Australian Book Review, May 2020 issue, no. 421 by Australian Book Review

First the pandemic, then the Australia Council

hat a difference a month makes! In late March, as we were sending the April issue to press, how bleak the outlook was here in Australia, but especially overseas. Future print editions seemed doubtful because of the scale of the threat and the imminent lockdown. One month later, any interruption to the print edition seems unlikely, with two caveats. Australia Post deliveries have slowed in recent days, and we’re unable to deliver the print edition to overseas subscribers, all of whom can access the digital edition free of charge. We will resume normal overseas delivery as soon as possible. It goes without saying that ABR – and the print edition – are here to stay. Magazines matter, but infinitely more important than our schedules and vicissitudes is the health of the world community. While the situation in places like Italy, Spain, Iran, Turkey, India, and the United States is alarming (like the antics of America’s rabid leader), here in Australia the situation is so much more promising than seemed likely in the middle of March. Following clear messages from government and a range of preventative measures, the rate of infection with Covid-19 has decreased markedly. The Australian community has demonstrated immense unity and self-discipline, despite the loss of income and employment, and despite the curtailment of basic entitlements that would have been inconceivable in February. Nonetheless, we all know what has been delayed, undone, jeopardised, or even destroyed along the way. Arts companies have been ravaged, though canny ones are finding ways to innovate, entertain, and survive. What will Australia look like when the crisis is over and when a vaccine becomes available (if that is possible)? Will we work as we formerly did? Will we fill cinemas and restaurants and concert halls? Will we travel in the old compulsive way? Will we be prepared to play sardines on trams and trains, exposing ourselves to all sorts of health risks – not just coronavirus? Might Australia emerge as a more self-reliant and compassionate society, a less plutocratic and chauvinistic one? These are some of the questions that inform Robyn Archer’s commentary on ‘the way we live now’, and Dr Hessom Razavi’s first article as the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow (a rather different début from the one we had in mind before the pandemic).

magine the nation’s arts council – Gough Whitlam’s proud legacy no less – choosing not to support the country’s premier opera company or string quartet or writers’ festival. Then imagine an Australia Council withdrawing its historical support from literary

magazines, with the exception of one current periodical. Well, the latter happened on April 2 when we learned that ABR – the recipient of multi-year funding for several years and of uninterrupted federal funding for at least three decades – would no longer be funded. Much has been said about this unfair and unjustifiable decision. ABR – believing in the kind of transparency and accountability that we look for from the Australia Council – has been very direct in its response. We have made it clear that non-funding has significant consequences for readers, authors, freelance writers, and publishers. The untimeliness of this decision has not escaped people’s notice. It seems extraordinary that the Council, at such a perilous time, will not fund seasoned, proven, innovative magazines that play a crucial role in the literary ecology. ABR has many questions about the process. Federal funding in 2017–20 has enabled this magazine to flourish in unprecedented ways. We have met all our KPIs in spades. In our application we foreshadowed an even more ambitious and expansive program, with many new features: an extra issue each year, rising rates for our 300-plus writers each year, and total payments of $1,200,000 in 2021–24 (more than half of it from our own revenue). These commitments must now be reviewed. Readers, though, should be in no doubt about the magazine’s viability or resolve. ABR is diminished, but not dimmed. This organisation has been through crises in the past, and doubtless there will be more in coming years, but nothing will shake our belief that Australians deserve a robust critical culture worthy of our national literature – and one that pays writers properly. The response from readers, subscribers, contributors, and ABR Patrons has been phenomenal. Countless people have expressed their dismay and incredulity to the federal government and the Council. A few of the many messages we have received at ABR appear on our letters page. Your goodwill, your concern, your prompt subscriptions, and your exceptional donations are tremendously heartening and galvanising. We are particularly grateful to those contributors who have offered to donate their fees back to the magazine. Clearly, more is at stake here than just ABR. The Australia Council may think we can do without magazines of this kind; Australian readers certainly don’t. All I can do, as Editor, all we can do collectively – staff, board, contributors, the army of volunteers and supporters that sustain this sixty-year-old enterprise – is to provide you with the most searching journalism we can, notwithstanding this lamentable decision by the Australia Council. Peter Rose

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Australian Book Review May 2020, no. 421

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces managed studio, Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Sue Kossew, Johanna Leggatt, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Alison Stieven-Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Rita Wilson Monash University Editorial Interns Perri Dudley, Elizabeth Streeter Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully

Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. Cover Image Silvia Giulianelli, an intensive care nurse in Pesaro, Italy, at the end of a long shift. Italian photographer and journalist Alberto Giuliani took a series of photographs in the hospital (including the one on page 20). The marks on her face were caused by the protective mask she wears. Cover design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information Page 57: Tim, 2006, by Wim Delvoye. Photo Credit: MONA/Jesse Hunniford. Image courtesy of the artist and MONA. 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

ABR May 2020 LETTERS

Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Beejay Silcox, James Walter, Alex Miller, Naama Grey-Smith, Roger Rees, Judith Masters, Sally Gray, Danielle Clode, Tom Griffiths, Jenny Esots, Gill David Egan, Katharine Margot Toohey

COMMENT

11 13 18

Robyn Archer David Fricker Hessom Razavi

On living in a time of Covid-19 The National Archives responds to Jenny Hocking Notes on a pandemic

SOCIETY

Kieran Pender

Crisis of Conscience by Tom Mueller

POEMS

16 29 46

Paul Kane Gig Ryan Lisa Gorton

‘In the Luxembourg Gardens’ ‘Fortune’s Favours’ ‘On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers’

SURVEY

Tim Flannery et al. Books for troubled times

LITERARY STUDIES

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Friends and Rivals by Brenda Niall

POLITICS

30 55

Paul Williams Peter Mares

Party Animals by Samantha Maiden The Future of Us by Liz Allen

HISTORY

31 32

Nicholas Brown Garry Wotherspoon

‘I Wonder’, edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark Fighting for Our Lives by Nick Cook

FICTION

34 35 36 37 38 39 39 49 53

Kirsten Tranter J.R. Burgmann Astrid Edwards Alex Cothren Ben Brooker Jay Daniel Thompson David Whish-Wilson Laura Elizabeth Woollett Chloë Cooper

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson Ghost Species by James Bradley Mammoth by Chris Flynn The Adversary by Ronnie Scott The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay Sweetness and Light by Liam Pieper New crime novels by Anne Buist, Kimberley Starr, and J.P. Pomare Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

41 42 43 63

Jacqueline Kent Rachel Robertson Megan Clement Andrew Ford

She I Dare Not Name by Donna Ward Hysteria by Katerina Bryant Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit Irving Berlin by James Kaplan

SCIENCE

Diane Stubbings

Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

Michael Winkler

Pathfinders by Michael Bennett

MILITARY HISTORY

David Horner

Fighting the People’s War by Jonathan Fennell

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Thomas McGee

We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know by Sophie McNeill

CLASSICS

Alastair Blanshard

Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini and Vox Populi by Peter Jones

GENDER STUDIES

Yves Rees

Trans America by Barry Reay

PSYCHIATRY

James Dunk

Psychiatry and Its Discontents by Andrew Scull

INTERVIEW

James Bradley

Open Page

ARTS

58 59 60 61

Julie Ewington Rayne Allinson Barnaby Smith Michael Morley

Mel O’Callaghan, edited by Talia Linz and Michelle Newton Tim The Toy of the Spirit by Anthony Mannix Requiem

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Blessed City by Gwen Harwood

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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 Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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The very best of Australian Authors

AVAILABLE NOW AT ALL GREAT BOOKSTORES & ONLINE WWW.INDIEBOOKSAUST.COM.AU

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ABR’s new Chair – Sarah Holland-Batt

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce that Sarah Holland-Batt is the new Chair of ABR. Sarah, who joined the Board in 2017, is the first Queenslander to hold this position – and our youngest Chair to date. She succeeds Colin Golvan AM QC, who took over from Morag Fraser in 2015. (Colin Golvan remains on the Board, and former County Court Judge Graham Anderson has joined it.)

Peter Rose, Editor of ABR, commented:

‘I look forward to working even more closely with my fellow poet Sarah Holland-Batt, who has been writing for the magazine since 2013. Young though she is, Sarah’s contribution to our literature and our society is already prodigious: as a poet, a teacher, an editor, a judge, a critic – and, more recently, as an activist.’

Sarah Holland-Batt commented:

‘I am delighted to be stepping into the role of Chair of ABR, which plays an irreplaceable role in Australian cultural life. It is an honour and privilege to serve as its Chair. The magazine has long championed and celebrated Australian literature and the arts, offering its readers world-class criticism, commentary, and creative work of unrivalled depth and breadth. At a time when venues for criticism and reviews are contracting, ABR’s role as an outlet that advocates for Australian literature and culture has never been more important, a fact recognised by the magazine’s thousands of enthusiastic subscribers and supporters. Like many other arts organisations, ABR is facing challenging and uncertain times – exacerbated by recent defunding by the Australia Council – but, driven by the unwavering dedication of its phenomenally hard-working staff, and buoyed by the generous support of its readers and patrons, ABR will survive these challenges stronger than ever. It will be a privilege to work alongside the magazine’s indefatigable editor, Peter Rose, its Board, and staff as we tackle these challenges together, and continue to deliver exceptional coverage to ABR’s readers, who are turning to the magazine for pleasure, provocation, and intellectual succour more than ever.’ Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book of poems is The Hazards (UQP, 2015), which received the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, fellowships at MacDowell and Yaddo colonies in the United States, and an Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio Library in Rome, among other honours. She presently works as an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Advances Bruce Dawe (1930–2020)

Bruce Dawe, the so-called Australian ‘protest poet’, died on April 1, aged ninety. Dawe was born in Fitzroy in 1930 and grew up in a working-class milieu, moving between seven schools before working myriad jobs – labourer, farmhand, postman, and more. His socially conscious poetry was enjoyed by a diverse audience; his collection Sometimes Gladness (1978) was a standard text on high-school curricula. John Kinsella, in a fine tribute published in The Guardian on April 3, wrote: ‘Always behind Dawe’s seemingly playful banter with us, his readers and public, is his commitment to sympathy and connection with the less empowered, the disenfranchised, downtrodden, neglected and exploited.’

Jolley Prize

As we go to press, entries are pouring in for the 2020 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $12,500. Entries close on May 1. Our judges – Gregory Day, Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven – will then start assessing the large field. The shortlisted stories will be published in the August 2020 issue of ABR. The usual ceremony remains moot: we’ll host one if we can. Meanwhile, for all those poets out there who are cooped up at home: the Peter Porter Poetry Prize will open on July 15.

Calibre Essay Prize

Judging was delayed because of the pandemic and the unprecedented number of entries, but the judges – J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton, and ABR Editor Peter Rose – have now finalised their deliberations. The two winning essays will appear in the June– July issue. The winner receives $5,000, the runner-up, $2,500.

Jess Hill wins Stella Prize

Congratulations to Jess Hill for winning the $50,000 Stella Prize for her pioneering work See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse (Black Inc.). This is a book of immense importance to discussions about domestic abuse and systemic violence against women. Hill, a Walkley Award-

winning investigative journalist, combines forensic research and immersive narrative. Zora Simic, reviewing See What You Made Me Do in the September 2019 issue of ABR, predicted it would be ‘the most important work of Australian non-fiction this year’.

The ABR Podcast

The response to our first ‘Poetry for Troubled Times’ podcast was enthusiastic. Various poets and critics read poems of considerable meaning to them – ones that seemed to speak to these anxious times. Readers included Judith Beveridge, Peter Goldsworthy, Lisa Gorton, and Paul Kane from New York (who has a pandemical poem in this issue, on page 16). Such was the response that we have recorded a second cohort of poets and aficionados. They include Anthony Lawrence, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Maria Takolander, and Claire G. Coleman. ( Jaya Savige reads Bruce Dawe’s poem ‘Happiness Is the Art of Being Broken’.) Look out for more poetry on the ABR Podcast in coming months. Previous episodes include Robyn Archer on the way we live during the pandemic and how it might change Australia once the crisis is over (see page 11). Billy Griffiths reviews Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini, and previous Calibre Prize-winners Michael Adams and Martin Thomas read their celebrated essays. Be sure to tune in – and don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss any upcoming episodes. The ABR Podcast is available on the ABR website, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Vogel bounty

After last year’s contentious decision not to award a winner, K.M. Kruimink has won the 2020 The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for her novel A Treacherous Country. Set in nineteenth-century Tasmania, it was shortlisted alongside three other works, all unpublished of course: Emily Brugman’s The Islands, Belinda Lopez’s Tete and Maree Spratt’s The Followers. Kruimink receives $20,000. Allen & Unwin published A Treacherous Country in April.

The ABR Podcast ‘‘is is a breath of fresh air. Each episode oﬀers a snapshot into Australia’s literary scene, review culture and arts world. Highly recommended.’

Astrid Edwards, 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

e Garret Podcast

Letters

We welcome succinct letters. Email us at letters@australianbookreview.com.au

A downright disgrace

Dear Editor, This looks, on the face of it, to be a downright disgrace. In a country which still hopes to be literate and educated, this journal links us to our major cultural tradition. No doubt somebody will purport to explain and support the decision. I also note that the cruel choice was made at exactly the point in history when – beset by pandemic – we will lack cultural education very sadly indeed. Chris Wallace-Crabbe (online comment) Dear Editor, I wouldn’t have a writing career without Australian Book Review, and I know I’m far from alone. ABR is many things, but its most vital role is as an incubator of new Australian voices, both creative and critical; our makers, thinkers, and dreamers. And with ABR’s unwavering – and distressingly rare – commitment to paying all of its contributors a fair (and growing) rate, the magazine gives us the support we need to keep writing at a time when it has never been harder to carve out a sustainable life on the page. The Australia Council decision is just the latest example of a myopic and feckless government mortgaging its country’s creative future. Beejay Silcox, Albany, WA Dear Editor, Now, when the mainstream press is substantially reducing, or even eliminating, review pages; when radio and television arts and review programs are also diminishing; and when many fear that Australian cultural production will simply become invisible, we need the ABR more than ever. Many will be dismayed at the Australia Council’s failure to understand ABR’s contribution. What is less well understood is the importance of a well-regarded general review, such as ABR, in sustaining longform research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, since much of this work is publicly funded, a capacity to engage lay audiences with what is produced, rather than it being limited to other specialists, is desirable. More significantly, if books in these fields cannot gain attention (and sales) beyond other professionals and students, they will not be published. In short, it is about the survival of such books and the dissemination of ideas well beyond the academy. ABR has served that purpose admirably for a long time. It is more important than ever now. Local publishers and academic journals are struggling to compete with British, European and US competitors whose larger audiences guarantee a greater impact factor. As a result, researchers are pushed to publish specialised ‘international’ research overseas; Australian case studies and topics drop off the agenda; and Australian books can seem irrelevant. In my field, political science, the principal Australian journal has ceased publishing book reviews. In consequence, ABR has become a necessary resource

even for those of us in specialist fields to identify what, in the case of substantial long-form research (rather than journal articles), is being published. The Australia Council must be encouraged to reconsider this decision. James Walter, Monash University, Melbourne Dear Editor, Australian Book Review is our assurance of our freedom as writers. It occupies a uniquely critical space in our culture that we leave vacant at our peril. If ABR is forced to close due to a lack of support from the Australia Council, the Australia Council will have failed all of us. To lose ABR would be a humiliation of the freedom of thought in this country. The critical voice of ABR is essential to the intellectual health of our society. Alex Miller (online comment) Dear Editor, Thank you, ABR, for your unflagging commitment to quality literary and arts journalism in these testing times. We have not only a global pandemic on our hands but also a muddy deluge of misinformation and disinformation. As Peter Rose writes, ‘Never has reasoned argument or cogent journalism been more important than it is now.’ In this, ABR is a necessary voice. Naama Grey-Smith, Melville, WA

Jenny Hocking and the ‘Palace letters’

Dear Editor, Congratulations to Jenny Hocking for her brilliant and revealing article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure’ (ABR, April 2020). It is both a record of the tumultuous events of 11 November 1975 and an exposé of the Thomas Cromwell-like intrigues and plots conducted by the then governor-general, Sir John Kerr, his secret confidant the High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason, along with Her Majesty the Queen, her private secretary, and her heir. All reveal that the hapless Kerr, contrary to official opinion, never acted alone. Professor Hocking’s examination of the Archives Act (1983) reveals that only rules that suit the monarch and by extension Australia’s coalition government will be adhered to. Hocking reveals how our federal government has now spent more than $800,000 to prevent Commonwealth records being released, on the spurious grounds that the letters relating to the dismissal of a twice-elected prime minister are now deemed personal property. Where will this end? There are enough characters in this essay for an all-revealing play to be written by the award-winning playwright Emily Steel in conjunction with Jenny Hocking and perhaps advised by Hilary Mantel. This play, At Her Majesty’s Pleasure, would fill theatres here and overseas, thus further rewarding Hocking’s research and scholarship. Never would a script be so theatrical and revealing. Ultimately, thanks to Jenny Hocking and ABR, the truth A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

will out, never mind how long it takes. We can take comfort, as Walt Whitman reminds us: ‘All truths wait in all things, / They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it.’ Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA Dear Editor, The more I read about our constitutional monarchy, the less benign it appears. Well done to Jenny Hocking for pursuing this matter so vigorously. I think the Australian public is being blinded by the soap opera the royal family has become and not pausing to think about how inappropriate it is for our modern, forward-looking nation to cling to its colonial origins so fiercely. The secrecy surrounding the monarch’s interactions with democratically elected governments is quite breathtaking when you take time to think about it. Judith Masters (online comment) Dear Editor, Thank you, Jenny Hocking, for your fantastic historical contribution and for your courage and resolve in taking on the power of the monarchy and the obfuscation of the National Archives. Sally Gray (online comment)

The least of our worries

Dear Editor, Long-lasting fires, like the ones experienced in many parts of Australia this season, certainly cause great trauma and distress as well as enormous damage. The need for Australians to find ways to live safely in fire-prone regions has never been more urgent. But to imply, as Tom Griffiths does in his article ‘Season of Reckoning’ (ABR, March 2020), that such fires might become the new normal or last forever is to ignore ecology and to miss the most terrifying threat they pose. The more frequent, more severe, and longer lasting fires we are seeing under a changed climate will inevitably exhaust the natural regenerative capacity of our native ecosystems. Over time, forests will disappear, accelerating reduced rainfall and falling water tables, and leading to the aridification and desertification of previously habitable areas. Fires may be the least of our worries when there is nothing left to burn. Danielle Clode, Bradbury, SA

Tom Griffiths replies:

I’m grateful that Danielle Clode is keeping the vital conversation about bushfires going, and I agree that the most fearsome long-term threat the fires pose is ecological. Over the summer, we saw fire interact with different ecological regions in new and frightening ways; we saw blazes in New South Wales behave like Victorian firestorms; and we saw the fires across Australia burn longer and with more ferocity than we have before. We are already experiencing – in our lifetimes – significant changes to native ecosystems due to fires exacerbated by climate change. ‘This is not the new normal,’ as I quoted James Bradley as saying; ‘It is just the beginning.’ I wrote my essay in the hope that this can be our season of reckoning – that we will indeed ‘worry’ about the fires – and that we will curb our society’s 1 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

obsession with fossil fuels and thus minimise the dire ecological outcomes that Clode describes.

Our tragic red summer

Dear Editor, The world may be grinding to a halt, but I have been immersing myself in my first copy of ABR as a subscriber. I was saving it up for a long-awaited trip to Tasmania, but alas this was not to be. Tom Griffiths’s reflective essay on our tragic red summer took me back to all the times I have stood outside with the smell of smoke filling the sky. Griffiths gives not only an Australian retrospective on bushfires but a call for climate action, a reckoning. As the world becomes more dystopian by the day, I hope his call reaches a wide audience. The more articulate and strident voices on the state of our nation we have, the better. Jenny Esots, Willunga, SA

Tom Keneally’s new novel

Dear Editor, Tom Keneally needs to research the methods of lamb castration (ABR, April 2020). The method he describes would have resulted in the extinction of the Sunday roast and the lambs that underwent the procedure he describes. Tom is a bit like Banjo Paterson, extolling the droving life but never going a-droving – pure theatre. Another comment on life on the land from the metropolitan armchair. Gill David Egan (online comment)

Jennifer Maiden

Dear Editor, Thanks for this in-depth review of Jennifer Maiden’s The Espionage Act by James Jiang (ABR, March 2020). This line is great: ‘One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue.’ To clarify regarding weariness: weariness, weariness in corruption, weariness in politics/espionage and weariness of the artist are actually themes in the collection, not a commentary on the poems or the poet. In terms of politics, it was interesting how media sources tended to try to apply the term ‘too weary to continue’ to Bernie Sanders until his recent success in Nevada. It seems it’s used often to mean ‘a physical state in which someone is worn-down or practically handicapped’ and the idea that someone cannot function in that state. But far from anything eugenic or Darwinian, survival (physical, artistic and political) depends often on reflecting on tiredness to continue. In ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Corruption’, Maiden writes: ‘Talking of the weariness of actors, Richard/Burton on a set once advised his daughter Kate, / who was exhausted, that the best thing was to use / the tiredness in playing the part, / not hide it.’ Just to quickly clarify a couple of things: Maiden uses the term ‘honeytrap’ not ‘honeypot’ to look at the deliberate the use of intimacy to compromise someone politically. Maiden was also not saying that that Turing’s preoccupation with Snow White was related to his death, but that Intelligence forces may have used that preoccupation to suggest that he had died by self-poisoned apple, while in fact there was apparently no poison in the apple. Katharine Margot Toohey, Quemar Press (online comment)

Commment

‘I spoke to many people and listened’ On living in a time of Covid-19

by Robyn Archer

loseted but not isolated, everyone will have a story, so there’s nothing special here. But the common difference is clear. When it’s about Brexit or Trump there, it’s us to them; when it’s bushfires here, it’s them to us. We have been globally entwined for decades, but the economic and political truths are mostly covert. It’s taken Covid-19 to put us all overtly at the same risk at the same time. For me, in the first weeks a world of words and friends opened up. In Tokyo they’re doing well at first: a culture of respect and teamwork as opposed to individualism. It’s what scientist and resilience champion Brian Walker calls the ‘we’ society versus the ‘me-me-me’: more from him later. Our Tokyo colleague is in her eighties and has been unwell, but she’s used to being isolated in her tiny space. ‘I have no work now,’ she writes, as if she expected to be still working at this age. It’s what I expected of her, the indefatigable entrepreneur. The colleague in Brussels is not as old but has been unwell for some months and is also used to being confined to her apartment. She says people can come over. She expresses her concern for artists, ‘the last in the chain’ and, with a typically broad view: ‘Human hubris is knocked out, and I’m sure this was high time.’ In the midst of the global crisis, which is perceived as the greater concern, ordinary life and suffering goes on. As Bertolt Brecht once commented, people don’t stop making love during wars. And now we, privileged in so many ways, have only the tiniest taste of what refugees and those in war zones at the edges of Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, and many other hellish places have been experiencing in extremis, some for decades now – queuing for basics like clean water, any morsel of food, and any remnant of health care. Their stories are still to be told. A colleague’s old Italian father dies of complications from motor neurone disease. ‘The old lavotore works all his life and we can’t even give him a decent funeral,’ the son laments. Another friend’s only son, only child, is rushed into Emergency in a critical condition, unrelated to Covid-19: this father is spending five hours a day at the hospital. In Singapore, a performer friend re-

covers in hospital from knee reconstruction. In Melbourne, where I am staying throughout the crisis, an esteemed colleague and friend is also in hospital about to have a gall bladder removed. In Chicago, a producer mate had to cut short a long trip in Greece and Europe because she busted her kneecap. She too has become accustomed to isolation: We are in Shelter in Place or Stay at Home or some such expression. Our Governor just called for it yesterday, beginning today, and I am enormously relieved that he is taking action along the lines of the Governors of NY and California. No one can wait for or depend on that monster of a president who will go unnamed. He will kill us all.

On Long Island a friend is taking meals around to ‘old lesbians’ living nearby. In New York, Jack is sitting on his Brooklyn balcony overlooking the Empire State – he’s drinking tequila. In Paris, the boys are together at length for the first time in years, taking lunch in the garden each day. We wonder what they’re eating, since the market to which they are devoted is closed. In Berlin, an older wiser friend is also thankful for her garden: ‘Of course having experienced different catastrophes in my lifetime it allows maybe another attitude towards today’s problems, but the sheer boundlessness today is worrying.’ In Vienna the couple and two kids are moving apartments. In Cambridge there’s a beautiful garden, almost an orchard, where the older friends contemplate the approach of spring. In Adelaide my second cousin, a young doctor working in obstetrics, is delivering babies: there are so many babies still entering this world, so different from our norm, yet it will be the only one they know. How can anyone possibly resent the simple imposition of staying indoors – unless you’re there because you’ve lost your job and you don’t know how to feed this family you’re suddenly close-quartered with? We feel for those households where tension has already been high; we are aware that domestic violence is on the rise. By any comparison, so many of us are feeling fortunate, not taking our privilege for granted. For us there are the words we have A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

waited to devour for years; and those we return to – our ‘bibles’ Here is Italo Calvino, from Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh: Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draughtsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

And here, from Brecht’s Poems 1913–1956 (edited by John Willett and Ralph Mannheim), is ‘On a Chinese Carving of a Lion’, translated by Willett: The bad fear for your claws The good enjoy your elegance This I would like to have said Of my verse

But Michael Morley emails me that Tom Kuhn’s version (‘On a Chinese tea-root Lion’, from The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, 2019) is closer in line length and rhythm to the original German: The evil fear your sharp claw. The good take pleasure in your grace. That I’d like to hear said Of my poem.

There are new discoveries, too: in my case Brian Walker’s Finding Resilience (CSIRO Publishing, 2019). Brian’s most recent, more personal follow-on from Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice (both with David Salt and both part of my small collection of bibles) is a joy to read. The tragedy in reading it is knowing that the science and the wisdom have been there for so long yet so few have taken advantage of it – it couldn’t be more poignant now. Brian’s definitions of resilience, a word about to be much over- and misused, have never been clearer: Resilience, then, is the capacity of an organism, an ecosystem, a business, a city, to absorb a disturbance by re-organising so as to keep functioning in the same kind of way and not cross into a different state of the system with a different identity, or even into a different kind of system. In essence it’s about learning how to change in order not to be changed

The desires that drove British voters to Brexit (but let’s not get carried away – about twenty-five per cent of the population made the decision – democracy is a strange beast) and American voters to Trump (though Hillary Clinton won three million more votes … yep, that’s democracy too) and Australian voters resisting the Labor Party’s cautious tilt towards economic reform in the interests of sustainability had one thing in common. Most people don’t 1 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

like change. Change is surely the most fundamental fact of life on earth, yet humans build houses, monumental structures, walls, and equally impervious institutions to create an illusion of permanence. It seems difficult for people to accept that the way we organise societies, and the way we relate to the natural environment, must be matters of constant change. Pandemics have several times wrought major change. Yet in all things, humans appear to treasure the status quo above all. In the United Kingdom, older Brits wanted it to be the way it was in reconstruction after the war – same as America. They wanted to be great again, not admitting this was impossible. Something similar operates in Australia – there’s myopia with regard to long-term sustainability. Brian Walker writes: Nobody likes fundamental change and one of the hardest parts of transforming is getting past the resistance to it, past the state of denial that it’s necessary. But it’s a case of the first rule of holes – when you’re in one, stop digging. Find or create something else to do. Sometimes it takes a crisis for this to happen.

And: A really important development in the social science approach to crises and resilience, matching so well with the ecological approach, has been the recognition and emphasis of uncertainty, change and crisis as normal, rather than exceptional. The world is perceived as being in a constant state of flux.

In The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007), Naomi Klein argues that radical capitalism has followed major catastrophes. She quotes Milton Friedman: … only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Paradoxically, it’s so close to what Brian Walker describes when he says ‘big disturbances are the drivers of real change’. Here I’m reminded of a passage I once quoted from Mein Kampf. I didn’t reveal the author’s name until afterwards. This drew an audible gasp from the audience: the author’s observations about unemployment during the German Depression were surprisingly insightful and sympathetic. But Hitler’s solution to the situation could not have been more horrific. Major crises drive major change, but the point is, what kind of change? Klein comments on Friedman: ‘Some people stockpile canned goods and water [we might add toilet paper!] in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas.’ Brian Walker has been saying for years that we have left it so late that the changes we need will cost us and that we will have to surrender some of the things we once craved and which we might have marked out as the deserved prizes of hard work and affluence. Early in the Covid-19 outbreak, I speculated that an upside might be the resurrection of the Australian manufacturing industry. As the crisis deepened, industry’s skills are being directed to making the things we need at this time. Why couldn’t

we maintain this? Why not strive to make the country less dependent on others? Yes, the products might be more expensive. That’s why we have become so dependent on products from other countries, even those we supply with the raw materials – because they are so cheap. Surely, paying more would be a small price for independence and ongoing sustainability. That hope folds into hopes for other major restructures, including steps towards the circular economy – less waste, more local – and the positive effects that could have on the environment. Many of those ideas appear in Klein’s most recent book, On Fire: The burning case for a Green New Deal (2019), and in Ann Pettifor’s The Case for the Green New Deal (2019). There may well be radical change after the crisis, but what shape will it take? Will it be the kind that kicks the inefficient and unsustainable old rattletrap back into some semblance of action, or is there a chance that the public might be convinced that a change of direction is needed: the creation of new twenty-first century jobs and an economy not based on greed or profit (the predatory behaviour of the stock market during this crisis has been sickening), rather than the false rhetoric of never-ending growth? As Brian Walker points out, the record has not been great for all those moments when that kind of redirection might have happened – the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the GFC, and, as Klein observes, Hurricane Katrina. In each case, what followed were short-term boosts for big business and private enterprise rather than long-term gains for humanity. Can we hope for something different this time? I could quote Brian Walker endlessly. Just get the book (you can buy it online from CSIRO Publishing). It’s an enjoyable and inspiring account – with its often very funny anecdotes and evergenerous acknowledgment of colleagues – of a scientist’s tales from the field. But it’s the final chapters, including ‘A Resilience

Pathway’, that we need right now if we are to seize the opportunity this horror offers us. The rumoured accusations in Australia of something starting to look like socialism in the government’s various stimulus packages provoke speculation. Will Australians get used to something more equitable? When the government decides it’s time to stop it, will the people say, ‘No, we think this way is more like an Australian fair go’, or will a majority still sense the relative lightness of their wallets and scream yet again, ‘Every man and woman and child for themselves – it’s the survival of the fittest!’ Not for long, we answer, not for long. Here, in closing, is the last verse and chorus from ‘The Song of the Flow of Things’, from Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (translated by John Willett): I spoke to many people and listened Carefully and heard many opinions And heard many say of many things: ‘That is for sure” But when they came back they spoke differently from the way they spoke earlier And it was something else of which they said ‘That is for sure’. At that I told myself: of all sure things The surest is doubt Don’t try to brush away the wave That’s breaking against your foot: so long as It stands in the stream Fresh waves will be always breaking against it

Robyn Archer is an ABR Laureate. She has recorded this article – even sung the closing chorus – for the ABR Podcast.

Comment

Questions of access

The National Archives responds to Jenny Hocking’s article on the ‘Palace letters’

by David Fricker

read with interest Professor Jenny Hocking’s article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets’ regarding the release of the ‘Palace letters’, the correspondence between Governor-General Sir John Kerr and Queen Elizabeth, covering the period of the dismissal of the Whitlam government (ABR, April 2020). There is no doubt that central to the ‘Palace letters’ case – currently being considered by the High Court – is the fundamental issue of control over and access to our nation’s significant archival records. Access to authentic Commonwealth records is core to accountability in our democratic process, and is diligently executed by the National Archives of Australia in accordance with the legislation set out in the Archives Act 1983 (Cwth).

However, Professor Hocking makes several erroneous assertions about the National Archives in her article (including the wilful withholding of these historically important records) that I would like to address here. The National Archives is a pro-disclosure organisation and operates on the basis that a Commonwealth record should be made publicly available, unless there is a specific and compelling need to withhold it. This is the intent of the Archives Act. Disclosure of primary source material should not be an automatic process, however. It requires judgement, skill, and responsibility. The National Archives is entrusted with the care of valuable information and tasked with making accessible that information once its sensitivity has sufficiently diminished. In the case of A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Commonwealth records, this is usually after twenty years (the ‘closed period’). Beyond that time, records should be made public, unless one of a few special exemptions apply. During 2018–19 the National Archives wholly released ninety-six per cent of records on request, partially released three per cent, and completely withheld only one per cent. In the case of personal records, an agreement is entered into between the National Archives and the depositor specifying the conditions under which access can be given. The Palace letters were deposited by Sir David Smith as Sir John Kerr’s agent with the Australian Archives in August 1978. In accordance with Kerr’s instructions, their release would occur sixty years (later changed to fifty years) from the end of Kerr’s appointment, ‘only after consultation with The Sovereign’s Private Secretary of the day and with the Governor-General’s Official Secretary of the day’. In March 2018 and again after appeal in February 2019, the Federal Court determined that the letters are not ‘Commonwealth records’ as defined in the Archives Act, and therefore are not subject to the access provisions defined in the Act for Commonwealth records. In August 2019 the High Court of Australia gave a grant of special leave for a further appeal, heard in February 2020. The High Court is now considering its judgment. It goes without saying that the High Court’s decision may change the situation. For now, the National Archives is bound to follow the law in the manner confirmed by the Federal Court and to continue to treat these records as personal papers. Stewardship of personal records requires a respect for the depositors. The National Archives is an institution of profound importance to Australia’s system of democracy and government. To fulfil its role it must maintain the highest level of public trust. If we were to start releasing personal records against the wishes of depositors, that trust would be quickly and irretrievably lost. The historical significance of these letters and the public’s interest in their content have never been in dispute. However, given the Federal Court judgments to date and the agreement made between the National Archives and the depositor, it would be a massive breach of trust if the National Archives were to make them public. Professor Hocking claims that the National Archives is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to ‘fight’ access to the Palace letters. We do not ‘fight’ access. On the contrary, the National Archives works very hard to make access possible. The National Archives is accountable for the decisions we make. Quite appropriately, from time to time we are required to appear before a tribunal or other court to have those decisions scrutinised and tested for propriety and lawfulness. This is part of being open, accountable, and trustworthy. We do incur legal costs, but it’s wrong to suggest this expenditure could be avoided by simply opening all records without regard for the law or our depositors. As previously stated, the Archives Act provides a general right of access to records in the open-access period, unless they are exempt under certain categories. Before records are released, they are examined by National Archives staff for any information that should be exempt. Professor Hocking makes reference to 1 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

the ‘inordinate and unacceptable delays’ in dealing with requests to access records. Every year, the National Archives receives tens of thousands of applications for access to records in the national archival collection. I acknowledge that for some there are unacceptable delays in processing these requests. A few high-volume or complex applications, often lodged by a handful of individuals, currently tie up the bulk of available resources. For example last year, 12,700 of the almost 25,000 requests for access were made by just four people. This resulted in a reduced capacity to process access requests made by the vast majority of applicants.

Central to the ‘Palace letters’ case is the fundamental issue of control over and access to our nation’s significant archival records In April 2019, amendments to the access provisions of the Archives Act took effect. These amendments provide the National Archives with tools to appropriately manage applications for access to large numbers of records. We continue to manage the backlog of applications in addition to responding to new requests for access to records. Finally, Professor Hocking quite wrongly asserts that the ‘Archives appears a broken institution, paralysed by delay, hamstrung by resource pressures, and indifferent to its core function “to connect Australians to the nation’s memory, their identity and history”’. This is far from the truth, and here I will let the facts speak for themselves. During 2018–19: •• hundreds of thousands of visitors engaged with the national archival collection through our research centres, public programs, events, and exhibitions across the country •• tens of millions of people accessed our services and information through our websites and social media channels •• more than 62,000 Australians received help with their research •• 310,452 records were wholly released, and 3,492 were partially released to the public •• digitised records continued to be published online, bringing the total to more than sixty million images available through our database RecordSearch The National Archives is a crucial national institution with a clear purpose and responsibility. Clearly, we are not broken. We proudly go on connecting Australians to the nation’s memory, identity, and history. g David Fricker is Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, a position he has held since 2012. Mr Fricker was appointed President of the International Council on Archives in 2014. In 2015 he became Vice-President of the UNESCO Memory of the World International Advisory Committee. ❖ The comments in this article are intended to explain the current position of the National Archives, and in no way attempt to pre-empt the considerations or judgment of the High Court.

Society

Fearless speech

Baklid-Kunz eventually consulted lawyers and sued the hospital in conjunction with the Department of Justice. She was made a pariah at work (‘it was like I had the plague’) and slandered in her The fate of whistleblowers local community by a PR firm hired by the hospital (a colleague Kieran Pender publicly labelled her conduct as ‘beyond morally obscene’). Once the lawsuit was settled, she found herself blacklisted in the industry. Due to her speaking out against wrongdoing, Baklid-Kunz’s career was ruined. Crisis of Conscience: This ordeal is just one of two dozen human tales that Mueller Whistleblowing in an explores.They range from the health-care sector to pharmaceuticals, Age of Fraud intelligence, the military, academia, international development, energy, and finance. There are three constants: unthinkable fraud, by Tom Mueller corruption, or wrongdoing; brave individuals sounding the alarm Atlantic Books to their supervisor, regulators, or the public; and a swift, brutal $ 39.99 hb, 597 pp backlash. These stories, Mueller writes, present us ‘with an unhistleblowing has a long history. The Ancient Greeks settling challenge. In [their] place, would we do what [they] did, had a term for it: parrhēsia, or fearless speech. In the risk what [they] risked?’ Rather than play the ‘tragic hero’, are we seventh century, a British king introduced the world’s more likely to be ‘a member of the chorus, looking on fascinated, first whistleblowing law, encouraging his citizens to report those appalled, yet silent, one of the countless mute witnesses too fearful who worked on the Sabbath. Ever since the phrase ‘whistleblower’ or stunned to react’? It is a question that will prompt plenty of was coined in the 1970s, the concept has gained renewed salience. soul-searching. In an era of widespread fraud and corruption, those prepared to Even the structures that governments and companies have speak up perform an essential service to society. set up to prevent wrongdoing and to encourage whistleblowing While whistleblowers may be vitally important, their experi- have failed. There is considerable irony in the fact that Baklid-Kunz ence is typically not a happy one. As Tom Mueller, an American worked in her hospital’s compliance department, effectively an based in Italy, outlines in his superb institutionalised whistleblowing new book, Crisis of Conscience, the unit. While regulatory obligations, hardships faced by the average whistlecompliance staff, ‘speak-up’ hotlines, blower are severe. Having interviewed and ethics training have proliferatmore than two hundred whistleblowed, ‘corporate crime has continued ers, plus ‘scores of attorneys, advounabated’. In the United States cates, politicians, historians, governalone, fraud is estimated to cost the ment watchdogs, intelligence analysts, economy five per cent of GDP; the cognitive scientists and other experts’, World Bank puts the global sum at Mueller tells the story of whistleblowclose to A$7 trillion. Mueller speaks ing. The reprisals, the job losses, the to Tom Devine, a doyen of whistlethreats, the blacklistings, the financial blowing law, who tells him: ‘I’ve never pain, the social isolation, the psychomet an organizational leader who is logical scars – in harrowing detail against whistleblowing in theory, and Mueller highlights the human sufferin practice, I’ve never met a leader who ing behind the newspaper headlines believes there actually were any whisof ‘scandal’, ‘corruption’, ‘fraud’, and tleblowers in their own organization. ‘abuse’. It makes for riveting but painful They seem to be thinking, “Those reading. people [in my organization] aren’t Take Elin Baklid-Kunz. After a whistleblowers. They’re assholes.”’ decade working for Halifax, a hospital Mueller is a writer of considerin Florida, Baklid-Kunz was proable talent. He contributes to The moted to its compliance department. New Yorker and New York Times Tom Mueller (photograph by Dave Yoder) She quickly realised that things were Magazine, and his first book, Extra awry: a ‘revenue-above-all philosophy’ saw patients unnecessar- Virginity (2011) – on the scandal-wracked world of olive oil – was ily admitted, the hospital was overbilling the government for a bestseller. His research is exhaustive: the book includes forty client care that was never delivered, and specialists were being pages of annotated bibliographical notes, giving readers a guide paid bonuses linked to the hospital’s operating margin (which is ‘to the broad landscapes of learning that relate to whistleblowing illegal). Beyondthe millions of dollars being fraudulently billed, as a social, legal, economic, psychological, biological, philosophical this conduct had a human toll: a surgical error made during an and historical phenomenon’. Mueller delicately deploys this broadallegedly unnecessary spinal fusion left a patient unable to walk. er context throughout the main text, effortlessly weaving together After her tireless internal whistleblowing fell on deaf ears, individual stories and higher-level theory. For all the research

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

that underpins Crisis of Conscience, it remains a compelling read, with beautiful prose, dark humour, and plenty of adjectivally dense passages from Mueller’s travels in search of whistleblowers. It is hard to fault such a powerful book. At almost 600 pages, the length may be off-putting to a casual reader. Some of the tales of individual whistleblowers, while instructive, might have been condensed or omitted to make this a tighter narrative and remove thematic repetition. Crisis of Conscience’s only substantive shortcoming is an absence of solutions: it is easy to bemoan the fate of whistleblowers, but how do we collectively change their lot? Mueller frequently references the Government Accountability Project, a trailblazing whistleblowing charity in Washington, DC, but only fleetingly highlights its work promoting stronger laws domestically and internationally. Across the globe, whistleblowing laws are heading in the right direction: in 2019 Australia overhauled its protections for private-sector whistleblowers, while the European Union passed a landmark directive requiring all member states to introduce robust laws. Greater reflection on the future of whistleblowing may have offered a more upbeat ending. Crisis of Conscience could not be timelier, though this was not Mueller’s intent. The book has its origins in 2012, on the eve of Barack Obama’s re-election, when the turbulence of Donald Trump and the coronavirus were not even among Nostradamus’s

worst nightmares. The past twelve months have underscored the importance of whistleblowing, such as the anonymous truth-teller whose revelations led to Trump’s impeachment trial, and the Chinese doctor, now deceased, who first raised awareness about the deadly virus (he was advised by police to stop ‘making false comments’). Closer to home, whistleblowers have precipitated several royal commissions and disclosed outrageous governmental misconduct. The rise of whistleblowing, the author notes, ‘is a symptom of a society in deep distress’. Mueller concludes with an epilogue entitled ‘The Banana Republic Wasn’t Built in a Day’ and a quote from John Stuart Mill: ‘Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.’ One obvious reaction to the tales of suffering set out in Crisis of Conscience, many of which end with words to the effect of ‘I wouldn’t do it again’, would be a strong aversion to blowing the whistle. While understandable, that is not the response Mueller hoped to elicit. ‘We all have the capacity to speak truth to power,’ he muses. If our society is to successfully navigate these tumultuous times, we must all speak up. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer, normally based in London.

In the Luxembourg Gardens The languid water of a fountain rises to a steady height, collapses upon itself, splashing

but you wouldn’t know it, just as we don’t know we won’t exist someday every day. Perhaps it is

a stone bowl on a pedestal. The elliptical pool ripples in the afternoon’s light air.

because we never will die – but that is at best a belief and more likely a faith in benignity.

This is where people gather to be alone or with others, where children lend their

The plague gathers impetus and victims, passing among us before it, too, passes away. No death, no life.

exuberance – festive – to the otherwise tranquil scene. We are in the midst of a plague,

Paul Kane’s most recent collection is A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina (2018). 1 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Paul Kane

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Comment

Notes on a pandemic How society has responded to Covid-19

Hessom Razavi

was operating when it arrived. Between patients I read the email hastily. It concerned an article from surgeons at Stanford University. Along with colleagues in the United States, Italy, China, and Iran, they were reporting an increased risk of death from Covid-19 among otolaryngologists, neurosurgeons – and ophthalmologists, like me. Surgery around the nasal passages or other mucous membranes of the face seemed to release a potentially lethal aerosolised load of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among the casualties were surgeons in their thirties. I thought of Dr Li Wenliang, the thirty-three-year-old Chinese ophthalmologist who died from Covid-19 after blowing the whistle on the outbreak in late December 2019. I closed my inbox and focused on the next patient. Amid the din in the theatre, a new alarm sounded a worrying thrum. Cycling home, I pedalled faster than usual. My wife, also a doctor, was in her third trimester of pregnancy; she was posted in Accident and Emergency at the time. Her commitment to work both impressed and concerned me. So far, Covid-19 had only affected pregnant women in a mild to moderate degree, with no cases of in utero transmission to newborns. Some babies had been affected by maternal illness after delivery, causing fever, respiratory distress, and, in one case, neonatal death. My wife and I considered the evidence – a tug of war of uncertainty, risk, and the limits of her duty to medicine. Soon afterwards, three MV Artania cruise-ship passengers, confirmed as Covid-19 positive, were transferred to A&E during her shift. That night, there were tears and hugs at our home. At work, in both public and private hospitals, the impact came in waves, each one bigger than the last. New infection-control measures rolled in daily: screening stations, thermometers, 1 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

personal protective equipment (PPE), wall-to-wall public health announcements. The undertow swept away hundreds of non-urgent appointments, all rescheduled to a later date in order to depopulate waiting rooms, maintain physical distancing, and preserve PPE. For deferred ophthalmic patients, there was, and remains, the small but significant risk of vision loss. After deliberation, I postponed a medical trip to Kalgoorlie, where I regularly perform outreach clinics and eye surgery for patients from the Goldfields. While these patients needed treatment, Covid-19 was proving to be, at least in Australia, a traveller’s disease. We also knew from China that up to sixty per cent of people carrying the virus had no symptoms. Health-worker visitors from the city, where most of the outbreak was clustered, could unknowingly bring the pandemic into remote regions. In Western Australia, two ophthalmic colleagues contracted Covid-19 and whole medical teams had to self-isolate. Hundreds of kilometres from Perth, with limited flights, large Aboriginal communities, and no intensive care unit (ICU) beds, how would country towns cope with an outbreak? These were lose–lose scenarios, with inadequate information and unknown unknowns. Speculatively, we began to trade away sight in exchange for life. Duty-bound to care for emergency patients, we now risk becoming the victims, and spreaders, of this pandemic. In our not-for-profit institute, the workload – safeguarding, compliance, rescheduling – has increased, while revenue continues to shrink. When the reckoning is a bright-red bottom line, it turns out that medical institutes differ little from other workplaces. Loyal staff have been stood down. The halls, formerly bustling, are now eerie and unfamiliar, medicine’s new ghost towns. In the words of one colleague, ‘I’ve never seen so few patients or felt so exhausted.’

On January 25, Australia confirmed its first case of Covid-19, joining a handful of countries outside China to do so. A week later, the federal government announced that foreign nationals returning from China would be quarantined in a third country. By March 1 we had twenty-nine cases and one death. The virus then hit its straps. By March 12, the rolling five-day growth factor had reached 1.39, equating to a doubling of cases every three to four days. Unabated, this suggested that we would have 153,000 cases by Easter. By March 17, twenty-nine cases had become 543; ten days later we surpassed 3,000 cases, with fourteen deaths. Australians learnt the meaning of ‘exponential’ as the curve of new cases careened towards vertical. There was panic in pharmacies and supermarkets; garden centres ran out of seeds, poultry breeders out of chooks. Social and news media inundated us with horrific images from hospitals in Italy, Spain, China, and the United States. The pandemic gathered pace, and with it, the nation’s attention turned to the preparedness of our emergency departments and ICUs.

description). ‘Being in PPE is awful. The masks are painful, it’s hot, you can’t take a [clinical] history. It changes the way you practise,’ Michelle said. The Covid cases came from cruise ships. Strangely, many of those affected were ‘happy hypoxics’, meaning that they sat and spoke comfortably, despite having blue lips and dangerously low blood-oxygen levels. These patients were prone to crashing rapidly, but ARIZe teams were trained for scenarios transcending usual critical care. The scale of the upheaval has come at a cost. Michelle describes ‘an existential problem, where our core business is put at risk’. The ‘frequent flyers’ to A&E, including the homeless, drug addicts, Indigenous people, and other vulnerable patients, are at risk of losing their lifeline. They are redirected to acute medical units, which are less equipped to care for them. Michelle worries about the compromises. ‘There are biases at play here, with no right answers, and probably some wrong ones. We’re making decisions on best principles, trying to predict the greatest good for the greatest number. The problem is we don’t know when we’re getting it right or wrong.’

r Michelle Johnston, a consultant emergency physician and author, was among the frontline workers preparing for the impact. Coincidentally, her first novel, Dustfall (2018), is set in a country town plagued by asbestos-related lung disease. Now, faced with a real-life respiratory pandemic, she spoke about the frenetic activity at the Royal Perth Hospital (RPH). ‘We’re reinventing ourselves every daybreak. It’s utterly unpredictable. The speed of information means policy on the fly, to stay ahead of the curve.’ As with most public hospitals, her department is split into two sections. A new Acute Respiratory Investigation Zone, or ARIZe, was created for patients with respiratory symptoms. Staff in a triage tent at the entrance ‘sieve and sort’ patients into different cohorts. An ICU outreach team was formed, and intubation simulations, with medical mannequins and critical-care scenarios, began. Stockpiling of PPE was a major concern. Fortunately, supplies have been respectable, bolstered by government procurement of extra stock. Nationally, sixty million face masks have been added to the stockpile, with another one hundred million set to arrive within weeks. There have been private and unexpected sources, too. In Perth, Clough Engineering, an oil and gas company, donated 3,000 masks. At RPH, doctors, nurses, and radiology staff work in common areas to ration supplies. There has been some disagreement between frontline workers and the executive about the scope of use for PPE in routine clinical care, outside of the ARIZe. An uneasy balance has been struck, with masks not officially recommended for routine work, yet used by staff on the A&E floor without penalty. The night before her first shift in ARIZe, Michelle was sleepless. In the past twelve months, she had contracted influenza A, influenza B, H1N1 swine flu, and typhoid fever. She didn’t trust her immune system. Dressed in full PPE, she was the first doctor to see a patient in ARIZe. ‘I didn’t want to die,’ she recalls. ‘I have children who need me.’ What was needed was a heightened awareness of the risks, without becoming ‘blinkered’ and ‘overwhelmed’ (Michelle’s

We now risk becoming the victims, and spreaders, of this pandemic

I know of health workers being verbally abused, even spat on, by members of the public. The New South Wales government has introduced a $5,000 on-the-spot fine for those spitting or coughing at essential workers. (Victoria has extended this to those working in supermarkets.) To date, Michelle’s experience has been different. Emergency staff have been applauded, food delivered to tearooms, a huge gift of chocolate received from Lindt. Michelle finds the support gratifying, yet ironic. ‘We’re being recognised by society as essential, but there’s a disconnect – we’ve always been doing this work!’

hroughout March, public concerns grew over the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic. Were we testing enough people? Should schools and businesses be closed? Could we acquire enough PPE and ventilators? Was our strategy tough enough? Given the horrors in Italy and with New Zealand going into lockdown, the writing seemed to be on the wall. What the hell were we waiting for? On March 17, more than 3,500 doctors addressed the debate in an open letter sent to state and federal governments. Warning that Australia was on a worse trajectory than Italy, they called for strict lockdowns. In Western Australia, on March 21, a similar letter was sent to Premier Mark McGowan. Led by Dr Astrid Arellano, an infectious diseases specialist in Perth, it stated: ‘People will forgive the imposed hardships … but they will not forgive us if we, knowingly, do not act now.’ The national Australian Medical Association (AMA) distanced itself from these petitions, while the AMA’s WA president, Dr Andrew Miller, and ABC broadcaster Dr Norman Swan vocally supported them. An unprecedented case of doctors versus doctors played out in public, exacerbating the confusion in the community. Around this time, I received a phone call from Dr Nick Coatsworth, a friend of mine since we were at medical school. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

At university, Nick’s amconfident the curve could bition and flamboyance be flattened through quarbelied an uncomplicated, antining, isolation, contact generous spirit. Since then tracing, and travel bans, he has specialised in resall of which were quickly piratory medicine and inimposed. Once commufectious diseases, and served nity spread began, notably as president of Médicins through cruise ships, the Sans Frontières Australia response was escalated to and as director of the Nainclude stringent social tional Critical Care and distancing. Trauma Response Centre ‘At every step, the apin Darwin. The father of proach has been proporthree children, he’s refreshtional and scalable, in line ingly humble and relaxed. with public-health prinIn conversation, I asked ciples, and the Australian Nick about his secondment Health Protection Principle to Canberra as a Deputy Committee,’ Nick stated, Chief Medical Officer to explaining that decisions Professor Brendan Murare driven by data, their phy, part of the Office of impact on society the foreHealth Protection’s Covmost consideration. ‘Take id-19 response team. Nick schools, for example. Data described the National from China showed a one Incident Room as a scene of per cent rate of infection ‘pressure, but not tension’. in children, four per cent in Hives of staff were organadolescents, and ninety-five ised into cells: epidemioloper cent among adults. gy, logistics, procurement, Children didn’t appear to be and liaisons with DFAT. spreaders. Transmission is The bulk of the departmainly coming from adults. ment’s resources had been We couldn’t justify giving reoriented to the pandemic. advice to shut down the There was a virtual briefentire school system. Ultiing each morning, led by mately, a non-immune poppublic-health experts, not ulation means a philosophbureaucrats. Decisions were ical decision between the Margherita Lambertini, a surgeon in Pesaro, Italy, at the end of a long shift – consensus-based. Massive welfare of individuals and twelve hours without liquid or toilet breaks because of the protective suit that screens displayed global society, where there won’t doctors and nurses are required to wear during the Covid-19 emergency. data from the embattled be a right or wrong answer. Italian photographer and journalist Alberto Giuliani took a series of photographs World Health Organisation in the hospital (including the one on our May cover). The marks on the clinicians’ faces You have to make decisions, (WHO) and from Ausstand by them, and then were caused by the protective masks. tralia’s National Notifiable move on.’ Disease Surveillance System. Despite being no stranger to As I complete this article on April 22, the curve has indeed emergency management, Nick was impressed. flattened. I wonder if this in fact reflects an unexpected synergy I asked him about the concerns of doctors’ groups, and ad- between the disparate voices coming from the federal, state, and mitted to having signed the WA doctors’ petition. ‘In Australia, frontline – even armchair – levels. Has the nationwide clarion call this has been a social media pandemic, as much as an infectious been clearer somehow than its separate notes? Whatever the case, one,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘With some exceptions, it’s Australians themselves who have changed, complying with public-health clinicians have not advocated for rapid lockdowns. the drastic changes to their lives. For now, at least, it’s working. The loudest voices have come from frontline staff, who bear the Nick Coatsworth warns that it’s too early to celebrate. ‘One greatest risks.’ in ten Covid cases has no known contact history,’ he observes. Horrific images from overseas had led to a doctors’ version Left unchecked for a month, one case can result in 400 people of ‘Dr Google’, where the reality – minimal community trans- being infected. ‘We need breathing room. If you flatten the curve mission – was distorted by incomplete information and the rapid enough, you can decide which restrictions to lift and also put in pace of change. The steepening curve was mainly attributable place serious sentinel monitoring.’ A phased lifting of restricto thousands of returning Australian travellers. Canberra was tions, in steps that can be measured and reversed, requires large 2 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

numbers of reliable testing kits. In addition to existing PCR swab tests, which detect viral genes, there is a potential saliva-based antibody test in the pipeline. In late March, the government announced the procurement of 1.5 million ‘point-of-care’ fingerprick blood tests, which can return results in as little as fifteen minutes. At the time of writing, more than 420,000 tests have been conducted throughout Australia. Reportedly, 10,000 tests are being conducted each day. Nick is confident that we are among the world leaders in tests per 1,000 people, though this is a difficult claim to verify, given the disparity in how testing is performed and reported in different countries. As we wrapped up our conversation, Nick reflected on the past few weeks. He spoke of the support he’s received from well-wishers. A former patient of his was among them. Twenty years ago, hers was the first baby he delivered. She’s emailed him now, with photos of her daughter, to say that he’s doing a good job. ‘It makes it worthwhile,’ he said.

n Australia, travellers returning from Iran were among the earliest reported cases of Covid-19. As the pandemic evolved here, my family and I fretted about Iran, our country of origin. Since February, Iran had become a global epicentre for the pandemic, beginning in the city of Qom. As the largest centre for Shia Islamic scholarship in the world, trade and travel through Qom, including with China, is heavy. From Qom the virus spread with frightening speed, yet the government refused to quarantine affected areas or to restrict travel. On February 25, Iraj Harirchi, the country’s deputy health minister, sweated profusely during a press conference while reassuring reporters that the outbreak was under control. Hours later, he tested positive for Covid-19. A dozen or more Iranian politicians have since died from the virus. Nonetheless, the government has repeatedly denied allegations of mismanagement or cover-ups. In late February, I attended the funeral, in Perth, of a close family friend. Aged in her sixties, she had been visiting Iran when she became unwell. The official cause of death was ‘respiratory illness’, but her family suspects Covid-19. Having worked with doctors in Iran, I can attest to their talent and robust medical training. I worry, however, about the Iranian health system and its bureaucracy, the limited testing capacity, and the lack of synchronised protocols. Across Iran, unprepared hospitals have sent unprotected staff to the frontline. By early April, more than one hundred doctors and nurses were among the death toll of more than five thousand Iranians. In early March, in an incredible and typically Iranian act of resilience, health-care workers in full PPE danced exuberantly to popular Persian tunes in defiance of a regime that has long banned public dancing. The video went viral, briefly buoying Iranians. Between March 9 and March 17, in an effort to quell transmission, Iran took the extraordinary step of temporarily releasing a reported 209,000 prisoners. I spoke with my Uncle S, himself a former political prisoner of the Iranian regime. Uncle S is currently stranded here in Perth. He has many concerns. ‘The official death toll in Iran is under-reported,’ he told me, echoing the concerns of humanitarian groups. ‘The government’s advice has been delayed and confusing. People are afraid, and have taken matters into their own hands.’

The response from the country’s religious orthodoxy has been alarming at times. We discuss the video clip, now famous, of a worshipper in the city of Mashhad licking the shrine of Imam Reza. In cities like Qom, the devout have broken locks and entered mosques to congregate and pray. The nation’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has nominated a bank account number and sought public donations, purportedly for redistribution to the people. A one-off payment, roughly equivalent to AU$100, is on offer to families, but only as a repayable loan. It’s a far cry from Australia’s $200 billion economic rescue package. From Tehran, Auntie Z texts me a WhatsApp video. In it, a council official, standing on the back of a utility van, hoses down a neighbourhood road with a garden-style sprayer. The sprayer’s chemical contents are unknown. But for the gravity of the situation, the ‘remedy’ would be comical. Auntie Z thinks it’s a lazy PR exercise. ‘Inja vaz kheili bade, hich emkanati nadarim,’ she writes. ‘Things are really bad here; we have no facilities.’

n late March, a thirty-four-year-old colleague of mine whom I shall call X became unwell at home. Over five days, their symptoms progressed from mild fatigue and muscle soreness to a fever over 39oC. Next came breathlessness, loud enough to be heard by their partner in the next room. A swab test delivered the verdict: X had Covid-19. They were separated from their family and admitted to hospital for oxygen therapy, prophylactic antibiotics, and monitoring. Blood tests showed spiking inflammatory markers. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and X mistakenly believed that these results predicted death. Highly anxious, X fell into a cycle of hypoxia and panic, similar to that seen in altitude sickness and other ‘air hunger’ illnesses. ‘I was panicking that I’d die, and wouldn’t live to see my six-year-old child grow up,’ X recalls. The precise cause of hypoxia – indeed of much of the Covid-19 disease – remains obscure. The basics of transmission – droplets, aerosolised micro-droplets, contaminated hands and surfaces – seem clear enough. Once in the lungs, however, the virus appears to enter a second, murkier phase. Autopsies of victims indicate that it directly attacks alveoli, the tiny air sacs in our lungs. There is a resulting drop in surfactant, the normal soapy covering that keeps alveoli inflated. Consequently, alveoli, and whole sections of lung, begin to collapse. Breathing becomes laboured, bloodoxygen levels drop. Patients can abruptly deteriorate, requiring intubation. The body’s immune response kicks in through its army of around two trillion lymphocytes, a subset of our protective white blood cells. Activated lymphocytes help to reduce viral titres, but there is collateral damage in the form of inflamed, boggy tissue, causing patients to ‘drown’ in their own waterlogged lungs. Bacteria – lovers of warm, wet environments – can move in, causing superinfection. At this stage, anti-viral, antibiotic, and immunosuppressive treatments may help some patients. While death from respiratory failure can occur, many patients will recover. For others, there is a sinister third phase, known as the ‘cytokine storm’. Here, the immune system spirals into an unregulated storm, possibly from an inability to remove infected cells from surrounding tissues. Cytokines, which are small signalling A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

proteins, are churned out in excessive amounts. Unchecked, they raise an indiscriminate, headless army in the form of lymphocytes and other white cell ‘soldiers’. This army infiltrates damaged and healthy cells, leading to ‘disseminated intravascular coagulation’, or blood clotting, throughout the body. By now, patients will be mechanically ventilated and in need of high doses of steroids, plus stronger medications to suppress the immune system. Despite this, vital organs can fail. Ultimately, a diagnosis of cytokine storm bears the grim likelihood of mortality, accounting for the global fatality rate of two to three per cent of all cases with Covid-19. X never entered the third phase of Covid-19. A chest X-ray showed healthy lungs, and X returned home to recover fully. A week later, two repeat swab tests were done. X admits to ‘shitting bricks’ while waiting for the results. Both came back negative: X was cleared of the disease. ‘I wouldn’t wish this disease on anybody,’ X says. ‘The mental trauma that you go through … I count myself as an agnostic, but those four days made me pray.’ I’m struck that a shred of genetic material, wrapped in a fatty capsule, 3,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, and not, strictly speaking, even alive, is turning people to religion, and bringing civilisation to its knees. On the heels of the bushfire season, as if further proof was needed, our utter fallibility in the face of nature is writ, underlined, and capitalised, larger than ever.

hroughout the pandemic, we’ve heard time and again about the need to ramp up our hospitals’ ICU capacity and to stockpile ventilators. State and federal governments, hospitals, and ICU departments themselves have responded to this call. Still, misconceptions remain about the role of ICU in Covid-19. Dr Cyrus Edibam has been the Head of ICU at Fiona Stanley Hospital (FSH) in Perth since its inception in 2014. ‘The public perception is that “if you’ve got a ventilator, you’ll be OK”,’ he explained. ‘This is far from the truth.’ In the United Kingdom, the survival rate for patients on ventilators in ICU has been a harrowing fifty per cent. Cyrus observes that the respiratory failure from Covid-19 is similar to, and less severe than, the H1N1 swine flu of 2009. Likewise, the management of hypoxia – with mechanical ventilation, inhaled nitric oxide, and prone positioning of patients – is well within the capacity of most well-trained ICU staff. Therein lies the catch. ‘The disease, one on one, is not that lethal,’ he explained. ‘With some exceptions, the mortality is accentuated by the imbalance between workforce and workload. It takes seven staff, for example, to turn one unconscious patient onto their front.’ Cyrus contends that, at FSH, more lives would be saved with 130 wellstaffed ventilators than with the 400 ventilators that could conceivably be rounded up. In China, ophthalmologists were called into ICU despite minimal expertise – a frightening prospect. ‘This is why flattening the curve is important, so that we maintain the caseload at a slow trickle.’ I ask Cyrus about his personal experience in ICU. ‘I was supposed to be away on long service leave,’ he said, ‘but the heroes here are the nursing staff.’ While doctors flit between beds, sometimes making decisions from outside the room, nurses spend up to twelve hours a day beside a single patient. ‘Any decision I make has to have the nurses on board,’ he remarks. 2 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

mid all this uncertainty, there is a stark human need for hope, succour, even revitalisation. At her workplace, Dr Michelle Johnston finds it ‘similar to the Bali bombings – this is what we’ve trained for … we’re in it together’. She goes to work on rostered days off in order to dispense coffees and chocolates. Other colleagues in A&E have volunteered for extra shifts. The Pan Pacific, a luxury hotel in Perth, is trialling a program to house twenty homeless people. At my own workplace, staff have banded together to accelerate projects in digital records and medical research. Many work productively from home. Telehealth and online teaching have been scaled up. We travel less, teleconference more – Zoom is everywhere. Work has been trampolined into the future. I wonder which of the changes will stick. Here, Dr Tim Dunlop comes to mind. Author of Why the Future is Workless (2016) and a columnist for the ABC and The Drum, Tim is an international leader in these spaces. On FaceTime from Melbourne, he opens with a scene from his home: his son Noah, a professional ballet dancer, is restricted to dancing on their balcony. It’s a self-isolation spectacular, a free show with applause from onlooking neighbours.

On the heels of the bushfire season, our fallibility in the face of nature is writ, underlined, and capitalised, larger than ever I ask Tim about my hunch: is there lemonade in these lemons? Tim describes this moment as a ‘big, real-time experiment’, a catalyst to smarter technology use, reduced waste, and more flexible industrial awards for wage earners. He observes a levelling effect, whereby governments, previously reluctant, are forced to address the needs of the working poor. The $1,500 JobKeeper allowance, and the supplement to the rebranded JobSeeker, exposed Newstart’s inadequacy. Who, now, would argue that Newstart met people’s basic needs? Tim anticipates other changes, more disruptive ones. To buffer against pandemics, corporations will increase capital investment in automation, at the expense of labour. The adoption of artificial intelligence will accelerate; some businesses will need fewer employees. These changes won’t be uniform. In Singapore, business rescue packages incentivise a pivot towards capital, while in South Korea, the opposite is happening. Tim is yet to observe a definite trend, one way or the other, in Australia. How will people survive a post-Covid future? ‘The whole idea of paid work as the norm needs to be questioned,’ Tim contends. In its place, he poses the notion of a Universal Basic Income. The UBI is an old idea, dating back to Thomas More’s Utopia in the sixteenth century. More recently, its champions have been Economic Nobel laureates Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, tech magnates Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and healthcare bodies such as the Canadian Medical Association. According to Tim, ‘A basic income provides a new “floor”, owed to you as a member of society.’ Conceivably, it’s a pre-emptive version of today’s Covid-19 allowances, with nominal dollar values ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 per month. But unlike rescue packages, a peacetime allowance would be planned and sustainable. Funding sources could include tax reform for listed

corporations (thirty-two per cent of which, we know from the ATO, pay no tax in Australia), annual dividends from a sovereign wealth fund (as practised in Norway and Alaska), and royalty payments from tech companies for mining our personal data – small individual fees applied to the richest corporations in human history.

for surges in infections to be swiftly detected and controlled. Nick and I compared notes on timelines from the Doherty Institute in Melbourne and Imperial College London. Assuming that our low rate of community transmission is maintained, the best guesses for substantial lifting of restrictions fall between October 2020 and January 2021.

n Australia, Covid-19 has been characterised most distinctly by its very uncertainty: the shadow over health and economic impacts, the timelines for the exit points, the efficacy of the off-ramps. As Australian case numbers have slowed, the clouds have lifted, but only slightly. Our southern winter is coming, and Singapore has taught us much about the threat of a second wave of the disease. As viruses always do, SARS-CoV-2 has been busy, meanwhile, mutating itself. The mutations have been small and so far inconsequential, but epidemiologists frame the next pandemic in terms of when, not if. The news is mixed, but not all bad. Though inconclusive, the available genomic data suggests a progression towards an ‘S’ type of the virus, which, if anything, is less infective than the ‘L’ type, first seen in Wuhan. While Covid-19 is highly contagious, it is much less fatal than the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and Ebola pandemics, whose estimated fatality rates were fifteen, thirty-four and fifty per cent, respectively. Still, these outbreaks were ultimately contained. History is more instructive. Since 1700 there have been nine major influenza pandemics, roughly three per century. The timing has been irregular, with intervals as short as three years and as long as fifty-six. Predictions of the next ‘due date’ are thus unreliable, if not misleading. The most severe pandemic was the Spanish influenza A virus, which infected an estimated 500 million people, a third of the world’s population. It killed between seventeen and fifty million people, putting the 170,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19 so far – tragic though they are – into perspective. The Spanish flu occurred a hundred years ago, in the wake of overcrowding and mass movements after World War I. We’re hardly comparing apples with apples, but nor should we underestimate our collective will to solve problems, re-emerge, and flourish. One strategy for doing so revolves around the promise of a vaccine. Currently, there are 115 vaccine candidates in development, backed by a reported US$2 billion fund, under the auspices of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Bill Gates is said to be ‘optimistic’ about the creation of a vaccine by the end of 2021. But a successful vaccine has never been made for a coronavirus before, including SARS and MERS, for reasons that include the unique immune characteristics of our respiratory tracts and the paradoxical risk of worsening lung disease from a misdirected, crossover immune response to the vaccine. CEPI itself estimates a success rate of ten per cent for vaccine candidates in 2020. While we await a vaccine, the Morrison government’s exit strategy is one of suppression. I consulted Nick Coatsworth again. ‘Suppression means low enough levels of disease in the community, so everybody who needs care gets it, and the health system is not overwhelmed,’ he told me. When restrictions are eased, our ramped-up sentinel testing and contact tracing provide, in theory,

As viruses always do, SARS-CoV-2 has been busy, mutating itself

I put New Zealand’s eradication strategy – eliminating the virus altogether – to Nick. ‘It’s not Covid that’s keeping me up at night, it’s the effect of restrictions on society as a whole,’ he replied. He cited rising mental illness, domestic violence, and alcohol-consumption levels; the possibility of a generation of high-school dropouts; the loss of treatment for non-Covid patients with chronic diseases; the huge toll on a nation in captivity. Eradication, he thinks, represents a narrow view of a single disease, overlooking the other maladies growing around it. With the Australian growth factor down to 0.85, meaning a downward trend in the number of new cases, the numbers appear, tenuously and for the minute, to be on his side.

n early April, I learned of the death, from Covid-19, of a twenty-eight-year-old nurse in the United Kingdom. Five days earlier, her baby daughter was delivered by emergency caesarean section, and survived. Vividly attuned to this story, I calculate that, by the time this article goes to press, our firstborn daughter – assuming she agrees to the schedule – will be one month shy of delivery. Her mother has stopped all patient-facing clinical work; she’s answering a Covid-19 hotline instead. I meanwhile have taken the imperfect decision to undertake an outreach trip to Kalgoorlie in early May. The virus lurks in the grass, always present, but all’s well at home for the moment. I contemplate the world our daughter will join. Will social distancing permit me in the delivery room? Will her grandparents be able to hold her? Years from now, what shapes, real or virtual, will her school and social lives take? Rational or not, my gestalt view – climate change notwithstanding – is that she’ll be fine. In a geographically isolated and prosperous nation, with a well-resourced health system overseen by an apparatus that grows more vigilant daily, her chances are enviable. In late April, a thin sense of security seems to stretch, gossamer-like, across the nation. Our daughter, too, will be an Australian, a member of the world’s most privileged, and perhaps safest, minority. g Hessom Razavi – a writer and doctor based in Perth – is the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow. He was born in Iran in 1976. When he was seven, his family fled that country to escape political persecution. He grew up in Pakistan and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia when he was thirteen. He completed his studies as an ophthalmologist in 2015 and has visited Manus Island and Nauru in a medical capacity. He also writes poetry and essays, and he is currently working on his first collection. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Survey

Seismographs of the human heart Writers nominate books that solace or distract

auvaise foi being rampant, I have reverted to the existentialists. It took me back to when I was twenty-one. I was in Florence, at the Boboli Gardens. Back then you could sit on the tiered steps without fear of arrest or ostracism. One afternoon I sat there in the notional December sunlight. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir’s All Said and Done (1972), the last instalment in her four-volume autobiography, which I had devoured on my travels. A pair of bourgeoises from Paris, chic and disapproving, walked past and glared at me de haut en bas. ‘Beauvoir!’ they sniffed, moving on. Well, Simone, still alive then, more radical than ever, was always divisive. I’ve just read Kate Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A life (Bloomsbury, 2019). It reminds you what a force she was: bold, ravenous, supremely intelligent, indefatigable, deeply treacherous to her younger lovers of both sexes, and weirdly deferential to Jean-Paul Sartre. Then I read Sartre’s Words (1964), one of the acutest memoirs of boyhood. Aged nine, Sartre knew that ‘when a lot of men get together, they have to be separated by rituals or else they slaughter each other’. ‘Dying is not everything: you have to die in time,’ he also reminds us. Death is pandemic in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), another work to be savoured. Is there a more intelligent or stoic character than Dr Rieux? ‘It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency,’ he concludes. Here’s a further taste of this necessary novel: Moreover, in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbours; each had to bear the load of his troubles alone. If, by chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren’t talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, and who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced. (trans. Stuart Gilbert)

I have asked a few colleagues and contributors to nominate some books that have beguiled them – might even speak to others – at this unusual time.

Peter Rose

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Tim Flannery

The Covid-19 pandemic comes to Australia on the back of horrific, climate-influenced bushfires, then floods. After the bushfire smoke and coronavirus, Australians are becoming used to life in masks. Perhaps the kindest word to describe the events engulfing us is ‘instructive’. Both climate change and Covid-19 work silently, unseen. Action needs to be taken against both before the true horror they are capable of wreaking manifests. The Morrison government was slow to address both crises, but after March 15, when cases of Covid-19 were doubling every four days, the federal government decided to put aside ideology and listen to the experts. Our best hope for the future is that this is an enduring change, one that will be applied to the climate emergency. But the early signs are not good. Behind the scenes, Angus Taylor continues to prop up the fossil fuel industry. I’m rereading Tacitus’s Annals. With Augustus dead, Tiberius had the chance to remake the governance of the Roman Empire. Cautious, uninspired, and seemingly visionless, he fails spectacularly and retreats to the Isle of Capri. Tacitus feels that he is living in a hopelessly corrupt and self-destructive world. He teaches me how very much, in times of crisis, hinges on excellent political leadership. Tim Flannery’s most recent publication is Life: Selected writings (2019).

Felicity Plunkett

Vivian Pham drafted The Coconut Children (2020) when she was sixteen, in a novella-writing course run by Sydney’s Story Factory, a Creative-Writing centre for marginalised young people. Sharp as the ‘blade of water’ refugees cross in its preface, The Coconut Children’s anatomy of intergenerational trauma sits under the surface of what Pham calls a ‘coming-of-age story’. Anyone who remembers being a teenager will recognise the glitchy hopscotch of playground negotiations. Pham’s savvy parody of cloistered classroom melodrama sits over a framework of resilience and pain experienced by her protagonists, Vietnamese refugees living in Sydney’s Cabramatta. Pham describes herself as a closet poet. I was absorbed by the plot and characters, but also dazzled by Pham’s poetic talent. As the lyric slivers of Pham’s novel trace the grain of fierce and fragile resilience, I traced their jagged and meticulously-layered pieces to prophesy: here is the start of a luminous literary trajectory. Felicity Plunkett’s new poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (2020).

Judith Beveridge

Being isolated from friends and family during this pandemic is hard, but any feelings of self-pity quickly vanish as I read Ovid’s Poetry of Exile (translated by David R, Slavitt). The isolation and loneliness that Ovid experienced during his relegation to the bleak, barbaric outpost of Tomis on the Black Sea is intensely moving. The poems are masterpieces of argument and complaint. Ovid wrote many of them to try to persuade Augustus to relent and have him returned, if not to Rome, then at least somewhere less primitive. They must have been what kept him sane and purposeful. Perhaps more importantly, they attest to the power of art as a spiritual resource. Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus (2015) is enabling 2 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

me to leave the human world behind and to gain some understanding of these most remarkable creatures and keep in mind the wonder of creation. Judith Beveridge’s most recent collection is Sun Music (2018).

Andrea Goldsmith

The numbers soar, there’s no curve in the graphs, coffins stacked high in warehouses, panicked crowds in India, huge menacing cruise ships, crouching people being hosed with disinfectant: the litany of doom drones on. And there’s Africa still to come. Even if I restrict my intake of news, the news manages to find me. When my dog and I go for a walk through the deathly quiet streets, rather than the greetings of old we walkers now avoid each other – yes, like the plague. Jane Austen has come to the rescue as she always does. Plunging into the familiarity of her novels provides a much-needed embrace. I balance Austen with Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler – have to keep an eye on the tyrants – and Zbigniew Herbert’s illuminating poetry. Herbert brings intellectual succour; he’s a gift in these troubling times. As is Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (2020), a brilliant, humane novel about everything in life that matters. Andrea Goldsmith’s latest novel is Invented Lives (2019).

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

A most diverting book, indeed compelling. is Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait (2019). An English artist who paints with pastoral attentiveness, she can also write. Married for some years to Lucian Freud, she portrays another bloke naked, flat on his back. Her most compelling portraits were of her curiously ugly mother, ageing towards death. Paul has told her life with a lucid persuasion. And her mother is quite strange: unforgettable. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s most recent book is Rondo (2018).

Chris Flynn

When my partner and I moved to Phillip Island – whose lovely Boonwurrung name is Millowl – we joked that we would congratulate each other in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The island is easy to quarantine. Dynamite the bridge, throw up a cordon and hunker down until the plague burns itself out, or the zombies run out of brains to eat. A year later, it doesn’t seem so funny. Fortunately, there are as yet no cases of Covid-19 in the region. I have taken refuge in D.H. Lawrence. The opening passage to the evergreen Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) is apt: ‘The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’ Chris Flynn’s new novel, Mammoth, is reviewed on page 36.

Kirsten Tranter

Quarantine might seem like the perfect time to embark on a deferred epic literary challenge like Ulysses or Proust, but I find myself quite incapable of the concentration that would require. Time, thought, attention have all been fractured in a way that wrecks the usual refuges of reading and writing.

Now more than ever I forgive myself for turning to books for solace, connection, escape. In our first week of isolation, I reread Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) in something like a state of panic, reassuring myself that the deadly virus she describes is so much more deadly than Covid-19, desperately needing her assertion of the value of art in a post-apocalyptic world. The motto painted on the caravan of the travelling group of actors and musicians at the centre of the story encapsulates why we read, why we create, why we explore other worlds in fiction: ‘Because survival is insufficient.’ Kirsten Tranter’s most recent novel is Hold (2016).

Dennis Altman

The Editor has asked for books that ‘solace, beguile, edify. or amuse’. I am cheating by nominating two recent American queer novels that have expanded the idea of trans-fiction, already a rich genre (think Virginia Woolf, Patrick White, Gore Vidal, Brigid Brophy). Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017) is sexy, witty, and a send-up of queer theory from an insider. Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018) retells the story of The Beggar’s Opera in an extraordinary voyage into gender confusion and colonial exploitation. It is set during the Great Plague of 1665 in London. And the memoranda of the Minister of Publick Health, and his concern for foreign vessels, seem remarkably apposite right now. But for escapist comfort nothing beats reading – or rereading – E.F.Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (1920–39), which remind us of the glorious triviality of everyday life. Dennis Altman’s latest book is Unrequited Love (2019).

Kim Mahood

My pick for a book to read while in lockdown is Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat, is placed under house arrest by the KGB. Evicted from the luxury suite of rooms he occupies in the Hotel Metropol, he is relegated to a small attic room in the same building. Over the next thirty years, the count employs wit, intelligence, learning, humour, curiosity, and compassion to stretch the boundaries of his circumscribed world and to create a life rich in human relationships, intellectual adventure, and occasional intrigue. Through the microcosm of the Metropol Hotel and the eyes of the urbane and resourceful count, Towles offers us glimpses of Russian history, the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and a fabulous tale of the capacity of the individual to turn incarceration into a remarkable kind of freedom. Kim Mahood’s latest book is Position Doubtful (2016).

Alice Nelson

During the summer of 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a long series of fervent letters to one another limning every aspect of their lives and work (published as Letters: Summer 1926). To call the collection a correspondence seems to diminish the incandescent beauty and passionate intensity of their communion. These are not mere letters: they are hymns and exaltations, seismographs of the human

heart. As they penned their letters, each poet was struggling to navigate a world divided and disfigured. Tsvetayeva was living in desperate exile in France, Pasternak was suffering under the repressive new Bolshevik regime in Moscow, and Rilke was dying in a Swiss sanatorium. Though the shadows were gathering, these letters feel like hope distilled. Their ravishing epistolary dance is a paean to human connection, but also a profound argument for the essential nature of literature and the power of poetry as a flare against the darkness. Alice Nelson’s latest novel is The Children’s House (2018).

Patrick Allington

For me, strange times call for strange books. For example, dipping in and out of Erich von Däniken’s frankly bonkers speculation on the past, Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1968), is amusing me. But I’m drawing particular, if discomfiting, solace from rereading Lisa Jacobson’s 2012 verse novel The Sunlit Zone. Set between 2020 and 2051, this dark, tense tale is anchored in a sense of grief and loss, time and ageing. It’s also a quite beautiful, subtle, intelligent vision of an imperfect future: cloned whales and damaged fish; ‘The news subedited by hackers’; hot pink synthetic lawns. Jacobson squeezes contradictory elements together: the story is trenchant but compassionate. It’s not comic but it’s frequently funny. Good books come and go too quickly: The Sunlit Zone, for its astute observations of the human spirit and for the audacious way Jacobson works her words, warrants a longer gaze. Patrick Allington’s novel Rise & Shine will appear in June.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Early on the morning of what we knew would be the last day of my father’s life, I stood in front of the bookcase with my car keys in my hand, looking for something I could rely on to get me through my shift of the bedside vigil while he sank deeper into the dark stream. In the overnight bag that I keep packed for last-minute travel or sleepovers or hospital stays, there are battered paperback copies of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), Dorothy Dunnett’s Checkmate (1975), and A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). But this day I needed something less cerebral, something elemental, something that felt like bedrock. Late that night in his quiet room as we sat with him and waited for the funeral people to come and take him away, my sister looked at my book. ‘Jane Eyre! You must have read that a hundred times!’ Kerryn Goldsworthy is working on a new edition of her book on Adelaide for NewSouth.

Michelle de Kretser

Since I don’t know you, I can’t recommend reading that will comfort and sustain you through lockdown. I can’t say that I find any reading particularly soothing at present. Nevertheless, I’ve bought books in the last three weeks, and I encourage you to do the same. By ‘books’ I mean books by contemporary Australian writers. Like so many other people, writers are doing it tough. I’m okay: most are not. Literature is a small and vulnerable affair in this country. Further down the line, bookshops and publishing programs will take a hit. So please buy Australian books. Whether or not they help you, you’ll be helping others scrape through. Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel is The Life to Come (2017). g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Literary Studies

Outliers

Intersections in Australian literature Kerryn Goldsworthy

Friends and Rivals: Four Great Australian Writers by Brenda Niall

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 280 pp

rmed with more than half a century’s worth of knowledge, experience, the fermentation of ideas and approaches in literary history and criticism over that period, and her own formidable reputation as a scholar and teacher of Australian literature, Brenda Niall returns in her latest book to the territory of her earliest ones. In Seven Little Billabongs:The world of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce (1979), Niall broke new ground not just in writing a serious and scholarly full-length treatment of Australian children’s literature, but also in departing from the orthodox biographical tradition of focusing on a single figure. As Niall recalls in her introduction, children’s literature was still being dismissed as ‘Kiddylit’ as late as 1987. Approaching it as a serious field of scholarly research had been a revolutionary idea in Australia in 1979; in this context, Niall’s name is now the first that anyone thinks of. Nor is the group biography a new thing for her, as demonstrated by her awardwinning The Boyds: A family biography (2002), in which she revisited, from a new and wider angle, her early work on Martin Boyd. Friends and Rivals returns to these familiar scenes by a different road. In grouping Turner with her fellow writers and near-contemporaries Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson, and Nettie Palmer, Niall normalises the notion of children’s literature and its authors as an integral part of literary history. While all four writers published work in several different literary forms and genres, Turner is best known for her children’s literature, Baynton for her short stories, Richardson for her novels, and Palmer for her literary criticism and journalism. Niall writes about all four categories as a continuum across a literary spectrum. Her chief interest is in the lives and times of these four women, and the ways in which those things are reflected in their work.

The main reason for choosing these four writers as a group study seems to be that each has held an idiosyncratic place in the history of Australian writing. Baynton was born in 1857, Palmer in 1885, with Turner and Richardson halfway between and exact contemporaries, both born in 1870. Of the Australian literary scene around the turn of the nineteenth century, Niall says that women ‘were not welcome among the “bards and bohemians” and because their material and outlook tended to be different from those of the men, they were often left on the margins of the story of Australian literature’. This observation from the introduction is echoed in the book’s final sentences: ‘these women writers defied the categories of female achievement. Today we would call all four of them outliers.’ Niall gives each author her own chapter, but she also explores the interrelationships among them, their similarities, and in some cases their dramatic differences. In considering them as a group, this book recalls two earlier such feminist landmarks in Australian studies: Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home: Australian women writers 1925–1945 (1981), which considers the interrelated lives of Marjorie Barnard, Eleanor Dark, Jean Devanny, Miles Franklin, Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and Christina Stead within their historical context; and Carole Ferrier’s edited compilation As Good as a Yarn With You: Letters between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (1992), which covers the period 1930–57. With the exception of Nettie Palmer, the youngest of Niall’s subjects by fifteen years, her ‘outliers’ and their best-known works belong to an earlier time. Turner’s classic Seven Little Australians was published in 1894, Baynton’s Bush Studies in 1902, and the third and final volume of Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony in 1929, while Palmer began ‘building her reputation as Australia’s steadiest and best-informed critic’ in the early 1920s. What Modjeska’s, Ferrier’s, and now Niall’s books have in common is their focus on the gender-specific experience of female authors in the first half of the twentieth century. Both Turner and Richardson were married to men who were devoted to them. The psychologically robust Turner was willing and able to do her own negotiating with publishers and to manage her own income, while Richardson had the same kind of enviable marriage as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf: all three were emotionally labile women guarded and cherished by strong, sane husbands who loved them and believed in their genius. Palmer was her novelist husband Vance’s loyal and adoring champion, in ways that sometimes hindered her own writerly judgement and reputation. Baynton’s life was shaped by her three marriages, first to an unfaithful wastrel, then to a well-heeled older man who

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provided her with money, education, polish, and support, and finally to an eccentric peer who made her Lady Headley before the marriage’s rapid unravelling. In each case, their experience of marriage bore directly on their subject matter, authorial practice, and success. Niall makes one observation about Baynton that rings true but runs counter to the notion that a coddled and cherished female author will benefit from those advantages: ‘Anger gave her stories their strange power, and when anger yielded to social ambition, she had no more to say.’ Niall explores all of these marriages with relish, and also hints at other intimate and often unrecorded matters of female experience. ‘It is possible that some anguished poems, written by Barbara about the loss of a child, capture the sadness of a miscarriage,’ she writes. She also speculates at some length about the peculiar and alarming evidence that Turner’s stepfather, only fourteen years her senior, entertained violently sexual feelings about her that he barely tried to hide, but that she, apparently, did not recognise for what they were. So quiet and approachable does Niall seem through the medium of her straightforward prose style that the reader is

almost relieved, and certainly amused, by the occasional silvery whip-flick of sardonic wit. In a description of Baynton, out on a shopping expedition described in Turner’s diary (for the two were unlikely friends and often went out together), Niall writes, ‘You can tell by the way she wears her jewels that she has more at home.’ Turner’s brother-in-law Fred Thompson is described as an ‘underperforming dentist’. And here is Richardson’s longsuffering mother, Mary, exiled in Europe as she tries to support the careers of her musical daughters: ‘After three years in Leipzig, speaking no German and enduring, in a two-bedroom flat, the sounds of Ettie’s piano, Lil’s violin and the cello played by their friend and lodger, Mattie Main, Mary needed to go home.’ Such light moments leaven this formidable combination of meticulous scholarship, reader-friendly lucidity, and ideas – built into the conception and structure of the book – about the nature of feminism, biography, and Australian literary and cultural history, and about the many places where those things intersect. g Kerryn Goldsworthy, a former Editor of ABR (1986–87), won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism and the 2017 Horne Prize.

Fortune’s Favours 1. Two birds scoop white sky into the lank pines behind your stone as if to say we’re with you. In front the road crofts and peaks. You can’t pinpoint the sector but it was adamantine like your knowing to pull out to sail through the lock, ink a renunciation into an oiled bay. The monstrance twinkles ahead, a wheeled pizza, while catastrophe tourism tails them with its clothes. My friends in books clash but offset the revenue stream. 2. Another glassed city, its users a charnel house of vacuous donations. The stray cat enters the soft-hearted, as hooped magpies cry beneath the lamp’s ‘pitch and tow’, the kale-faced dog moored to its owner tilts as you pass. Gossip enlivens a queue dimmed by its saviours who puzzle at the gated votes that snuff them out.

3. Sagely, we reach the bridge, its pylon rows in cataract sky. You couldn’t elsewhere, broken up. Slide guitar bends sunset. Planes crunch. Do what you like, some flutter will tether you aloft while we remain, dripping palace, spectral heath. The phone sparkles in your hand, your life on a plate. 4. A wall of art chops to heaven, isolated showers and plaintive consumerists wobble from strasse to jalan beneath the book’s mite of optimism and Khachaturian’s clapped jigs that tease the spray-on air after the election.

Gig Ryan

Gig Ryan’s most recent collection is Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2012). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Politics

Destiny things

Scrutinising the 2019 election Paul Williams

Party Animals: The secret history of a Labor fiasco by Samantha Maiden

Viking $34.99 pb, 336 pp

here seem to be fewer post-election books doing the rounds after the 2019 federal campaign than has been the case in recent decades. Why is this? The 2019 campaign may have been achingly bland, but the result shocked pollsters, voters, and a news media that had long predicted a Labor win. Morrison’s ‘miracle’ victory is probably Australia’s most historically significant one since the last ‘unlosable’ election, back in 1993, when another cocksure opposition took its own ‘big target’ tax package to the people. Samantha Maiden’s hefty account of the Coalition’s surprise win – or Labor’s shock loss, which followed a fiasco of a campaign – fills this void. Maiden, a former News Corp and Sky News journalist (now writing for The New Daily), offers a book that, in eighteen chapters, fulfils two critical roles. Maiden provides a colourful chronicle of events before, during, and after Labor’s defeat. She reveals the sort of covert minutiae available only to Canberra insiders. We learn that George Brandis, Australia’s high commissioner to London, was fearful of being sacked by a Shorten government; and that former Labor Treasurer Wayne Swan didn’t speak to Anthony Albanese for years after the demise of Julia Gillard. Maiden, of course, offers the usual post-election analysis of the factors driving the vote. Satisfyingly, she goes further than Labor’s own critical Emerson–Weatherill review. While Maiden doesn’t exactly refute the essence of the two most commonly cited causes – an unpopular Opposition leader in Bill Shorten and a ‘big target’ tax package – she does offer nuance in anatomising each, while busting some myths along the way. Maiden, drawing on Australian Election Study (AES), disputes the widespread assumption that older and middle-class voters rejected Labor because of fears of negative gearing and franking credit reform. We now know that many older and wealthier voters in Sydney and Melbourne swung behind Labor, voting altruistically against their own economic interests. Maiden contends that Labor’s formerly rusted-on working-class voters, and a mercurial ‘fluoro collar’ aspirational class, spurned the Opposition because, with austerity measures looming, Labor and Shorten represented too great a risk to their interests. Labor failed to mitigate that suspicion or to counter the Coalition assault it must have known was coming. Maiden doubts the negative impact of a franking credit policy that would have affected a mere 6.5 per cent of taxpayers (and no pensioners) and that would 3 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

have reaped $60 billion in revenue over ten years. She points out that AES data indicates that negative gearing and franking credit reforms were supported by fifty-seven and fifty-three per cent of voters, respectively. Maiden brings together a host of neglected factors in the election. There is a suggestion that Labor’s campaign director, Noah Carroll – who had never run a national campaign – was too ‘secretive’ with internal polling and focus-group data, and failed to communicate with the all-important leadership group (Shorten, Tanya Plibersek, Penny Wong, and Don Farrell, sometimes expanded to a ‘Gang of Seven’, with Chris Bowen, Jenny Macklin, and Tony Burke). Maiden notes a general lack of debate in the party – Shorten feared internal dissent and placed a premium on party unity after the recent chaos in the Liberal Party – and the fact that the caucus and shadow cabinet often acquiesced in decisions of the leadership group. It is the book’s second critical contribution – a study of the increasingly close nexus between politics and the media – that will win it influence and readers, especially among journalism and public relations students. Maiden’s unpicking of the ‘Choppergate’ affair of 2014 – when Bronwyn Bishop, speaker of the House of Representatives, hired a helicopter to attend a Liberal Party fundraiser – is perhaps the most revealing. We learn that this self-indulgence, which soon became a scandal and eventually unseated her, came to light as a result of work done not by news media journalists, as we were led to believe at the time, but by ‘young Labor staffers’ in Shorten’s office. Maiden argues that, in an age when media outlets (even the Canberra press gallery) are being gutted by digital publishing, researchers in party offices have become essential (though partisan) arms of the Fourth Estate, keeping political rivals accountable, if only through digging for dirt. Maiden writes that Labor was ‘running one of the most methodical, relentless and successful investigative journalism units in Australia’. Maiden’s account of how Labor uncovered Bishop’s chopper ride is worth the price of the book alone. Suffice to say that the first ‘Choppergate’ story, fed to Melbourne’s Herald Sun, contained no Labor quotes: the story was not to appear like a Labor ‘drop’ but rather a piece of ‘shoe leather’ journalism from which community outrage would grow organically. Maiden rounds out the book with an important chapter on the polarising Adani coal mine and on mining billionaire Clive Palmer, whose United Australia Party preferences, along with those from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, would buttress Coalition seats in Queensland. Arguably, some content towards the end is misplaced. The sad tale of former New South Wales State Secretary Kaila Murnain appears to enjoy greater emphasis than that of former Senator Sam Dastyari, while some biographical material on Shorten – his first day with the AWU, for example – would be more at home in early chapters. The lack of index is frustrating, but the narrative is strong and the prose friendly. Samantha Maiden concludes with a discussion of Albanese as a ‘destiny thing’. The fact that Albanese is not Shorten means that victory for Labor is indeed conceivable at the next federal election – as is the possibility that Scott Morrison’s leadership will be enhanced by the current pandemic. g Paul Williams teaches at Griffith University.

History

A vernacular intellectual A probing, gentle personality Nicholas Brown

‘I Wonder’: The life and work of Ken Inglis

edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark

Monash University Publishing $39.95 hb, 382 pp

am ashamed to recall that when our high-school history class in the late 1970s was set K.S. Inglis’s The Australian Colonists (1974), I – and I don’t think I was alone – didn’t quite know what to do with a text that focused on ‘ceremonies, monuments and rhetoric’, one that began as a study on 26 January 1788 but worked back as an historical enquiry from 25 April 1915. Inglis declared his determination to challenge ‘tunnel history’, but we still felt lazily safer with a neat progression of names and dates. I remember our teacher’s disappointment as we repeatedly missed the point. Rob Wilton was fresh from his own university studies, with the aura of being the draft-defermentcard-burning son of a general who, despite his own reservations, oversaw Australia’s commitment to war in Vietnam. Wilton also gave us Russel Ward’s A Nation for a Continent (1977), Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), and Humphrey McQueen’s A New Britannia (1970). It took me a long time to realise just what we had been offered. I Wonder, based on papers delivered at a 2016 colloquium for Ken Inglis, held just over a year before his death, reminds me. This collection draws out more than is usually encompassed in ‘life and work’ tributes. Of The Australian Colonists, for example, Frank Bongiorno unpacks that book’s ‘vital yet ambiguous space’ in Inglis’s professional positioning, in the writing of Australian history, and perhaps even in its presentation. (Richly illustrated, the book was designed by Melbourne University Publishing to reach a wide market in a ‘semi-coffee-table format’, as one eminent professor stiffly observed.) Each chapter draws out similar elements of Inglis’s distinctive place in a formative period of Australian historical writing, in interrogating patterns of meaning in our civic culture, enriching forms of commentary and scholarship, and testing ways of presenting the past to reach new, or refresh established, audiences. The title captures Inglis’s characteristic preface to seminar, supervision, or conference questions, and his probing but gentle personality: the reflective questioning rather than resolved argument in research; his gentle induction as a teacher ( Joy Damousi recalls) into the ‘seriousness’ of historical study; his positioning as an observer rather than as an activist in much of his work on public as well as historical issues. Introducing a 1995 selection of Inglis’s shorter pieces, Craig Wilcox evokes Inglis as a ‘vernacular intellectual’. That description is affirmed in this collection and set in a wider context.

Starting in Preston in 1929, Inglis’s life was, he conceded, never far from his history, and his history in turn was framed by significant transitions in cultural and political engagement. The boy, self-conscious at not having the medals of a war-veteran father to pin to his shirt at school Anzac ceremonies, would become a leading scholar of war memorialisation. His particular attention to Australia’s ‘civil religion’ of Anzac was built through the 1960s, as Graeme Davison notes, when negotiating a ‘critical but respectful’ enquiry on such a topic was far from straightforward (Davison recalls wondering ‘was he just being polite to the old diggers?’). Anzac was at that time clouded by the politics of Vietnam rather than boosted by later culture warriors. In 1998, Inglis’s awardwinning Sacred Places could still insist on vigilance in defining concepts such as ‘holy’and ‘religious’– a task almost impossible given the remorseless secularisation and politicisation of the issues since then. Growing up with the constant presence of radio, including its slow search for an identifiably Australian voice, Inglis would write histories of the ABC (1983 and 2006) that emphasised its place in the lives of listeners as much as its institutional evolution (and he would realise, on first hearing the word ‘podcast’, that the world of broadcasting he understood was ‘over’). Flourishing in the postwar expansion of secondary and tertiary education, and asso-

Ken Inglis (front row, second from right), shown here in a group of Queen’s College students who had done well in their exams. The group includes Arthur Huck (front row, second from left), Max Corden (front row, extreme right) and Dunera internee George Nadel (back row, second from left). Courtesy Inglis Family

ciated social democratic politics, Inglis’s first work on health, class, and the church was, as Janet McCalman traces, shaped in, if not ‘overwhelmed’ by, the emergence of the new social history (Stuart Macintyre adds that Inglis was advised not to pursue an Oxford PhD topic on the Socialist League: a ‘man called E.P. Thompson was working on that’). Back in Australia by 1956, at the University of Adelaide, Hugh Stretton counselled Inglis not to ‘sit on the fence’, but his temperament tended more to the power of questions than answers, and a trust, Robert Dare suggests, in a ‘less credulous, less cruel’ citizenry that might think through issues for themselves. He found a ‘comfortable place’ through ‘moonlighting’ in the new A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

History journalism of reportage and current affairs, Tom Fitzgerald’s journal Nation (launched in 1958) providing the opportunity to be (in Peter Browne’s phrase) ‘cool and questioning on the page’. The trial of Max Stuart, an Arrernte man charged with the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl, stirred the opportunistic instincts of the young Rupert Murdoch while also leading to Inglis’s meticulous ‘ring-side’ account of Stuart’s conviction. Hoping to ‘tell the story, not be part of it’, Inglis modelled The Stuart Case (1961) on American writers he admired as both ‘omnipresent and invisible’. Updated in 2002, the book ‘is still used as a major study in the training of journalists’, Bob and Sue Wallace report; it also informed a docudrama, Black and White (2002). Rich in the texture of testimony, it teased away at, while also being partly defined by, the extent to which Stuart ‘troubled the white man’s world more than he knew’. While celebrating Inglis’s work, this collection prompts reflection on such issues of historical perspective. Martin Crotty asks why Inglis never completed the book covering his journey to Gallipoli with veterans in 1965. He was concerned that the manuscript ‘didn’t come out right’ in balancing the honour of Anzacs and the ‘rather sad and sorry spectacle’ of elderly men abroad. Ian Maddocks recognises Inglis’s contribution as foundation professor of history (1967) and then vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea – ‘a huge turning point in race relations’, Diane Langmore recalls, and in fostering new national leaders, in contrast to more troubled times since. Maddocks regrets, however, that Inglis’s ‘genius as an observer’ did not draw more on this experience. The pointed contrast is to the work of his wife, Amirah Inglis (remembered in a chapter by Judith Keene as an energetic activist and historian), in tracking the fusion of gender and race in Australian rule. At ANU from 1975, Inglis conceived the ‘slice’ approach to a bold bicentennial history ‘gift to the nation’: multi-authored volumes taking a profile at fifty-year intervals through Australian society. Innovative and consolidating Inglis’s enduring ethnographic interest (discussed by Shirley Lindenbaum, his sister and a City University of New York anthropologist), the project had a mixed reception in design and delivery. Marian Quartly focuses particularly on criticism from women’s and feminist historians, who sought a more structural, critical understanding of the past. Not one for theory, Inglis’s test for history, Seumas Spark observes, was ‘does it tell us something we don’t know’. That ‘us’ defined both the nuances of both shared memory and culture that Inglis plumbed with such sensitivity, but it perhaps begged its own questions. Inglis’s last work in retirement was on the Dunera ‘boys’ – refugee ‘aliens’ from Nazi Germany, several of whom he met as they contributed to postwar Australia, from guiding his student curiosity to questioning his ‘woolly liberalism’ in Port Moresby. A surrogate for a memoir for his grandchildren, this subject captured not only the history Inglis valued but also that which he represented. We have lost several leaders from a transformative generation of Australian historians in recent years: each – like Inglis, as remembered lovingly in this book – has much still to tell us about what the craft can offer, and what shapes and supports its contribution. g Nicholas Brown is a professor in the School of History, ANU. 3 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Lessons to be learned Notes on a pandemic Garry Wotherspoon

Fighting for Our Lives: The history of a community response to AIDS by Nick Cook

NewSouth $39.99 pb, 400 pp

t is quite an apposite time for the appearance of Nick Cook’s Fighting for Our Lives: The history of a community response to AIDS, when the world is dealing with the impact of another deadly virus. There are always lessons to be learned: where better to start than from historical experience. It was nearly four decades ago, in November 1982, that the first case of HIV/AIDS was diagnosed in Sydney, heralding the onset of an epidemic that terrified the country. Part of the reason for the fear and paranoia it engendered was that it was utterly unexpected. Even though Sydneysiders had survived many epidemics in the past – from smallpox in 1789 to the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–20, all of which affected thousands of people, some with immense death rates – a range of medical developments over the twentieth century, such as inoculations and vaccinations on top of existing strict quarantine regulations, had led to a belief that medical science had finally got ‘disease’ under control. Since World War II, new generations of Australians had grown up secure in the belief that epidemics were a thing of the past: they would not have to face something that had been almost commonplace in their grandparents’ times. Then along came HIV/AIDS. While we now know it is an infection contractible by anyone, irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, its initial occurrence was among gay men, both in the United States and here in Australia. No one knew what it was, how it was transmitted, or how to deal with it. This was at a time when male homosexual acts were still illegal in New South Wales, police violence against those of a dissident sexuality or gender persisted, and moralising politicians wanted Mardi Gras banned. So it was clear from the outset that any positive responses would have to come from within the community. Cook details for us, in eleven comprehensive chapters, the variety of responses that occurred, often in the face of overt hostility from both the wider Australian public and various authorities, AIDS being regarded as a danger to the rest of Australia. The book’s focus is on New South Wales, and naturally on Sydney, where a ‘gay world’ already existed, one that was active politically. A range of support networks was developed quickly. Cook traces their development after the AIDS Action Committee was formed at a meeting on 15 May 1983 (it became the AIDS Council of NSW [ACON] the following year). By 1985 several other important groups had been set up: the Ankali Pro-

ject, the Community Support Network (CSN), and the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation. These groups provided a wide range of support to people dealing with AIDS in New South Wales, and Cook assiduously details the problems these groups faced and how these issues were managed. ACON provided coordination for the gay community’s varied responses to AIDS, and it later widened its purview to deal with those affected in the wider Australian public as well.

authorities as either accidents or suicides. Education about AIDS was necessary. It went into unexpected areas: dramatic television advertisements, such as the one featuring the Grim Reaper’, raised awareness, and condoms were slipped on bananas. Sex education information was directed not only at the wider Australian public; also introduced were ‘Codes of Practice for Sex Venues’. As Time magazine noted, ‘What liberals in large parts of the Western world have advocated in vain for decades, the fear of AIDS has achieved in a couple of years.’ One unusual development noted by Cook is that, on a range It was clear from the outset that any of issues, governments soon had to deal directly with the homopositive responses would have to come sexual community – groups that had previously kept each other from within the community at arm’s length, for a variety of reasons. These collaborations were crucial. Having Neal Blewett and Peter Baume as federal health Cook allows the voices of many of the participants to speak; minister and shadow health minister undoubtedly influenced this gives his account a dramatic authenticity. It wasn’t always how the infection was dealt with in Australia. Still, it wasn’t ‘plain sailing’ – there were until 1996, in what became strong differences within the known as ‘the protease mogay community about what ment’, when combination to do, the most obvious leadtherapy became available, ing to the emergence of ACT that people no longer exUP, because of dissatisfaction pected to die of AIDS and over slow access to possible began learning to live with treatment drugs. HIV. Cook recounts the many If there is a weakness tragedies of the AIDS era; in the book, it is that Cook the tainted blood transfufocuses almost entirely on sions that led to the death of ACON and its work, perhaps three babies in Queensland; understandably, ACON havthe hounding of Eve van ing commissioned the book. Grafhorst, a schoolgirl who This attention to the organcontracted AIDS and was isation’s history can also be shunned locally; and the commended as an exercise growing number of deaths, in thoroughness, but a wider all caught in scaremongerview might well have given a ing newspaper headlines. As different context to his story. with Covid-19, rising death Both in 1982 and the rates were a marker of the following decades, the imimpact of the infection, and pact of HIV/AIDS on the the death notices started to city’s gay community, and take up pages of Sydney’s on Australia generally, was at gay newspaper, with the first an object lesson in how names of friends, lovers, and ephemeral ‘progress’ can be. neighbours appearing. Many There was immense despair, of these deaths were selfbut because of the commuassisted by those in the latnity’s response and the way ter stages of AIDS-related in which this was developed, infections. the pandemic became a Gradually, the extent of lesson in hope. Nick Cook’s ACON’s float at the Mardi Gras Parade, 1990. Despite the pouring rain, 50, 000 people gathered along the parade’s the tragedy became apparent. book might well be useful route to cheer on participants (photograph by Robert French) This included numerous ‘afreading for health experts fronts’: the stigma; the Mediand politicians today. As cal Journal of Australia’s cover that stated ‘Depravity Kills’; the calls countless sages have told us, ‘Those who forget their history are by some ‘moralists’ for the incarceration of all homosexuals; the doomed to repeat its mistakes.’ g hysterical panic over sex workers and appropriate ‘precautions’; and the escalating violence being perpetrated against gay men, Garry Wotherspoon is a writer and historian, a former academic, their murders on beats often conveniently shrugged off by the and a former NSW History Fellow. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Virtual vacation Expatriates on Hydra Kirsten Tranter

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

Bloomsbury $29.99 pb 368 pp

or anyone feeling stir-crazy after weeks cooped up in self-isolation, A Theatre for Dreamers offers an appealing escape, a virtual vacation on the Greek island of Hydra. Dive into these pages and you can swim vicariously in a perfect horseshoe-shaped bay, dry off in the summer sun, admire countless young, scantily clad men and women, and end the day with a glass of retsina while you watch the moon set and listen to a young Leonard Cohen enunciate profundities about life and art. Polly Samson’s novel is set in 1960, when eighteen-year-old Erica Hart travels from England to Hydra with her lover Jimmy and brother Bobby. Her pilgrimage is inspired by opening a copy of Charmian Clift’s book Peel Me A Lotus sent by the author, a friend of her mother’s, which arrives soon after her mother’s death from cancer. Clift’s writing about her creative, bohemian family life in Greece offers a vision of life beyond the stifling conformity of suburban England, an existence that Erica’s mother might have longed for, and one that Erica has the chance to embrace thanks to a surprising legacy of money that her mother sequestered from her weekly housekeeping allowance. The fictional Erica – sweet, shy, consumed by grief, searching for purpose, alive to all the beauty and sexual intrigue of the island – is Samson’s way in to exploring the myths and legends of the real-life expatriate artists of Hydra in the 1960s. Clift unofficially adopts Erica as she adopted many stray artists, poets and hangers-on who passed through her household, where she and her husband, the writer George Johnston, held court in the burgeoning island community of aspiring artists. Twenty-fiveyear-old Leonard Cohen arrives at around the same time, flirts with everyone, and begins an affair with the beautiful, married Marianne Jensen. With its promise of escape, A Theatre for Dreamers might be the perfect book for these coronavirus times, but it also speaks to a potentially relatable sense of confinement. Hydra is a paradise, a source of inspiration for free, wandering spirits, but it is also a place of misery for those trapped by financial circumstances (George Johnston, broke, desperately ill, and driven to publish for money when the concept is anathema); by commitment to family at the expense of art (Clift, who cares for her husband and their three children, along with others who swing into their orbit); or by abasement to an ideology of feminine servitude (Marianne, tortured by marriage to an unfaithful husband and subsequent dedication to a careless Cohen). 3 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

The setting is poised just on the brink of the second wave of feminism; an older Erica reflects that 1960 is ‘in reality half a decade before the sixties began’. The pill isn’t yet available. Women like Clift who question male domination in art and life are the exception to the rule. Samson explores the tensions within unequal relationships between men and women, these male geniuses and their downtrodden muses, who double as domestic servants. Samson brilliantly conjures the atmosphere of the island, the crumbling, majestic structures, the landscape in all its seasonal wonder. Erica describes a night where the artist ‘colony’ gathers around the charcoal grill at the local tavern: ‘This evening has been born from one of those murmuring sundowns, our bodies molten as the sea and the sky turned to honey. We’ve been dipping and diving and drying off in the sun all afternoon. The night-scented jasmine is soporifc as a lullaby.’ So many details feel perfectly rendered: the crusty salt of Erica’s hair as it dries, everyone barefoot in the warm night. There is occasionally a laboured, documentary feel to these scenes, as every figure of cultural significance is name-checked at any given dinner party, but this is redeemed by the loveliness of Samson’s prose. The moments of truest feeling come in the form of Clift’s fury at her own circumstances, such as when she confesses her reaction to Cohen’s enquiry about a place to write. ‘You know, that nice young Canadian poet earlier, when he asked me if I knew of a room, a nice simple room, he said, with maybe a bed and a desk and a chair? I was jealous, so jealous that for a moment I actually hated him. Imagine what I would get done, I thought, at a table in that little white room with nothing but my typewriter for company.’ But she has no room of her own, and her husband has ‘Fuck Virginia Woolf ’ emblazoned above his own writing table. For the reader familiar with the tragic story of the Clift– Johnston family, these moments are shadowed by the knowledge of what is to come. There is a painful asymmetry to the way the novel serves, on the one hand, as a beautifully illustrated background to some of Cohen’s most famous songs, and, on the other, as a suggestive guide to Clift’s deep emotional agony. At the end of the story, an older Marianne reflects that ‘our children paid the price for our freedom’. It sounds like a cliché, and also like an understatement. I grew up surrounded by the next generation of writers, including Clift and Johnston’s son Martin. I remember him as an exception to the brash egotism of most of those types: extraordinarily gentle, shadowed by an aura of damage. In the few moments he appears in the margins of the story as a skinny child, Samson captures his quick brilliance, his shyness and sensitivity. I was the age of young Erica when Martin drank himself to death with solemn, dedicated effort, aged forty-two. For Erica, imagining herself as Clift’s daughter is a kind of game that she plays at, and then can choose to put aside, so very unlike Clift’s actual children. This feels to me like a thing that the novel struggles to accommodate, invested as it is in the romance and tragedy of Clift’s own particular self-destruction. g Kirsten Tranter grew up in Sydney and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a founder of the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing, and her latest novel is Hold (2016), longlisted for the Miles Franklin award.

Fiction

‘Five minutes into the future’ A work of ecological grief J.R. Burgmann

Ghost Species by James Bradley

Hamish Hamilton $29.99 pb, 288 pp

ames Bradley’s Ghost Species arrives at a time when fiction seems outpaced by the speed with which we humans are changing the planet. Alarmingly, such writerly speculation has been realised during Australia’s tragic summer, when the future finally bore down on us. And there are few writers of climate fiction – or ‘cli-fi’, the term coined by activist blogger Dan Bloom and popularised in a tweet by Margaret Atwood – who so delicately straddle the conceptual divide between present and future as Bradley. Ghost Species assumes many characteristics of science fiction, but it also has the quality of what Roger Luckhurst calls proleptic realism, ‘a modelling of the present day tilted five minutes into the future … within the horizon of current research’. Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson, whose climate novels abound with scientific detail, Bradley pursues a minimalist aesthetic, translating science into poetic terms. There is a striking sparsity to the prose, a rendering of the world with a precision that elicits a sense of the scientific, a poetics of observation, record, and projection. While Bradley described his previous novel Clade (2015), a landmark for the genre in terms of form and style, as ‘geological fiction’ exploring ‘timescales beyond the human’, Ghost Species carries a sense of unbearable urgency, a detailed account of ‘accelerating collapse’. Seasons go awry, shifting in the course of mere decades in ways once associated with larger, geological timespans. A summer of ‘anxiety about fire and heat’ gives way to an August in which ‘there are fires, though that is no longer new’ and, towards the end of the novel, burning years where ‘winter will never arrive’. The opening narrative, a brief jeremiad, hints at great personal and planetary loss as a mother tells her child a sweeping, fable-like history of the human species, a ‘story about a people long ago … who were not quite like us’. The continuing stakes of that history are made clear, when the mother admits that ‘she is not alone in despairing for what the future holds, in wanting to find ways to hold it back for as long as possible’. It is thus ‘a story she tells only on the edge of sleep because she does not want the child to ask her how it ends’. Although the identities of this mother–child dyad are unclear until much later, this initial sense of an ending lends the novel a kind of ecological grief that encodes the narrative with existential dread. The core narrative begins in an all too plausible near future, tilted five minutes into the future, as it were. Californian tech

billionaire Davis Hucken – a Silicon Valley analogue to Mark Zuckerberg – secures a vast portion of Tasmanian land for the Foundation, a secretive though outwardly philanthropic offshoot of the social media platform Gather, whose user base is said to exceed those of Instagram and Twitter combined. The Foundation’s principal aim is to re-engineer the climate by reviving extinct species. However, Davis has other ideas – a glint in his ‘colourless blue’ eyes – when he recruits scientists, Kate Larkin and her partner Jay, to head a top-secret program tasked with resurrecting the Neanderthals, ‘to re-engineer our relationship with nature, the way we think, the sorts of attitudes that have got us where we are’. Unlike the winding, episodic structure in Clade, which creates a more otherworldly atmosphere, Ghost Species proceeds in a linear, at times breakneck, fashion, a deeply considered elegy with shades of the thriller. For in a matter of years (or paragraphs) they arrive at creation: Eve, the first and last of her kind. With her comes an awakening – and the novel’s central thesis – as Kate realises something: This project is wrong, not because it is an exercise in vanity, because it places humans at the centre of things or pretends to godhood … Instead it is wrong because it fails to see their solution is part of the problem, a misplaced belief that this is another problem they can manage, engineer, control.

Against the directive of the Foundation, Kate contemplates mothering the Neanderthal child, wishing to guide her as she grows up. As planetary breakdown quickens, the narrative shifts, refocused through Eve, as she struggles to comprehend our strange species: ‘violence … infects human society … Even the fires she can smell, the disruption of the forest can be seen as an expression of that same violence, enacted on a planetary scale.’ In the wake of civilisation, Eve finds refuge with a utopian enclave of sorts, an eco-community holding out against collapse and barbarism, eking out a little life. Even here, at the end of the world, she witnesses the ongoing ‘duplicity, the ease with which [they] lie and dissemble … Is it simply their nature? Or is it the price for their society? Their constant competition for status and power?’ Like many recent climate-change novels – for example, Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) – Ghost Species stresses that to address anthropogenic climate change not only requires immense social transformations, but also seismic cultural shifts, a recreation of the human. As a friend laments to Eve: ‘We had forgotten how to imagine other worlds.’ But through Eve, often by way of counterexample, Bradley gestures towards what that ontological regenesis might be, sketching the faint contours of how we might ‘reveal the world, or perhaps … make a new one’ far different to our own. g J.R. Burgmann is a writer and PhD student at Monash University, and co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach (Liverpool University Press, 2020). He is a researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Man versus beast

Over the course of the evening, a prehistoric penguin (Palaeosphenisucs patagonicus, but call him Paleo for short), the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy (who happens to be Pharaoh A witty exploration of history and humanity Hatshepsut, and she wants everyone to know), and a prehistoric Astrid Edwards pterodactyl (Pterodactylus antiquus) join the conversation as they await their auction. The absurdism ratchets up a notch, as Paleo and Hatshepsut bicker, T.bat acts like a teenager (there is a hint of Jurassic Park about him), and the pterodactyl – the oldest by a few hundred million years – remembers deep time. The reflections on hominids provide an endless stream of social commentary and the failings of humans. When talking Mammoth about the artwork depicting his excavation, Mammut notes ‘the by Chris Flynn image is a confection, of course, as is most human art’. Mammut University of Queensland Press is aware of his reputation (and that of his descendants, elephants) $29.99 pb, 264 pp as a species with long memories. He considers his kind storyverything about Chris Flynn’s Mammoth – the charac- tellers, and at several points the reader is treated to his thoughts ters, plot, and structure – should not work. But it does, on writing – ‘no-one gets into the writing game for money these and beautifully so. Mammoth is narrated by the fossil- days. No-one in their right mind, at any rate.’ ised remains of a 13,354-year-old extinct American Mammoth Flynn’s wit is on best display when critiquing Americans and (Mammut americanum), who likes to be addressed as Mammut. their never-ending belief in their own exceptionalism. Mammut, On 24 March 2007, the eve of his sale at the Natural History after all, notes that he has witnessed ‘forty-one of the forty-three Auction in New York, Mammut finds himself in a room with Commander in Chiefs. Let me tell you, and I say this as an origTyrannosaurus bataar (who prefers to be called T.bat). inal American, nothing compares to this nation’s willingness to Time, especially deep time, is a major preoccupation in the promote patently false notions about itself in order to create a novel. Mammut is an infant from the myth of American potency.’ point of view of T.bat (who lived around Human foibles – and the ever-present seventy million years ago), but because desire among humans to steal and possess Mammut walked the Earth with ancient old things – means Mammut was traded humans and has lived as a fossil among and stolen in post-revolutionary France, humans for more than two hundred years the failed Irish Rebellion, and even a part (T.bat was only unearthed in 1991), he of Lewis and Clarke’s expedition into the has experience other fossils do not. To American Midwest. The point is clear: pass the time on the night before the hominids may have, to date, avoided an auction, Mammut tells the tale of his extinction-level event, but we have not life, his death, and his reawakening as a learned from our mistakes. fossil travelling the world at the whims of There are two epilogues. The first is Homo sapiens (whom all characters refer from the narrator (which one suspects is to as hominids). close to the real voice of Flynn). Here we Mammoth is absurdist and full of learn there was indeed an auction at the humour. Early in the work, Mammut Natural History Auction in New York Chris Flynn addresses the reader and says, ‘Man on 24 March 2007; on sale were the tusk versus beast. Those were heady times. We lost, of course. But we of an American Mammoth, the severed hand of an Egyptian gave you a run for your money.’ Soon after, Mammut and T.bat mummy, and the skull of a Tyrranosuarus bataar, as well as the discuss what Homo sapiens would taste like and whether T.bat (a remains of a fossilised prehistoric penguin and pterodactyl. In carnivore, don’t forget) would have tried to eat a mammoth had keeping with the absurdity of the tale, the narrator reveals that they ever lived in the same time period. Then there is the running in real life the actor Nicholas Cage actually bought the skull joke of T.bat’s tiny hands. As the ever polite Mammut notes, ‘It’s (outbidding Leonardo di Caprio) and was forced to return it okay for a Tyrannosaurus to joke about the size of his hands but when the skull was proven to have been illegally smuggled out if anyone else does it’s body shaming.’ of Mongolia. Americans and their penchant for large old things! Mammut recounts the extinction of his species, partly a result The second epilogue offers an alternative ending, and it is of hominids and partly a result of catastrophic climate change. here that the reader is left with hope. We hominids may be one When remembering those ancient humans, Mammut notes, ‘Their of the most intelligent but least sophisticated species to have numbers were few at first, but we immediately knew they would ever walked the planet, but we still have a choice to stop the be trouble … [They] singled out mature bulls such as myself for destruction we wreak. g our tusks. They fashioned them into thrones for their chieftains. My species was being wiped out so their leaders would have Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. somewhere nice to sit.’ Times, of course, haven’t changed much. She teaches writing at RMIT University.

3 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

Days of our Grindr

Wordswarms and quiet observations Alex Cothren

The Adversary by Ronnie Scott

Hamish Hamilton 256 pp, $29.99 pb

ne of the few details we learn about the unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s début novel, The Adversary, is that he is fond of Vegemite. Although only a crumb of information, this affinity for the popular breakfast tar reveals much about our hero. Just as Vegemite ‘has to be spread very thin or you realised it was salty and unreasonable’, his human interactions give him a soupçon of a social life, a mere taste that never threatens to overwhelm his senses. Despite being in the prime of his life and free of obligations during university break, this young gay man rarely ventures beyond his Brunswick share house, preferring to ‘read books, take a break from study, and stare all day at Grindr’. Amid the sexual buffet of hook-up apps, his problem is not so much finding company as keeping those in his network in equipoise between available and physically present: ‘my ideal boyfriend would be found in a hard-to-reach location, large and silent, mythical in several important ways’. He is confused by the countervailing surges of lust and disgust he feels for the bodies around him. ‘I was basically a sexual being … I just knew people were gross and preferred them to keep their distance’. This confusion is a welcome reminder that knowing one’s sexual orientation does not by itself unknot the complicated and highly individualised question of exactly what it is we desire and from whom. Wisely, the novel never clarifies how we are supposed to feel about the narrator’s social quarantine – is it cowardice or courageous non-compliance? In this way, The Adversary brings to mind another enigmatic novel, Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). Our narrator does eventually upend his routine of endless showers and lonely binge-drinking. He ventures into the world with the most 2020 resolution imaginable: ‘make friends other than internet and sex people’. His impetus is the looming absence of Dan, housemate and friend, who has a serious new beau in the handsomely blank Lionel: ‘my friend had been substituted with a boyfriend … the real Dan was drip-fed nutrients in some basement cocoon, swaddled up in bodysnatcher ooze’. Dan is the book’s best character, his mercurially shifting moods leaving the narrator feeling ‘respected one second, extremely small and laser-scrutinised the next’. It is not hard to see how Dan’s mix of detachment and disarming tenderness intoxicates the narrator, although their relationship seems to be less protégé-and-mentor than experimentand-scientist. In one hilarious scene, Dan reacts to the narrator’s

confusion with clinical chill: ‘This is why I was right to make you go out and meet people. Everyone should be able to interpret human scents.’ Desperate to replace Dan or become a person interesting enough to retain him, the narrator sets out into the Melbourne summer, where hijinks ensue. He trips and mumbles through a series of lovers and mishaps, although the action is mostly low-key. Those expecting self-discovery via the exotic or erotic, à la Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning Less (2017), may find their blood cooled a bit. Scott’s talents reside instead in dry-ice descriptions of the approximate, the tantalising, the not quite sensual: ‘we didn’t really know how to touch each other properly; we lay on our sides, propped up on one arm, sort of lazily batting each other’s chests and stomach’. One can almost hear the Hollywood string section’s befuddlement when a belated kiss is described as ‘how a mouth could taste, as long as you were busy thinking about real estate’.

Amid the sexual buffet of hook-up apps, his problem is not so much finding company as keeping those in his network in equipoise between available and physically present Despite being fairly light on incident, the book still feels dense due to the narrator’s indefatigably neurotic voice, which is part Woody Allen, part David Foster Wallace footnote. Although it is hinted that the narrator is studying literature, he seems more like a talented but over-exuberant first-year sociology student, his rapid-fire brain unable to let the slightest human interaction go unparsed: ‘Two strangers jogged past, a demonstration of social innocence, a model by which two people could pass by two others, and everyone could choose their preferred level of involvement.’ It is ironic that the narrator sweats off an ecstasy comedown while promising to never again ‘do anything that didn’t have an off button’, because his brain is its own perpetual motion machine, spitting up questions quicker than they can ever hope to be answered: ‘where to put my hands? Who to marry? How to sit?’. This voice will probably be the book’s most divisive quality, its Vegemitiness, if you will, but those who enjoy Scott’s essays and his stewardship of the offbeat literary magazine The Lifted Brow will likely vibe with his character’s ability to explain how disinterest from a crush solves the Fermi paradox: ‘maybe it was just that other civilisations were boring, and Vivian-like societies knew we weren’t worth their time’. These word swarms are offset by moments of quiet observation that ring all the louder for their contrasting simplicity, such as the narrator’s haiku-like wonder at how digital flirting can so quickly become an IRL body: ‘This person, basically nude, so different from those pictures. The way someone could end up here, a stranger and you.’ The novel itself maintains this online-era blend of intimacy and distance throughout, inviting us into the inner life of someone so compelling that only at the affair’s end do we realise we never even knew his name. g Alex Cothren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University. He has published in various magazines. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Fiction

A babble of strange voices An absorbing and affecting début Ben Brooker

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

Scribe $29.99 pb, 288 pp

alking animals in fiction have, for the most part, been confined to children’s or otherwise peripheral literature. Yet they often serve a serious purpose. Aesop’s fables, with their anthropoid wolves, frogs, and ants, have been put to use as moral lessons for children since the Renaissance.The ‘it-narrative’, fashionable in eighteenth-century England and perhaps best exemplified by Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little: Or, the life and adventures of a lap-dog (1752), saw various animals expatiate their suffering at human hands. In a similar vein, the equine hero of Black Beauty (1877), the creation of Victorian Quaker-reformist Anna Sewell, railed against life as a taxicab horse. The habit of contemporaneous critics has been to dismiss such works as irredeemably sentimental, anthropomorphic, or merely curious, even when – as with George Orwell’s political fable Animal Farm (1945) or Virginia Woolf ’s Flush (1933), a ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel – starkly adult concerns are operating. What each of these examples has in common is that the animals depicted in them nevertheless remain indexed to the human realm, their otherness and agency – in a word, their animalness – elided. By contrast, a recent flurry of ‘serious’ Australian literature – including Eva Hornung’s novel Dog Boy (2009) and Ceridwen Dovey’s short story collection Only the Animals (2014) – offers complex, unvarnished portraits of the inner lives of animals, and of the often fraught entanglements between them and us. To this emerging body of work we can now add Laura Jean McKay’s début novel, The Animals in That Country. Its unconventional narrator is not, in fact, an animal, but a human: grandmother Jean Bennett, a tough-as-nails, possibly alcoholic guide in an outback wildlife park. ‘Tourists just want to stare into the eye of a four-metre croc,’ she says, ‘hold a blonde python, then sit on the zoo train with the breeze in their faces while I chug them on down to the back of the Park, to where we keep the dingoes.’ It’s the dingoes Jean likes best, and one in particular: ‘sweet’ Sue. Dingoes are one-person animals – and here the novel feels indebted to the demonological trope of the witch’s familiar. In the opening chapter, Sue even bites Jean and draws blood, as familiars are said to need to do in order to live – but Jean, characteristically, is under no illusions: ‘You can’t pop them in a backyard and expect them to be there when you get home from work. They’ll jump clean over your fence, be out ripping up chickens, finding a pack before you can blink.’ 3 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Jean’s relationship with the humans in her life is even thornier. She clashes with Angela, the Park manager who is also her daughter-in-law. Jean, separated from her ex, Graham, has a ‘weakness for… sausage-like guys [that] look like they’re about to burst out of their skin’, drunkenly bedding a succession of them. Only Kimberley, her granddaughter by Angela and troubled son, Lee, commands her unalloyed affection. Having established these characters with vivid economy – Kimberley is ‘like a toothpick in checks with a mop stuck on her head’ – McKay introduces the novel’s fulcrum with equal concision: a ‘superflu’ that becomes an epidemic in less than a week. The parallel with the coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping the world is too eerie to miss, but the effects of ‘zooflu’ are altogether stranger: anyone who contracts it begins to understand the language of animals – mammals initially, then even the birds and insects too. Overwhelmed by the babble of strange voices – McKay’s animals don’t merely ‘talk’ but issue meaning, often of an oblique kind, through the sum of their minds and bodies – many are driven to a kind of madness, some drilling holes in their own heads to stop the voices getting in. Animals are released en masse, scorned, and killed. Civilisation begins to collapse.

Animals remain indexed to the human realm, their otherness and agency elided Lee, effectively kidnapping Kimberley, takes off down south, seemingly intent on communing with a pod of whales. Jean, also infected, follows, unable – like Sue, whom she cannot bring herself to abandon – to resist the pull of her kin. All of this is sketched out in prose that is spare but colourful, viscerally imagined and alive with a distinctively Australian gallows humour. The book errs, perhaps, only in its resort to a deus ex machina-style development to tie off the plot. What is so striking about the way that McKay depicts human–animal communication in the wake of the epidemic is its avoidance of mawkishness or wish fulfilment (Doctor Dolittle this isn’t). The animal language, appearing on the page in bold typeface with poetry-like line breaks, carries a harsh, uneuphemised logic of survival. In ‘animalese’, petrol is ‘dead whales’ and crows are ‘sky meat’. As Jean says: ‘They’ve got it in their heads we’re out to kill them and keep dropping food along the way. We’re just messy predators too clumsy to catch them. That’s how all these animals see us. We’re not “friend or foe”; we are the enemy, every single time.’ The novel’s boldest stroke is to recast the dream of interspecies communication as a nightmare, in the process reasserting rather than diminishing the alterity of animals (which here, in a further alienation, inhabit a temporality distinct from our own). In turn, McKay exposes our own animality anew, and challenges us to reconsider our unstable relationships with the non-humans in our lives without providing a pat moral. This is an absorbing and affecting book, and one to which I’m able to pay the highest compliment: that, in the days after finishing it, the world felt different to me, its animals not speaking but not silent either. g Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, and essayist.

Fiction

Transgressions

Ties that bind

Jay Daniel Thompson

David Whish-Wilson

A character-driven novel

Three new Australian crime novels

Sweetness and Light by Liam Pieper

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 336 pp

onnor is a thirty-something Australian who bides his time grifting in India. His targets are Western female tourists, whom he describes as ‘talent’, and whom he seduces and fleeces. Connor seems to be escaping something, most likely the upbringing in which his masculinity and personal safety were constantly called into question. Sasha is an American tourist with an equally bleak back-story. Her marriage has just ended, and she is in India to attend an ashram. Sasha hopes that this experience will deliver her to ‘another level’ of spiritual enlightenment, one she could not achieve in the cacophony of New York City. These two troubled souls cross paths on a train and begin something resembling a relationship. This connection is threatened by the domineering individuals who have inserted themselves into Connor’s and Sasha’s lives. The couple are menaced by a past that’s never far away. Sweetness and Light, the fourth book by Melbourne writer Liam Pieper, is a character-driven affair. The sad and sordid world inhabited by the protagonists is evoked with disarming vividness; the unfolding of Connor and Sasha’s relationship, and the danger it faces at every turn, keeps the reader on edge and encourages us to turn the pages. Admirably, the novel avoids moralising about his protagonists’ actions. This is no easy feat when considering Connor’s transgressions. Sweetness and Light also eschews the kind of glib psychologising that could so easily pervade a narrative such as this. Substance abuse is a key theme here, as in Pieper’s first book, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year (2014). In Sweetness and Light, The author conveysboth the thrills and the ongoing harms wrought by alcohol abuse. Pieper also provides a corrective to the naïve, exoticising cultural narrative of Westerners trekking to India in search of spiritual highs. As may be evident, the contents of Sweetness and Light are anything but. The title’s irony is a bit too obvious. Nonetheless, Pieper’s book is compelling, crackling as it does with a tension that doesn’t let up. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. His research interests include digital media writing, media controversy, digital media pedagogy, and gender and sexuality in media culture.

ome years ago, a crime-writing friend of mine was at a writer’s festival with Lee Child. After a few drinks, my friend asked Child how he’d gone about preparing to write his Jack Reacher novels. Child’s reply was something along the lines of not putting pen to paper before he’d spent six months reading all of the successful crime novels he could find, and before parsing out exactly what made them popular with readers. Once this was done, he sat down to write. The rest, of course, is history. If Child were setting up shop here in contemporary Australia, the chances are strong that one of the key elements he’d take from commercially successful novels of recent years would be a rural setting. This makes sense, in that it’s partly Australia’s vast and varied landscapes that make the country unique and of interest to overseas readers in particular. Neither does the rural turn of much recent Australian crime fiction point toward a formulaic bent – there exists a great variety of representation of character and place. Three new Australian crime novels demonstrate this variety, although, remarkably perhaps, they are linked not just by rural settings but also by a primary relationship between a mother and son whose anxieties provide the ignition point necessary to drive the narratives. Anne Buist’s follow-up to her three-book Natalie King: Forensic Psychiatrist series is the standalone The Long Shadow (Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 320 pp). The novel’s first-person narrator is psychologist Isabel Harris, who, together with her husband and infant son, has moved from the city to the small town of Riley. Her first impressions are that ‘there was little to announce Riley itself, just a dark line of trees in the distance: a gash, with Riley on it, that cut through the centre of the landscape’. The town is small, isolated west of Dubbo, and prone to flood, although it’s currently in a time of debilitating drought. Isabel’s husband, Dean, is an institutional toecutter who has been sent to Riley to sort out perceived problems at the local hospital. The locals are rightly wary of Dean and his motives; the hospital is the biggest employer in town and there has been a spate of small hospital closures elsewhere. To occupy herself, Isabel establishes a mother–baby therapy group whose members – Sophie, Teagan, Roisin, Kate, and Zahra, each with different problems – are central to the novel’s plot, while serving as windows to the town’s broader social politics and history. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Unbeknown to her patients, Isabel is also the victim of a recent trauma after the near loss of her son, Noah, following a momentary lapse of concentration. When a note is passed to Isabel during the group’s first meeting, suggesting the culprit behind the twenty-five-year-old abduction and murder of a newborn is once again active, Isabel is drawn to investigate, driven by the relentless anxiety that her son might be in danger. This is no easy feat, of course, in a town riven with secrets and ancient loyalties. Isabel is an outsider, too, in more ways than one – not only is she from the city, but her middle-class values, her tendency to view everyone through the lens of clinical analyses, and her husband’s employment all work to distance her. Driven by a stubborn need to know the truth about the historical murder, it’s ultimately good old-fashioned relationship building that creates the emotional intimacy and trust necessary to get to the heart of the matter.

ith the recent bushfires fresh in everyone’s memories, Kimberley Starr’s Torched (Pantera Press, $32.99 pb, 400 pp) couldn’t be more topical. The novel is written from two perspectives: that of Phoebe Warton, a small-town school principal and, to a lesser extent, her teenage son Caleb. They both live in the Yarra Valley town of Brunton, close to the city but distant enough to have its own distinct personality and longer European gold rush history. When a catastrophic fire ignites one afternoon, burning through the town and taking many lives, the immediate suspicion falls upon Caleb, a CFA volunteer who wasn’t at his post and who can’t properly explain his absence. Caleb fits the profile of a firebug, both as a young male and an outsider – he wears Goth clothes and sports lip rings. To many townsfolk, he appears surly and aloof, it not outright deviant. These prejudicial feelings condemn him when the catastrophic fire recedes, and some of his actions take on a sinister appearance. The reader, however, comes to know Caleb through Phoebe’s eyes. She refuses to believe in his guilt, and it’s her steadfast defence of her son that drives the narrative as evidence mounts. Their filial relationship is tellingly described, as we come to understand why Caleb is so troubled, secretive, and at times apathetic. His behaviour frustrates Phoebe, of course, who, in words familiar to many parents of teenage children, has gradually lost her vision of his ‘infinite, magical future.’ But Phoebe never loses hope, despite the costs to her relationships in the town. She backs Caleb every step of the way, even as she seeks to break through his teenage reserve, and to thereby discern the meanings behind his works of art drawn at the time of the fire. This central relationship, with all of its anxieties and frustra-

tions, and all of its history and complexity, is both the heart of the novel and the driver of the plot, but it is also a terrific meditation on the meaning of motherhood in the face of misunderstanding, disbelief, outright malice, and intimate deception. Torched is also a beautifully written novel, using an elegant language to sift through each character’s stories but also to vividly represent the town of Brunton itself, and its various townsfolk, while poetically and powerfully rendering the other vital and omnipresent character of Torched – fire itself.

.P. Pomare’s second novel, In the Clearing (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 326 pp), is similarly elevated by its use of the telling image and a focus on deep characterisation. It is also brilliantly plotted – turning our expectations and readings of characters on their heads to great effect. Alternating between the points of view of Amy, a child growing up amid the zealotry and weirdness of a rural cult, and Freya, a single mother to seven-year-old Billy, living in isolated peace but preparing for the worst, the novel begins with the chillingly authentic abduction of a child – a new member for the cult, and a new sister to Amy. Amy is a terrific character, with just the right notes of naïveté amid her growing doubt. Her diary entries render the sinister in childlike terms that suit her limited horizon. Her job is to teach her new sister while taking it upon herself to protect her from the punishments doled out to transgressors. Freya, on the other hand, is a woman whose trauma appears initially in the rearview mirror – ever visible but hopefully receding out of view. She is, however, eternally vigilant, and when signs start to appear that things aren’t as they seem, she doesn’t dismiss them but rather acts on them. The rising sense of psychological tension brought about by the alternating perspectives is deftly managed, so that when the two narratives are brought together, the effect is as visceral as it is clever. Pomare’s writing is clear and precise, with not a word wasted. The characters are especially well drawn, developed patiently and with empathy, so that the narrative’s various twists and turns reveal themselves with the appropriate degree of surprise, while remaining perfectly in keeping with our enhanced understanding of Freya’s and Amy’s worlds. It is the plot, however, of In the Clearing that is especially impressive – ambitious, audacious, and masterfully rendered. g David Whish-Wilson’s latest novel is True West (2019) and his next novel is Shore Leave, out with Fremantle Press in November 2020. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia, and coordinates the creative-writing program at Curtin University.

TRIBUTE AND TRADE

China and Global Modernity, 1784–1935 Essays on China and the West Edited by William Christie, Angela Dunstan and Q.S. Tong 4 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

Memoir

Says who?

Sailing close to the rocks of self-pity Jacqueline Kent

She I Dare Not Name: A spinster’s meditations on life by Donna Ward

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 324 pp

he confusing aspects of this book begin with the title, She I Dare Not Name. Instead, there is a whole book about this person, a self-described spinster. Then there’s the S-word itself, which has carried a heavy negative load since about the seventeenth century. (A minor irritation is the back-cover blurb, which describes this as ‘a book about being human’ – as distinct from being what?) She I Dare Not Name is a series of essays in which Donna Ward explores herself as a single, childless woman. She tells her own life story, moving backwards and forwards in time. She was evidently a girl and young woman who expected marriage and motherhood to be part of her life. Presumably she intends to show how, through her experience of living, she has learned to assimilate the aspects of the person she is, wrestling with the difficult business of living, growing, being an adult. I was expecting her to grab the title ‘spinster’ by the scruff of the neck and send it packing, with forceful arguments about single women’s courage in rejecting unsuitable opportunities to couple and/or procreate, as well as their intelligence and general assertiveness, along with a few statistics about how much healthier, happier, and long-lived single women are. There is some of that. Ward says, ‘Reclaiming spinsterhood … is to drift into the joy of a room of one’s own … it is to live, work and sleep to one’s own beat.’ She also expands her field of reference by describing others – a man walking to the South Pole, for example – who have perforce come to terms with enforced solitude. This is where she is at her best: there is some beautiful writing about the joys of being alone in nature. Ward is good on the silence of the solitary life, and her descriptions of landscape and climate – especially a huge Perth storm in 2010 – are sensitively observed. She also has some interesting things to say about the position of single women in Australian society. There is a useful and depressing list of all the things that Gough Whitlam achieved for women, and how much of that was destroyed by John Howard. She also skewers the behaviour of some people when confronted by single women. Anyone who has been, or is, in that situation will surely recognise the ‘so why aren’t you married yet?’ question, and we have all met Bridget Jones’s Smug Marrieds. But Ward seems overwhelmed by what she has not chosen for herself. ‘I am beyond the balance of intimacy and solitude and deep, deep into the territory of she I dare not name,’ she writes. ‘I am spinster. I stand in grief and loneliness, the fractured para-

graphs of a discontinued narrative.’ What are the sources of this grief ? Ward mentions a series of failed relationships with men. Instead of discussing the dynamics of these and perhaps looking at what she has expected such liaisons to be, she belittles or dismisses those experiences, coyly giving former lovers names from Greek mythology. Nor does she spend much time on analysing what she thinks marriage and children might give her and what she might give in return. She also writes about friends who, secure in their knowledge that her life is not theirs and that theirs is better, evaluate her in terms of what she does not have. (My response to this was simple: for heaven’s sake, ditch those people and find some friends who will value you for the person you are.) There is quite a lot of this sort of thing, and it becomes annoying.

Ward as evidently a girl and young woman who expected marriage and motherhood to be part of her life Ward says that travel helps her deal with her sense of feeling that she is a lesser being because of her single status. She is a practising psychotherapist, and she seems to have enough money, time, and freedom to go when and where she likes. (Aren’t spinsters supposed to be poor and downtrodden?) It’s good that she is able to do this, but from time to time she sails much too close to the rocks of self-pity. Ward’s sense of what she lacks overpowers many of her insights in the book. She has also fallen into the habit – a trap common to writers of memoir and autobiography – of assuming that all women in her position have the same views as she does. (She states that feminism has rejected all forms of religion because religion is patriarchal. This will be news to feminists who are believers.) Certainly, many woman who have lived alone without family all their adult lives have had pangs of regret about childlessness. But pangs of regret do not a thesis make. In the face of some of Ward’s declarations about the bad aspects of singlehood, I sometimes found myself thinking: Yes? Says who? In the end, I found this book exasperating, largely because Ward spends so much time harping on the misery of being herself. Her pervasive tone of ‘woe is me’ – the book is introspective without much self-awareness – is sometimes downright alienating. I put this book down thinking that it may be possible to be too much in touch with one’s feelings. g Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her most recent book is Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019).

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www.australianbookreview.com.au A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Memoir

Reckoning

A memoir of mental illness Rachel Robertson

Hysteria

by Katerina Bryant

NewSouth $29.99 pb, 208 pp

read this book about a young woman falling into the dislocating world of a puzzling mental illness at a time when the global pandemic was disrupting many people’s equilibrium. I started to wonder: might living through this time of enhanced anxiety encourage empathy towards people who experience extreme anxiety in non-pandemic times? If those living in the ‘kingdom of the well’ (as Susan Sontag puts it) now start to recognise the contingent, temporary, and often accidental nature of well-being, could that trigger a deeper understanding of those who always live with chronic illness or disability? Katerina Bryant has suffered from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder since she was a child. In her early twenties, she began to experience moments of depersonalisation when she dissociated from all around her, ‘like a cloak taking me out of the world’. The episodes became more serious and more frequent, almost like epileptic seizures. Hysteria is partly the story of Bryant’s search for a reason for the episodes – a diagnosis if you will – and partly an exploration of the lives of four other women who lived with or studied similar illnesses. The way Bryant weaves her own story, which is beautifully rendered, between stories of other women and references to books and films is a strength of this memoir. The reader’s curiosity is always piqued, and yet there is no sense of the gratuitous voyeurism that can accompany some illness narratives. Bryant’s non-epileptic seizures are a modern incarnation of what used to be known as hysteria (later called conversion disorder). Hysteria, of course, was only diagnosed in women: it was thought to be a malady of the uterus. As Bryant notes, hysteria really signified the lack of a diagnosis, and its manifestations and ‘treatment’ reflected the socio-cultural milieu more than they did any clear medical or psychiatric knowledge or guidelines. In 1602, fourteen-year-old Londoner Mary Glover was subject to exorcism, whereas Blanche Wittmann in the 1880s was probably given an early version of electric shock treatment. Today, medication and psychological therapy are more likely to be offered as treatment. As well as Glover and Wittmann, Bryant examines Sigmund Freud’s account of his case study ‘Katharina’ in his Studies on Hysteria, and explores the life of German psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson. Bryant learns something from each of the women she studies. Edith was imprisoned (largely for being Jewish) in 1936 in Jauer Women’s Prison, where she continued to practise among the wom4 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

en prisoners. It was there that she described depersonalisation as a result of imprisonment. When she became gravely ill, friends were able to intervene. Edith escaped and moved to New York, where she continued to live and work for forty years. Bryant reads Edith’s life as a form of hope, a suggestion that she, like Edith, can be resilient, can survive. The other stories here are bleaker. Descriptions of Glover’s cold and paralysed body when she has a seizure and the prayers that surround her are chilling. The story of Wittmann (the socalled ‘Queen of the Hysterics’) is tragic: part of her ‘treatment’ was being locked in an asylum, having words about her illness etched on her body, and being publicly displayed by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot to his peers as an example of hysteria. After Charcot’s death, she remained at Salpêtrière Hospital working as a technician in a radiology lab then dying of cancer from radiation exposure at the age of fifty-four. In researching and writing about historical instances of supposedly hysterical women, Bryant is fulfilling several purposes. She is reading to try to understand her own experience, to find connections with other women, and to manage her fear and isolation. Narrative, involving as it does a form of linear progression, is a useful coping mechanism. For a writer and scholar such as Bryant, it is a natural way to find order and meaning in the chaos and uncertainty of a complex psychiatric illness. But the book is more than this. It is also a contribution to feminist counternarratives about women and the way women’s experiences have been controlled, exhibited, and pathologised by the medical and, before that, clerical professions in patriarchal cultures. The stigma of mental illness and neurobiological differences may not result in witch burning or institutionalisation in Australia now, but it still weighs heavily on individuals, contributing to their marginalisation, vulnerability, and poverty. Hysteria offers an engaging and insightful view from the inside of one woman’s experience and sets this story in a larger historical context, laying bare the suffering of women deemed to have hysteria, charting what has changed, and noting what has not yet shifted. In her own words, Bryant is aiming to ‘make severe mental illness something other than abject’. In fulfilling this goal, Bryant also notes that writing Hysteria ‘healed me of the idea that I could not live with the seizures’. This is no restitution or cure memoir but instead a kind of reckoning. What sort of life can she carve out for herself, now that she understands better the nature of her illness? How can society support and care for – and care about – others with severe mental illnesses? These are good questions for a memoir to explore, particularly in Covid-19 times, when we all see vulnerability in the mirror. In ‘voicing the shape’ of her own mental illness, Bryant may be giving us a way of learning to live with anxiety and fear, a way of looking outwards, with compassion and attention, from the self to the wider community. g Rachel Robertson is a West Australian writer and senior lecturer in writing at Curtin University. She was the joint winner (with Mark Tredinnick) of the 2008 Calibre Essay Prize. Her essays and short fiction have been published in many anthologies and journals. She is the author of Reaching One Thousand: A story of love, motherhood and autism (2012, 2018) and co-editor of Purple Prose (2015) and Dangerous Ideas About Mothers (2018).

Memoir

Radical hope

A lodestar for progressives Megan Clement

Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit

Granta $34.99 hb, 244 pp

ho better to shepherd us through a once-in-acentury pandemic than Rebecca Solnit? The prolific essayist, activist, and critic has long acted as a lodestar for progressives to follow in times of despair, providing encouragement to find Hope in the Dark (2004), as she did in a collection of essays after the beginning of the Iraq War, and demonstrating how human ingenuity can shine through in the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina in A Paradise Built in Hell (2009). It’s not surprising, then, that Solnit has been widely sought in 2020 to dispense her trademark brand of radical hope that we will emerge in better, fairer shape after our Covid-19 nightmare. But the Solnit we meet in Recollections of My Non-Existence, a memoir which covers her early years of adulthood, is not the Solnit we know today. This is a nineteen-year-old loner trying to find her voice as a writer in San Francisco against the insistent drumbeat of the threat of male violence, a writer who is ‘unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant and exhausted’. Recollections of My Non-Existence covers the years when Solnit was ‘trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone’. In January 1981 she moved into a studio apartment, the room of one’s own she needed to become a writer – ‘a home in which to metamorphose’ where she lived for twenty-five years. Now, nearly four decades later, she writes, ‘it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice’. That voice has been one that has offered women rigorous definitions of the shifting phenomena so many can sense happening but cannot quite put their fingers on. We were all tired of being patronised by men who knew less about a subject than we did before 2008, but that did not stop us from letting out a collective cry of recognition when we read the viral essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (later the title of a 2014 collection). Because of that piece, we were given the term ‘mansplaining’ – inspired but not coined by Solnit – to use when we encountered it in the wild. In the same way, Recollections of My Non-Existence confirms the suspicion that women are harmed by the act of existing in a fundamentally sexist milieu, especially when we are young, and that we do not have to personally experience the worst violence to be inexorably changed by it. Feminists have long talked, as Solnit does here, about violence

against women existing on a spectrum – one that begins at discrimination and ends at femicide. But there has been a reluctance to explore the less horrific acts that nonetheless preoccupy, exhaust, and harm us because of a perception that certain victims haven’t had it as bad as others. As Solnit points out, the problem with the pervasiveness of gender violence, in the 1980s as today, is that we have to change our behaviour in fear of it, even if we don’t experience it ourselves. ‘It gets you even if it doesn’t get you.’ This is especially vital in a post-#MeToo environment in which women are accused of conflating acts of verbal harassment and unwanted touching with rape or physical violence – often because the men who perpetrate these things are not as monstrous as Harvey Weinstein, which rather than merely setting the bar low seems to locate it somewhere below the Earth’s crust. The women at the extreme end of that spectrum cannot speak because they have been killed on the basis of their gender. Solnit makes a convincing case that the rest of us should all be able to speak and write about our experiences at other points along the continuum in the hope that it will change the culture that enables it to exist in the first place. ‘Silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder.’

Who better to shepherd us through a once-in-a-century pandemic than Rebecca Solnit? The downside of Solnit’s gift for naming quasi-universal phenomena is that at times her insights can feel obvious, her metaphors clunky. Though she is a gifted polemicist, polemic and memoir don’t always sit well together. In a passage comparing gender violence to a war in which a man can treat a woman as a ‘subject nation’, she writes that she tried to ‘survive all that by being an unnoticeable nation, a shrinking nation, a stealth nation’. It may be possible for a nation to shrink, but it is extraordinarily difficult for one to pass unnoticed, or to somehow operate in stealth mode. If the analogies do not always land, Solnit is generous in spirit – it is genuinely touching when she describes the ‘pinnacle’ of her career as the moment when a young woman ‘burst into a spontaneous jig at the sight of me’ at a book festival. Elsewhere, an anecdote about upsetting the archetypal ‘Midcentury Misogynist’ William S. Burroughs at his own party by dressing as a ballerina and posing for photos with him is laugh-out-loud funny and makes the reader want to see more of her wit throughout. At its best, Recollections of My Non-Existence pinpoints the simultaneous feelings of menace and promise we have during those excruciating yet exhilarating years of young womanhood. The menace is that you might get beaten or assaulted, raped or murdered. The promise is that you might become Rebecca Solnit, and that when young women see you they will dance a spontaneous jig. g Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Science

Consensual truth A limited defence of science Diane Stubbings

Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes

Princeton University Press (Footprint) $49.99 hb, 370 pp

n lectures delivered at Princeton University in November 2016, science historian Naomi Oreskes asked why, at a time when the epistemological and cultural relevance of science is subject to increasing doubt, we should still have confidence in science as our primary source of knowledge about the physical world. Why Trust Science? is the culmination of those lectures, and includes not only Oreskes’s appraisal of the scientific method but also four commentaries on the lectures. It is a work predicated, rightly or wrongly, on the assertion that the eminence of science ‘can no longer be maintained without argument’. In Merchants of Doubt (2010), co-authored with Erik M. Conway, Oreskes forcefully established the degree to which the science around smoking, ozone depletion, and climate change was, and continues to be, manipulated by political and economic interest groups. Here, however, Oreskes’s defence of scientific authority smacks of faint praise; a vindication that is haphazard and ultimately unconvincing. Beginning with the eighteenth-century notion of the ‘man of science’, and traversing the philosophies of Auguste Comte, Karl Popper, and Thomas Kuhn (among others), Oreskes surveys the development of science as a method for understanding and interpreting nature. While her acknowledgment of observation, theory, and experiment as the central drivers of science is crucial, the connection between Oreskes’s review of the history and philosophy of science and her conclusion – that we should trust science because of the consensual means by which it advances knowledge, and because of ‘its sustained engagement with the world’ – is limited. In truth, much of this material reads like a gratuitous detour (necessary, perhaps, to extend the lectures for publication), one that distracts from the more coherent if cursory arguments she offers regarding science’s expertise, its system of peer review, and its ability to self-correct. It is this latter aspect that Oreskes explores in her second lecture. If science was so wrong in its embrace of, for example, eugenics or limited energy theory (which argues that women should not pursue higher education lest they diminish the energy available to them for reproduction), how can we be sure that science is not also wrong now when it advocates for vaccination regimens or action on climate change? Oreskes seeks to demonstrate that objections to now-contentious theories were not as muted as we might suppose (eugenics), or that it was not so much science that went awry as the ways in which the science was represented in 4 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

the media (dental floss), but her arguments are at best ineffective and at worst a salve for doubters. For example, in her discussion of the rejection of continental drift, she signals that resistance to the theory was bound up in the anti-European ‘political ideals’ of the American scientific community. Similarly, her examination of scientific opposition to eugenics suggests that much of this opposition was politically motivated: left-wing scientists challenged eugenics not solely because of the scientific weakness of the argument but because they were certain that any program of eugenics would not be applied equally across social classes. In both cases, what begins as a defence of science only serves to imply the degree to which science may be steered – for good or ill – by social and political considerations. The four commentaries on Oreskes’s lectures are drawn from the history and sociology of science, philosophy, economics, public policy, and social psychology. (Which begs the question, why wasn’t a working scientist offered the chance to respond?) Each offers its own solution to the trust deficit that science is facing: a greater emphasis on the impact science has on our daily lives; more openness between government and scientists in the development of public policy; improvements in science communication; and a solution to the recurrent problems around the replicability of scientific findings. The overall tenuousness of these responses is captured in the confession of the social psychologist: ‘My observations … are mostly speculations. Everything I have said could be wrong. But I might be right as well.’ The perspectives offered on science in these commentaries – and, it must be said, in the book as a whole – seem merely peripheral to the fundamental problem that science currently faces: that we are living in a post-truth world where facts are too readily at the mercy of ideological imperatives (something to which Oreskes only fleetingly alludes). Further, no attempt is made to situate the diminished authority of science within a broader context, one in which many of the traditional bastions of authority – the political/ruling classes; the media – are similarly under threat. Why Trust Science? is not without its merits. Oreskes is right to stress the value of diversity in the practice of science, while also underscoring a distinction between the (desired) objectivity of science and the individual flaws and biases of those working within it. Her gesture towards the importance of scientific literacy if we are to overcome the ignorance that politicians (among others) are happy to exploit is welcome, as is her recognition of the harm that ensues when doubt and denial are normalised, although she fails to give either issue the weight it deserves. It is difficult to identify the audience Oreskes envisages for this book. She grants that ‘more scientific research is unlikely to settle the matter [of why we should have confidence in science], because non-scientific objections are not driven by scientific considerations and therefore will not be resolved by more scientific information’. Nevertheless, that is precisely what she seems to be reaching for here. Reading Why Trust Science?, one has a nagging sense that Oreskes has applied herself to the wrong question. More concerning, the weakness of her advocacy is likely to do little to inoculate science from the destructive advance of anti-science. g Diane Stubbings is a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne, investigating intersections between science and theatre.

Indigenous Studies

Catalyst and curio The dank spectre of racism Michael Winkler

Pathfinders: A history of Aboriginal trackers in NSW by Michael Bennett

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 336 pp

he Aboriginal tracker is a stock character in certain Australian films, employed as set dressing, catalyst, curio. Although fictional trackers have been celebrated on celluloid, few real trackers have been given life within the national memory. Some people may recall Billy Dargin and his role in locating and shooting Ben Hall. Others might think of Dubbo’s Tracker Riley, or Dick-a-Dick, who found the missing Cooper and Duff children near Natimuk in 1864 when they had been given up for dead. In Pathfinders, Michael Bennett reveals that there were more than one thousand Aboriginal men and women employed as police trackers in New South Wales between 1862 and 1973. Apart from trailing criminals or seeking missing people, trackers were also engaged in cadaver recovery, horse-breaking, station upkeep, grave digging, and rudimentary forensic investigation. The narrow acknowledgment by police of the superiority of Indigenous skills in this setting made tracking ‘one of the few jobs on offer for Aboriginal people in colonial society where traditional knowledge and training gave them a comparative advantage over the invaders’. At its essence, tracking meant ‘knowing how humans and animals modified the land as they moved across it’. The best trackers’ ability to traverse the bush was overlaid with minute attention to detail, psychological insight, and the application of informed guesswork. Many of the tracking feats astonish. Dargin tracked bushranger Gordon Mount for 300 kilometres. George Sharpley spent three days successfully tracking a thief more than 100 kilometres from Lightning Ridge to the Queensland border, over red stone ridges and clay pans. Bennett reports a case in Maitland in 1845 where a tracker noticed an ant carrying a white maggot ‘such as putrid flesh would produce’. This impelled him to dig deep below a stump with a black ant nest, uncovering a corpse. A culprit was found and hanged for murder. No one from 221B Baker Street could have done better. Bennett’s research foregrounds not just trackers but also some less well-known outlaws. There are the brutal Clarke brothers, responsible for the slaughter near Jinden of four special constables, numerically a greater outrage against police than Stringybark Creek. Bennett lists the astonishing escapes and escapades of Tommy Ryan, and recounts the three-state rampage of Jack Gowanah and Willie Koonamberry. Billy Bogan, a fine tracker who fell foul of the law, reversed his skills to evade capture for almost a year. The same gamekeeper-turned-poacher principle helped

the Governor brothers elude pursuers. They climbed through tree canopies and clambered along the bottom rung of wire fences to avoid leaving a trail. Throughout Pathfinders there are glimpses, sometimes explicated, sometimes at the edge of the frame, of Aboriginal disadvantage. Poverty, violence, racism, forced removals, early death – all the miserable marker posts of the past 232 years. Trackers dwelled in the uncomfortable zone between Aboriginal and settler worlds, grappling with the eternal dilemma of what to do when asked to track their countrymen and women, and with the invidious task of trying to ‘balance loyalty to the job with loyalty to family and culture’. Approval and even acclaim from non-Indigenous Australians came at a cost. As Bennett writes, ‘Even if it is accepted that trackers were largely loyal to their own communities, the fact that they worked for the police and helped protect the economic resources of the dominant white society that exploited Aboriginal people will mean their achievements will not be uniformly celebrated.’ Not that the dank spectre of racism was ever far away. In 1914, early in Tracker Riley’s career, the Dubbo Liberal published an article that commented on ‘the savage nature of these human bloodhounds’, a slur that Bennett believes may have led Riley to briefly resign his post. His career soon resumed, but when he retired in 1950 after forty years of celebrated service, he was denied a police pension. These stories are told without flash. Bennett is too scrupulous to tizzy up the historical record. Consequently, the book will be met more as a resource than as an entertainment. He has been as diligent as any tracker, working his way through the archives and undertaking original research for decades, evidenced through the copious reference section. His self-imposed parameters – restricted to what, who, when, and sometimes why – allows no incursion into the realm of how. White Australia’s othering of First Nations people and cultures, typically expressed as racial discrimination, slides at the other polarity into exoticising. Thus something as extraordinary as the ability to discern tracks through vast tracts of unhelpful country can be consigned to the category of magic. ‘Spooky Aboriginal bullshit’ is what a character in Dead Heart (1996) calls it; ‘weird Abo shit’ is how it is painted in Welcome to Woop Woop (1997). How could these trackers do what they did? Was it a quality of seeing, something that extends beyond eyesight? Was it a preternatural capacity for close attention? Was it superior cognitive processing, linking many seemingly insignificant indicators into a narrative? What rarefied intellect can trace pathways through the tangled Australian landscape without compass, topographical map, or SatNav, and is it a feat of remembering or of understanding? These are questions for a different book. Meanwhile, Bennett’s research should remediate some of the gaudy fictional interpretations. Whereas Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002) portrayed the role’s drama and dignity, the more common filmic approach was exemplified by Journey out of Darkness (1967), where the tracker with quasi-magical powers was played by Ed Devereaux in blackface. The Arrernte man he captured was Malay-born Tamil singer Kamahl. With Bennett’s book for guidance, Australia can do better. g Michael Winkler won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers I Charles Baudelaire’s mother— orphaned at seven—living on the charity of friends— at twenty-six married an ex-priest, widower— After her husband died she married again and was happy— It is said—

‘This second marriage was to have a disastrous effect on his life’— ‘No longer being the sole focus of his mother’s attention gave him a trauma’—

‘When you have a son like me you do not remarry’— He asked her endlessly for money— She repaid his publishers— He wrote to her— ‘I am the only object which makes you live’— ‘After my death, you will no longer live, that’s clear’— He wrote repeatedly of returning to Honfleurs— He passed through there once by train and did not stop— II Rainer Maria Rilke’s mother— whose first child died at two weeks— it is said— ‘acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl’s clothing’— and hurt her husband’s ‘sensibilities’ by ‘parading the boy in female dress’— Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood— ‘In Western European countries until about 1920 boys would wear dresses until they were ‘breeched’— ‘breeching’ happened from the age of about fourto eight-years-old’— She gave him the doll, doll-bed and kitchen that he wanted— He spent hours combing his doll’s hair— He had a ‘saber hammered in gold’, a knight’s ‘tin decoration’— He was, he wrote, ‘eating like a wolf, sleeping like a sack’—

When he turned six she breeched him and took him to school— He suffered from headaches and fevers— She sat by his bed, through all the hours, to soothe him— In his second year of primary school, 200 hours— In his third year of primary school, two whole quarters— His father left—The grandparents were no help— His father blamed his mother for his unhappiness at the military school that his father had chosen— He wrote to her almost every day— He wanted letters, food packets, skates, visits— She gave him these— Whenever she left—they say—he felt abandoned— ‘If in my father’s house’ (his father had left) ‘love was shown me with both care and concern only by my father’ (he lived with his mother) ‘you know those persons who are to blame— and that the woman whose first and most immediate care I should have been loved me only when bringing me out in a new little dress’— ‘Quiet endurance and courageous resignation’, he said, were his thing— and his suffering, ‘only the whim of a pitiful, pleasure seeking creature (Mother)’ — III Arthur Rimbaud’s mother— according to reports— was ‘sour-faced’— was ‘narrow-minded, stingy, completely lacking in a sense of humour’— was ‘renfermée, têtue et taciturne’— He named her his ‘Mouth of Darkness’— His father— ‘good-natured, easy-going, generous’— came home on leave only to give her another child— ten weeks with her—five children— after which he did not come back again— When the youngest was four he retired easily to Dijon— She named herself a widow— She worried about the children’s education—

She had to call the police to bring him home— In Paris, he put sulphuric acid into Charles Cros’s water— He stabbed a knife into Verlaine’s wrist— His ‘teen rebel phase’—they say—was ‘a reaction to life with Vitalie’— He stayed with her all summer writing ‘A Season in Hell’— She paid for it to be published— When she asked him what it meant he answered ‘It means what it says’— From Africa, he kept writing her letters— he wanted books, goods—he had tasks for her— He had ‘a romantic view of his father’— ‘My dear Mummy— I got your letter and the two stockings alright— Do not be upset about all this, however— But it’s a poor reward for so much work— so many privations and troubles— P.S. As for the stockings, they are useless—I shall sell them somewhere’— In 1890, a photo—she stands in her garden with flowers— IV Philip Larkin’s mother sent him ‘seven enormous pairs of socks’ and lilies to brighten up his room— ‘Dear Creaturely Mop, this seems a good time to warn you I am down to my last three pounds’— She wrote to him— ‘Marriage would be no certain guarantee as to socks being always mended, or meals ready when they are wanted. Neither would it be a good idea to marry just for these comforts. There are other things just as important’— for which, she has been held responsible for his not marrying— ‘He couldn’t marry anyone because he was involved with his mother’— It is said— She wrote—

she was ‘nervous, constantly whining’— ‘she was the poet’s muse—and his millstone’— ‘When I came to the sketch of me, I laughed outright’—

His father attended Nazi rallies— In his mother, though, he complained of ‘a kind of “defective mechanism”. Her ideal is “to collapse” and to be taken care of ’— ‘Dear Mop Creature—send some underclothes please’—

Lisa Gorton Lisa Gorton’s latest poetry collection is Empirical (Giramondo, 2019). This poem combines quotes from Wikipedia biographies of the poets and, sometimes, of their mothers.

Military History

Patriotism and mutiny

French-speaking population had little enthusiasm for the war, and conscription for service overseas would have split the country. With its large Afrikaner population, many of whom opposed An engrossing study of wartime armies the war, South Africa never resorted to conscription; by the last David Horner year, the Union had trouble maintaining its sole fighting division. Australia relied on volunteers for overseas service, but introduced conscription for home service at the beginning of the war. This Fighting the People’s War: meant that conscripts could fight in the Australian territory of The British and Commonwealth New Guinea; later the conscripts fought further afield. armies and the Second Whether the soldiers were conscripts or volunteers, they genWorld War erally came from the lower socio-economic levels of their societies. They were the same men who had suffered in the Depression; by Jonathan Fennell acutely aware that they were being asked to shoulder a more Cambridge University Press onerous burden than civilians at home, they were determined $45.95 hb, 964 pp that they should be fighting for a better future. This attitude was n its long war in Afghanistan, Australia lost forty-one soldiers. highlighted by the so-called ‘Furlough Mutiny’ in New Zealand. These deaths were felt keenly, and usually the prime minister, In mid-1943 almost 6,000 New Zealand soldiers serving in the other senior politicians, and army chiefs attended the funer- Mediterranean returned to New Zealand on furlough. There they als. In addition, more than 260 soldiers were wounded. Service discovered that ‘wharfies’ earned far more than they did and that in Afghanistan was trying and demanding. Yet, while Special 3,500 men who were eligible for war service were kept at home beForces units were constantly rotated through numerous deploy- cause they held jobs in ‘essential industries’. Most of these soldiers ments, at any particular time fewer than 2,000 Australian sol- refused to return to the war; only thirteen per cent of the original furlough party embarked for the return voyage. The remainder diers were serving in Afghanistan. How much more difficult, then, was it for a democracy like were court-martialled and dishonourably discharged. Fennell Australia to maintain tens of thousands of soldiers overseas calls it ‘the most severe outbreak of indiscipline in any British or Commonwealth force in both world during the six years of World War II? wars’. Casualties were far heavier. For inReflecting the attitude in New stance, in the battles in Egypt between Zealand, in 1944 and 1945 the July and November 1942, the 9th AusBritish and Commonwealth armies tralian Division lost 1,225 killed, 3,638 struggled to maintain their numbers. wounded, and 946 captured. Many As Fennell puts it, this manpower soldiers had been overseas for more crisis was not just a product of demothan two years. How did they maintain graphic limitations or the problems their morale? How did Australia find of balancing the requirements of the trained reinforcements to keep the armies against wartime economies, division up to strength? ‘but also a manifestation of the These are the sorts of quescontinued inability of Britain and tions that Jonathan Fennell, senior the Empire to mobilise and enthuse lecturer at King’s College, London, its citizen armies … to serve with seeks to answer in this outstanding the unswerving commitment and new book, which looks at experiences self-discipline required’. of the citizen armies of Britain, AusThroughout the war, Army autralia, Canada, India, New Zealand, thorities censored soldiers’ letters and South Africa in World War II. As to remove any information that Fennell makes clear, in those countries Jonathan Fennell might have been useful to the there was much less enthusiasm for enemy. This censorship also enWorld War II than for World War I. In the first two years of World War I, 307,966 Australian men abled the authorities to gauge the morale of the soldiers voluntarily enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) from and to pinpoint causes of discontent. Fennell has used a population of barely five million. In the first two years of World the censorship summaries, based on seventeen million letters, to War II, total enlistments in the Second AIF, from a population gain an insight into the thinking of the soldiers during the war. Soldiers’ morale was affected by a series of influences. The first of seven million, amounted to 188,587. Britain and the Commonwealth countries responded to this was the tactical ability of their commanders. Fennell shows how, problem in varying ways. Britain and New Zealand promptly after early defeats, commanders slowly reshaped their tactics, so brought in conscription. This was not necessary in India where, that, with appropriate training, their soldiers were at last able to with its huge population, sufficient volunteers could be found win on the battlefield. For instance, the Australian Army under to join the army for its economic benefits. In Canada, the General Sir Thomas Blamey developed tactics and organisations

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Fiction that were suitable for jungle warfare in New Guinea. Another cause of low morale was incompetent junior officers. In response, the British Army introduced a selection process that not only produced better officers but encouraged more soldiers to apply for officer training because the selection system no longer relied on class or the old school tie. A variant of this process is still in use in the Australian Army today. Similarly, psychologists tested soldiers to ensure that they were employed in the most suitable occupations. Further, soldiers needed to feel that they were fighting for a purpose. The British and Commonwealth armies employed education officers to lead unit discussions about current affairs and to circulate current affairs bulletins. The psychology and education corps, now important parts of the Australian Army, were formed at this time. When the censorship summaries showed that the soldiers were disgruntled about conditions, the army introduced canteens, mobile bath units, and other amenities. General Ronald Forbes Adam, the British Army’s adjutant-general and one of the unsung heroes of the war, aimed to make the Army an institution ‘more careful of human values, more responsive to the needs and aspirations of the ordinary soldiers and more democratic in spirit’. Fennell sets these issues against succinct accounts of all the major campaigns conducted by the British and Commonwealth armies, revealing how they developed new tactics and responded to the challenges of maintaining morale and fighting spirit. With numerous campaigns and battles to analyse, the book is long, but it is worth the effort. It is deeply researched in the archives of the respective countries and uses the latest scholarship to make wise and balanced judgements about the performances of the armies in their many battles. Inevitably, in covering such a broad canvas the author cannot be expert on everything. Referring to political problems in Australia, Fennell claims that the government and the opposition could not find ‘a way to work effectively together in the national interest’. He overlooks the Advisory War Council, where government and opposition leaders sat together. Through his membership of this council, John Curtin was better prepared for the time when he became prime minister in 1940. Further, Fennell accepts the old canard that Curtin insisted on the 1st Australian Corps returning from the Middle East. In truth, it was Winston Churchill who suggested the divisions go to the Far East; Curtin insisted that they be diverted to Australia rather than to Burma. This is an engrossing book that should cause scholars to rethink their approach to the study of Britain and the Commonwealth countries in World War II. It should spur Australian scholars to re-examine Australia’s role in that war. g David Horner is emeritus professor of Australian defence history in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. Author or editor of some thirty-five books on military history, defence, and intelligence, he is the Official Historian of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations, and also Official Historian of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). The first volume of the ASIO history, The Spy Catchers, was joint winner of the 2015 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for History.

Multiple perspectives

A postcolonial look at the Gold Rush era Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Stone Sky Gold Mountain by Mirandi Riwoe

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 264 pp

n this multi-perpective novel, Mirandi Riwoe trains her piercing postcolonial gaze on Gold Rush-era Australia, lending richness to the lives of the Chinese settlers who are often mere footnotes in our history. Ying and Lai Yue are outsiders before their arrival in Far North Queensland, where they have gone to find their fortunes after their younger siblings are sold into slavery. While Ying struggles with hiding her gender in the male-dominated goldfields, Lai Yue is haunted by his betrothed, Shan – killed in a landslide back in China – and by his failure to protect the family from penury. Meanwhile, in nearby Maytown, a white woman, Meriem, grapples with her exile from respectable society while working as a maid to local sex worker Sophie. As in her Stella Prize-shortlisted novella The Fish Girl (2017), Riwoe masterfully wields the interiority of marginalised characters to destabilise dominant colonial narratives. Riwoe’s depth of research is evident in her intricate descriptions of late-1800s Queensland. Food is a signifier of both cultural difference and shared humanity: on the goldfields, hunger is universal; sweet morsels and quaffs of rum connect characters when language cannot; the whites are no less foreign than the Chinese whose dietary customs they mock. The opening of the novel is somewhat languorous, as Riwoe lingers on characters’ memories of the lives they have left behind. It is with Ying’s relocation to Maytown, and the challenging of expectations as she befriends Meriem, that the pulse of the story quickens. Lai Yue’s fate feels comparatively separate, as he takes a job as a carrier on an all-white expedition; nonetheless, it’s a heartbreaking depiction of the long-term effects of shame and alienation. Aboriginal claims to the land are alluded to at various points. ‘[I’m] as fearful of the natives as anybody,’ Lai Yue reflects, downplaying a massacre he has witnessed. In highlighting the perspectives of non-white settlers, Riwoe paints a nuanced portrait of our violent past and maps the fault lines within our multicultural present. Fans of The Fish Girl will doubtless enjoy reading Riwoe as she works with a larger canvas and a bigger cast of characters. This is innovative historical fiction, and a vital reappraisal of an oft-glorified period in Australian history. g Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of a short story collection and two novels. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

International Studies

Information hostages The callous strategies of war Thomas McGee

We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know: Dispatches from an age of impunity by Sophie McNeill

ABC Books $34.99 pb, 416 pp

n 1991, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard provocatively claimed that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’. His argument was not a denial of the violence, suffering, and death experienced by civilians but rather that those very realities were absent in the mediatised consumption of the conflict. Dominant discourses reproduce the key events of the age, and the distant spectator can hardly escape the saturation of simulated symbols they entail. In Baudrillard’s words, ‘the warriors bury themselves in the desert leaving only hostages to occupy the stage, including all of us as information hostages on the world media stage’. Since the Gulf War, media coverage of conflict has evolved alongside the emergence of an expanded apparatus of propaganda and misinformation. The advent of ‘fake news’ wars, accompanied by social media bots and trolls, has arguably resulted in a devaluation of truth in journalism. Sophie McNeill’s We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know: Dispatches from an age of impunity is framed as a call to arms against this status quo from within the media industry. As the ABC’s former Middle East correspondent, McNeill tells the story of the region’s post-Arab Spring conflicts and continued injustices through a series of civilian profiles. The violence that has engulfed Syria for almost a decade forms the backdrop of the first half of the book. Indeed, the title stems from McNeill’s original reporting on the evacuation of civilians from a besieged eastern Aleppo. With her accessible and captivating prose, McNeill narrates various aspects of Syria’s tragedy. She documents how hopes for peaceful change diminished as popular dissent in 2011 was met by a ruthless government crackdown and how it ultimately developed into civil war. The people she profiles testify to the withholding of food aid and the targeting of health-care facilities as callous strategies of war. Other narratives tell of civilians wounded by barrel bombs, family separation, displacement, and the impacts of social isolation for refugees in Europe. As one of her interviewees reports, ‘Syria can teach you that things can always get worse.’ Rather than autobiographical memoirs of a journalist in the field, the book gives centre stage to the portraits of heroic characters whose individual fates represent the devastating contours of Syria’s conflict landscape. McNeill here goes far beyond the limited soundbites and feature stories of ‘people behind the headlines’ that might appear in daily news. Instead, her three-dimensional protagonists and their complex dilemmas develop across the chapters. Each story presents a compelling example of personal 5 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

sacrifices made for loved ones, community, or ideals. The tragic denouement of the love story between young revolutionaries Noura and Bassel is followed by the desperations of ‘Doctor’ Khalid, a ward nurse stepping up to perform increasingly impossible life-saving surgery on civilians in his besieged area, as the United Nations failed to provide supplies and alleviate malnutrition. While the position of the author is mostly unobtrusive, on occasion McNeill powerfully breaks the fourth wall of journalism and enters into the scene as an actor herself alongside her Middle Eastern subjects. This appears to be precisely what she is calling for her readers to do: to go beyond observing and take decisive action. For example, while reporting on the chaotic beach scenes on the refugee trail in Greece, an emotional encounter with ‘one old man standing alone by himself, leaning on a cane and quietly crying’ compels the author to step outside the journalistic brief. ‘None of us wanted to just carry on and pretend we had never met Nazieh and heard his desperate tale,’ she writes as her film crew embark on a quest to reunite him with his separated family members. The remainder of the book expands the scope from Syria’s unspeakable horror and suffering to cover similar experiences from the wider Middle East (Yemen, Iraq, Palestine, and the Arabian Gulf ). The regional scope, as well as her determination to capture the nuances in violations committed by all actors, is certainly a strength of McNeill’s work. While condemning the devastation caused by the Saudi-led bombardment in Yemen, she does not shy away from highlighting the recruitment of child soldiers by Houthi rebels on the other side. She shows how civilians in Iraq and Syria have been simultaneously victims of Islamic State terror and US-led international coalition airstrikes. Likewise, not only Israel but also the inter-Palestinian rivalry (between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority) have deprived Palestinian civilians of urgent medical care. In presenting these nuances, McNeill also highlights Western double standards across the region: complicity in oppressive policies of wealthy Gulf states, while condemning the same practices elsewhere. Another recurring theme and frustration from reporting on the region is the arbitrary nature of why one story or image attracts global media interest, while others – equally deserving – fail. Why did the story of Rahaf Mohammed escaping from Saudi Arabia’s oppressive male guardianship laws become viral news, symbolising the national condition of women, while the similar situation of Dina Ali had not? Further, when does short-lived outrage have the power to bring about decisive change before tomorrow’s new headlines? How to maintain global interest and momentum when violations are repeating ad infinitum? In contrast to previous atrocities (the Rwandan genocide, the Biafra crisis, the Srebrenica massacre, etc.), those of today can be live-tweeted blow by blow. The Syrian conflict is likely the most painstakingly well-documented in history, yet still the violations persist. While offering a bleak commentary on the limitations of modern journalism to prevent such transgressions, McNeill’s narrative approach also delivers a potential solace: that to engage with the experiences of individuals and capture their bravery might be a catalyst for necessary collective action. g Thomas McGee is a PhD researcher in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. ❖

Classics

Classical retreats

The sanctuary of classical antiquity Alastair Blanshard

Long Live Latin: The pleasures of a useless language by Nicola Gardini Profile, $32.99 hb, 254 pp

Vox Populi: Everything you wanted to know about the classical world but were afraid to ask

by Peter Jones Atlantic, $27.99 hb, 319 pp

hat is the value of useless knowledge? One of the by-products of the rise of artificial intelligence is that the realm of what one really needs to know to function in society is ever shrinking. Wikipedia makes learning facts completely redundant. Pub trivia competitions now seem a fundamentally anachronistic form of entertainment, like watching a jousting tournament in the age of artillery. One can appreciate the skill, but one also knows that its time has come and gone. In recent decades, nowhere have we seen greater advances in technology than in language. Grammar, spell-checkers, and online dictionaries have relieved us of the burden of learning orthography (or even that the word ‘orthography’ exists). Software packages promise to watch over you as you write, constantly providing prompts to improve your syntax. It comes at the cost of never being allowed to use the passive voice, but this seems a small price to pay to write copy that would impress any advertising agency. While it is still extremely buggy, it is clear that translation software will soon make it unnecessary to learn a foreign language for the purposes of everyday communication. Against this background, going to the tremendous effort of learning a ‘dead’ language like Latin seems a ludicrous proposition. Yet, in the figure of Nicola Gardini, it has found its most eloquent and persuasive defender. His Long Live Latin: The pleasures of a useless language is an extremely personal account of the delights that learning Latin has given him from the time he first encountered the language as a boy in Milan. Gardini has no truck with any utilitarian arguments for learning a language. He is unimpressed by the suggestion that learning Latin imposes discipline, helps train the memory, or makes us think logically and with precision. If this is the desired aim, why not learn maths or algebra? There is only one reason for learning Latin: it makes our life richer and more beautiful. Gardini illustrates this principle through a series of encounters with key Latin authors. From Ennius to St Augustine, no major figure is ignored. Each brings something different to the table. For example, Cicero established Latin as ‘a language of truth and justice’. Catullus taught it how to be sexy. Lucretius gave Latin a clarity that allowed it to perfectly capture everything from the profound emotions of a cow mourning for its lost calf to the physics of the universe. Gardini shows how each author engages with the nature of the world and the place of man within it. Attentive to form as much as content, he shows how

their solutions are as stylish as they are profound. He makes you painfully feel all the nuances that are lost in translation. Along the way, Gardini does not hesitate to point out the instances where Latin vocabulary has impacted on English. This, too, is part of the joy of learning Latin. Recovering the origins of words allows you to make connections between meanings and associations that have been lost. ‘Thanks to Latin, every word I knew doubled in sense. Beneath the garden of everyday language lay a bed of ancient roots,’ he writes. The book is a paean to the importance of being able to carve out time to retreat from the world and inhabit another time and place. It opens with a letter from Machiavelli, who describes how when reading Latin authors he steps ‘into the ancient courts of ancient men, where a beloved guest, I nourish myself … and for four hours I feel not a drop of boredom, think nothing of my cares, am fearless of poverty, unrattled by death’.

There is only one reason for learning Latin: it makes our life richer and more beautiful Such a withdrawal should not be confused with escapism. The purpose of this retreat is to return energised to face the world, equipped with the skills to face its problems head on. Out of Machiavelli’s sojourns in these ancient courts would emerge The Prince, a work unrivalled for the way it engages with life’s brutal realities. Confronted by the death of a journalist friend in Iraq, Gardini found it was Seneca’s Consolatio ad Marciam, an essay written around 40 ce to console a mother on the death of her son, which gave him the strength to endure. ‘Through Seneca I was able to speak … he showed no fear in speaking, not even when faced with the greatest of losses, the death of a loved one. And in truth, why be silent before death? Why pretend that only sobbing and silence are worthy? Words are life.’

ardini’s discussion of Latin is unashamedly rosy-coloured, and a similar romanticism infuses Peter Jones’s Vox Populi: Everything you wanted to know about the classical world but were afraid to ask. For many years, Jones has written a column in the Spectator, pointing out the similarities between ancient and modern life. In this book, he aims to provide a short guide to the highlights of the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome. This accessible survey covers everything including philosophy, history, architecture, archaeology, politics, and art. Inevitably, the discussions are cursory, but the work cannot be faulted for its breadth. The topics are independent of one another, so it is an easy book to dip in out and out of. Chapters are subdivided into discrete subsections, few longer than a couple of pages. Text boxes with discussions nestle among the main text. Translations of primary sources jostle alongside historical commentary. At times, it all feels a bit haphazard. The book reads like the notebook of your very learned uncle. The work is written for the general reader, but even if you know a lot about the ancient world, there are new things to discover. For example, I was surprised to learn that the way to establish archaeologically whether a rabbit is wild or domesticated is to examine its diet. If you discover that it has A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

been eating its own faecal matter, it is domesticated. Apparently, this is something that only rabbits in hutches do. Useless knowledge? Probably. Although it does make me revisit all the times I held up and kissed my cousin’s pet rabbit. The word ‘isolation’ is ultimately derived from the Latin word insula, meaning island. As it looks like we are set to endure

months of isolation, mentally retreating to the island sanctuary of classical antiquity seems a desirable plan. As these books demonstrate, it will be a far from barren place. g Alastair Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland.

Gender Studies

Remembrance of trans past A history that misses the mark Yves Rees

Trans America: A counter-history by Barry Reay

Polity $115.95, 256 pp

oday’s transgender community is woefully ignorant of its past, beholden to ‘historical amnesia’ and the ‘erasure of much trans history’ – or so Barry Reay would have us believe. Reay, a prolific historian of sexuality at the University of Auckland, begins his new history, Trans America, by decrying the supposed trans failure to look to the past, before setting about the task of correcting, as he puts it, ‘the significant structural and conceptual weaknesses in trans history’. It is indeed undeniable that Reay’s monograph has few predecessors. Internationally, scholarly transgender histories are few and far between. In the United States, the field is essentially limited to Joanne Meyerowitz’s How Sex Changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States (2002) and Susan Stryker’s recently updated Transgender History (2008, 2017), the latter strangely unacknowledged by Reay. Here in Australia, an Australian Research Council-funded project on ‘Transgender Australians’ (2018–21), led by Professor Noah Riseman at the Australian Catholic University, marks the first concerted foray into a local trans past. This limited catalogue of scholarship should not be equated with a general dearth of trans historical consciousness. On the contrary, hunger for lineage is rampant within trans and gender-diverse (TGD) communities, as evidenced by the proliferation of backwards-glancing films, television dramas, and books such as POSE (2018–), Gentleman Jack (2019), Transparent (2014–19), the rebooted Tales of the City (2019), The Danish Girl (2015), The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017), Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), Leslie Feinberg’s canonical Stone Butch Blues (1993), The Watermelon Woman (1996), We Both Laughed in Pleasure (2019), and the 2019 re-release of Paris is Burning (1990), to name just a few examples. Contrary to what Reay suggests, the past is everywhere in TGD culture. 5 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

More to the point, the underdeveloped state of trans historical scholarship is perhaps better attributed to the historical and ongoing oppression of TGD people rather than to any failure of interest or imagination. Long criminalised and still stigmatised, gender non-conforming people too often endure precarious lives on the margins. As a result, trans voices are often silenced within mainstream archives and trans scholars are rare within the hallowed halls of academia. Little wonder, then, that we know significantly less about history’s gender-benders than we do about, say, Eleanor Roosevelt or Alfred Deakin.

Hunger for lineage is rampant in trans and gender-diverse (TGD) communities Reay, however, gives little credence to these structural forces. Instead, he constructs a historically illiterate straw man, living only in the present, unwilling or unable to conceive of a deep trans past. This is the audience Trans America sets out to school. The aim is to kick their putative amnesia to the curb. Having established this mandate, Trans America then takes readers through the story of trans experience in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, a chronology presented over five chapters rich with enthralling detail and stunning images. Trans America is a deeply researched history that encompasses both trans medicine and vernacular cultures. To his credit, Reay paints a longue durée history of ‘sexual and gender flexibility’, showing that the blurred boundaries and indeterminate identities often associated with the transgender turn of the 1990s existed on the streets decades earlier. His critique of the ‘medical model’ will also resonate with contemporary TGD readers, many of whom

Alicia Vikander and Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures)

Fiction continue to endure strict medical gatekeeping and dehumanising rituals of ‘treatment’. Despite sections that beguile, the book’s prose and conceptualisation both feel undercooked, as though Trans America was rushed to publication to capitalise on the ‘trans tipping point’. In terms of content, notable omissions abound: trans-exclusionary feminism escapes mention; Indigenous and other non-Western gender formations are given short shrift; the experience of violence and incarceration is handled in a mere three paragraphs; and the whiteness of the term ‘trans’ itself is ignored until the final pages of the book. Throughout, the ways in which class and race shaped trans experience is the elephant in the room. Nor does Reay articulate the specificity of the ‘American’ trans experience, and at times he conflates US trans history with a broader Western past. More laudable is the concerted attention given to transmasculine experience, too often relegated to the sidelines of trans discourse. The sensitive analysis of drag cultures is another highlight, with the text enriched by exquisite photographs of performers. In his quest to be authoritative, Reay makes light of the profound epistemological challenges of trans history. As is well known, we can only apprehend gender non-conforming lives in the past via words and categories that are themselves historical artefacts. Our current terms – ‘transgender’, ‘genderqueer’, ‘gender non-conforming’ – only date back a few decades. Even the antecedent terms ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ are less than a century old. Can we name someone as trans before this identity existed? How should we parse lives that troubled or rejected gender norms prior to our modern taxonomies of gender difference? For Reay, the answer to this conundrum is to construct a strict periodisation that limits ‘trans history’ to the invention of these concepts by medical experts, a process begun by European sexologists in the late nineteenth century. He dismisses the activist refrain that ‘trans people have always existed’ as ahistorical nonsense. But this is a deceptively simple solution to a thorny problem. True, trans people who were named and identified as such are a recent phenomenon. Yet that does not mean we should ignore earlier evidence of people who presented and lived as a gender different to that assigned at birth. We cannot retrospectively name these people as ‘trans’, but nor can we comprehensively exclude them from the remit of ‘trans history’. This is an unresolvable tension, one that makes a mockery of historiographical pretensions to know the past. Much as TGD lives today resist the taxonomical impulses of the medical gaze, the trans past is an undisciplined history that refuses to be definitively bounded and known. As a serious work of scholarship, which undeniably adds texture to the trans past, Trans America represents a step towards the thriving historiography the TGD community deserves. Within its pages, other scholars will find an invitation to dive even deeper into trans history, drawing out complexities we’ve only begun to glimpse. In this flawed yet pioneering history, Reay helps launch a conversation that will, it is to be hoped, continue – passionate, rigorous, fiercely contested – for years to come. g Yves Rees is a Lecturer in History at La Trobe University and co-host of the history podcast Archive Fever.

Ness and Hetty

A gentle exploration of female friendship Chloë Cooper

Cherry Beach

by Laura McPhee-Browne

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 240 pp

ow do you define love? How much of yourself do you need to sacrifice to keep a friendship afloat? And can we ever truly understand the inner workings of other people’s lives? These are some of the questions that Laura McPheeBrowne explores in Cherry Beach, a gentle tale of female friendship. The story is narrated by Ness, a shy young queer woman who is hopelessly in love with her straight best friend, Hetty. When the pair decide to embark on a new phase of their lives by moving from Melbourne to Toronto, their friendship is tested; the two women realise that they want different things and slowly start to drift apart. The ever-increasing distance between the two becomes the catalyst for Hetty, at first so charismatic and vivacious, to reveal her vulnerability and to subsequently fall into chaos. The story of Ness and Hetty’s time in Toronto is interspersed with Ness’s adolescent memories of growing up with Hetty in Melbourne. Through spontaneous swimming trips and playground friendships to past loves and break-ups, a deeper portrait of the duo’s shared past and deep love for each other is painted, allowing for a greater insight into the devastating effects of their changing relationship. Throughout the book, McPhee-Browne explores themes of love, friendship, and mental health with poetic insight, using water as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of life. Each chapter is named after a different body of water and the prose shimmers like reflected light. At times the languid pacing, overwrought metaphors, and deep introspection threaten to smother the plot. However, the dark undercurrent that is present throughout manages to push events towards the novel’s inevitable conclusion. Ness’s voice is melancholy and distinct, and her experiences of sexual explorations are delicately and honestly portrayed. McPhee-Browne immerses the reader in the experience of awkward emotional growth with great tenderness and insight. At its core, Cherry Beach is a compelling examination of love and loss in all their guises. g Chloë Cooper is a Brisbane-based freelance writer, a contributing editor at Peppermint magazine, and a bookseller at Avid Reader bookshop. Her work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Overland, and SBS. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Psychiatry

House of cards

A corrective for psychiatric overreach James Dunk

Psychiatry and its Discontents by Andrew Scull

University of California Press (Footprint) $59.99 hb, 376 pp

adness ‘haunts all of our imaginations’, writes Andrew Scull in Psychiatry and Its Discontents, but it is more than a nightmare. Each year, one in five Australians will experience mental illness, according to the Black Dog Institute, and the World Health Organization warns that one in four globally will experience a mental or neurological disorder during their lifetime. The essays gathered here, however, raise grave doubts about the psychiatric knowledge and practice upon which these epidemiologies are based. The book opens with a lucid mixture of biography, bibliography, and historiography – a personal narrative of the shifting terrain of madness scholarship over five decades. The sixteen articles and reviews in this volume were written over the last decade. Although they have been revised, sometimes extensively, those who read the book cover to cover will notice episodes to which Scull returns again and again: the professional politics that produced the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition in 1980; the rapid decline of psychoanalysis in American psychiatry over the following decade; and the competition of hospital superintendents, outpatient clinicians, neurologists, and psychologists over the human mind. Anathema in a monograph, here the repetition makes for an emphatic, iterative articulation of the recurring themes of Scull’s research. Sometimes the repetition is jarring. The emperor, Scull tells us on several occasions, has no clothes. The metaphor is never properly articulated, but it seems to imply that psychiatry has been parading through the streets of the mind and the brain for a century or more without therapeutic benefit or scientific substance, and that everyone has learned to look elsewhere and say nothing. This would make Scull the child who simply sees, in another phrase Scull likes, wie die Dinge sind – how things are. It’s an attractive conceit, but if it is true that psychiatry is underdressed or even, as the fable implies, not entirely rational, Scull is far from a gormless child. His writing combines the structural curiosity of the sociologist with the historian’s quizzical eye and interest in causation. Scull’s significant corpus in the history of madness ranges from the rise of the asylum and psychiatry’s slow, fitful emergence under its eaves to a magisterial study of madness in world civilisations. It provides necessary ballast for the volume’s freewheeling adventurism. There is a sixteen-page study of institutional solutions for mental illness, from the Byzantine hospital to the blithe late twentieth-century shift to ‘community care’; 5 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

a meticulous demolition of Foucault’s ‘great confinement’ and other ‘fictions’; an excursus on faith and mental health; an unflinching account of rival lobotomists demonstrating their craft. After the longer-range essays of the first part, the remainder of the book focuses on the twentieth-century sciences of the mind. Review essays trace the ‘defenestration’ (another of Scull’s favoured terms) of Freudian psychodynamics, clumsy and brutal experiments in psychosurgery, the inflated claims of neuropsychiatry, the delineation of post-traumatic stress disorder, and recent enthusiasm for neural imaging technology as a window into the mind. Most are caustic corrections of psychiatric overreach. Interspersed through these reviews are longer chapters revised from academic articles. There is a fascinating gendered study of two acolytes of leading American academician Adolf Meyer (‘an eclectic,’ writes Scull, ‘who hid the barrenness of his doctrines behind a fog of verbal obscurantism that he summed up as “psychobiology”’). One excelled in biological experiments and technologies, and the other became one of the most prominent psychoanalysts in the country. There is an essay on the Rockefeller Foundation’s enormous injection of funds into academic psychiatry in the 1930s and 1940s, and a revealing study of the century-long competition of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis for funds, patients, and dignity. But the last essay in the collection, ‘Delusions of Progress’, brings out the full measure of Scull’s discontent. It outlines the perilous state of contemporary psychiatry by comparing two comprehensive attacks on the field written from opposing theoretical positions.Gary Greenberg’s The Book of Woe:The DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry (2013) is highly critical of psychiatry’s bullish embrace of neurobiology, and holds that the medical model of mental illness is a category error, while neuropsychiatrist Michael Alan Taylor’s Hippocrates Cried: The decline of American psychiatry (2013) argues that mental illness has no meaning and that psychotherapy is baseless and often harmful. Psychological symptoms are simply signposts, writes Taylor, to disordered brains. Both Greenberg and Taylor reject the prevailing ‘descriptive psychiatry’, encapsulated in the fabled DSM. Its ascendancy began with the third edition, a strategic response to a series of comparative studies that found that psychiatrists studying similar symptoms were producing an embarrassing range of diagnoses. DSM, argues Scull, ejected the Freudian neuroses and psychoses of the earlier manuals, but also their vague efforts to outline causation. It was a supposedly biological psychiatry without any firm foundation in biology, and yet its more regular and reliable diagnoses were of great use to Big Pharma, the insurance industry, and families looking to access desperately needed assistance. Descriptive psychiatry gained widespread professional and popular support, and yet, writes Scull, the DSM is a ‘disaster’, and the psychiatry based upon it ‘a rickety, unsafe, unscientific enterprise’. Andrew Scull leaves his readers with this vision, which he has conjured from many vantage points, with careful scholarship and sharp prose: psychiatry as a palatial house of cards, quivering in the wind. g James Dunk is a historian and writer living in Sydney. His latest book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, was published by NewSouth.

Politics

Demographic dividends A superpower that can improve our lives Peter Mares

The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover by Liz Allen

NewSouth $29.99 pb, 240 pp

n Australia, debate about population runs in well-worn grooves. The focus is on size – ‘big Australia’ versus ‘not-sobig Australia’ – and the tool used to regulate numbers is immigration. When politicians link population growth to excessive house prices, traffic congestion, unemployment, or crime, they call for immigration cuts, not for birth control. Liz Allen wants us to think about population more broadly by introducing readers to the wonders of demography, which she calls a ‘superpower’. Its transformative possibilities operate at two levels in this book. First, there is demography’s effect on Allen’s own life. Traumatised by sexual abuse as a child, Allen attempted suicide as a teenager, dropped out of school, became homeless, and had her first baby at sixteen. Motherhood and a supportive relationship with the father (who is still Allen’s partner) brought focus and stability. At eighteen, she went to TAFE to finish high school; she went on to do a social science degree. Allen discovered demography through happenstance – it looked a less boring undergraduate elective than jurisprudence – but she was quickly hooked, not least because the subject helped make sense of her own life. Rather than seeing her difficult circumstances as a personal failing or a punishment from God, Allen came to understand that much of what happens to us is the result of luck or what she calls, borrowing from Warren Buffett, ‘the ovarian lottery’. This leads to the second, larger view of demography as a superpower that can improve the lives of all Australians. Demography gives us the information to understand social problems and to build policies and institutions with a cradle-to-grave concern for well-being. Quality early-childhood education, for example, can serve as an ‘equaliser’ that gives children from disadvantaged families ‘a leg up on the ladder of life’, creating opportunities that more fortunate children might take for granted. Allen’s passion for her topic is admirable, and The Future of Us is at its best when she is explaining her discipline and its complexities. She aims at a general audience with a conversational style that is easy to read but that can also grate, especially with its plethora of rhetorical questions, such as ‘I suspect you’re thinking: Well, so what?’ I wasn’t. For Allen, the ‘true wonder of demography … is not its capacity to predict the future but to shape it’. She wants to use its superpowers to pursue a progressive agenda, but the book overreaches in placing too much weight on demographics as

both cause of, and solution to, contemporary challenges. One of her major concerns, for example, is intergenerational wealth inequality. Demography can help define the contours of the problem, but the tools of political economy are more likely to explain it, and tax settings more likely to address it. Allen’s central argument is that the composition of Australia’s population is what matters, not its size, because this determines our capacity to reap the ‘demographic dividend’ that comes from having a high proportion of working-age people relative to children and retirees, who are less economically productive. Australia, like many developed countries, is ageing, and our demographic dividend risks morphing into an unsustainable ‘dependency burden’ (though Allen prefers the more neutral term ‘support ratio’), where the pool of tax-paying workers is too small to generate enough revenue and supply sufficient services to sustain a greying population. Allen gives us a glimpse of what Australia might look like if the proponents of zero-net migration had their way. In half a century, the population would be about the same size as it is today, but the largest demographic cohort would be women aged over eighty-five. Supporters of halting immigration should be careful what they wish for, given that large swaths of the Australian economy rely heavily on migrants as customers and workers. Courtesy of Covid-19, we are getting a taste of what happens when you close the border to new entrants. Australia’s tertiary-education sector is taking a huge hit from a substantial fall in international student numbers. Fruit and vegetable growers are fretting about how to harvest their crops without backpackers on Working Holiday visas. Migrants, often on temporary visas, are crucial to the labour force in sectors like health care, aged care, cleaning, and hospitality. A longer-term fall in migration will reduce demand in other sectors of the economy, such as housing. This will slow the construction industry, one of the nation’s biggest employers, which sheds workers rapidly in a downturn but only hires slowly when conditions improve due to long project lead times. Allen does us a service in raising the challenges and complexities that will be thrown up by an ageing society, but her tone is too strident: ‘A potential demographic disaster of dystopian magnitude is on our horizon … sooner or later it’ll slam into us.’ Equally, her solutions are too pat: ‘It’s a simple fact: we can’t survive without migration.’ Immigration is helping Australia to defer the challenges of an ageing population, but it is not a solution because migrants grow old too. And as the pandemic shows, it is risky to rely on population growth as a key driver of economic growth. Birth rates are falling in many parts of the world; sometime this century the population will peak globally. For now, migration can redistribute young people across ageing nations, but the future’s real demographic (and economic and political challenge) is for nations to learn to thrive as their populations get older and smaller. g Peter Mares is the author of three books: No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s housing crisis (Text Publishing, 2018), Not Quite Australian: How temporary migration is changing the nation (Text Publishing, 2016), and Borderline (UNSW Press, 2001). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Interview

(Photograp by Nicholas Purcell)

Open Page with James Bradley

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His books include the novels, Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, and Clade; a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus; and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year. His latest novel, Ghost Species, is reviewed on page 35.

Where are you happiest?

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

What’s your idea of hell?

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

In the ocean at dusk or dawn – or at my desk. Shapeless days when I get nothing done.

Fearlessness.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

I spent my teenage years reading science fiction and comics, but I reread Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy dozens of times as an adolescent (and dozens more as an adult).

What is your favourite film?

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

Consistency.

Having children has stolen my ability to watch films: the window of opportunity in the evening is just too brief. But recently I adored Parasite (2019) and A Separation (2011). I never miss a chance to rewatch 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

And your favourite book?

An impossible question. Three that have changed my life at different points are Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986), and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).

I’m embarrassed to say the writers I really admire have remained pretty consistent across my life.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Lack of time, social media, and my crippling selfdoubt.

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

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

Generosity, wit, an ability to enjoy something while also being sceptical of aspects of it or its author. And there are so many I admire: overseas I never miss Adam Mars-Jones or Patricia Lockwood; here in Australia I greatly admire James Ley and Felicity Plunkett.

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

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Mary Shelley, Marcel Proust, and David Bowie.

I’m always little uneasy about the edge of élitism underlying the policing of language, but I have to confess to a loathing for psychological banalities like ‘closure’ and ‘unconditional love’, most of which are actually worse than meaningless.

Who is your favourite author?

I don’t do favourites, but there are a few writers, like Ali Smith, Dana Spiotta, Rachel Cusk, Richard Powers, David Malouf, and William Gibson, whom I never find less than thrilling.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine? Lyra Belacqua, or possibly Karl Ove Knausgaard. 5 6 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

It depends a little on which festival we’re talking about, but in general I love the opportunity to meet other writers and interact with readers.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

I do, but warily, not least because writing them means I tend to be pretty good at reading between the lines.

Are artists valued in our society?

I’m sorry, I missed that: I was laughing too hard.

What are you working on now?

Two new novels and a book of essays about the ocean.

A R T S A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Art

Centring

An innovative art monograph Julie Ewington

Mel O’Callaghan: Centre of the Centre

edited by Talia Linz and Michelle Newton

Artspace Confort Moderne and UQ Art Museum $60 hb, 200 pp

his beautiful book is ostensibly a conventional art monograph. In its innovative tweaking of the standard model, however, Centre of the Centre is one of the most rewarding publications about an Australian artist in recent years. Exploring two decades of ambitious work by Mel O’Callaghan, an Australian based in Paris, the book begins now, with her latest projects. In a quasi-geological enterprise, it then mines works whose interconnected seams comprise expansive video installations, sometimes including objects; wonderful paintings on glass; and, always, performed actions. Speaking about Parade (2014), Juliana Engberg noted the ‘ritualised, Sisyphean endeavour’ characterising O’Callaghan’s work. In its elegant coherence, Centre of the Centre resembles an artist’s book, conceptually driven. This is a visual project: the book is notable for unusually extensive suites of images encompassing selected projects, with gorgeous, scrupulous photographs announced by brief texts, rather than images illustrating written expositions. Installation documentation and video stills predominate; eventually, they summon something of the sensuous immersion of the works themselves. Intimate physical encounters with high-resolution images are the art book’s special gift, and Centre of the Centre’s mission. It is an exquisite experience; and the book itself is a substantial thing to hold. Artspace’s editors Talia Linz and Michelle Newton are attentive to the artist’s theoretical freight, and it’s refreshing that word length is never mistaken for significance. At the outset, three pithy texts consider Centre of the Centre and Respire Respire, O’Callaghan’s two major recent works shown together, symbiotically. French curator Daria de Beauvais traverses O’Callaghan’s vertiginous forays into extraordinary physical locations for her videos; Sydney academic Edward Scheer discusses her longstanding investigation of trance states in ‘How to Keep Breathing’; and the distinguished American anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli is interviewed by Australian curator Kathryn Weir about the artist’s fascination with the interdependence of living and non-living elements. O’Callaghan’s ambition is not only a matter of physical scale but one of intellectual reach; her works are experimental hybrids of instinctive action and scientific research. Collaborations with scientists have seen O’Callaghan filming bird-nest gatherers in the Simud Putih caves in Borneo, researching marine biodiversity in the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines, and viewing hydrothermal vents on the Pacific Ocean floor, courtesy of a US 5 8 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Navy vessel. Yet the starting point for Centre of the Centre was personal, a mineral specimen owned by O’Callaghan’s grandfather, holding inside it what seems to be ancient water. Wishing to investigate the birth of geological life, O’Callaghan found her way, serendipitously, to Dr Daniel Fornari, an eminent marine geologist, who welcomes collaboration with artists as a way of expanding the horizons of younger scientists, in particular: ‘the collaborative endeavour is what science is all about’, Fornari remarked at the book’s launch at Sydney’s Kronenberg Mais Wright; art is ‘a vehicle for discussion’. Reciprocal relationships (and poetic leaps of faith) are the hallmark of O’Callaghan’s practice: at the launch, Newton noted how artist and scientist speak about the same sites in different ways. These remarkable, even improbable, collaborations speak to O’Callaghan’s awe in the face of the natural world, the wonder with which she views its processes of becoming, and, most crucially, the metaphoric beauty she finds there – the paradox of living water within the rock. Centre of the Centre is undoubtedly a labour of love. It marked the exhibition of the two new works at Le Confort (Poitiers, France) and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Manila in mid-2019, at Artspace Sydney (August 2019), and the University of Queensland Art Museum (February 2020). It accompanies a national tour of the works by Museums and Galleries of NSW, now on hold until 2021. The book would not have been possible without the driving energy of Artspace and its exhibition partners, as well as generous commitments from a slew of private and institutional sponsors and contributors, including the artist’s gallerists: the acknowledgments page reveals the protean effort required to birth such an exceptional, even lavish book, but in fact this is typical of how art publishing happens today, at least in this country. Even before Australia’s cultural life went into limbo in March 2020, art publishing in Australia was precarious. With small print runs and prohibitively high costs, contemporary art books are becoming more rare every year. Several important art publishers have closed, and vanity publishing aside, only major museums can now afford the illustrated books that were once commonplace, and then only when sales are boosted by blockbuster exhibitions: think Ai Wei Wei or, infinitely worse, KAWS (both at the NGV). Yet art books remain crucial. This exquisitely considered book shows how publications support the claims of Australia’s excellent contemporary artists to national and, importantly, international attention. Under Alexie Glass-Kantor’s leadership, Artspace is an energetic publisher for solo Australian artists showing in major international exhibitions and art museums. Centre of the Centre is an integral part of contemporary cultural production, rather than a retrospective assessment, and, significantly, writers on individual works, such as Alexandra Pedley, Joäo Silvério, and Peta Rake, are studio and curatorial colleagues who have been involved in their development. But this achievement is fragile. How will publishing energy be sustained after 2020 without renewed government commitment, and when Australia Council support for the remaining Australian art journals and for many distinguished literary journals, including ABR, has been terminated? This is the moment to rethink the country’s cultural life – urgently. g Julie Ewington is a writer, curator, and broadcaster.

Art

The plinth of isolation A sedentary vigil at MONA Rayne Allinson

Tim Steiner (photograph courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania)

‘A

ll of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,’ wrote the seventeenth-century writer Blaise Pascal. As many of us are discovering, doing nothing alone in a room is a surprisingly difficult and demanding task. Even in these unusual times, when we are being asked – or in some cases, legally required – to stay home and do as little as possible, we are bombarded with suggestions as to how we might fill this sudden excess of time. We can stream a classical concert, watch sea otters floating in distant pools, binge-watch the latest drama series on Netflix, try out ballet fitness routines in our lounge room, or (my chosen method) try to learn the ukulele. And then what? As Pascal knew (even without the benefit of YouTube or TikTok), the easier it is to distract ourselves, the more restless we seem to end up feeling. Nobody is succeeding at the art of sitting quietly in a room alone like Tim Steiner. Since 2011 the forty-three-year-old former musician from Zurich has spent around 3,500 hours sitting still and straight-backed on a rectangular plinth in Hobart’s Museum of New and Old Art (MONA). For five hours a day, Steiner sits while hundreds of visitors mill around him, scrutinising, photographing, and discussing – occasionally with open disgust or disapproval – the colourful tattoos inked on his back by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. Thought to be the only living artwork in the world, Steiner was bought by a German collector for €150,000 in 2008. According to the terms of his contract, after he dies, his skin will be removed and framed for posterity. Until then, he considers his back ‘a canvas’, and himself a ‘temporary frame’. Despite MONA temporarily closing its doors on 17 March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 crisis, Steiner continues to sit – alongside other works of art – on a mezzanine overlooking the Void, a subterranean space framed by slabs of Triassic sandstone. A live stream has been set up to record Steiner’s every breath and movement, from 10 am to 4:30 pm. The idea of thousands of self-isolating people watching someone sitting quietly alone

in a room seems perfectly in keeping with MONA owner David Walsh’s darkly ironic sense of humour. ‘Of course! How very MONA,’ one of my friends smirked when I told them about the live stream, MONA having become a uniquely Tasmanian synonym for anything quirky, weird, or absurd. I clicked the link to confirm that the video really was live, and not just a static image of Steiner’s back on a loop (yes, he gets up occasionally for a toilet break). I watched intently for a full five seconds before my attention slid away to the next email. Yet as the long days of self-isolation wore on, I found myself returning to Steiner (or rather, back to his back). There was something oddly comforting about his presence, his persistence, his endurance. Although he sits as still as any sculpture, his skin glows with animate heat. The tattoos are too faint to make out clearly in the half-light of the sandstone walls, apart from a large Madonna kneeling above his spine and a Mexican-style skull grinning between his shoulders. At first, the experience of watching Steiner on live-stream seemed less about inspecting the artist’s handiwork than about the audience’s own voyeuristic gaze. We often go to museums and art galleries to stare at inanimate (and often naked) human forms, but watching Steiner sit for hours on end is an unusually intimate experience. Perhaps because, unlike a statue or a painting, Steiner could decide at any time to get up and walk away.

There was something oddly comforting about his presence, his persistence, his endurance I wondered what habits of mind Steiner had cultivated to keep coming back to his plinth of self-isolation. In an ABC interview from 2017, Steiner described a typical day: he arrives at the museum several hours before opening time, does some yoga, meditates, and stares at the other works of art around him before assuming his position on the plinth. Occasionally, he might listen to music on headphones, but for the majority of the time he sits there in silence. ‘Every hour sucks on that box, believe me!’ he laughed. Try sitting motionless on your desk for five minutes, let alone five hours, and you’ll see what he means. ‘My body is in a state of pain all day long … At the end of the day I’m broken physically and mentally, I can barely speak. It’s like I run a marathon in my head every day.’ And yet, he says, he loves his job. ‘Doing nothing all day is the hardest, most challenging, most rewarding, most overwhelming thing I’ve ever done ... it’s discipline. We live in a world where everything is about choice, [but for me] there is no choice, I have to sit on that stupid box five hours a day or I lose my job. So taking the element of choice out and just forcing myself to do this, I’m starting to come out on the other side of a very long, dark, challenging tunnel. And there’s a lot of light here. I’m still not there yet, but I’m on the way.’ According to Walsh’s most recent ‘COVID-19 Diary’ entry on MONA’s website, Steiner did have a choice about whether to continue sitting in the museum after it was closed to the public. He asked to keep sitting. ‘I was flabbergasted,’ Walsh wrote. ‘I shouldn’t have been. It’s his job.’ But why would someone show A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

up to a job that he himself described as mental and physical torture? Steiner’s answer offers all of us a ray of hope for our current situation. ‘Being locked down on this box every day has made me really, really free, in spirit and in mind ... It has taught me that in life it really doesn’t matter what you do, it matters how you feel about it and how you approach it.’ Aware that with every passing hour, day, and year his body’s canvas ages, the tattoo colours fade, and his mortal ‘frame’ becomes more scarred and worn, Steiner has gained a different perspective on time, mortality, and the nature of existence. ‘In this world of ridiculous speed and unbelievable complexity, I’ve just

realised... it’s about simplicity. It’s about minimizing.’ From his front-row seat above the Void, Steiner’s body radiates a reassuring message. ‘It’s weird to say, [but] ... our existence is perfection.’ g Tim (MONA), by Wim Delvoye, was live-streamed from MONA in March 2020. Rayne Allinson is a writer based in southern Tasmania. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford, and is the author of A Monarchy of Letters: Royal correspondence and English diplomacy in the reign of Elizabeth I (2012).

Art

The hidden self

Communicating the experience of psychosis Barnaby Smith

The Toy of the Spirit by Anthony Mannix

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 239 pp

ny definition of what constitutes ‘outsider art’, or art brut, is elusive. The boundaries of this ‘category’ are notoriously porous. There is no manifesto, no consistent medium, nor is it especially tied to any single period in time. However, it can be argued that outsider art is often regarded as art created by those on the margins of society, such as people in psychiatric hospitals, in prison, or the disabled. Outsider artists are also usually self-taught. For several decades, Anthony Mannix has been at the forefront of Australian outsider art, his particular qualification for the label being serious mental illness (though the term ‘illness’, as The Toy of the Spirit implores, is problematic). Mannix was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the mid-1980s, and spent periods as a patient in psychiatric hospitals over the next decade. Now based in the Blue Mountains, he has been free of schizophrenic episodes for many years. Mannix’s colourful, detailed, hallucinatory drawings and paintings are extraordinary. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia and has been exhibited worldwide; he was also featured in the historic 2017–18 exhibition at MONA in Hobart, The Museum of Everything. The Toy of the Spirit is the first collection of his writings, all of which were produced between 1985 and 1994. This is a wild and provocative adventure into the nature of psychosis and the unconscious, or, as Mannix describes it, ‘The Hidden Self which has the faculty of luminous creativity and conveys messages not only for the individual but for the future of our species.’ 6 0 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

The book is also a meditation on what Mannix believes to be society’s warped view of mental illness and its attitude towards the mentally ill in hospital. He writes of his experience, ‘The madhouse proved an eventful place amid the unrelenting boredom that it typifies and produces as currency to dole out in useless amounts to its inmates.’ This book would not exist without the writer and poet Gareth Jenkins, who has provided studious and passionate attention to Mannix’s work. Jenkins completed a doctoral thesis on the artist in 2008, and has spent countless hours sorting through the artist’s vast collection of home-made books and texts (many handwritten) in order to decide, with Mannix, which writings to include here. The Toy of the Spirit is also punctuated by Mannix’s macabre and erotic illustrations. Jenkins has provided an elegant and insightful introduction to this unique book. This offers essential context for understanding Mannix’s writing, and primes the reader for what to look out for amid the challenging, disorienting prose to come. Mannix’s writing can be graphic and disturbing, absurdly hilarious, and earnestly polemical; it might be described as experimental memoir or even prose poetry. Jenkins writes: The ‘uncontrollable wild screams’ of Mannix’s individualistic voice are everywhere evident in his work, work unashamedly driven by his madness and its eroticism. Mannix admits the instability of madness into language so as to more fully communicate his experience of psychosis …

The book is organised into five chapters. The first, ‘Dedications’, features brief introductions to the characters that inhabited Mannix’s schizophrenic mind, strange and colourful figures (or even objects, or ideas) that ‘visited’ Mannix during psychotic episodes. These include ‘The Vision’, ‘the reincarnated Salome’, and ‘Tiberia and her dirty little smile’. The second chapter, ‘The Machines, or Concise History of the Machine (as far as I know them)’, is a series of whimsical illustrations accompanied by short poems or playful aphorisms. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters (‘The Skull’, ‘The Demise’, and ‘The Light Bulb Eaters’, respectively) are all, in different ways, attempts at a linguistic and metaphoric rendering of the experience of psychosis. The final chapter, ‘The People’s Odyssey’, is a series of ekphrasis-like

reflections on the work of other outsider artists, including Philip Heckenberg and Janine Hilder. A tantalising proposition throughout The Toy of the Spirit is Mannix’s bullish refutation of the idea that the altered ‘reality’ that psychosis inflicts on the affected individual is inferior to, or less valid than, conventional or consensus experience of the world. He writes, in his sprawling way: It is that with psychosis there is a disco-ordinate expansion of reality making readily possible the working, and competently so, of direct oppositions. In terms of our desire for imbued human dynamics we should be enjoining not curing.

In an extension of this, Mannix explores the notion that the psychotic state is actually desirable, mysterious, and arousing. It is also – vital for Mannix – the locus of the creative impulse; the unconscious, accessed through psychosis, is the ‘toy of the spirit’ of the book’s title. While acknowledging the strangeness and darkness of his condition, he contends that madness is a portal to an experience that is intoxicating, revelatory, and important. He writes (in a rare experiment with line breaks):

It is society’s misconception that lunatics are unprivileged people, that they are somehow handicapped with an incomprehensible negative … … it is not so, in reality they are handicapped with an incomprehensible positive … … almost as if they are an evolutionary experiment for the future. [All ellipses in original]

Readers might detect the influence of William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Antonin Artaud, all of whom are namechecked in the book. Borges and Kafka are in the mix, too, while some passages come across like an X-rated Edward Lear. Mannix’s surreal landscape of the unconscious also strongly recalls the imagery of filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. While Mannix’s primary medium of expression may not be writing, The Toy of the Spirit is a dazzling and intricate entry point to the psychedelic playground that is his inner world. g Barnaby Smith is a writer, critic, poet, and musician currently based in northern New South Wales.

Music

Theatrum Mundi

Castellucci’s individual take on Mozart’s Requiem Michael Morley

Requiem at the Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewis)

ne of the most vivid (and, even today, relevant) descriptions of the music critic’s approach to responding to all those non-literal notes on the page and in performance was provided almost a hundred years ago by Ford Madox Ford, in his memoirs. The anecdote is worth quoting in full: The other day I attended a concert consisting mainly of the Song Cycles of Debussy setting words of Verlaine. They were sung by an Armenian lady who had escaped from a Turkish harem and had no

musical training. She was a barbaric creature who uttered loud howls and the effect was to me disagreeable in the extreme; all the same the audience was large and enthusiastic and the most enlightened organ of musical opinion of today spoke of the performance with a chastened enthusiasm. I happened to meet the writer of the notice in the course of the following afternoon and I asked him what he really got for himself out of that singular collocation of sounds. He said airily: ‘Well, you see, one gets emotions.’ I said: ‘Good God, what sort of emotions?’ He answered: ‘Well, you see, if one shuts one’s eyes, one can imagine that one is eating strawberry jam and oysters in a house of ill fame, and a cat is rushing violently up and down the keyboard of the piano with a cracker tied to its tail.’ I said: ‘Then why didn’t you say so in your notice?’ He smiled blandly: ‘Well, you see, an ignorant public might take such a description as abuse, and we cannot afford to abuse anything now.’

It may be that some members of the audience at Romeo Castellucci’s highly individual take on, and response to, Mozart’s Requiem, experience something similar. Some audience members did indeed respond to the stage images with closed eyes. In doing so they denied themselves the opportunity to see and respond to some of the most evocative, poetic, and, yes, musical images seen on the Festival Theatre stage since Bo Holten’s Operation Orfeo back in the 1990s. What Castellucci offers with his juxtaposition of theatrical images is a collage/montage of scenes that, while they might not be seen as literal responses (let alone equivalents to the vast range of dramatic and poetic moments in Mozart’s score), engages the imagination and the emotions of the viewer/listener. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

The progression of moments from death through life’s travails to Fiddler on the Roof?), and some suggestive of Pina Bausch – text birth offers a Theatrum Mundi that can encompass joy, sadness, projections onto the wall of the white-box set remind us of cities, lamentation, protest, and quietude. languages, plants, beings, and buildings lost and now extinct – not On the other hand, given the range of theatrical images, the just religious or political architectural icons, but even Wembley open-minded and -eared viewer has to acknowledge the aptness Stadium! While I suspect I might not be the only member of the to this theatre experience of the old catchphrase ‘a picture is worth audience a little puzzled by the introduction of Kangaroo Island a thousand words’. Some might find some of the scenic moments and Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens, the effect of the projections was that accompany and counterpoint the music (not just of Mozart’s not as disconcerting as it may seem in print. Requiem, but also plainchant and other selections from carefully Over the production’s ninety-minute duration, the contribselected Mozart works) confusing, puzzling, or haphazard. Not ution from the Adelaide Festival Chorus was exemplary. Evelin this viewer. From the opening moments, when we are presented Facchini’s choreography was carefully attuned to the non-prowith the contemporary image of an elderly woman alone on the fessional dancers. Throughout, the use of concentric circles and stage with a bed and a television set, to the sound of a haunting rhythmic hand and body movements never appeared simplistic and meditative plainchant, through to the closing image of a or dumbed down. The quartet of soloists was impressive, with very young (real) baby alone individual contributions downstage centre, while the stylish and full of musicality. notes of In paradisum are The Adelaide Symphony intoned by a boy treble, the Orchestra under Rory Macdirector finds images and donald, though not heard to scenes that counterpoint, its best advantage because of and are a mostly persuasive the unsympathetic acoustic response to, the music. of the Festival Theatre, was Castellucci’s approach always precise and attentive may be hinted at by his to the powerful moments inclusion of a seemingly in the score, as well as to arbitrary moment at the the more reflective and rebeginning, when the elderly strained elements of some woman picks up an orange, of the added music, not a holds it, and then places it bar of which seemed out of carefully on the stage. Orplace in this larger palimpsest anges may seem arbitrary, (and in many respects, the but they are very much part original Requiem is itself a of the German aesthetic palimpsest). response to Mozart and his Throughout the perforRequiem at the Adelaide Festival (photograph by Tony Lewis) work, given that Mozart’s mance, even during such act of plucking an orange from a tree in a duke’s garden is the confronting moments as the sequence when a crashed car starting point for Eduard Mörike’s great nineteenth-century occupies the centre of the stage as successive chorus members novella Mozart’s Journey to Prague (in this case, for a performance strike individual poses across the bonnet (yes, it sounds dire in of Don Giovanni). the description, but is anything but in the staging), one is always The act of plucking the orange leads to Mozart’s hearing aware that the director’s view of the piece is not far removed in his creative imagination a tune from his boyhood and to his from that of the composer, who once wrote to his father, ‘Death’s endeavouring to recycle this for an important moment in Don image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very Giovanni. In essence, this is analogous to Castellucci’s approach, soothing and consoling.’ And this only four years before he left though in place of the music he instead offers us images springing his Requiem unfinished. g from his imagination, though these are never intended to swamp the original. Requiem, a co-production of Festival d’Aix and the Adelaide FestiThroughout the performance, it is as if we are invited to val, was presented by the Adelaide Festival in association with the reflect on a question posed first by Hegel, and which the com- ASO and the AFC. Performance attended: 4 March 2020. poser Hanns Eisler summarises as follows: ‘There is a wonderful sentence in Hegel’s aesthetics, which unfortunately has never Michael Morley is Emeritus Professor of Drama at Flinders been correctly understood. It goes: If, in a piece of music, grief University. He has written theatre and music reviews and arover something lost is being expressed, one must immediately ticles for a variety of publications, including Theatre Australia, ask: Why is grief being felt, and what has been lost?’ the National Times, The Australian, the Australian Financial ReWhile the chorus moves and sings in simple but very precisely view, Opera News (New York), the Kurt Weill Newsletter, the choreographed patterns – some derived from Balkan dance, some Sondheim Review, and the Adelaide Review. He has also contribfrom more contemporary moves (did I detect a sequence rem- uted translations for the English edition of the collected poems iniscent of Jerome Robbins’s choreography for ‘Tradition’ from of Alfred Brendel. 6 2 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Biography

Sweating blood over songs A prodigy from Siberia Andrew Ford

Irving Berlin: New York genius by James Kaplan

Yale University Press (Footprint) $49.99 hb, 424 pp

t the end of 1910, Irving Berlin took a winter holiday in Florida. James Kaplan writes, ‘Here we must pause for a moment to consider the miracle of a twenty-two-year-old who in recent memory had sung for pennies in dives and slept in flophouses becoming a prosperous-enough business man to vacation in Palm Beach.’ In his new biography of the songwriter, Kaplan does a nice job of describing the vertiginous progress of Berlin’s early success. Israel Beilin was born in 1888, probably in Siberia, the eighth child of Lea and Moses Beilin. The family moved to Belorussia and then to New York in 1893. The spelling of their surname was changed to Baline, and Israel quickly became known at Izzy. Moses, a peripatetic cantor in Europe, found himself mostly unemployed in New York, so the teenage Izzy, who seems to have inherited his father’s singing voice, busked and sang at tables, plugged songs for publishers, and was a ‘slide singer’ – which is to say he led cinema audiences in singalongs, the lyrics projected on slides. In bars, he would sometimes substitute his own risqué words and before long was writing original songs – first words, then words and music – his name appearing as ‘I. Berlin’. By 1910 he was Irving Berlin. He still hadn’t written anything you’ve heard of, but was sufficiently well-off to take that Palm Beach holiday. On the very day of his departure for Florida, before heading down to the newly opened Penn Station, he recalled a syncopated march tune he’d made up a few months earlier, and fitted some words to it. It was about a bandleader called Alexander, and it celebrated a new musical fashion. In 1911, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, gave Berlin his first bona-fide hit, with others quickly following. Later that year, ‘Everybody’s Doing It Now’ brought together the ragtime craze and the younger Izzy’s talent for smutty lyrics. It was also in 1911, right at the end of the year, that Berlin met and fell ‘hard’ for the nineteen-year-old Dorothy Goetz. Everything happened quickly. By February 1912 they were married, honeymooning in Havana, where Dorothy picked up typhoid. She contracted pneumonia in June and died in July. Berlin, ‘precocious in many things, including sorrow’, was now a twenty-three-year-old widower. Alongside novelty dance numbers such as ‘I Love a Piano’ and ‘When that Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’, Berlin now developed a line in songs of love and loss. ‘When I Lost You’ was an immediate hit, and ‘All By Myself ’, ‘What’ll I Do?’, ‘All Alone’, and ‘Always’ followed over the next decade and a bit.

Part of Berlin’s success was his work ethic. ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ might have been completed in a hurry – after all, he had a train to catch – but more commonly he would ‘sweat blood’ over his songs, friends claiming they always knew when he’d completed one, because he looked drawn and wan having been up all night. The aim of this labour was simplicity of form, clarity of words, lucidity of melody. Stephen Sondheim, an admirer of Berlin, though not an uncritical one, compared him to Cole Porter (all three – Berlin, Porter, and Sondheim – wrote both words and music). ‘The seeming artlessness of [Berlin’s] music matches the seeming artlessness of the lyrics,’ Sondheim wrote, ‘just as the elegant self-consciousness of Porter’s matches the elegant selfconsciousness of his. Berlin knows how to inflect words melodically and rhythmically so that they seem to flow organically; the listener is rarely aware of the songwriter.’

Part of Berlin’s success was his work ethic – he would ‘sweat blood’ over his songs The artlessness that Berlin worked so hard to perfect (and that was brought to life so artlessly by favoured singer Fred Astaire) made his songs ripe for mass consumption, and in Hollywood in the 1930s he was unstoppable. But he wasn’t always so straightforward. One of Berlin’s finest songs, forever associated with Astaire, is ‘Cheek to Cheek’. Kaplan, no musical analyst, turns to Philip Furia here, borrowing his observations about the song’s debt to Chopin’s Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53, and its double bridge, the first beginning ‘Oh, I love to climb a mountain / And to reach the highest peak’, and the second, ‘Dance with me – / I want my arms around you’. ‘Cheek to Cheek’ was written for Top Hat, which also contains ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’, the song Berlin considered his best vehicle for Astaire. Berlin’s extreme fame rests on two songs that aren’t nearly as good: ‘God Bless America’ and ‘White Christmas’. The first is the song some Americans think should be their national anthem, the latter remains the world’s best-selling record. That a Jewish immigrant should have written either is at the heart of Kaplan’s biography, which is in Yale’s Jewish Lives series. Berlin’s simple, diatonic melodies seldom display his cultural background in the way that Harold Arlen’s quite often do (Arlen’s father was also a cantor). But living in what Kaplan refers to as the American ‘waspocracy’, Berlin was always aware of his outsider status; Hollywood and Broadway were as anti-Semitic as anywhere. Mind you, Kaplan finds anti-Semitism in unlikely places. When ‘God Bless America’ is dismissed by one critic as ‘doggerel’ (which it is), Kaplan hears an echo of ‘mongrel’. As for the ‘New York Genius’ of the subtitle, Kaplan’s fastpaced narrative conveys them effortlessly – both the ‘New York’ and the ‘genius’. This is not just a life, but a life and times, and the times were shaped, in part, by Irving Berlin himself. g Andrew Ford is a composer and writer. He also presents The Music Show on ABC Radio National, and is author of several books. His most recent, written with Anni Heino, is The Song Remains the Same (La Trobe University Press, 2019). A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

Letters

From the Archive

This year marks the centenary of the great Australian poet Gwen Harwood, who was born in Brisbane on 8 June 1920. Her poetry is renowned (Peter Porter rated her ‘the most accomplished poet the country produced in the twentieth century’), but she was also one of the country’s most scintillating letter-writers. In our November 1990 issue, Kerryn Goldsworthy reviewed Blessed City: The letters of Gwen Harwood to Thomas Riddell, January to December 1943. This review is one of countless features in our digital archive going back to 1978, all accessible by subscribers.

wen Foster met Lieutenant Thomas Riddell in Brisbane in 1942, when she was twenty-two. ‘Tony’ Riddell, stationed in Brisbane, was sent to Darwin early in 1943; and between January and September of that year, Gwen Foster wrote him the eighty-nine letters that make up this book. It’s the chronicle of a year, of a city, of a family, of a friendship, of a war no one could see an end to, and of that stage in the life of a gifted young woman at which she says, ‘At present I am unsettled and do not know which way my life will turn.’ The ‘blessed city’ of the title is partly Brisbane, partly Harwood’s family home, partly ironic and partly not, and mostly a way of talking about a particular state of being. At twenty-two, Harwood had already entered, and subsequently left, a convent; her spiritual awareness and philosophical sophistication shine briefly and occasionally through the pages of what otherwise looks like an excellent script for a comedy routine. Occasionally, these two manifestations of her personality – the comic and the mystic – meet, as on the subject of convent food: Our Miss Foster spent six (6) mths in a convent from August– January 1941–1942. We have every reason to believe that she related to you the incident of the Mouldy Pears … She also consumed obediently a Yellow Pudding (unnamed) which contained lumps of unknown substance THE SIZE OF A FULL-GROWN CANARY’S BODY, floating in stuff which she will not attempt to describe.

Harwood excelled then, as always, at mimicry. These letters are regularly ‘interrupted’ by anonymous voices in various modes, as well as by a number of named alter egos who are forerunners of the ‘pseudonyms under which she hoaxed a generation of editors in the sixties and seventies’, as editor Alison Hoddinott points out in her excellent introduction. One of these pseudonyms, ‘Timothy Klein’ (aka T.F. Kline, apparently), had its beginnings in the Tiny Tim of these letters, who pops up occasionally and parenthetically to remark, ‘Oh hell’. The letters are also scattered with brilliant parodies, which further enhance the multitude-of-voices effect. Bureaucratese, publisher’s blurbs, ‘women’s magazines’, etiquette books, and the epistolary styles of bygone eras are all plundered and pilloried for Tony’s entertainment. When her mother accidentally leaves the table knives on the stove and their handles ‘catch on fire’, Gwen 6 4 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W M AY 2 0 2 0

gleefully relates the incident and proposes an extra paragraph to be ‘inserted in the book of etiquette’: It is not permissible to comment on the fact that the handles on the knives given to you are partly burnt away. Should any of the burnt portions come off in your hand, drop them quietly on the floor and they will be removed by the servants.

Harwood’s mother looms large in these letters. Her name is Agnes; early in the correspondence she becomes Agens by typographical accident, and subsequently remains so by daughterly design. Mother Agens is a model of the loving but uncomprehending parent, a pragmatically savage cutter-down of trees (‘I just sat down and cried’) whose reaction to her daughter’s wish to enter a convent is, ‘Why aren’t you happy at home?’ She fears and mistrusts her daughter’s artistic vocation almost as much as her religious one: ‘Agens’ fear that “Gwen will write it down” is as real to her as my fear that she will cut down trees I love is real to me. Agens has never been able to help me in the ways I most need help.’ ‘Father Foster’ and brother Joe, also known as Hippo, are represented in an altogether less troubled and more gently comic style. During this period, Harwood was working at the office of the War Damage Commission, though she seems to have spent most of her time teasing her infuriatingly stodgy workmates, scrambling the switchboard, and writing these letters. The catch-22 atmosphere in which she ‘worked’ is apparent from the very first letter: ‘As I always add a few hundred onto any orders that come through my hands, enormous piles of stationery and Forms A, B, C and D are arriving day by day. They come in huge packages from the stores, labelled “NOT FRAGILE”.’ Asked by her boss (for whom one begins to feel a certain sympathy) why she doesn’t ‘behave in a normal manner’, she replies: ‘Little Gwendoline was never quite like other girls.’ Volumes of writers’ letters usually have a pretty specialised audience, but this lovely book would give pleasure to almost anybody. Wartime letters are always moving and always highly charged, even if only with what is not said. Wartime letters to a serviceman from a witty, affectionate young musician and nascent poet with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue are, to Harwood’s generation and to later ones, an amazing gift. g