid-line.
A fair example of Johnson’s approach at its most effective can be found in ‘John Martin’s Twenty Five Lashes’. ‘... The first lash tears open thin skin. The flogger / clears the gore with his fingertips to make sure the next // lash will let those knots dig in ...’ It is not hard to feel Johnson’s personal identification with her ancestors here.
Dark Convicts is a graphic (and, at times, ironic and entertaining) account of our more-complex-than-previouslythought colonial origins. It also illustrates, yet again, how well poetry is suited to narrative purposes. g
Geoff Page based in Canberra, has published more than twenty collections of poetry.
WRITTEN WORD
Multiplicity
Benjamin
Madden
THE POEM IS YOU: 60 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POEMS AND HOW TO READ THEM by
Stephen Burt
Harvard University Press (Footprint) $64.99 hb, 426 pp, 9780674737877
Northrop Frye wrote that ‘No kind of book is easier to attack than an anthology’, as Stephen Burt reminds us in the introduction to The Poem Is You: 60 contemporary American poems and how to read them. Frye’s comment was occasioned by an anthology of poems from his native Canada, but in recent years perhaps no national literature has borne out the truth of it more than that of the United States, where poetry anthologies have occasioned impassioned debates turning on the most fundamental questions of aesthetics and politics, inclusion and exclusion. Burt’s contribution to the genre, which collects sixty poems written or published since 1980, is less an attempt to refigure an existing canon in one direction or other than to record the salutary aftermath of the canon wars, that is, the ever-increasing diversity of American poetry: diversity in the identities of American poets, and diversity in the kinds of poems they write.
The Poem Is You pairs each of its poems with an explanatory and appreciative essay. In that sense, it goes beyond the traditional ‘anthology’, which not coincidentally, is a word that does not appear on the cover of this volume, a fact that might escape the reader who is arrested by the slightly didactic tone of its subtitle, ‘60 contemporary American poems and how to read them’. Didacticism in the defence of poetry is no vice, but, happily, nothing could be further from the spirit of these essays: throughout, the style of Burt’s writing is as relaxed and inviting as its content is trenchant and learned. If the sheer capaciousness of contemporary American poetry is one of its defining features, Burt’s achievement here is to have been an enviably capacious critic, responding to the event
of each poem in labile and unpredictable ways. Pairing each poem with an essay has another advantage over more conventional anthologies: the case for each poem’s inclusion can be made quite directly. As for the poems and poets left out of this volume, ‘the poets whose best poems are twenty pages long, or are whole books, or are audio files, or were written too early to count’ (the longest poem in the collection is James Merrill’s late ‘Self-Portrait in TyvekTM Windbreaker’), Burt is generous in his recommendations for further reading; this is a book that continually points beyond itself.
A limit on length of this kind necessarily tilts the collection toward what used to be called, perhaps too complacently, the ‘lyric poem’. But the lyric has always invited its own antithesis, the anti-lyric that asserts the primacy of language over the communication of deep subjective truths. The growing diversity of American poetry since 1980 enlivens and enriches the dialectic between these two approaches; indeed, insofar as American poetry after 1980 gets beyond the classic avant-garde and post-avant-garde versus traditionalist rivalry, dialectic is too limited a term for such a multiplicity of voices. It is no coincidence that these years also witnessed the explosive changes brought about by personal computing and the internet, leaving the lyric poem jostling for attention with a drastically expanded field of textuality. But it is equally true that precisely this expanding textual universe can furnish new resources and new vernaculars for poets to explore, as selections by kari edwards, Gabby Bess, Claudia Rankine, and others demonstrate.
Indeed, Burt is notably sanguine about the tired story of poetry’s decline: this volume’s lack of defensiveness is one of its most salutary characteristics. Burt seems content for the poems themselves to justify the poet’s art, just as the supple explications that accompany them justify the critic’s. And though those explications consistently demonstrate Burt’s mastery of close reading and poetics, they do so in an unflashy way. At every step, that knowledge is deployed only as an aid to readerly comprehension and never as an end in itself: what effects can a
given form or trope produce for readers? Moreover, each poem is experienced, as it should be, in the fullness of its potential to disrupt critical certainty, as when, opening his commentary on Robert Grenier’s ‘Shoe from the Waves’ (which I choose as a test-case of avantgardism, since it consists only of the line ‘oh he got a shoe from the waves’), Burt offers a series of contextual frames for the poem in sentences, each of which begins with a disarming ‘maybe’. Burt’s approach, in other words, is to eschew certainty and the vast machinery of avant-garde poetics in favour of – and this is a word that recurs throughout the introduction – an invitation. And even the most traditionally minded reader of poetry would be churlish to refuse one so generous; raising the question of how much interpretation a poem as slight as Grenier’s can support, Burt concludes ‘that kind of overreading – sometimes comic, sometimes deadpan, sometimes philosophically ambitious – might be what poetry, in general, rewards’. Those rewards are amply displayed here.
For Australian readers, this book serves another timely, if perhaps unintended, purpose: to remind us that the yawning contradictions of the American project, even though they may produce moments of appalling reaction like this one, can help us see better the successes and failures of our own pluralistic experiment. The Poem Is You is a determinedly open-ended book, but if it tells story at all, it is a typically, though not uniquely, American one: it is the effort of poets, critics, and readers in a society founded on an heroic ideal of selfhood – like that often expressed in lyric – to grapple with the limitations imposed by that self’s historically constituted nature. The diversity represented in and by the poems in this volume is not, in other words, incidental to the story of American poetry, just as race, class, gender, and so on are not political hobby horses foisted on to literature by dogmatic critics. If we are to take seriously the promise contained in John Ashbery’s line ‘The poem is you’, we must acknowledge that these concerns issue from the vital heart of the lyric form. g
Benjamin Madden teaches literature at the University of Adelaide.
BEYOND THE VAPOUR TRAIL: THE BEAUTY, HORROR AND HUMOUR OF LIFE: AN AID WORKER’S STORY
by
Brett Pierce
Transit Lounge
$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9780994395740
Beyond the Vapour Trail, a memoir-cum-travel book spanning six continents, concerns the author’s experiences as an aid worker for non-government organisations such as World Vision. Brett Pierce’s work involves researching and setting up community projects, and adapting and remodelling child sponsorship programs. He describes it as ‘sitting down with these communities to explore the causes of poverty and to pursue their dreams for a better life’.
Beyond the Vapour Trail, an odd but interesting work, moves backwards and forwards in time and encompasses many genres and styles. These include self-mocking humour, loving emails to his wife, poetic descriptions of scenery, travel advice, analysis of the issues facing aid workers, and clear details of the political background of the places and communities he visits. Pierce cites some horrific stories, but his touch is light. He encourages readers to admire the people he meets and to be awed by their resilience and courage, particularly the children. He loves those he comes across and values their insights into the communities’ problems. Readers will enjoy and learn much from this book.
Although Pierce rarely visits tourist spots, his book will also be useful for those who visit the countries he describes: how to deal with airport delays; the types of food available; culturally appropriate behaviour; and how to behave towards people and animals that wish to kill them.
Pierce writes vividly, but I wish he had included more photographs. He often describes scenes he has photographed: it would have been good to see them.
Katy Gerner
Indigenous exclusion
Changing the settler-state from within
Kevin Bell
THE LAND IS OUR HISTORY: INDIGENEITY, LAW, AND THE SETTLER STATE
by Miranda
Johnson
Oxford University Press, $29.99 pb, 223 pp, 9780190600068
Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity. A century ago, making those statements would have been virtually unthinkable to most, such was the dominance of exclusionary colonial bigotry. For the mind-space to experience national identity more inclusively, we in the modern era owe much to the extraordinary activism of those peoples after World War II. From a deeply comparative and historical perspective, this book narrates and celebrates that activism, which has occurred not only in Australia but also in Canada and New Zealand.
Miranda Johnson is a lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. We have here her auspicious first book, The Law Is Our History: Indigeneity, law, and the settler state, which is ambitious in scope, yet readable and concise in style. It is based on years of research and several extensive periods of scholarshipsupported residence in the states concerned. To read this book is to engage with three important interrelated themes: the common historical forces by which the Commonwealth settler-states were made; the impact of colonialism upon the social and political organisation of their indigenous peoples; and how the modern activism of those peoples has reshaped and is reshaping those states.
Not that the specificity of the Indigenous experience in each state is lost in the telling. Self-consciously avoiding over-generalisation, the author focuses empirically upon emblematic local examples of indigenous activism.
In Australia, this includes the Yolngu in relation to the Gove land rights case; in Canada, the Dene in relation to the protection of the Mackenzie Valley in the Northwest Territories; and in New Zealand, the Whanganui in relation to the sacred river that bears that name. Each example (and others) is used to support the main argument, which is that, by contrast to comparable peoples who have overcome colonialism by obtaining statehood – as in Africa – Indigenous peoples are changing the Commonwealth settler-states from within. That, argues Johnson, deserves our attention.
As discussed in the brilliant introductory chapter that is worth the full price of the book, these Indigenous peoples have often succeeded in modern claims-making, despite the disruptive and sometimes genocidal impact of colonialism. The analysis teaches us important lessons of twentieth-century settler-state history: assimilationist policies potentially lead to the elimination of Indigenous peoples; welfarist policies lead all too often to their stigmatised dependency; social justice policies don’t fully comprehend Indigenous selfdetermination; and recognition policies, on their own, lead to little at all. Enter the present. The increasingly persuasive claim of Indigenous peoples, which is developed in detail in the book’s six substantive chapters, is that they should be treated as ‘coeval’ partners in a new social contract, one reflected in constitutions, in treaties, and in governmental administration in the states concerned. These substantive chapters are fascinating case studies of Indigenous activism. Each tells a story of how law, in one form or another, was used to seek native title in, or protection of, Indigenous
homelands, particularly when threatened by large-scale mining and other activities of modernity. The authorial voice is one of a sympathetically engaged, but not ideologically dogmatic, analytical historian. She is interested in real people. Hosts of Indigenous and nonIndigenous characters worthy of our attention populate the studies: venerable elders, idealistic advocates, compassionate judges and others. Out of obvious if understated respect for their profound historical agency, Johnson makes them a feature of the narrative. The leitmotif of each study, which is cleverly reflected in the implied syllogism in the title of the book, is that Indigenous historical dispossession and contemporary survival are connected by land. As gently spoken/sung in the lilting Whanganui poem from the book, the people, the land (and waters) and the flow of history represent a compound spiritual force: ‘The river flows / from the mountains to the sea / I am the river / the river is me.’
If timing is everything and luck a fortune, the author and Oxford University Press have both in the Australian context. Publication of the author’s arguments is especially timely here because of the constitutional recognition debate. Luckily for them, this debate has entered a new and welcome stage – intensive internal Indigenous consultation. Recently, it seemed that the debate was faltering. An historically unusual response has been adopted by national political consensus: rather than put upon, Indigenous peoples have been given time for consideration. Despite the delay, history may see this positively as a marker of respect and reconciliation. Therefore, I suggest, we should pay attention to the general discussion in the book of, first, the perceptible yearning in settler-state societies (like ours) for an enhanced sense of identity and meaning and, secondly, the national anxiety engendered in those states by entrenched Indigenous disadvantage and social and political exclusion. As the author argues, the formation of such states has been comparatively recent and is therefore historically thin. Recognising and incorporating ancient Indigenous histories in the national story can play an important role in building a sense of
identity that is more historically leavened. This enlivens the possibility of a new social contract (and social contact), in which state redemption, which only Indigenous peoples as the victims of colonisation can give, is traded for recognition of Indigenous peoplehood and self-determination, which only states can give through constitutional change, treaties, and other changes to the internal political order. This argu-
ment historically transcends but definitely encompasses the debate in Australia about constitutional recognition. It is for that reason that participants in and followers of this debate, among others, should welcome this book. g
Kevin Bell is a justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria and former president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
I was the greatest art potter
I was the greatest art potter but only I knew it, photographing myself holding signs that read Unequalled, Unrivalled, and Undisputed
before burying my work in the natural museum of history, a grave I folded between the 1890s and obscurity.
Shapes came to me as verses to the prophet, but I couldn’t eat what I made in pottery.
The functional world collapsed into an architecture of folds.
I cast my babies, coated them in strange electric glazes.
A thousand things went democrat: mostly tragic fires, but also the decorative mode, which conspired to prove inadequate my world of hands.
I dressed up as Father Time and pointed abroad.
I closed my eyes, tied my mustache in a knot.
DeWeese ❖
Christopher DeWeese’s most recent collection is The Father of the Arrow Is the Thought (2015). He teaches at Wright State University, USA.
Christopher
Exotes
Paul Giles
THE GLAMOUR OF STRANGENESS: ARTISTS AND THE LOST AGE OF THE EXOTICS
by Jamie James
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$37.99 hb, 375 pp, 9780374163358
Described in one of the blurbs on its back cover as ‘a cabinet of wonders for lovers of faraway countries,’ Jamie James’s The Glamour of Strangeness is unusual in terms of the wide variety of the material it covers. James focuses here on artists who left their homelands ‘to create a new self in a new place’, arguing that the ‘exotic’ aesthetics wrought by these adventurous exiles resulted in them becoming personae non gratae in their native lands.
As James tells us in his preface, this book began as ‘a dual study of Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who enjoyed a season of fame in Europe, and Walter Spies, the dreamy German artist in Bali’. However, he also explains that ‘as the book progressed, other, similar cases presented themselves that seemed too good to leave out,’ with the result that we are also introduced here to a much more extensive cast, including Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara; American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren in Haiti; and Victor Segalen, a Breton naval doctor who emigrated to Peking to immerse himself in classical Chinese civilisation. At the time of his death in 1919, Segalen was working on an ‘Essay on Exoticism’, which he subtitled ‘An Aesthetics of Diversity’, and it is a similar kind of ambition to place the ‘exote’ within a broad intellectual framework that provides the rationale for James’s book.
We might wish, however, that James had stuck to his original plan, for the sections of this book dealing with Javanese culture make for much the most compelling reading. The author himself, formerly a freelance arts journalist in New York, has lived in Indonesia since 1999, and the sections here treating Saleh’s painting (based on a ‘landmark exhibition at Indonesia’s National Gallery’ in 2012) and the work of Spies are fascinating, the latter being heightened by some excellent colour reproductions furnished by the New York trade publishers. It is also both surprising and revealing to learn about the extent of Hollywood’s engagement with Indonesian culture on either side of World War II. James discusses Honeymoon in Bali (1939, starring Fred MacMurray) and Road to Bali (1952, starring Bob Hope), as well as Charlie Chaplin’s visit to Bali in 1932, after the success of City Lights Chaplin also developed ideas at this time for a feature film to be set on the island, but this plan never came to fruition. Unfortunately, though, James attempts to expand his thesis to encompass a global version of the exotic, and this is much less convincing. He conceptualises his variegated subjects in terms of certain characteristics they shared: linguistic dexterity, artistic versatility (‘working in many media’), the fact that they ‘were all brave people’ and suffered premature deaths. But there is not even a nodding acquaintance here with considerations of how exile was a constituent aspect of modernism more generally; as many scholars have observed, exile was, for various reasons, more the norm than the exception among avant-garde artists in the first half of the twentieth century. James casts aspersions several times on systems of ‘feminist and postcolonial critiques’, but such hostility to what he calls academic ‘spinners of theories’ leaves him to construct a narrative of exoticism based upon nothing more than what he calls ‘sympathetic vibrations’ with his subjects. He finally excuses this impressionistic method by describing his account of ‘a group of artists’ who created ‘works in different media that span two centuries’ as merely ‘a thought experiment’.
Such lack of clarity is particularly
regrettable since James is so knowledgeable about the particularities and idiosyncrasies of Indonesia; he describes in illuminating detail how its culture arose from a conflict in the nineteenth century between Dutch and Javanese interests. Epigraphs from Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop, and others are strewn around the book, which reads at the end more like a heterogeneous collection of curiosities than anything resembling a coherent argument. (Herodotus, for example, is hailed and farewelled in one sentence.) The form of the narrative reflects this generic hybridity, mingling discursive prose with conversational colloquialisms based upon the author’s autobiography: Richard Halliburton, for instance, is described as ‘a Marco Polo for the Jazz Age’ and ‘already a quaint figure by the time I discovered his book in my grandmother’s library in Oxford, Mississippi’. This anecdotal style leads to an odd conflation of objective and subjective perspectives, leading the author to admit that ‘while I was writing this book in Bali and Lombok, I sometimes wondered if I was writing the story of my own life’.
Edmund White is thanked in the acknowledgments for making ‘some excellent suggestions that bore fruit’, and this whole enterprise carries the air of an intellectual flâneur sauntering past strange exhibits on the world stage. Taken on their own terms, James’s peregrinations are often lively and interesting, and he comments on a characteristically evocative scene set in a Peking brothel from Edmund Backhouse’s autobiography Décadence Mandchoue (1943), where to ‘evoke the timeless, radiant splendour of his night of paid sex, Backhouse quotes Homer, Sophocles, Euripides’, and a host of other cultural authorities. James aptly describes the overall effect of this as ‘not erudite so much as demented’, and though this would be an unduly harsh assessment of his own work, it does suffer from similar contortions, where disinterested analysis and sexual badinage are brought together in an enticing but not entirely convincing manner. g
Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney.
Seeing Garbo
Dennis Altman
AND THEN I FOUND ME
by Noel Tovey Magabala Books
$33 pb, 241 pp, 9781925360479
Looking back on his career, Noel Tovey writes: ‘I could work in three languages. I had dined in the finest restaurants in Europe and America with pop stars and royalty and I had a career in the theatre that most Australians would envy.’ The man who wrote these words grew up an abused and neglected child. When he was seventeen, he served time in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison for ‘the abominable crime of buggery’, a fact not always mentioned in online references.
Tovey began life as a dancer in Melbourne. In 1960 he went to London where he became a successful performer, director, and art dealer. Tovey is also Aboriginal. Part of London’s appeal for him was the relief it offered from the relentless racism of the Australia of his youth. His own reconciliation, with his return to Australia in 1990, and his exploration of his own Aboriginal ancestry, is central to his story. Thirteen years ago Tovey published a memoir, Little Black Bastard (Hodder, 2004) which became the basis for a one-man show, staged in a number of cities. (Aged eighty-two, Tovey will reprise it at La Mama Theatre in early May 2017.) And Then I Found Me, a sequel to that book, covers the thirty years during which Tovey built a successful career in London.
Memoir is a difficult form; what we find fascinating about our own lives is not necessarily what the reader is seeking. Little Black Bastard is full of insights into Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s, and charts territory not necessarily familiar to many of us. When Tovey moves to London, his career flourishes and he moves in more exalted circles, but he adds little to our understanding of the social milieux in which he moved. There is much detail here about various theatrical productions, above all The Boyfriend, in which he toured to several
continents, and Oh! Calcutta! After appearing in the London première in 1970, he brought it to Australia, only to be defeated by local censorship.
The Boyfriend took Tovey to South Africa during the period of apartheid. Of the segregated toilets he encountered on arrival he writes: ‘In that instant finally, I understood what apartheid meant and why I had denied my own black inheritance for so many years.’ This could have been the pivotal point of the book, but Tovey reveals a complex ambivalence in exploring the pains of racism and his own indigeneity. It is difficult to understand his enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher, who opposed Malcolm Fraser’s attempt to impose sanctions on South Africa. Did Tovey ever reflect on this when canvassing for Thatcher in Fulham?
And Then I Found Me reveals that the process of ‘finding me’ has been a lifelong journey, marked by similar inconsistencies and doubts. In 1986, the year both his partner and mother died, Tovey writes of visiting Uluru and feeling ‘for the first time in my life … that I was part of this land and this country’. Four years later Tovey moved back to Australia, where he has had a distinguished career supporting Indigenous arts. Yet in Little Black Bastard he wrote: ‘Now that I am seventy there is no need for me to know the complete history of my Aboriginality. Curiosity is for the young.’
Parallel to coming to terms with his Aboriginality is Tovey’s discovery of gay politics and his support for AIDS organisations. He was present at the Stonewall Inn on the night that street riots following a police raid saw the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in New York: ‘This night would prove to be life changing for all of us; it was our Armageddon.’ But if Stonewall was ‘life changing’ the book does little to explain why. It is not until the onset of AIDS and the illness of his partner that there is any sense of involvement with the movement that exploded across the Western world after 1969.
Too much of the book is a chronology of events and people: far too many people. I was reminded of Jim Sharman’s refusal to include an index in his
memoir (Blood and Tinsel, MUP 2008); he wanted people to read the book rather than just check their names. Only occasionally does Tovey give us more than a glimpse of the parade of famous people: do we really need to know that he saw Greta Garbo on a bus, or that he met Orson Welles?
Name-dropping works when it reveals something about either the writer or the celebrity, and there are interesting, if fleeting, insights in his encounters with Robin Maugham and Roman Polanski. Overall, though, the roll-call of encounters is rather like walking down Hollywood Boulevard; one sees the stars on the pavement but little more.
Tovey, like many authors, writes partly to examine himself. The most interesting sections are the personal, in particular the troubled relationship with his partner, Dave, who died from AIDS, and with his own daughter, Felicity, who died a few years later from an overdose. In seeking to balance these stories of his intimate life with the glamour of the theatre and antiques worlds of London And Then I Found Me doesn’t always succeed.
Like the best of memoirs, Tovey has laid the foundations for what I hope will be a future project, a serious biography of an Australian whose life reveals much about the hidden injuries of racial and sexual prejudice, and the struggle to surmount them. g
Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University. His most recent book is How to Vote Progressive (co-edited with Sean Scalmer, 2016).
O’s brain
Suzy Freeman-Greene
INSOMNIAC CITY: NEW YORK, OLIVER, AND ME
by Bill Hayes
Bloomsbury
$29.99 hb, 304 pp, 9781620404935
When Oliver Sacks began seeing Bill Hayes in 2009, he had never been in a relationship. He wasn’t out as a gay man and hadn’t had sex for thirty-five years. Sacks, the celebrated author and neurologist, was almost thirty years older than Hayes, who had moved to New York from San Francisco after the sudden death of his partner. The two visited the Museum of Natural History and went for walks in the Bronx botanical garden, where Sacks could expatiate on every species of fern. When Hayes gave Sacks a long, exploratory kiss on his seventy-sixth birthday, the older man looked utterly surprised. ‘Is that what kissing is?’ he asked. ‘Or is that something you’ve invented?’
Hayes’s luminous memoir, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me, is full of such startling questions. For Sacks’s mind – erudite, deeply scientific, yet with a childlike sense of wonder – must now process the mysteries of love. He caresses his lover’s biceps: ‘they’re like … beautiful tumours’. As he watches Hayes do his daily push-ups, he counts them by naming the elements: titanium, vanadium, chromium. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could dream together?’ he asks Hayes one night in bed.
This is a memoir bookended by deaths. It begins with the loss of Hayes’s partner, Steve, who died in bed of a cardiac arrest at just forty-three. It ends,
as we know it will, with Sacks’s death from cancer at the age of eighty-two. The prose is poetic, deeply felt, but never mawkish or prurient. Between journal entries about his life with Sacks, (or O as he calls him), Hayes writes about the people he meets and photographs as he roams Manhattan and rides the subway: Kenneth, a young man in a business suit quietly weeping on the train; Ali, who runs the local tobacconist; Sunny, a Sri Lankan taxi driver who declares he will remain a virgin until married.
At first I was so greedy for time with O that I almost resented these tales of New York, where life, as Hayes puts it, ‘is a John Cage score, dissonance made eloquent’. But they grew on me. They are finely observed. In depicting a wider, grittier world, they ensure this memoir is outward-looking, never self-absorbed. Given the curiosity and generosity of spirit that characterised Sacks’s writings, this seems apt.
Still, it is O who is the star of this book, or more precisely, O’s brain. He savours words like ‘triboluminescence’; gets stoned on cannabis chocolates, then forensically describes his hallucinations; plays Schubert on the piano, though half-blind; and marvels at the ‘living geometry’ of the local skate park. As the pair listen to Bach one night, he says, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a planet where the sound of rain falling is like Bach?’ There are lovely anecdotes about his brushes with fame: a lunch at BjÖrk’s house in Reykjavík – like something from a fairy tale with its staircase made of whale rib bones – and a hilarious encounter with the model Lauren Hutton, who latches onto Sacks at a chamber orchestra concert. (‘Hey doc, you ever done Belladonna?’) O hasn’t a clue who she is.
Hayes, in turn, is teaching O new things, like how to share a life with someone and how to open a bottle of champagne (which O does wearing swimming goggles, just in case). In closely observing the world around him, he is moving through his grief over Steve’s death. The tall trees outside his apartment window fascinate him. Whipped by wind, rain, and lightning, they are ‘not fighting this storm but yielding to it’. Their species, he notes, has evolved
to survive.
The last fifty or so pages of this book – so tender, intimate, restrained – are painful to read. A recurrence of a melanoma has metastasised to O’s liver. He takes the news calmly (he is not interested in ‘prolonging life just for the sake of prolonging life’). Soon after, he writes a list of eight and half reasons to remain hopeful. ‘1. An easy death (relatively). 2. Time to “complete” life’, and so on.
After surgery to cut off the blood supply to the tumours, O is in so much pain he keeps tearing off his hospital
Sacks’s mind – erudite, deeply scientific, yet with a childlike sense of wonder – must now process the mysteries of love
gown. Hayes calms him by reading from a book on the elements. As his condition worsens, O either rests or writes with his fountain pen and notepad. ‘The most we can do is write,’ he reflects, ‘intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.’ He gradually lets go of everything inessential, barely eating, keeping his eyes closed when not writing.
When O’s breathing slows, in the last phase of dying, Hayes clears away the medical detritus littering his room – the oxygen tank, the pads and medications – and brings in the things O loves: his books, his ‘beloved minerals and elements’, his fountain pens, a fern, a cycad plant, and a ginkgo fossil.
Later, when the funeral directors have taken O’s body away, Hayes returns to his own apartment. He feels ‘tired, grateful, peaceful, battered, sad, wise, old’. Once more, he is grieving in New York. But he has made something beautiful and wise from his sadness. After finishing Insomniac City, I started looking at trees, really closely, and I found myself uncharacteristically chatting with a woman from Lahore on my morning bus. g
Suzy
Freeman-Greene is the Arts and Culture Editor of The Conversation
Snakes in the cockpit
Simon Caterson
THE FABULOUS FLYING MRS MILLER: AN AUSTRALIAN’S TRUE STORY OF ADVENTURE, DANGER, ROMANCE AND MURDER
by Carol Baxter Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 423 pp, 9781760290771
Among the glittering generation of pioneering aviators and aviatrixes of the 1920s and 1930s, Jessie ‘Chubbie’ Miller stands out as remarkably adventurous. Carol Baxter’s highly readable biography provides an engaging portrait of a young suburban housewife who decided, quite literally, to make her own way in the world. As Baxter acknowledges, for a biographer it is a tremendous story that just keeps on giving. This book does it justice.
Born in 1901 in a small town located at the end of a railway line that stretched almost 400 kilometres from Perth, itself the most remote capital city in the world, Jessie Beveridge moved with her family in 1906 to the bright lights of Broken Hill. Her provincial upbringing was constrained all the more by the conservative religious views of her parents, who expected their daughter’s destiny to consist of marriage and motherhood.
Like a Miles Franklin heroine, however, Jessie dreamed of a brilliant career. She came a little closer to realising that dream in 1917 when the family moved to Melbourne. There she met George Keith Miller, a journalist with a name similar to that of a certain legendary Australian test cricketer. (Confusingly, Jessie was widely known during her public career as Mrs Keith Miller.)
At the age of eighteen, Jessie married the twenty-two-year-old Miller. After several failed pregnancies, and having experienced a growing sense of frustration within her marriage, Jessie left Australia and travelled to England for a six-month holiday. Although she would return to Australia, Jessie had effectively left behind her life there forever.
At a party in London, Jessie met Bill Lancaster, an Anglo-Australian pilot who wanted to be the first to make the flight from England to Australia in a light aircraft. Despite the fact that she had never flown before, Jessie agreed to help Lancaster organise the trip, provided that he took her along as his passenger. The fact that a woman would be joining the record-breaking flight attempting to fly halfway around the world helped attract sponsorship and publicity to a project that hitherto had struggled, as it were, to get off the ground.
Jessie turned out to be a natural at PR, declaring to a reporter: ‘I am an Australian and have always wished to be the first woman to fly from London to Australia.’ The duo departed in October 1927 on their epic journey with some fanfare, though without being able to get any insurance for themselves or their equipment. Their two-seat single-engine Avro Avian biplane, dubbed the Red Rose, was made of wood and linen, featured separate open cockpits and rudimentary instruments that were not lit. While airborne, Jessie would take over the controls while Lancaster peered at maps, and that was how she began to learn to fly.
The journey was replete with incredible risk and misadventure. A constant series of engine problems was punctuated by mishaps, including a crash, a forced landing, and the discovery of a venomous snake that had found its way into Jessie’s cockpit. They encountered fog, sandstorms, and torrential rain; their maps and money were stolen. They were easily beaten to the record by Bert Hinkler flying solo in the same type of aeroplane, and there was no crowd to greet them when they landed in Darwin after a journey that took them more than three months to complete.
Although their arrival in Australia was anti-climactic, Jessie and Bill had gained international fame with their exploits. Like characters in a Howard Hawks movie, through their shared adventure they had also found each other. Indeed, the two of them were soon on their way to Hollywood to pursue the prospect of a feature film about their exploits. (The movie was never made, though decades later in the 1980s a
television miniseries called The Lancaster Miller Affair was produced in Australia.) Now settled in America, Jessie, who had obtained her pilot’s licence, began competing in the female-only transcontinental air-racing circuit known officially as the Women’s Air Derby and referred to patronisingly by the popular comic Will Rogers as the Powder Puff Derby.
The couple’s fortunes declined with the onset of the Great Depression, though there was to be an unwelcome second act in their lives as celebrities. It began when Jessie employed a ghost writer named Haden Clarke to help her produce an autobiography. The two embarked on an affair that ended when Clarke was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head. Lancaster was charged with murder but subsequently acquitted, despite the fact that two suicide notes supposedly left by Clarke were found to be forgeries.
Jessie turned out to be a natural at PR
Notwithstanding his acquittal at the end of a trial that caused a media sensation, both Lancaster and Jessie were told to leave the United States. Lancaster disappeared in 1932 while flying solo over the Sahara in an attempt to break the England to Cape Town flight speed record. Jessie subsequently married an air hire company owner in England and retired from flying altogether. She only reappeared in public when Lancaster’s remains were finally discovered in 1962. Like Burke and Wills, Lancaster had died of thirst isolated in the desert, keeping a diary until the end. g
Simon
Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer.
Enlighten me
Tim Smartt
THE DREAM OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
by Anthony Gottlieb Allen Lane
$49.99 hb, 320 pp, 9780713995442
In 1784 Immanuel Kant wrote a remarkable essay entitled ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ The essay, written for a magazine, provided an occasion for the great and difficult philosopher to present some of his ideas to a broader audience. The essay is short, accessible, and contains breezy descriptions of freedom, rationality, and human dignity. Kant’s answer is that enlightenment consists in acquiring the capacity to think for oneself, rather than outsourcing one’s thinking to others. Kant writes: ‘It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.’
There is something exhilarating about the idea that intellectual and moral maturity are attainable, and that the road that leads there can only be travelled by the courageous. Perhaps this explains the Enlightenment’s special allure for people who are interested in exploring the world of ideas.
Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Enlightenment, an introduction to the philosophy of this period, is the second instalment in a three-volume history of Western philosophy aimed at a general readership. The first volume, The Dream of Reason (2000), covered philosophy from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, and was both popular and critically well received. Gottlieb’s trilogy, when finished, will take up the commendable and difficult task of popularising the history of philosophy. The seminal book in this genre is Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945); Roger Scruton
and Anthony Kenny have penned other notable surveys. The Dream of Enlightenment tells the story of philosophy from the 1620s to the 1770s. Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume are covered in some depth; there are briefer discussions of Bacon, Bayle, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.
The main strength of Gottlieb’s book is the storytelling. Gottlieb, who edited The Economist for more than a decade, puts his journalistic instincts to good use in constructing his narrative. The book is crammed with fascinating biographical details about the philosophers. We learn, for example, that the young Thomas Hobbes worked as an assistant to Francis Bacon; that Descartes’s Meditations (1641) was published with responses from Hobbes and other prominent intellectuals; that Locke wrote a constitution for the colony of Carolina (which stretched from presentday Virginia to Florida); that this document won him an admirer, years later, in Thomas Jefferson; that Voltaire scribbled angry marginalia in his copies of Rousseau; that Hume and Rousseau struck up a friendship, only to fall out publicly; and that (my favourite) Diderot once said of Leibniz, ‘When one compares one’s own talents with those of Leibniz it is tempting to throw away one’s books and go off and die in some quiet corner.’ Gottlieb also provides an illuminating account of three social developments that absorbed writers during this era: the scientific revolution; the religious fragmentation and violence that followed the Reformation; and changing attitudes towards political authority.
The book, though enjoyable and highly readable, is not entirely successful. Gottlieb falters in two important respects. First, his accounts of individual philosophers are surprisingly uneven. The chapters on Locke and Hume are engaging introductions to their thought, and convey their motivations and major breakthroughs. Gottlieb’s discussion of Hume’s account of inductive reasoning is particularly lucid. However, the discussion of other philosophers is problematic. For example, Gottlieb presents Descartes as something of a joke. We are told he ‘was a proud man’ who ‘often lost his temper’ and was ‘exceptionally
abusive’. Apparently, his writings were partly ‘an exercise in propaganda’; they ‘ramble back and forth’; and he ‘tried to work out too much in his head’. It is unclear why Gottlieb adopts such a derisive tone here, and it does not help us to comprehend Descartes’s ideas. Indeed, the details of Descartes’ swork, which many take to be amongst the most important in Western philosophy, are not given their due in The Dream of Enlightenment Second, Gottlieb makes it clear that Enlightenment thinkers defined themselves vis-à-vis Aristotelian scholasticism, the dominant philosophy of medieval Europe, but he does not devote sufficient time to explaining exactly what this is. One could, of course, turn to Gottlieb’s first volume. However, the reader who has no desire to read another book in order to understand this one will be left with a weak understanding of what was so new about Enlightenment philosophy. Gottlieb’s book provides a neat way of getting one’s head around one of the most important periods in the history of philosophy. But the literature is already populated with accessible, lively, measured introductions by some of the world’s best philosophers. Richer accounts of the figures covered in Gott-lieb’s survey can be found, for instance, in: Simon Blackburn’s Think (1999); Steven Nadler’s The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A portrait of Descartes (2013) and A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s scandalous treatise and the birth of the secular age (2013); Philip Pettit’s Made with Words: Hobbes on language, mind and politics (2008); Maria Rosa Antognazza’s Leibniz: A very short introduction (2016); and Daniel Garber’s essay ‘Religio Philosophi’ (2005). g
Tim Smartt is a Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame Australia in the Institute for Ethics and Society.
DOWN THE HUME
by Peter Polites Hachette
$27.99 pb, 267 pp, 9780733635564
Peter Polites’s first novel is remarkable in its power to evoke growing up caught between conflicting cultural and sexual identities. It tells the story of Bux, a gay man haunted by his addiction to painkillers, his abusive relationship with his drug-dealing bodybuilder boyfriend, his violent alcoholic Greek father, and a childhood where his sexuality and his traditional Greek upbringing mark him forever as an outsider. The novel pulses with the frenetic life of Sydney’s western suburbs, where cultures, peoples,and languages clash.As Bux moves across the city, the stark disparity between Sydney’s multicultural west and monocultural east becomes a central theme.
Working as an orderly in an aged care home, Bux develops a friendship with Bruno, an elderly Italian with Alzheimer’s who, as a young immigrant, fell in love with an Australian man. A framed photograph of the pair together is Bruno’s prized possession. Through Bruno’s fractured utterances Bux builds a picture of a love affair that was doomed because of the homophobic times.
Bux’s other support comes from his mother. Like her son, she is a survivor of trauma and deeply aware of the inequities of life. Their relationship is both tender and volatile, and her complexity and candour make her a memorable character. The novel is written in clipped sentences that encapsulate Bux’s fragile hold on reality and his inevitable descent into addiction. Memories recur as he revisits the streets and landmarks of his past. Even though deeply clouded by drugs he shows a remarkable insight into the world around him. The text is punctuated with untranslated Greek words and the tough language of the street, reflecting the multiple worlds that Bux inhabits.
Down the Hume should rightly take its place alongside the fiction of Christos Tsiolkas, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and newcomer George Haddad as work that reflects the reality and occasional ugliness of Australia’s multiculturalism.
Crusader Hillis
ALL FALL DOWN
by Cassandra Austin Hamish Hamilton
$29.99 pb, 260 pp, 9781926428253
The collapse of a bridge is the catalyst in Cassandra Austin’s All Fall Down, isolating the small town of Mululuk in true Australian gothic fashion. Janice, crossing the bridge to flee her husband Craig and reunite with former lover Shane – or maybe not – manages to survive the fall, waking from a coma weeks later with a head injury people aren’t sure she isn’t faking. Charlie prays over her, not necessarily for her survival, while Father Nott and Gussy prepare to protest the government’s refusal to open the new bridge until Richard, who may or may not be an insurance assessor, is satisfied he knows what caused the first one to fail. Father Nott’s teenage niece Rachel is thrust into the middle of everything. Banished to Mululuk by her father, self-absorbed Rachel is oblivious to the shimmering tensions, lies, and half-truths that cloud Mululuk’s air as densely as the red dirt of the desert surrounding it.
Any decent literary small town roils with secrets, and Mululuk stands in that tradition, the perfect milieu for sordidness. Affairs, past insults, tested friendships, and bad habits are all laid bare as Austin weaves her complex plot between shifting perspectives in sleek, elegant prose. The interplay between the characters and the reader is reminiscent of a comedy of errors, albeit without the humour, and it is entirely engaging. The reader is privy to the truth behind every misunderstanding, misconception, and superstition that assail Austin’s well drawn, grounded characters. Bridges, Charlie knows, demand a sacrifice to remain standing, while Gussy hunts a more earthly saboteur, and Father Nott would rather neither of them speak to Richard. While All Fall Down isn’t exactly a thriller, a delicious tension is maintained throughout. Each revelation adds to an increasing foreboding that reaches its climax throughout the final stunning and satisfying scenes.
Benjamin Chandler
SEE WHAT I HAVE DONE by
Sarah Schmidt Hachette
$32.99 pb, 328 pp, 9780733636882
In this gripping first novel, Sarah Schmidt re-imagines the lives of Lizzie Borden, her family, and the brutal double murder of her father and stepmother, for which Lizzie became notorious. Set in and around the Borden’s house at Fall River, Massachusetts, the narrative has a dense, claustrophobic air that feeds the portrayal of this family as menacingly close.
The novel moves backwards and forwards in time between 3 August 1892 – the day before the murders – and the days immediately after. Following an increasingly familiar structure (found, for instance, in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap [2008] and Josephine Rowe’s A Loving, Faithful Animal [2016]), the narrative is related from several points of view, the chapters alternating between first-person accounts from Lizzie, her older sister, Emma, the family’s maid, Bridget, and Benjamin, a violent young man engaged by the sisters’ (frankly creepy) Uncle John to ‘talk some sense’ into Mr Borden.
This book is remarkable in many ways. It resonates with seemingly effortless details of the sounds, smells, and oppressive heat of the summer of 1892. The characters of Lizzie, Emma, and Bridget in particular are keenly observed and counterbalance one another beautifully. Perhaps most remarkably, despite Lizzie’s notoriety, the suspense is maintained from beginning to end. This is partly attributable to the continued speculation about the case, which Schmidt alludes to in a somewhat jarring chapter set in 1905 and narrated by Benjamin, which summarises Lizzie’s arrest, her imprisonment pending trial, and her acquittal (according to the jury, ‘women just don’t do this type of crime’). More important, however, is the subtle layering of points of view, the effect of which is to keep the reader guessing as we try to determine whose version of events we can trust. Schmidt is a consummate storyteller whose account of the Borden murders is utterly compelling. Anna MacDonald
Publisher of the Month with Phillipa McGuinness
What was your pathway to publishing?
I was about to land a cadetship with The Age, or so I thought. When I missed out, I applied for a job as a publishing assistant with Cambridge University Press. Before long I was working in CUP’s Sydney office, a terrace in Surry Hills. Bits of crumbling wall would fall onto our desks, so manuscripts were often covered in sand. It has always been a glamorous industry, but one I’m very glad I fell into.
What was the first book you published?
An arcane legal studies book, the name of which I can’t remember – not such an auspicious start. But I do remember the second or third: Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (1996) – an early career highlight, and a book that made me realise what Australian history could be.
Do you edit the books you commission?
Structural editing, yes; copyediting, no.
How many titles do you publish each year?
About twenty-five.
What are the main qualities you look for in a new author?
Having something to say, most of all, combined with a desire to write for a real audience. Sometimes my attention will be grabbed by an idea, a turn of phrase, or an anecdote. Sometimes something so important lands that you can’t not publish it. I want to find authors willing to take risks, who won’t look back over their shoulders but will direct their words out into the world.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
The early conversations – in person, by email or phone, or those in my head as I read their manuscripts. The excitement as you think, ‘we could make this work’; and the realisation, in the midst of that buzz, that you share a vision. At times I realise that an overly-cautious author, burdened by their own expertise, isn’t doing their subject justice.That’s a terrible disappointment that you have to suck up, then try to fix. The opposite
is the joy you feel when something turns out to be even better than you hoped.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I work on my own book. My biggest concern is not to miss my own deadline – such bad karma. I thought becoming a writer would make me a better publisher. Now I’m not so sure. But being a publisher for twenty years has definitely made me a better writer, though I now understand why authors want to talk non-stop about their work. I fear I am becoming that person at a party everyone is stepping away from.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?
Diana Athill, at least as she presents herself in Stet. I still remember a conversation I had with John Iremonger about political biography. Stephen Page at Faber is very interesting on the place of publishing in our digital world. But I most admire the Australian publishers working hard every day to match good books with their readers. Who are they? Nearly all of them.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
No, I think it may be a beneficiary. You want a writer who will stand out because of their voice, their originality, their story.
On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?
Is it greedy to ask for all of the above? I would also add responsive and engaged readers to that mix.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
Rosy. Distraction is the main enemy of writers and readers. Step away from your phone!
Phillipa McGuinness is Executive Publisher at NewSouth Publishing. She edited the book Copyfight (2015) and is writing a history of the year 2001, to be published by Random House in 2018.
ABR Arts
Anwen Crawford on Berlin Syndrome
Theatre
Ian Dickson
The Bleeding Tree (Sydney Theatre Company)
Film
Andrea Goldsmith
Denial (Entertainment One)
Tribute
Morag Fraser
The irreplaceable John Clarke
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
Director Cate Shortland and the crew of Berlin Syndrome on location in Berlin
TRIBUTE
The irreplaceable A
tribute to John Clarke (1948–2017) by Morag Fraser
Years ago, when I was editing a magazine, John Clarke would occasionally ring, sometimes to discuss what might have been called business, but, more often, just out of the blue. John would talk and I would listen. And so would the entire office staff – listen. They’d get the cue from our wily receptionist, pick up their extensions and stop work for the duration of the call. If they’d had an enterprise agreement, I would have made sure it included that time out, and immunity from prosecution under privacy laws. Innocent days. Days of joy. Even Gough Whitlam, who would also call occasionally, couldn’t command quite the same degree of blissful communal eavesdropping.
I trust John would not have minded. His public life, after all, was devoted to bringing piquant, abrasive pleasure to all manner of people. And yet he seemed able to remain himself, whole, private, thoughtful, and morally sane, even as those eyes would glint and spirit you into the extremes of absurdity.
He was serious about poetry, knew it intimately, so intimately he could parody works with the kind of genius that would delight all but the most fragile poetic ego. Listen to his full-body immersion in Dylan Thomas’s grandiloquence, or to the ABC’s Poetica podcast where he riffs on poetry, literary afflatus, skill, and his own parodies in The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse (1994), and where he also lets slip the following advice in that heat-seeking missile vernacular of his:
‘I think it would be a good exercise in schools for people to work out how it is that a poet particularly writes as distinct from that other poet, and have a go at doing it, because it’s like wearing someone else’s shoes and clothing, you walk as them, and all sorts of interesting things happen. You catch sight of yourself walking like someone else in a shop window.’
Good indeed, as an exercise for life as much as for satire. You walk as them, and all sorts of interesting things happen.
But it was not only as fodder for satire that John worked out how poets write ‘particularly’. Words, precision, timing, rhythm, and irony were John Clarke’s tools of trade. And he had the humility – and wisdom – to acknowledge writers who used their tools to perfection,
and for transcendence. I remember once standing in a queue outside the Melbourne Town Hall waiting to get into a Writers’ Festival session featuring Seamus Heaney. I turned and there was John, on his own, in line and hoping to score a late ticket. No striding to the front of the queue or pulling rank. I happened to have a spare and can’t think of anyone who would have made better use of it. That was a good day.
Another good day was the one when John agreed to let me use four passages from his inimitable series with Bryan Dawe for a book of Best Antipodean Essays He expressed some bemusement at being thought of as an essayist. I had no doubts. The sequence was called ‘Born Leaders of Men’, and featured John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, and David Gower, captain of the hapless England team in the 1989 Ashes series (which England lost 4-nil). Poor doomed David Gower:
‘If you’re not to going to win, what are your expectations?
We’ve got an expectation, we’ve got an agenda, we’ve got an aim for Edgbaston, and we hope to work towards it and achieve it.
And what is that aim?
We’d like to get Stephen Waugh out.
During the match?
No, probably not at Edgbaston, but certainly some time before August. We’d like to get him out before he goes home.’
The passages are as fresh and pointed as the day they went to air. Cupidity, intransigence, bombast, Paul Keating’s withering rhetoric, and David Gower’s funk – all there, and they make you ache with laughter, and then shudder with the shock of shared recognition of folly. Who else could have written this contributor’s note?
‘John Clarke was born in New Zealand, and lives in Melbourne. He is a writer/performer, and advisor and comforter to the Government and people of Australia.’ He says it all, and in so few words. Bless him. g
Morag Fraser was chair of Australian Book Review from 2006 to 2015, and editor of Eureka Street magazine from 1991 to 2003.
Art and life
Andrew Fuhrmann
THE LEGACIES OF BERNARD SMITH: ESSAYS ON AUSTRALIAN ART, HISTORY AND CULTURAL POLITICS
edited
by Jaynie Anderson, Christopher R. Marshall, and Andrew Yip Power Publications
$39.99 pb, 372 pp, 9780994306432
Apersistent fascination attaches to those who help break the new wood, and so it is with Bernard Smith (1916–2011). His contribution is foundational to the study of the arts in Australia. Smith was for more than sixty years the country’s leading art historian, but he was also an educator, curator, newspaper critic, collector, memoirist, and biographer. Even as an artist his work has acquired an aura of significance. When I was last at the National Gallery of Australia, one of the large and rather tenebrous canvases he painted in the early 1940s was hanging alongside work by James Gleeson as an example of early Australian surrealism.
The Legacies of Bernard Smith arose from a series of symposia held at the University of Melbourne and the Power Institute in 2012, a year after Smith’s death at the age of ninety-four. There are twenty-one chapters in all, covering many and various topics. It is an interesting collection, but I suspect that we still don’t have a clear vantage on Smith’s long and distinguished career, and that there is much more to say about his influence.
It is still European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) that most intrigues. Smith’s classic study of the art of the European colonial period anticipated many of the issues around cross-cultural transmission and exchange that have dominated the humanities and social sciences for the last half a century. Kathleen Davidson’s forward-looking chapter draws on this landmark survey to suggest new lines of research into the place of photography in Imperial contexts. European Vision focuses on the ways in which the visual culture of
Europe was influenced by encounters with the landscapes and peoples of the South Pacific and Australia. It is, therefore, a book about the impact of the periphery on the centre, and not the other way around. Paul Giles calls this Smith’s antipodean perspective, a critical strategy of inversion which Smith used throughout his career. Giles argues convincingly that Smith may one day be remembered chiefly as a cultural theorist, one who was sensitive to the different ways in which the global circulation of art and culture could be framed and reframed.
Today, however, Smith is best known as the first truly Australian art historian. The parochial problem of what makes someone truly Australian is one he often wrestled with. Catherine Speck critically examines his writings on expatriate artists and extracts a new and more tractable definition of Australian art. Andrew Sayers, meanwhile, reminds us of Smith’s foundational role in giving narrative shape to the development of Australia’s colonial artistic culture. Smith, for example, was the first to pay serious attention to the art of men like J.W. Lewin, and his assessments of their various contributions have proven surprisingly durable.
There is less praise for, and indeed less interest in tracing, possible legacies stemming from Smith’s last two books, Modernism’s History (1998) and The Formalesque (2007) Terry Smith laments that his former lecturer from the University of Melbourne refused to make room for critical theory in his frameworks of analysis. He argues that this ultimately crippled Smith’s attempt to understand Modernism in its relationship with Postmodernism. Terry Smith is also critical of Smith’s call for a return to the concept of period style and his coinage of a new term to replace Modernism, dismissing it as ‘smartalecky anti-theory’. Robert Gaston – in a fine chapter on Smith’s years at the Warburg Institute – simply notes that the old man should have realised that style names are virtually immoveable. Certainly, the response to these two late works has been muted, but I tend to agree with Paul Giles that the shape of Bernard Smith’s legacy will not become
clear until two generations have passed. I am not sure that we have heard the last of Smith’s ‘formalesque’, even if many now regard it as a quixotic folly.
Smith was not simply a creature of the academy. We should remember that foundational books like Place, Taste and Tradition (1945) and Australian Painting (1962) were written for the widest possible readership. Smith was an acute historian, and he insisted on the highest standards of art-historical scholarship, but he was also conscious of the need to integrate the study of the history of art into the general life of the community. On this theme, Steven Miller offers useful details about the touring exhibitions which Smith organised at the National Art Gallery of New South Wales between 1944 and 1948, and Joanna Mendelssohn highlights the way in which Smith encouraged universities, galleries, and art museums to recognise their interdependence and to work together to raise the level of arts discourse.
In The Legacies of Bernard Smith, you will also find chapters reflecting on his time as a grassroots activist in the Sydney suburb of Glebe, as a collector who believed in a common responsibility to support the arts by purchasing new work, and as a public intellectual facing up to the consequences of colonial violence.
The collection sometimes seems a bit eclectic, but could it be otherwise? And if the chorus of Smith’s admirers and occasional adversaries gathered here tends to dwell on the individual man rather than his influence on others, it is nonetheless a generous tribute. g
Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. Between 2005–8 he worked as personal assistant to Bernard Smith.
Into the desert
Gareth Hipwell
STRICT RULES: THE ICONIC STORY OF THE TOUR THAT SHAPED MIDNIGHT OIL
by Andrew McMillan Hachette
$24.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780733638084
In July 1986, an ascendant Midnight Oil joined forces with the Northern Territory’s trailblazing, predominantly Indigenous Warumpi Band and embarked on the joint Blackfella–Whitefella tour of remote Indigenous communities in the Western Desert and Top End. The bands would perform for more than a dozen communities, from Warakurna, Western Australia in the south-west to Groote Eylandt on the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north-east, taking in, among other places, the Pintupi community of Kintore; the Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatjira and Aranda settlement (and Warumpi Band home-ground) of Papunya, and the Gumatj centre of Yirrkala. Strict Rules is then-music journalist Andrew McMillan’s breathless, kaleidoscopic account of that tour. Originally published in 1988, the book is reissued here to coincide with Midnight Oil’s The Great Circle world tour, and includes a new epilogue from frontman Peter Garrett.
When the Oils and Warumpis hit Docker River, the Fraser government’s historic Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (1976) was barely a decade old. Indigenous rejection of a century of missionary round-ups, forced settlement, and decades-old policies of assimilation was a recent development. The Northern Territory into which Midnight Oil plunged headlong was the site of a nascent sovereignty movement agitating against the twin-colossi of mining and militarisation. The Cold War still loomed large, and US forces were an uneasy presence in the Territory. The bands’ entry into many of the tour’s stopping points required that they first obtain permits from the relevant community councils.
The wounds of white atrocities committed against the regions’ Indigenous
people are a disquieting background to McMillan’s narrative, as are the many still-pressing problems faced by the Indigenous people he encountered, including chronic inner-ear and kidney disease, entrenched alcohol abuse, and petrolsniffing. McMillan bears unflinching witness to appalling intergenerational deprivation and disadvantage.
Against such a momentous and chequered backdrop, rock and roll understandably yields top billing to McMillan’s more pressing preoccupations. His take on the sand-rattling business of live performance is, accordingly, somewhat fractured and episodic; gig reviews separated by tranches of historical background and social enquiry. McMillan hews throughout to the roving, queasycam style of early influence Hunter S. Thompson to produce a multi-faceted chronicle of the tour. He casts his eye over manifold logistical difficulties –strained relationships and personal antipathies, distance and isolation, cross-cultural suspicions and resentments, and enormities inevitably lost in translation. Traversing country, he surveys traditional lands blighted by stripmining, weighing ecological degradation against the assurance of self-sufficiency afforded many Indigenous communities by mining royalties.
Strikingly, in McMillan’s telling, a certain distance, both spatial and cultural, obtains between Midnight Oil and Warumpi Band. The divide is bridged most decisively during the bands’ iconic performance at Cooinda, where Midnight Oil famously joined the Warumpi Band onstage to share in the latter’s anthemic ‘Blackfella–Whitefella’, trading instruments before segueing into their own ‘The Dead Heart’.
Save for two performances, McMillan paints the Warumpi Band as a rousing live act at the peak of its powers, led by its electrifying Gumatj Yolngu frontman, the late George Burarrwanga. Midnight Oil, in contrast, encountered markedly varied responses. Performing on improvised outdoor stages and in rec halls alike, we see the Oils triumph in front of wildly receptive crowds one night, before encountering perplexed disengagement the next.
Charged with fresh political fire
centred, in greater part, on the plight of Indigenous Australia, seminal Midnight Oil albums Diesel and Dust (1987) and Blue Sky Mining (1990) undeniably bear the stamp of the band’s 1986 experiences. McMillan’s unwavering projection of Garrett as a man of clear conviction, conscience, and charisma makes the latter’s ultimate fate in federal Cabinet a poignant footnote.
Perhaps more pronounced than the tour’s influence on Midnight Oil, however, was the impact it had on McMillan himself. McMillan’s prose fairly crackles with the tindery, dry-brittle textures of Western Desert spinifex and mulga in the book’s opening chapters, throughout which he refers to himself, in the third person, as ‘the hitch-hiker’. But, as the tour sweeps northward out of the desert and into the coastal idylls of the Top End, McMillan symbolically dispatches this restless alter ego, signalling his decided attachment to the region that would soon become his adoptive home. As his An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land (2001) attests, McMillan’s experiences on the Blackfella–Whitefella tour set the course for the rest of his life (he died in 2012). His powers of description in the latter half of the book are formidable, establishing him alongside Xavier Herbert as one of Australian literature’s most vibrant chroniclers of the Tropical North.
When the Oils exited the Top End to stage left, the Warumpis returned to the ‘great silence’ of the desert. Their retrospective compilation Warumpi Band 4 Ever (2015), which encompasses, among other things, the band’s three studio albums, still thrills with potent feeling.
This is, of course, our recent past. In his epilogue, Garrett considers several worrying developments in the ensuing decades, including recent political posturing in Western Australia on the issue of ostensibly ‘unsustainable’ remote Indigenous communities. Tellingly, such enduring hope as still chimes in Strict Rules is rooted in McMillan’s reflections on the clear gains won by the return of Indigenous lands to their traditional owners. g
Gareth Hipwell is a Sydney-based freelance music journalist and author. ❖
The Bleeding Tree
by Ian Dickson
Three women are staring into space. They are shocked, dazed, not yet believing that what has just happened has actually occurred. Beneath them is the body of a man, husband, and father whom they have just murdered. So begins the darkly lyrical nightmare ride that is Australian playwright Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree, which won several 2016 Helpmann Awards, including Best Play and Best Direction.
Much of Cerini’s earlier work has revolved around an anatomisation of a certain kind of white male ‘to see what breeds about [his] heart’, highlighting his anger, his propensity to violence, his sense of entitlement, and his limited concept of masculinity. Here, the white male has already been anatomised, as it were, and we are dealing with the consequences of his actions.
Since we are aware of the murder from the start, the play is not a whodunit, rather a where-to-put-it, as the three women work out what to do with the body. Terror ensues when nosy neighbors drop by and cover-up stories have to be quickly invented, but gradually the three come to the realisation that the local response is not what they might have expected. Cerini has described a theme of the play as ‘the scars that women wear’. We follow the man’s wife and two daughters as they move through a maze of emotions: release from oppression, fear of discovery, a gradual sense of their own power, and finally to a feeling of rebirth.
The play’s heightened language, which occasionally blossoms into rhyme, is at odds with the squalor of the women’s situation. But Cerini creates authentic poetry from their limited vocabularies and frequent obscenities in, a way that recalls Genet. I am not sure, however, if the mother would use the word ‘kharma’, though she would definitely understand the concept. The dialogue is shot through with the darkest of humour; one can be wincing and laughing at the same time.
From dust we come and to dust we shall return is a concept that Cerini presents here with macabre delight. We are treated to gruesome descriptions of the rapidly festering corpse being consumed by various predators. But he is also playing here with the concept of decay and rebirth and the fact that the remains of even the most despicable human being can be subsumed back into the natural order of things. At the end, the mother boils the remaining bones to use as fertiliser for a rose garden. The play’s final lines lead us out of the darkness:
You grow a new garden Ma?
I grow one for you.
What colours you after?
Any’ll do.
Any?
Yeah, any but his.
The colour of his gaping hole where all hell pokes through.
Just three days it takes to be rid of his spell.
Patience and good luck, some the universe sends.
The dead hole where his place was, makes its own amends.
Lee Lewis’s production is beautifully attuned to the play’s style. We are thankfully spared the sight of the body. The horror is left to the words. On Renée Mulder’s steeply raked, fragmented set, Paula Arundell, Airlie Dodds, and Shari Sebbens play not only the mother and daughters but also share the dialogue of the intrusive neighbours, so that we have a sense of a story not merely being re-enacted but of a fable told around a camp fire.
Dodds and Sebbens start from the same place emotionally. They combine delight and anxiety; at last they can tell their abusive father what they think of him, but there is a remnant of irrational fear, as when children use a naughty word and wait for a reprimand. As the play progresses, Sebbens forges ahead with no regrets, while the more tentative Dodds finds the corpse’s decay confronting. Both are superb.
As the mother, Paula Arundell, who won a Helpmann Award for this performance when the play was first presented at the Griffin in 2015, is magnificent. She is all edgy determination as she attempts to hold it together, but we get glimpses of the abusive hell she has delivered herself from. The rage with which she rounds on one of the neighbours, one of the many who knew what she and her daughters were suffering through but did nothing about it, is devastating.
It is good to see a play of this quality getting a second showing. As Kip Williams points out in his introductory program note, STC and Griffin have a history of shared productions. Long may it continue. g
The Bleeding Tree (Sydney Theatre Company), written by Angus Cerini and directed by Lee Lewis, was performed at Wharf 1 Theatre in March and April 2017. Performance attended: 11 March.
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
Berlin Syndrome
by Anwen Crawford
Australian director Cate Shortland has made three feature films about young women who find themselves out of their depths. Her first, Somersault (2004), set in wintry Jindabyne, featured Abbie Cornish in an early and memorable role as a troubled teenage runaway. Lore (2012) was adapted from Rachel
grapher, whose chance meeting with a local man has awful consequences.
The sense of threatened, and threatening, submersion that characterises Shortland’s films is as much visual as psychological. She uses a cool, sea-blue palette, and her close-up shots often have a shallow depth of field, so that certain objects loom into focus while the rest are a watery blur. Guileless young women drift through these submarine realms, as if they will take whatever comes their way, though they may struggle, intermittently, to find solid ground. This tilting between acquiescence and self-possession made Somersault, in particular, very moving, but the imbalance of states is greater in Berlin Syndrome, and the naïveté of the main character feels far less credible.
In the opening scenes of the film, we watch Clare, wide-eyed and twenty-something, explore the German capital. She carries a backpack and a camera, like any number of thrifty travellers. She first encounters Andi (Max Riemelt), who looks about the same age as her, on a street corner. He drops some books, offers her some strawberries, and then pulls her in for an overly familiar kiss on both cheeks. I don’t know about you, but after that indecorous gesture I would have set off walking – or possibly running – in the opposite direction. The guy is so obviously a creep that it seems ludicrous that any young woman would stay to talk with him, much less spend a whole day in his company, as Clare does, during which time he also puts his hands around her throat. That still isn’t enough of a warning sign: she drives off with him (he locks the car doors) to a conveniently abandoned Berlin apartment block (‘It’s so quiet here’), where they have sex. The next morning they wake up in each other’s arms.
Seiffert’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Dark Room; its titular character, the daughter of Nazis, must lead her younger siblings on a difficult journey across Germany during the last days of World War II. Shortland’s new film, Berlin Syndrome, also takes places in Germany, as the title suggests, and is also adapted from a novel. But the setting is contemporary, and the plot concerns Clare (Teresa Palmer), an Australian tourist and photo-
None of this is to suggest that what happens next is Clare’s fault, though I do wonder if the film suggests it: that because of her failure to recognise danger, or because of her attraction to it, or both, bad things are inevitable. What happens is that when Andi leaves for work in the morning, Clare discovers that she has been locked in. The remainder of the film is a slow, relentless grind through her sexual slavery and emotional abasement. There is little explicit violence, but what we see is enough. And we soon discover, along with Clare, that Andi is quite the Bluebeard.
I so deeply disliked this film that I doubt my own feelings; perhaps I misunderstood it. But I hated its steady, unperturbed stylishness, which seemed to belittle
Teresa Palmer as Clare in Berlin Syndrome
the horrific subject matter. Everything – from Clare’s bound and bruised wrists, to afternoon dust motes, to Christmas wrapping paper – is afforded the same kind of fetching close-up. The film never registers Clare’s fear on a formal level; never tries to demonstrate, cinematically, her subjective experience of isolation and abuse. But nor is Shortland brave or cruel enough to implicate her audience in the scenario, as a director like Michael Haneke might have chosen to do. Instead, with the camera taking neither the victim’s nor the torturer’s side, the viewer can be nothing but a helpless bystander, which I found intolerable.
As the film goes on, we learn more about Andi than we do about Clare. Andi’s father, with whom he has a strained relationship, is a lecturer, who talks with his students about the former German Democratic Republic. This echoes some dialogue in the opening scenes, when Andi chides Clare for her interest in photographing the historic architecture of communist Berlin. ‘You photograph disappointment,’ he tells her. If the film is trying to draw an analogy between Clare’s imprisonment and the formerly walled-in city, it doesn’t succeed, in part because state repression is not just a scaled-up version of domestic violence. And if Shortland really wanted to investigate any connection between the two circumstances, Berlin Syndrome would have had to deal more thoroughly with the question of surveillance, which was so integral to the manufacture and maintenance of fear inside the GDR. Andi does photograph Clare, but overtly, not covertly, posing her in ways that resemble a certain style of grungy, déshabillé fashion shoot. And he shows an almost total lack of interest in what she does – which isn’t much – when he is not there to terrorise her directly. There are long stretches in which Palmer is left on her own, with little to do as a performer other than to look scared, and sometimes bored.
Of course, Clare escapes in the end, which is hardly a spoiler, because it’s as much a given as was her initial kidnapping. I was relieved, but the feeling was generic – it was relief at being freed from the relentless inevitability of the plot, rather than sympathy for a character who remains barely sketched in, even by the film’s end. Clare’s punishment for having trusted someone is to have had that trust, and her autonomy, denied her, and what is implied in the film’s clumsy machinations is a conservative understanding of sex and of gender relations, in which a casual sexual encounter will always be, for a woman, potentially ruinous. That moral message is as cramped and depressing as a locked room. g
Berlin Syndrome (Entertainment One), 116 minutes, directed by Cate Shortland, based on the novel of the same name by Melanie Joosten.
Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly. Her essays have appeared in publications including Overland, Meanjin, The Age, and The New Yorker. Her book, Live Through This (2014), is published by Bloomsbury.
Trainspotting
by Dilan Gunawardana
When ticketholders are forewarned not to wear white clothing to a small-scale production, feelings of trepidation are understandable. The aptly named ‘In Your Face Theatre’ troupe’s Trainspotting condenses Irvine Welsh’s 1993 critically acclaimed collection of short stories about a group of self-destructive Scottish heroin addicts and their equally dysfunctional friends, and spits it back at theatregoers – quite literally – over the course of seventy-five outrageous minutes.
The cast of seven was uniformly outstanding. Gavin Ross was a roguish, sympathetic Mark Renton; Erin Marshall powerful as the griefstricken Allison during one of the story’s many nadirs. Chris Dennis, as the volatile Begbie, terrorised the audience like a frenzied lion in a chicken coop. Calum Barbour was Monty Pythonesque as a frazzled, obsequious job interviewer.
The audience was thoroughly manhandled (and womanhandled) as Trainspotting ’s degenerates stumbled and stomped between the seats, occasionally nude, yelling into faces, sprawling on bodies, and hurling liquids – alcohol, spit, and the contents of the infamous beds-heet and toilet scenes – in all directions. Although shocking, this was a truly immersive experience, one that placed viewers at the centre of the novel’s poignant, darkly humorous wretchedness. Just don’t wear white.
Trainspotting (In Your Face Theatre) played at fortyfivedownstairs until 13 April 2017. Performance attended: 22 March.
Dilan Gunawardana is Assistant Editor of ABR.
Gavin Ross,
Chris Dennis, and Rachael Anderson (In Your Face Theatre/ fortyfivedownstairs)
Spielberg’s list
Jake Wilson
STEVEN SPIELBERG:
A LIFE IN FILMS
by Molly Haskell
Yale University Press (Footprint)
$36.99 hb, 248 pp, 9780300186932
Steven Spielberg may be the most beloved filmmaker alive, but this has rarely stopped critics from patronising him. ‘Such moods as alienation and melancholia have no place in his films,’ the New Yorker’s David Denby wrote on the occasion of Spielberg’s seventieth birthday – a sweeping claim that could hardly be more wrong. In truth, these moods have always been central to Spielberg’s unsettling Romantic vision. Think of the telephone linesman Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) yearning to escape his family in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977); the trick-ortreaters roaming suburbia at sunset in E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial (1982); and all the Lost Boys – and sometimes girls – who wander through subsequent films from Empire of the Sun (1987) to Catch Me If You Can (2002) to The BFG (2016). Happily, Molly Haskell is a more sensitive observer than Denby. Steven Spielberg: A life in films has the virtue of paying attention to the films themselves, not merely to their maker’s public image as a cheery, wholesome entertainer. This is doubly impressive considering that Haskell has never been an ardent fan. In her introduction to this compact book, she admits to doubting whether she was the best writer for the job, given that Spielberg’s ‘great subjects – children, adolescents – and genres – science fiction, fantasy, horror, action-adventure – were stay-away zones for me’. This is
an understandable statement coming from Haskell, a pioneering feminist film critic best-known as the author of the classic study From Reverence to Rape (1974), which belongs on every buff’s bookshelf. Far from sharing Spielberg’s boyish interest in gizmos and extraterrestrials, Haskell regards such fixations as straightforward symptoms of arrested development, grounded in fear of adulthood and especially of adult relationships with women.
If there is a grain of truth in Haskell’s assessment, there is also a hint of the condescension so often directed at Spielberg, and yet, in her disarming frankness and warmth, Haskell is the furthest thing from a snob. Six years older than her subject, and like him a product of American suburbia, she regards him with the mix of irritation and admiration a sister might feel for a gifted younger brother: it is this unresolved attitude which gives the book its liveliness and allows Haskell to view the films through fresh eyes.
Fresh up to a point, that is. There have been many books about Spielberg, most notably Joseph McBride’s astute, exhaustively researched biography, first published in 1997, with an expanded edition following in 2011. As her footnotes acknowledge, Haskell leans heavily on this near-definitive work, treating the mass of often contradictory testimony assembled by McBride as raw material to be boiled down to its essence; in doing so, she occasionally succumbs to the glibness which is the negative side of her rapid, vivid style.
Freudian concepts are a crucial part of Haskell’s critical tool-kit; she is unabashed in her efforts to psychoanalyse Spielberg from afar. For all his success, she portrays him as in some ways an eternal outsider, shaped by his Jewish sense of difference – the book was commissioned by Yale University Press as part of their ‘Jewish Lives’ series – and by the shock of his parents’ divorce. How much this really tells us is hard to say. No special knowledge of Spielberg the man is required to detect Oedipal subtext in Roy or E.T.’s yearning to board the mother ship; on the other hand, there have been plenty of nerdy Jewish boys from broken homes who did not turn their adolescent traumas into
record-breaking box office hits.
Some strain is visible in the effort to cover a long and prolific career in 200odd pages: Haskell makes a handful of factual errors, and gives only a sketchy account of what Spielberg’s ‘technical mastery’ actually amounts to (for this, the formalist scholar Warren Buckland is a better guide). Still, she shows more understanding of Spielberg’s art than most of his devotees, pointing out that even his later ‘serious’ films have the exaggerated clarity of cartoons (a famous example is the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List [1993], a speck of colour in a black-and-white world). Haskell sees, too, that his inhuman manipulation of emotion is essential to his artistic personality, and that his ruthlessly sentimental climaxes, with beams of pure light descending from on high, can be as alienating as they are ecstatic.
Above all, she does justice to A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), for me not only Spielberg’s masterpiece but the greatest film to emerge from twentyfirst-century Hollywood. Famously, the script was developed over many years by Stanley Kubrick, who proposed before his death that Spielberg replace him as director. The result is a unique hybrid, an adult fairy tale that for once confronts the implications of Spielberg’s obsession with innocence head-on. The protagonist is a robot boy (Haley Joel Osment) programmed to love his adopted mother (Frances O’Connor) for all eternity; separated from his sole object of desire, he pursues her as relentlessly as the shark in Jaws (1975).
Here is Oedipal longing with a vengeance. Mother and child are ultimately reunited after a fashion, and some critics have accused Spielberg of softening Kubrick’s original vision; but this claim, too, could not be further from the truth. Haskell knows better, aptly describing A.I. ’s sublime ending as ‘poignantly and explicitly Proustian’. Tellingly, though, even she has trouble giving her subject full credit for knowing what he was up to – insisting that it was Kubrick, certainly not Spielberg, who had been reading Proust. g
Jake Wilson is a Melbourne freelance writer.
Denial
by Andrea Goldsmith
The opening scene is a stunner. David Irving (Timothy Spall), top of the pile of Holocaust deniers, is giving a lecture. ‘I say to you quite tastelessly,’ he says, ‘that more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.’ Irving speaks earnestly and with authority; the camera, perched low, frames his torso and head from that same half side-on angle that Hitler’s photographers favoured. This is no skinhead speaking, no foulmouthed, leather-clad neo-Nazi, this is a man straight out of British Establishment central casting, a courteous man who, even when saying the most appalling things, knows how to prepare the ground: I say to you quite tastelessly David Irving, Holocaust denier, Hitler apologist, and at one time a respected historian, has been around for decades, touting his abhorrent beliefs long before 1993 when Deborah Lipstadt, Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, published Denying the Holocaust: The growing assault on truth and memory. In 1996, after the book was published in the United Kingdom, Irving filed a case in the English High Court against Penguin Books (Lipstadt’s UK publishers) and Lipstadt herself. He accused her of writing about him in such a way that misrepresented his beliefs and undermined his reputation as an historian. Specifically, she had accused him of being racist and anti-Semitic, and of deliberately falsifying evidence to support his thesis that there were no gas chambers, no Holocaust, and indeed no campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Lipstadt decided to take him on; if she was to win, the burden was on her to prove that what she had written was true. Her British legal team was led by Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) who represented Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce. The barrister was the hard-drinking, heavysmoking, impeccably tailored, and utterly brilliant Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson). Both Wilkinson and Scott are superb: restrained, witty, eloquent, and always compelling. They have the best lines in David Hare’s excellent script.
Lipstadt seems to have more difficulty understanding the British legal system and British mores and manners
than she does Mr Irving. She seems so very American: outspoken, opinionated, loud, and so emotional; indeed, this film is as much about the difference between the Brits and the Americans as it is about the case. ‘What feels best,’ Rampton, the barrister says to her later in the film, ‘doesn’t necessarily work best.’
Lipstadt’s legal team, to her horror, tell her they will not be calling any survivors to the stand. ‘But they are the proof,’ she says. Irving will be representing himself, they explain, and he will ridicule any survivors in crossexamination. Also, they add, no one’s memory is complete: it will not be difficult for Irving to trip these people up on small, even irrelevant details. She remains unconvinced until they show her a film clip of Irving with a survivor. It is a distressing scene, but they make their point. And they won’t be putting her – the expert and the accused – on the stand either. It is her case, but she’s not allowed to speak. She disagrees with their approach, but retains them nonetheless.
This is a thoroughly absorbing film about the intricacies of the law and the differences between opinion and belief on the one hand, truth and facts on the other. It shows, convincingly, that fake facts and alternative facts are deliberate lies, and if such are used to support a thesis, that thesis is false. It is a film that also demonstrates that all opinions are not equal, and along the way it shows the importance of an independent judiciary. In short, Denial, about events that happened nearly twenty years ago (the case went to court in 2000), a film finished before Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, is extremely relevant today. Timothy Spall portrays a truly convincing Irving. Even when everyone says he is wrong, he knows he is right; he doesn’t even need to speak, his facial expression speaks for him. It is testimony to Spall’s brilliance that he evokes Irving so well – a man with a physical presence and bearing that Spall in no way approximates. Spall’s Irving is terrifying, beguiling, likeable, hateful – all at once.
Weisz has a harder task with the overly emotional Dr Lipstadt. The character is neither as complex as Irving nor as interesting as the lawyers and their strategies. Weisz provides a creditable performance given the limitations of the role.
A minor strand of the film shaped around a Holocaust survivor (Harriet Walter) is overwrought. Every now then there are shots with a hand-held camera in an unnecessary and unsubtle attempt to ramp up the temperature. And while the statue of Queen Boudicca on The Embankment was probably part of Lipstadt’s London experience during the trial, this monument, representing fight and determination, comes across as heavy-handed and clichéd. But these are relatively insignificant quibbles in an otherwise admirable film. g
Denial (Entertainment One), 110 minutes, is directed by Mick Jackson and based on the book History on Trial: My day in court with a Holocaust denier (2005) by Deborah Lipstadt.
Andrea Goldsmith is a Melbourne-based novelist and reviewer.
Land of Mine
by James Dunk
Martin Zandvliet’s Land of Mine is unsettling from the very outset. During the credits a recurring sound becomes audible, then consuming: the sound of heavy breathing. Sergeant Carl Rasmussen, in Danish army fatigues and a maroon beret, studies a column of grim-faced German prisoners of war. Inscrutable, he drives past soldiers, then stops and throws his jeep into reverse. Jumping from the vehicle, he assaults one German who is carrying a Danish flag. ‘This is not your flag. This is not your home!’ Punching the German in the face, he screams, ‘This is my land!’
The film’s original title, Under Sandet, was a metaphor, not a pun. Just as the Germans mapped what lay ‘under the sand’ of the nation’s beaches, the film maps the periphery of the nation’s history. Anticipating a northern Allied invasion, German soldiers planted more than 1.4 million landmines along Denmark’s western coast. After the German surrender, some 2,600 prisoners of war were reclassified as ‘voluntarily surrendered enemy personnel’ in order to bypass the Geneva Convention, and conscripted to clear the mines. Many – the precise number remains unclear – were from the Volkssturm, a militia created in the final months of World War II from the remaining male population, those too young or old to have fought earlier. Zandvliet’s film, focused on a unit of fourteen adolescent Germans, is an elegant, understated attempt to balance narratives of good and evil during the war.
Before the preview I attended, a trailer screened for Director Mick Jackson’s Denial, which is based on the libel case brought by the historian David Irving against Penguin Books in 1996. Irving became a Holocaust denier after reading a specious report authored by Fred Leuchter, an arts graduate who worked as an execution engineer. The report was commissioned by Ernst Zündel as part of his defence in a Canadian court against the charge of reporting false news. Although much of Leuchter’s supposedly expert evidence on gas chamber engineering and toxicology was dismissed, and though Zündel was found guilty, the Supreme Court later
overturned the conviction – not because his pamphlets were correct, but because the Canadian Constitution protected the spread of all news, true or false.
Land of Mine is not, of course, ‘false news’. It is one of those projects which aim to correct the historical record of World War II without straying, like denials of the Holocaust, into falsehood. The carpet bombing of German cities, for instance, which Irving has also written about, is now well understood. Max Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) undoes the idea, ingenuous or disingenuous, that the Allied nations were wholly ‘good’ and the Axis wholly ‘evil’. One cannot think of the boiling of human flesh in man-made firestorms –strategic infernos – and hold to such binaries.
While the film does not deny the reality of German wrongdoing, it remains quiet on the subject. Zandvliet signals, from Rasmussen’s opening outburst, the colossal evil of the Third Reich. While such signage is effective, it is not always affective. The violence done to Denmark from 1940 to 1945 is represented only by Danish rage and spite; all the violence on screen is Danish. The film’s point of view is that of the boys; their wretchedness is tautly recreated as they train with live mines and perform their dreadful work. Zandvliet has cinematographer Camilla Hjelm’s camera linger on the boys’ faces. He has cited the influence of the American documentary
Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction undoes the idea that the Allied nations were wholly ‘good’ and the Axis wholly ‘evil’
filmmakers David and Albert Maysles, whose filming was ‘so vulnerable and sensuous that you could not help feeling the presence of their characters’. The boys are profoundly vulnerable; they bear the brunt of Denmark’s fury at the crimes of their brothers and fathers, and their country’s menacing weltanschauung. This ‘group of boys’, writes Zandvliet, was ‘forced to do penance on the behalf of an entire nation’.
The film addresses this injustice without flinching. An older woman sitting near me left halfway through the film, muttering ‘that’s enough for me’. It is indeed a frightful thing to watch a teenage boy explode. Here, though, it is neither gratuitous nor prurient. Despite the sympathy the film elicits, the statistics that screen at the end of the film wrench us from its claustrophobic world and from the faces of the boys, into the present age of history and its deniers. How can we mourn some 1,300 German lives – even boys, drafted by the Nazis – set against the millions of victims of Nazi atrocities? Land of Mine asks quietly, how can we not? g
Land of Mine (Palace Films), 101 minutes, is directed by Martin Zandvliet.
James Dunk is a historian and writer living in Sydney.
Horizon Zero Dawn and The Walking Dead: A new frontier
by Chris Flynn
The worlds of literature and video games appear, at first glance, to be distinctly at odds. Bibliophiles may feel that playing video games is puerile and a waste of time. Some gamers regard books as old hat, a stuffy waste of time that could be better spent enjoying oneself conquering digital guardians. But these worlds are merging with each passing year. Computer and console technology is now so advanced that games resemble feature films. Graphics are lifelike, characters are motion-captured by actors, and soundtracks make the music charts (as was the case with Jessica Curry’s composition for 2015’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, which was the best-selling classical album in the United Kingdom upon its release).
Little wonder, then, that game developers are making inroads into the territory previously inhabited solely by authors of literary fiction, with immersive narrative games that follow all the conventions of the novel. Games have always been, to a degree, playable stories, but the medium is now so awash with familiar tics that both designers and players alike are demanding a narrative maturity that has pushed video games to a new, highly literary level.
Horizon Zero Dawn (released in March 2017) has been hailed as one such beast, and rightly so (). The story is a dystopian nightmare, wherein the player takes control of Aloy, a young woman who has been shunned from birth by her tribe, the Nora. Relics of our world
litter the landscape: ruined buildings covered in moss; buried compounds faintly lit by still functioning screens; and unpredictable robotic creatures that resemble horses, deer, and hawks.
Aloy, a sarcastic and courageous enigma, is frustrated by the mystery of her origins. As she explores the richly rendered landscape of rainforest, desert, and icy tundra, the follies of the past (our present) are poignantly revealed. Society is now a matriarchy, where men are foot soldiers and stay-at-home parents. Women rule the detritus of civilisation, since the avarice and arrogance of men destroyed it a thousand years prior.
Horizon Zero Dawn is a triumph on all fronts. The narrative is compelling, the dialogue witty and natural, the revelations tinged with sadness. Stealth is emphasised over conflict, but when Aloy must fight against rival tribeswomen or enormous mechanical beasts, the player is put under terrifyingly realistic pressure. Were it the first in a series of Game of Thrones style novels, everyone would be reading it. As a game, it’s not doing too badly either, selling 2.6 million units worldwide within its first fortnight of release. These figures augur well for the future of narrative, irrespective of the device.
The Walking Dead has consistently been one of the most watched television shows in the world since 2010. Following the travails of a group of survivors living in a hostile, post-viral America, where death leads to reanimation as a ravenous zombie, the premise was hardly original. Based on a popular series of comic books, the show struck a chord with viewers, and has been praised for its grittiness and astute treat-
A screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn (detail)
ment of moral conundrums. Now in its seventh season, the show is a victim of its longevity. The writing has nose-dived sharply of late. Plot points are belaboured, loved characters have become irritating cyphers, and the overarching narrative has lost direction. Loyal viewers are deserting the series in droves.
The producers might want to take note of the high standard of writing on show in the spinoff games, the
Game developers are
making
inroads into the territory previously inhabited solely by authors of literary fiction
latest chapter of which is A New Frontier (also released in March 2017). First released in 2012, these are episodic interactive graphic narratives, rather than true games. The player essentially watches a story, and is faced with conversational choices or scenario-based decisions that propel the narrative. The choices made influence the direction of the plot, much like the old Choose Your Own Adventure novels from the 1980s. The main difference is that The Walking Dead games are for adults, and a strong stomach is required.
A New Frontier () is technically season three of the game series. Although it features a new family of survivors, led by former baseball player and problem gambler Javier Garcia, series protagonist Clementine makes a disturbing reappearance. The sense of desperation that is now absent from the television show is acutely present here. Javier, on the run with his sister-inlaw, surly teenage nephew, and innocent niece, is staying just ahead of a horde of walkers. They scavenge for supplies, barely able to bed down for the night, lest the herd overtake them. The depravity of the living has always been the source of the television show’s most shocking moments, and that is given full throat here. Javier and his family shelter for the night in a junkyard, where they help themselves to a hidden store of supplies. This understandable action brings them into conflict with a group known as New Frontier, amoral survivalists who brand their members and show no mercy to strangers.
The killing of a child during the confrontation triggers a chain reaction of events that leads to torture, death, and the destruction of several survivor communities. It is precisely this sense of consequence and recrimination that has been lacking in the ponderous television show, whose thunder has been stolen by the morally complex writing in these thoughtful companion games. g
Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment) is available on PlayStation 4. The Walking Dead: A new frontier (Telltale Games) is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Android, Microsoft Windows, iOS.
Chris Flynn is the author of two novels: A Tiger in Eden (2012) and The Glass Kingdom (2014).
Not As the Songs of Other Lands
by Jane Clark
Opportunities to see nineteenth-century American art are rare in Australia. This beautiful small exhibition offers fascinating parallels between Australian and American landscape painting of the period, both popularly admired as expressions of a national psyche, revealing comparable interests in territorial expansion, exploration, settlement, displacement of prior inhabitants, transplantation of European values, and a deep reverence for the natural world. Loans from the Terra Foundation Collection of American Art are brought together with paintings and prints from Melbourne University’s Russell and Mab Grimwade ‘Miegunyah’ Collection, plus a few important paintings from other Australian institutions.
In large part, the works of art look similar because their subject matter appeals to our biological instincts about where we might or might not wish to live: fertile valleys, rivers, sweeping prospects, sheltered spots with cosy buildings; or, conversely, stormy weather and unfamiliar wilderness, possibly inhabited by people who did not want to move. Our evolved aesthetic preferences are put to use by artists to tell cultural stories, which in nineteenth-century America and Australia were – and still are – sometimes alike and often not. In fact, the differences between these ‘national’ landscape traditions are probably at least as interesting as the parallels between them. On the face of it a history lesson, Not As The Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting has plenty to say about the here and now.
European–American history began centuries before Captain Cook (although Australian Aboriginal history is three times longer than Native American). The United States of America varied demographically from the start – Spanish, Dutch, French, British, and more – united in part by revolution, annexation, and purchase, then catastrophically split by civil war. It was the revolution-
ary War of Independence that meant Britain needed somewhere other than America to send convicts. Only two of the American artists represented in the exhibition were not born in America; whereas none of the ‘Australians’ was Australian-born. Indeed, Australia wasn’t a nation until 1901. North America seemed to its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonisers a truly New World, with infinite resources for the future clear across the continent – its Manifest Destiny; and a pervasive sense of exceptionalist, often classically inspired noble purpose imbues much American literature, oratory, and art. ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way,’ wrote Bishop George Berkeley in 1726, in Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America (UC Berkeley is so-named because it was a long way west). Religion played a greater part in American colonisation than in Australian, with the Pilgrim Fathers and others leaving Europe specifically for religious freedom. And the transcendentalism expressed in the so-called Luminist paintings of Martin Johnson Heade and Fitz Henry Lane has no close counterpart in Australian art.
The exhibition’s title is a line from ‘An Australian Symphony’, by the patriotic Queenslander George Essex Evans, born in 1863 in England and lauded by Alfred Deakin as our ‘national poet’. Evans evokes the ‘windswept plain, the dim blue peak’ and ‘dead gray trunks and boulders red’, his gist being that Australia is a lovely but lonely, silent, and rather tentatively engagedwith place. There are no covered wagon trains heading west in depictions of that upside-down ‘new’ land. We Australians still cling mainly near the coast. For all their differences, there are also wonderful synchronicities between these respective national visions. They are revealed in both the arrangement of the exhibition and the fine, affordable catalogue. Perhaps most notable, visually, is the transition from sublime distant mountainscapes in the Romantic tradition, in subjects by Thomas Cole and Eugene von Guérard, to the intimate all-encompassing high-horizoned picnic spots painted later by Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, John La Farge, and George Inness. The impetus to paint history is seen in both John Glover and, via literature, Thomas
Cole, the founding father of the Hudson River School of American national landscape (though he was born in Lancashire). Von Guérard, born in Austria, trained in Dusseldorf, Germany, as did a number of American landscape painters, before he came here in the 1850s. Artists had international ambitions then as now.
In her thoughtful catalogue essay, Meaghan Katz explains that the ‘cultures that created this art were imperfect and unfinished’. So too, of course, are both today.
There are many unfinished stories that these works of art still point to in 2017. When we look at Glover painting Tasmanian corroborees, or Worthington Whittredge an Indian encampment in Colorado, and ask whether their nineteenth-century attitudes to settlement in the wilderness and their depictions of First Peoples were flawed, we must ask, I believe, are we honestly
managing a whole lot better? The proposition that things are ordained or inevitable can be a very human comfort: that cities can expand unsustainably; that bleached coral is of no significance – or, anyway, that nothing can be done about it; that clean coal is real because we are told so; or that offshore detention centres are of no concern while out of sight. What are we actually doing with our golden soil and boundless plains these days? g
Ian Potter Museum of Art in collaboration with the Terra Foundation of American Art, Chicago and Giverny. The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 14 March to 11 June 2017. A cross-disciplinary international symposium, Parallel Histories, was held 6–8 April. Richard Bell’s Embassy took place in the exhibition space 28–30 April: a program of discussions, screenings, and performances.
Jane Clark is Senior Research Curator at MONA (The Museum of Old and New Art).
Newburyport Marshes: Approaching Storm c.1871 by Martin Johnson Heade (Courtesy of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection)
why do you write?
If I knew the answer to that I probably wouldn’t write.
are you a vivid dreamer?
I know I dream, but all I remember are my nightmares.
where are you haPPiest?
Weekends in bed with my wife, Mandy, and Coco and Basil, our chihuahuas.
what is your favourite film?
The mysterious and exquisite The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), directed by Sergei Parajanov.
and your favourite book?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
name the three PeoPle with whom you would most like to dine.
A St Patrick’s Day dinner with Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, and Flann O’Brien.
which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in Public usage?
‘Liminal’ is a word abused by academics to spice up their bad prose. ‘Drongo’ sounds like its meaning and perfectly describes certain people.
who is your favourite author?
Vladimir Nabokov
and your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Proust’s Marcel and Thackeray’s Becky Sharp.
which quality do you most admire in a writer?
Curiosity.
name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
Rereading Pynchon was a truly dispiriting experience, but Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint is even more
exuberant and funny the second time round.
what, if anything, imPedes your writing?
Having a life.
how do you regard Publishers?
If they publish my work they’re terrific – if not, then they’re drongos.
what do you think of the state of criticism?
There are no critics anymore, only reviewers. and writers’ festivals?
For an extrovert a chance to entertain, for an introvert sheer hell.
are artists valued in our society?
Australia doesn’t value artists much, but it keeps us humble, which may be a good thing.
what are you working on now?
A novel.
Louis Nowra is an Australian writer, playwright, screenwriter, and librettist. He is the author of plays including Inner Voices, Visions, Inside the Island, Così, Radiance, and The Boyce Trilogy. He has also written five non-fiction works, The Cheated, Warne’s World, Walkabout, Chihuahuas, Women and Me, and Bad Dreaming; the novels The Misery of Beauty, Palu, Red Nights, Abaza, and Ice; the young adult novels Into That Forest and Prince of Afghanistan; and the memoirs The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon, as well as radio plays, telemovies, and film scripts.
