Marta Dusseldorp and Ben Winspear in Scenes from a Marriage by Joanna Murray-Smith Photography David Kelly
Our new Laureate Australian Book Review is thrilled to name Robyn Archer as our new Laureate. She joins David Malouf, who became the inaugural Laureate in 2014.
Robyn Archer is primarily, and famously, a singer. She made her professional début in 1974 as Annie 1 in the Australian première of Brecht and Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins (a role she reprised in the 1990s). Other celebrated roles have included Jenny and Mrs Peachum (The Threepenny Opera). An internationally renowned exponent of classic European cabaret, she continues to tour with new programs. Her onewoman cabaret show A Star Is Torn toured Australia from 1979 to 1983; it also ran for a year in London’s West End. For almost half a century, audiences here and abroad have relished her inimitable voice, presence, and diction.
More broadly, Robyn Archer’s influence on our culture has been phenomenal. Few Australian performers have made such a varied and substantial contribution. In addition to her own artistic work, which has won her many awards (including a Helpmann in 2013), she has directed and programmed several arts festivals, including Adelaide (1998 and 2000), Tasmania (Ten Days on the Island, 2001–05) Melbourne (2002–05), and Liverpool (2004–06). Deputy Chair of the Australia Council from 2012 to August 2016, she is a ceaseless advocate for the arts and a respected mentor to new generations of artists and artistic directors. Her many honours include an honorary doctorate from Flinders University; Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; and Officer of
the Order of Australia.
The Editor and Board of ABR greatly respect this unique Australian artist. Her charismatic stage presence and inspiring commitment to artistic values make her a most deserving ABR Laureate.
In creating the ABR Laureateship, our purpose was twofold: to celebrate distinguished artists, and to advance
months.
Please join us on Thursday, 10 November at the Monash University Museum of Art when we will introduce our new Laureate and also launch the Arts issue, to which she has contributed. Full details appear on the inside back cover.
ABR Gender FeLLOwship
the work and prospects of younger artists. As with David Malouf, we will invite Robyn to nominate an ABR Laureate’s Fellow. The Fellow will work closely with the Editor on a substantial work for publication. On this occasion, she or he will receive $7,500, courtesy of the ABR Patrons, who fund this program. We look forward to naming the new Fellow in coming
ABR has four new Fellowships to unveil this month and next. The first of them is the ABR Gender Fellowship. Worth $7,500, this is the first of its kind to be offered by the magazine. We are seeking proposals for a long article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms. How timely it is too, with a renewed focus in the media, literary circles, and the academy on the representations of women and men, and of gender and gender relations, in contemporary literature. The cultural lenses through which writers and readers, and publishers and critics, see the world continue to be heavily influenced by beliefs, attitudes, and assumptions about gender and gender differences. This new Fellowship is funded by ABR Patron and board member Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO.
Published authors, critics, and commentators have until 1 February 2017 to apply for the Fellowship. See our website for guidelines and a fuller description of the parameters.
BOB dyLan
In a decision that has upset some purists, the Swedish Academy has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature to US singer–songwriter
[Advances continues on page 6]
Robyn Archer in the cabaret show Tonight: Lola Blau, Adelaide, 1980
Australian Book Review
November 2016, no. 386
Since 1961
First series 1961–74
Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
ISSN 0155-2864
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Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Victoria 3006
Editor Peter Rose Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu Assistant Editor Dilan Gunawardana Business Manager Grace Chang Development Consultant Christopher Menz
Chair Colin Golvan
Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members
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ABR Laureates Robyn Archer, David Malouf
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November 2016 Contents
Neal Blewett
Ian Donaldson
Timothy Neale
Colin Golvan
Lisa Gorton
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Peter Goldsworthy
John Allison et al.
Bill Manhire
Letters
Rhys Winterburn
Indigenous Studies
Megan Davis and Marcia Langton (eds): It’s Our Country
Damien Freeman and Shireen Morris (eds): The Forgotten People Kevin Bell
Poems
Judith Bishop John Hawke
Law
Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Gabrielle Appleby, and Andrew Lynch: The Tim Carmody Affair David Rolph
Society
Peter Mares: Not Quite Australian Maria O’Sullivan
Graeme Davison: City Dreamers Brian Matthews
Lauren Elkin: Flâneuse Anna MacDonald
Fiction
Patricia Grace: Potiki
C.K. Stead: The Singing Whakapapa
Lloyd Jones: The Book of Fame
Maurice Gee:The Burning Boy
Fiona Farrell: The Skinny Louie Book Kevin Rabalais
David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short (eds):
The Near and the Far: Sara Savage
Jacinta Halloran: The Science of Appearances Fiona Wright
Laura Elizabeth Woollett: The Love of a Bad Man Dina Ross
A.N. Wilson: Resolution Ann-Marie Priest
Sam Carmody: The Windy Season Alex Cothren
Sean Rabin: Wood Green Dilan Gunawardana
Kristel Thornell: On the Blue Train Francesca Sasnaitis
Hebe de Souza: Black British Sonia Nair
Arts Update
Joe Cinque’s Consolation Jake Wilson
Tristan und Isolde Peter Rose
Night Of James McNamara
The paradox of Herbert Vere Evatt
A new study of the young Judith Wright
A celebration of the Gurundji struggle
The god of cheaper prices
Margaret Atwood retells The Tempest
A cultured union
The duplex needs of Clives James
Arts Highlights of the Year Poet of the Month
Film
Joel Gwynne (ed.): Transgressions in Anglo-American Cinema
Dion Kagan
Music
Toby Gleason (ed.): Conversations in Jazz
Des Cowley
Robert Forster: Grant & I Doug Wallen
Art
Sebastian Smee: The Art of Rivalry
Miriam Cosic
Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (eds): New Objectivity Christopher Menz
Christopher Heathcote: Inside the Art Market
Francesca Sasnaitis
Ian McLean: Rattling Spears Billy Griffiths
Politics
Rosa Prince: Comrade Corbyn Simon Tormey
Caryn Coatney: John Curtin Paul Strangio
Memoir
Juris Greste et al.: Freeing Peter Kate Ryan
Bob Ellis, compiled by Anne Brooksbank: Bob Ellis
Jan McGuinness
Essays
Teju Cole: Known and Strange Things
Sujatha Fernandes
Literary Studies
William Egginton: The Man Who Invented Fiction
Gabriel García Ochoa
Philosophy
Peter Singer: Ethics in the Real World Ben Brooker
Medicine
Greg De Moore and Ann Westmore: Finding Sanity
James Dunk
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Bob Dylan, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. Dylan, now seventy-five, is the first songwriter to receive the honour, and the first American since Toni Morrison in 1993. (The annual neglect of Philip Roth is striking; but then, we are talking about a prize that overlooked Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf.)
In a review by Barnaby Smith (ABR, December 2015), Dylan is described as one of the ‘relatively few figures in popular music deemed worthy of serious academic attention’, due to his ability to capture the Zeitgeist of American culture through his lyrics. Leonard Cohen, one of Dylan’s peers, likened the award to ‘pinning a medal on Mount Everest’. Much like the mountain, Dylan has remained silent on the matter thus far.
Oddly, the Academicians chose not to cite Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One (2004), one of the great modern American memoirs.
patrick white’s LarGesse It will be interesting to see what Bob Dylan, presumably an immensely wealthy performer, does with his prize money (approximately US$1,000,000) – that is, if he accepts the Nobel Prize. Let’s hope he does something creative and altruistic with it, like Patrick White, who received the Nobel Prize in 1973. White, despite his reputation as a curmudgeon, promptly created the Patrick White Award to honour writers who have been highly creative over long periods but who have not received adequate recognition. It remains one of the most generous benefactions from an Australian artist. Christina Stead was the first recipient (1974); other winners have included Amy Witting, Rosemary Dobson, and Fay Zwicky. At times the question of the writers’ supposedly ‘inadequate recognition’ has seemed rather hazy (if not a rather public cross to bear). It would be hard to argue that the work of Thea Astley, Gwen Harwood, Randolph Stow, and Robert Adamson is unsung.
Carmel Bird is the winner of the
2016 Patrick White Award. Since 1976 she has published fiction, essays, anthologies, children’s books, and writers’ manuals. Carmel Bird, who met Patrick White in 1961 (‘in awe’) commented: ‘I am honoured and overcome with joy to have been selected to receive the Award.’ The prize this year is worth $20,000.
hOme tO the paLace
We all have our favourite ‘last words’. Arts Update has a penchant for this offering from Primmie Niven, wife of the actor David Niven, who died after a fall during a game of ‘Sardines’ at a Hollywood party. ‘We’ll never be invited again,’ she said.
Claire Cock-Starkey has produced an anthology of Famous Last Words (Bodleian Library [Footprint], $27.95 hb). Loftily, J.S. Bach consoled his family: ‘Don’t cry for me, for I go where music is born.’ P.T. Barnum, by contrast, was all business to the very end: ‘How were the receipts today at Madison Square Gardens?’ Lytton Strachey, ever undeceived, remained sceptical: ‘If this is dying, I don’t think much of it.’ D.H. Lawrence, for once, was pragmatic: ‘I think it is time for morphine.’ For sheer style we liked Chekhov’s ‘It is some time since I drank champagne’ and Tsar Alexander II’s farewell, on being targeted by an assassin: ‘Home to the palace to die.’ Australians, clearly, never expire, at least not memorably. No Australian features in Famous Last Words. Do readers of Advances have any mortal nominations?
hazeL rOwLey Literary FeLLOwship 2017
Applications are now open for the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship (worth up to $15,000). The Fellowship commemorates the work of distinguished biographer Hazel Rowley, author of acclaimed biographies of Christina Stead, Richard Wright, and the Roosevelts. The Fellowship is intended to support Australian writers of biography and writers working on an aspect of cultural or social history. Past Fellows include Maxine Beneba Clarke (2014), whose memoir The
Hate Race was reviewed by Catherine Noske in our October 2016 issue. The Fellowship may be used to fund research or travel, to develop a new proposal, or to prepare a manuscript for submission to potential publishers. More information about the Fellowship can be found by visiting www.hazelrowley.com. Writers have until 16 November to apply, at www.writersvictoria.org.au.
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All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or business@australianbookreview.com.au (quoting your subscriber number, if you have one). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Terms and conditions apply.
Trumpery
Dear Editor,
Sandy Thorne seems to think Donald Trump can restore America to prosperity and its past greatness (Letters, October 2016). All great nations rise, decline, and fall. If Caligula can put his horse Incitatus forward as a Senator, I suppose it’s possible that the American people just might vote in Donald Trump as president. As Bob Dylan sang ‘The answer is blowin’ in the wind’. Which brings us to one of the definitions of ‘Trump’ in the Oxford dictionary, ‘To break wind audibly’.
Rhys Winterburn, City Beach, Qld
THANKING OUR PARTNERS
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts SA.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, and our new partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Sydney Ideas
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Lighting Labor’s powder keg
The paradox of Herbert Vere Evatt Neal Blewett
EVATT: A LIFE by John Murphy
NewSouth, $49.99 hb, 451 pp, 9781742234465
John Murphy opens his magisterial study of Herbert Vere Evatt – the fourth major biography of the good doctor – with an essay on the challenge of writing biography in general, and of writing one on Evatt in particular. He prefaces this discussion with a short description of one fateful and illuminating incident late in Evatt’s political career. On the evening of 19 October 1955 in the House of Representatives, during a debate on the Petrov Royal Commission, Evatt, then leader of the federal ALP, stunned his followers and invited the derision of his opponents when he claimed that he had been in communication with Vyacheslav Molotov, Russian foreign minister and a Stalin henchman for thirty years, who had declared that disputed documents before the Commission were forgeries. The prime minister, Robert Menzies, who had feared a forensic dissection of the Commission Report, could not believe his luck: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.’
For Murphy, that incident illustrates the paradoxical nature of Evatt: ‘intellectually complex but … sometimes childish … [with] strange fractures through his character and an apparent inability to read the social world around him’. The puzzle of Evatt’s character, augmented as it is by a lack of personal material – no diaries, few personal letters (Evatt was a notoriously poor correspondent) – plus the passions of the Cold War that raged around him, have, to Murphy’s mind, defeated previous biographers. The trajectory of Evatt’s life is
clear; but it is the identity at the heart of this journey that is the challenge.
Murphy posits six key character traits to guide us through the Evatt labyrinth: first, ambition (‘No matter how high he rose, his ambition was still unappeased’); second, ‘overweening self-regard’; third, suspicion of the motives of others (‘he lived in a world frighteningly devoid of trust’); fourth, a belief in legal rationalism as the source of truth, though as Russel Ward told Evatt, commenting on the Molotov incident, ‘correct legal protocol was suicidal political insanity’; fifth, liberalism – Evatt was more interested in protecting civil liberties than in transforming social conditions; and finally,a ‘distinct lack of self-awareness’. In Murphy’s judgement, ‘[h]e was an enigma to others, but perhaps also to himself’. It should be noted that these traits have been culled from the views, not of Evatt’s enemies, but of friends, colleagues, and dispassionate observers.
With these traits as everpresent guides, Murphy embarks on an otherwise conventional biography with a chronological narrative from Evatt’s birth in the Hunter Valley town of Maitland in 1894 to his death in 1965. He accepts, as do Evatt’s other biographers, that his mother, Jeanie, was the key parental influence; his father, a notable local cricketer, died when Evatt was only seven. Evatt seems to have remembered little of his father or at least, as the cautious Murphy points out, ‘more precisely he recounted few memories
of him’. But if Murphy concludes that his mother’s determination to see her children do well (she had six sons) and her ‘ferocious commitment to education’ does much to explain the ambition of her brightest son, he rejects the psychological layering around this theme that characterises Peter Crockett’s biography of Evatt (1993). Nor does he have any time for Kylie Tennant’s romantic myth that because both Evatt’s parents were of Irish descent he imbibed rebellious Irish folklore at the family fireside. As Murphy points out, Evatt’s father was of Anglo-Irish stock, from a family which had long supplied military officers to the Empire.
The critical factors for Murphy are class and academic achievement. The Evatts were the owners of a ‘respectable’ hotel and, though the evidence is fragmentary, Murphy conveys the impression of ‘a family holding on to the lower rungs of the middle class’. Evatt’s mother’s ambition and his own intellectual brilliance –a stellar path through Fort Street High School and Sydney University – guaranteed him full middle-class status. As Murphy succinctly observes, that was ‘not an obviously Labor pedigree’. Unlike the social democratic parties of Europe, the early labourist ALP mistrusted intellectuals and middleclass professionals. Evatt was an anomaly: a generation before Gough Whitlam, he was the first major ALP figure to come to the party from the middle class.
Murphy’s chronological approach suits Evatt, whose various career changes tended to fit into discrete chronological compartments: barrister 1918–25; NSW State Labor MP 1925–30; High Court judge 1930–40; Federal Labor minister 1941–9; Federal Labor leader 1951–60; Chief Justice, NSW Supreme Court 1960–62. Each of these periods has a distinct tempo and tone. First, the brilliant young lawyer and his meteoric rise at the Sydney bar. By the time he was thirty, Evatt had appeared before the High Court seventeen times and had established a reputation as ‘a champion of the labour movement in the courts’. Then the young MP for Balmain in the NSW State Parliament, where his upward trajectory stalled. He failed to win an anticipated cabinet post, not recognising perhaps that his caucus colleagues might have thought a little parliamentary experience a prerequisite. He fell out with
his leader, Jack Lang – he was not alone in this – and became one of Lang’s fiercest critics, likening his leader’s dictatorial tendencies to those of Lenin and Mussolini. Disendorsed, he ran against the official candidate, was expelled from the party but still managed re-election. With the party divided and in opposition, Evatt appears to have become disenchanted with political life and seems scarcely to have been present in the 1929–30 sessions of the State Parliament.
Through the beneficence of the Scullin federal government, Evatt was raised to the High Court at the age of thirty-six, becoming the youngest High Court judge ever. The appointment of this inexperienced ‘leftie’ outraged a conservative profession. Despite this controversial start, the 1930s seems to have been the happiest
period in his life. Always preferring legal rationalism to political persuasion, he enjoyed High Court work, despite the irascibility of some of his colleagues. Murphy notes that the correspondence between the judges ‘bristles with ego, rivalry and umbrage’. Sheltered from the turbulence of the political world, Evatt found the leisure to write; he published four major historical works during the 1930s. Again, it was during the High Court period that he and his wife, Mary Alice, developed a growing interest in modern art. They were not only becoming major collectors, but by the end of the 1930s Evatt was the champion of the moderns against that defender of the art establishment, Robert Menzies. Murphy paints a delightful picture of the socially conservative Evatts
Dr Evatt with Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, and Alexei Pavlov of the Soviet Embassy, during Molotov’s 1942 visit to Britain (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade via Wikimedia Commons)
OPERA IN CONCERT
PORGY and BESS
Gershwin’s Opera in the Concert Hall
Chief Conductor David Robertson brings us a semi-staged performance of Gershwin’s masterpiece – Jazz, Spiritual and Broadway meeting in a musical drama of enormous emotional power. Its unforgettable characters sing such beloved showstoppers as ‘Summertime’, ‘It ain’t necessarily so’, ‘I got plenty o’ nuthin’’ and ‘Bess, you is my woman now’.
David Robertson conductor / Alfred Walker Porgy (pictured)
Julia Bullock Clara / Leon Williams Jake / Jermaine Smith Sportin’ Life
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
SAT 26 NOV 7PM FRI 2 DEC 7PM THU 1 DEC 7PM SAT 3 DEC 7PM
STAR SOLOISTS
Zukerman plays Tchaikovsky and Mozart
The legendary Pinchas Zukerman returns to Sydney to make more glorious music, this time in a program featuring two beauties for violin and orchestra by Tchaikovsky, Mozart’s ‘Strassburger’ concerto and then finishing with Tchaikovsky’s dramatic Symphony No.4.
TCHAIKOVSKY
Souvenir d’un lieu cher: Mélodie Sérénade mélancolique
MOZART Violin Concerto No.3 in G, K216
TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No.4
Dvořák’s Cello Concerto Dedications
16 NOV 6.30PM THU 17 NOV 1.30PM EMIRATES METRO SERIES FRI 18 NOV 8PM Your
The sensational Alisa Weilerstein returns to Sydney to play the greatest cello concerto of them all: the Dvořák! Loved as much by musicians as by audiences.
LUTOSŁAWSKI
Sacher Variation for solo cello Symphony No.3
DVOŘÁK Cello Concerto in B minor
Brett Dean conductor Alisa Weilerstein cello
Pinchas Zukerman violin-director
being hosted by the bohemian Reeds at Heide, with the painter Sam Atyeo as the Evatt court jester.
War drew Evatt back to politics as the celebrity candidate for Barton in the federal election of September 1940. When the UAP government fell in October 1941, Evatt, despite his brief federal apprenticeship, became both attorney-general and minister for external affairs in the Curtin government. These ministerial years were his most successful in politics, perhaps because as attorney-general his legal experience gave him unrivalled authority, and as minister for external affairs he was relatively free from party constraints. An effective attorney-general rather than a law reformer, he implemented policies aimed at sustaining the war effort and preparing for the peace. He placed much more emphasis on his role at External Affairs, where he sought to articulate an independent foreign policy for Australia as well as pursuing an ambitious liberal internationalism. He compelled both Britain and the United States to recognise Australia as an autonomous nation, not one which either could take for granted. In the struggles to establish the constitution of the United Nations, he became the champion of the small powers, seeking with limited success to qualify the veto of the great powers, and to promote the role of both the International Court of Justice and UNESCO. It is probably true to say that he was the most significant Australian player on the world stage in the first half of the twentieth century. This prominence ensured that after the triumph of Menzies and the Liberals in the election of 1949, followed by the death of Chifley eighteen months later, Evatt became leader of the Opposition without a contest, but not without many doubters. This opened the most disastrous phase of his career. As Murphy writes ‘the combination of Menzies’ resurgence, domestic anticommunism and the international Cold War would destroy him’. Under Evatt, the Labor party split in 1955, crippling his leadership and denying the ALP federal government for nearly a generation. Murphy has a splendid metaphor on the magnitude of the break, comparing the early Labor splits of 1916 and 1931, when a few leaders peeled off to the conservatives, ‘as chips off a block’, whereas 1955 ‘fractured the rock entirely’. How far was Evatt to blame? To what extent
was he the wrecker? Or did the real explanation lie in the ‘powder keg’ – the underground war in the broader labour movement between right-wing Industrial Groupers, backed in Victoria by B.A. Santamaria and the secretive Catholic Social Studies Movement, and the communists and their left-wing allies? It is an issue which Murphy examines meticulously. He argues that Evatt, in a series of politically unwise interventions – easily pictured as pro-communist – and by his erratic and intemperate behaviour over the
Robert Menzies could not believe his luck: ‘The Lord hath delivered him into my hands’
Petrov Affair, inflamed tensions within the party and facilitated Menzies’ wedging of the Labor party on the issues of communism and the Cold War. Murphy also admits that Evatt lit the powder keg with a speech in October 1954 denouncing the malign influence of Santamaria and the Victorian Groupers, thereby initiating a series of convulsions that led directly to the Split six months later. But he acquits Evatt of the charge that he deliberately provoked this split to sustain his leadership. His grounds for so doing are not particularly creditable to Evatt. Such a charge, Murphy writes, ‘exaggerates his control over events, control over the party and perhaps control over himself’. In essence, Murphy concludes that given the powder keg ‘it is hard to imagine an alternative trajectory in which the split did not occur’.
The onset of dementia and a severe stroke ended Evatt’s brief reign as chief justice of the Supreme Court of NSW, which had been designed as an honourable exit from Parliament. A glimpse of him in court by the young Michael Kirby, who describes him as ‘Lear disconsolate’, captures this final stage. Coincidentally Murphy, in a much wider sense, also likens him to Lear, as a man of extraordinary talents, but a man blind to his own inadequacies for political leadership ‘driving himself forward to his ruin’. g
Neal Blewett has had a varied career as an academic, politician, and diplomat.
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Multiple tales to tell
A diligent study of Judith Wright
Ian Donaldson
THE UNKNOWN JUDITH WRIGHT
by Georgina Arnott
University of Western Australia Publishing, $29.99 pb, 350 pp, 9781742588216
Literary biographers and their intended subjects at times agree and at times disagree about the stories they think should be told. J.D. Salinger and Vladimir Nabokov – the one, fastidious about his privacy, the other, insistent on his version of history – famously took their biographers to court and emerged victorious. Such tussles are settled at times more quietly, through compromise, withholding of copyright, or spoiling tactics of some other kind. Doris Lessing, on learning that no fewer than five different writers were preparing to tell the story of her life, sat down to write a two-volume autobiography which would serve, so she thought, as a gazumping record of a life about which she knew she knew more than any of her would-be chroniclers. But once she got going she found that her views and opinions had changed disconcertingly over the years, the perspectives of youth giving way to those of old age. Biography, she reflected, was an unstable art, subject always to flux, contingency, and the restless, revisionist movement of time. Her biographers might tell one kind of story about her –or five different kinds – but she too had multiple tales to tell.
Judith Wright, like Lessing, thought deeply about the conflicting pressures of public and private life, about the shifting angles of vision that time allowed, and the various possible moments for personal disclosure. Conscious of the distress that her long and widely known relationship with philosopher Jack McKinney had given to his family, Wright took pains to keep secret her later partnership after McKinney’s death with the even more publicly visible figure of H.C. Coombs. At one stage she burned two decades’ worth of letters
she had received from Coombs, then soon regretted the loss. She resolved to keep later letters from him, and agreed with Coombs to their ultimate deposit in the National Library, along with her letters to him, with embargoed access for three years after their deaths. She showed similar vigilance and similar hesitation over Half a Lifetime, the much revised, long withheld, still unfinished manuscript published with her permission in 1999, a year before her death. ‘Autobiography is not what I want to write’, the book begins, as if through gritted teeth, offering to the public a portion of her life but (as the title suggests) not the whole.
So what of the other half? Tantalised by gaps in the biographical record, Georgina Arnott has set out to discover the ‘unknown’ Judith Wright: those parts of her own and her family’s history that the poet herself had either forgotten – she often complained of bad memory – or had knowingly decided not to reveal. Arnott focuses on the first twenty-one years of Wright’s life, a period for which no diaries, letters, poems, or papers relating to her time as a student are to be found in the NLA’s otherwise extensive Judith Wright archives. Those who have written about these early years, Arnott suggests, have been largely content to repeat the events that Wright herself saw fit to describe.
Veronica Brady’s South of My Days, for example, published in 1998, presents a version of Wright’s family history suspiciously close, Arnott thinks, to that given in the then still-unpublished manuscript of Half a Lifetime, to which Wright had granted Brady early access, and in Wright’s two published accounts of the lives of her pioneering greatgreat-grandparents in the New England
district, George and Margaret Wyndham: The Generations of Men (1959) and The Cry for the Dead (1981).
In the twenty-two years separating those two titles, Wright had learned more about the wider effects on local Aboriginal communities of the pastoral invasion of New England, and The Cry
Biography, Doris Lessing reflected, was an unstable art, subject always to flux
for the Dead offers a markedly different perspective from that given in The Generations of Men. But either out of respect for her family or lack of full historical knowledge, Wright does not speak in either book about the Wyndhams’s possible role in the forcible clearance of Aboriginal people in the region, and ‘never surrendered her respect’ for these early members of her family. Violent clashes were still occurring between pastoralists and surviving members of the Wonnarua people in this region until about 1830, as Arnott’s researches show. ‘SHOOT THEM DEAD, if you can’, advised George Wyndham’s friend, the Singleton magistrate, Robert Scott. George Wyndham himself, Arnott suggests, may have shared Scott’s views, and possibly used those very tactics. (Cut off their big toes, said George of these troublesome natives, then they won’t waste time climbing trees and chasing possums when they should be busily working for you.)
Arnott documents other hitherto neglected corners of the early biographical record. She sketches the life of Wright’s independent, strong-minded grand -
mother, May, who managed huge holdings in Queensland and New England after her husband’s death. She assesses the influence of Judith’s conservative father, Phillip, and of her sickly mother, Ethel, a model of all Judith wished not to be. She describes Judith’s not always happy schooldays in New England and the excitements she encountered on her move, as a young woman, from the country to the city. She describes in a little detail the influential figures she encountered at Sydney University, including Camilla Wedgwood, independent-minded anthropologist and Principal of Women’s College, and A.P. Elkin and W.E.H. Stanner, early movers in the field of Aboriginal studies; along with other university luminaries of whom Wright had a somewhat more mixed opinion, including the philosopher John Anderson, whose greatest influence on Wright, Arnott believes, ‘was to heighten her suspicion of communism’; publisher and editor Clem Christesen, about whom she harboured similar doubts; Challis Professor of History Stephen Roberts, to whose work Wright was (perhaps surprisingly) not yet attracted.
Arnott looks also at the influence on Wright of her mentors in the Sydney Department of English, which at that time offered no courses on contemporary authors and (in Wright’s later recollection) ‘had no truck with Australian writing’ – though University librarian H.M. Green was independently offering some lectures on Australian literature. There were teachers whom Wright admired, such as Arthur Waldock, who ‘looked like Hamlet’ and lectured somewhat histrionically on Shakespeare. But to qualify for honours Wright was obliged to take a course on English ‘before Shakespeare’ which consisted solely of sixty lectures on Beowulf, with sixty more lectures on the same text promised to intending honours students in the second year – an offer that Wright, fatigued by the hero’s adventures by the end of her first year, was ready to let slip.
The Unknown Judith Wright, described by its author as a ‘categorydefying’ book, works best as a study in social history: in tracing the pastoral
settlement in New England, the growth of ‘agrarian politics’ in the region, the attractions of ‘modern’ life in pre-war Sydney, and the general fervour of 1930s Australian academic life. In its final chapters, the book moves on to more sensitive ground, as – in the classic death-struggle that life writing offers – the biographer seeks to reveal what her subject had sought in her lifetime to conceal.
Arnott looks at eleven poems published at Sydney University under pseudonyms between 1934 and 1936: material which, she believes, ‘allows us to hear, directly, thrillingly, the feisty voice of a young Judith Wright and forces us to reconsider the woman we thought we knew’. If these poems are indeed by Judith Wright – and a plausible case for her authorship of many is
advanced – then the voice (it needs also to be said) is not always feisty, and is one that Wright herself – while confessing in general terms to have written ‘schoolgirl’ verses in her early years and verses of which she was ‘now very ashamed’ while at university – wished never to identify as her own, either at the time or in later life. One particular signature she would not reveal, she declared, even if ‘wild horses are harnessed to me’. Readers of Arnott’s book may at times feel similarly torn, between admiration for the author’s diligence and sympathy for the shrewdly self-shielding poet. g
Ian Donaldson is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His books include Ben Jonson: A life (2011).
White emissary from Canberra
A celebration and critique of the Gurindji struggle
Timothy Neale
A HANDFUL OF SAND: THE GURINDJI STRUGGLE, AFTER THE WALK-OFF by Charlie Ward
Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 384 pp, 97819253771613
The iconography of Indigenous land rights in Australia is fundamentally deceptive. Take, for example, the famous photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring red sand from his hand into that of Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari on 16 August 1975. In the image, the white emissary from Canberra – pink-fleshed in a wool suit and Windsor knot – appears to bestow something substantial. Lingiari’s left hand holds papers which, moments before, Whitlam described as ‘proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people’, while the earth that fills Lingiari’s right hand, Whitlam avowed, is ‘a sign that we restore them to you and your children forever’. The whole scene, for good reasons, resembles the ancient European ritual of ‘livery in deed’ in which the transfer of soil or a
branch stands in as material testimony to the transfer of more ethereal legal rights.
While the accepted meaning of the handover, then as now, is that it represented a victory for land rights, Charlie Ward suggests in A Handful of Sand that it was ‘anything but’. This is at least true, Ward argues, for the Gurindji and their ngumpit countrymen living at Kalkaringi, the former Wave Hill Welfare Settlement, and Daguragu, the place on Wattie Creek where the ‘track mob’ led by Lingiari and others chose to settle after walking off a nearby pastoral station in 1966. What the Gurindji received after years of struggle, rallying support from across the country, was not possession, in any strong sense, but rather a pastoral lease and soft promises that freehold title was coming. The lease
fulfilled some of the track mob’s aspirations by providing the basis for their own pastoral business. However, as Ward details, the lease and other land rights that followed also came with an abundance of legal apertures through which federal and (later) Northern Territory governments could exercise control.
The handover image thus actually encodes a pair of myths central to Indigenous politics in Australia, or what might more accurately be called the whitefella politics of Indigenous country. The first myth is that Indigenous people were given control of their communities through the ‘self-determination’ and ‘selfmanagement’ policies of the Whitlam and Fraser governments. Instead, as Ward shows, these administrations ironically established, equipped, and supported an army of variously well-intentioned and opportunistic kartiya (outsiders, settlers, whitefellas) to administer the project of Indigenous independence. The second myth is that Indigenous people have substantial legal property rights. Decades of fearmongering by the timorous pastoral and mining sectors, buoyed by conservatives such as Joh Bjelke-Petersen and John Howard, have helped obscure the fact that since colonisation, Indigenous people have never held their soil, or the minerals under that soil, in exclusive possession. None of the manifold forms of Indigenous land rights in Australia – from South Australia’s Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 1966 to Victoria’s Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010 – offers what Whitlam’s words and actions suggested on Gurindji country that sunny day in 1975. Ward takes us to this broader view by focusing on both the Gurindji’s long quest for independence and the disappointments that followed in the decade after the handback. Drawing on archival research and interviews with many of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors in this story, he seeks to understand the shifting motivations at work
and their effects on the realisation of the track mob’s aspirations. In this sense, the book is more interested in personalities than in structures or academic analyses of policy. Events are marked by interpersonal exchanges, taking us up close to members of the track mob such as Lingiari, Captain Major Lupngiari, and Mick Rangiari, labour organisers such as Dexter and Davis Daniels, and the kartiya at Daguragu and Kalkaringi such as Philip Nitschke and Rob Wesley-Smith, among others.
This arguably makes Ward’s book an account of Wave Hill alone, though an account in which we can nonetheless espy familiar political rhythms being played out and sedimented. First, an Indigenous group subject to gross inequity takes bold action to embarrass the settler colonial state. Soon, commercial stakeholders – in this case the British pastoral giant Vestey’s – who have long profited
from this inequity deny culpability and deploy lobbyists to quietly secure their interests, while government actors find obscure reasons to delay. Others are rallied to support the Indigenous group and expand the embarrassment of the state. Policy reviews are commissioned, and advice taken, until a legislative option emerges that instantiates a new inequity, albeit one cloaked in a miasma of optimism. Exhausted by this process, and unable to recruit the next generation to their worldview, Ward argues that the track mob became desperately resigned two decades after the walk off.
A Handful of Sand is both a celebration and critique of the Gurindji struggle, grounded in the author’s long engagement with the community. Like others before him, Ward is clear in pointing out that the frontier pastoral model pursued by Lingiari and others was not sustainable, though he does not blame the Gurindji for the station’s eventual demise. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is not its compelling retelling of the famous walk off, or the handover, but its documentation of the creeping effects of policy, at a personal level, on those who grappled with the Whitlam and Fraser bureaucracies. In these later chapters, we can see the political project of independence being turned into the later project of coercive improvement, measured out in ‘gaps’ and ‘jobs’. Nonetheless, Ward evokes a hopeful note in closing. The abiding image of Wave Hill should be ‘Lingiari’s legacy’, which he detects in the resilience of contemporary Gurindji leaders, rather than something as insubstantial and ephemeral Whitlam’s handful of sand. g
Timothy Neale is a writer and researcher currently employed at Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute for Sustainability and Globalisation. ❖
Gough Whitlam and Gurindji men, 16 August 1975 (courtesy of Rob Wesley-Smith)
An exploration of faith, an examination of conscience
‘Not since writing Schindler’s Ark have I been so affected. Crimes of the Father is a novel I had to write.’ - TOM KENEALLY
Reaching out
Two unique contributions to a complex debate
Kevin Bell
IT’S OUR COUNTRY: INDIGENOUS ARGUMENTS FOR MEANINGFUL CONSTITUTIONAL RECOGNITION AND REFORM
edited by Megan Davis and Marcia Langton
Melbourne University Press, $29.99 pb, 206 pp, 9780522869934
THE FORGOTTEN PEOPLE: LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE APPROACHES TO RECOGNISING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES
edited by Damien Freeman and Shireen Morris
Melbourne University Press, $29.99 pb, 200 pp, 9780522869637
Are you part of the non-Indigenous majority? Have you had too little contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Do you feel that you do not fully comprehend their worldview, but wish you could? Is entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage eating away at your sense of Australia as a fair and united country? Do you still possess the recollection of your first encounter with an Aboriginal person, and wonder why it remains so enduring? Are you troubled by the time being taken to achieve constitutional recognition and frustrated that an apparently simple issue has become so vexed? If these questions resonate in your mind, you have much in common with many Australians and may benefit from reading these books.
Melbourne University Press has published It’s Our Country and The Forgotten People as companion contributions to the national debate about recognising Aboriginals in the Australian Constitution. In highly readable chapters by contributors from a variety of backgrounds, they each examine the issues in different ways, the former from an Indigenous and the latter from a liberal and conservative political perspective. You will not find here the answers to all of the questions that may be asked, but you will find informed discussion that is accessible to a general readership.
The publication of a book about constitutional issues written and ed-
ited wholly by Aboriginal authors is a significant event in the history of Australian letters. The editors of It’s Our Country are highly distinguished scholars: Megan Davis is a Professor of Law and Director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales and an expert member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; Marcia Langton is a Professor of Indigenous Studies and holds the inaugural chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. Individual contributors, such as Noel Pearson and Patrick Dodson, will be known to many, but more than a dozen others, each deserving to be better known, write from their own particular Indigenous knowledge and experience.
The publication of The Forgotten People (the title draws on a famous phrase of Robert Menzies) is also a significant event because it represents a genuine attempt by writers from the (self-identifying) political right to explain the complexities of constitutional recognition as a reform proposal and suggest possible paths forward. The editors are also scholars: Damien Freeman is a lawyer, writer, and philosopher who lectures on ethics and aesthetics at Pembroke College, Cambridge; Shireen Morris is a lawyer, senior policy adviser, and constitutional research fellow at Noel Pearson’s Cape York Institute, and a researcher at Monash University.
Individual contributors, including constitutional lawyers, political commentators, and public intellectuals, open the eyes of the reader to this perspective in a way that no other publication goes near.
These books share a commitment to addressing historical injustice and making real improvements to Aboriginal well-being and social, economic and political participation. As a means, constitutional recognition, in some form or another, is seen to be positive but not itself sufficient for the achievement of those urgent ends. In broad terms, the problem addressed by both books is achieving recognition that is not merely symbolic but substantively meaningful, and doing so in a way that might pass the toughest referendum test in the world: a majority of voters in a majority of states. The common premise that recognition on its own is not enough helps us to appreciate why constitutional reform is complex and that we have reached a critical point in the debate, one that invites consideration of what it really meant to colonise a country that had been occupied by many peoples, with their own established political and social systems, for at least 40,000 years.
As initially proposed by the authoritative Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australians in 2012, constitutional recognition would not have gone to a referendum on its own. It would have been combined with (among other things) the longoverdue repeal of certain dead-letter, race-based provisions and the inclusion of a prohibition upon discrimination on the grounds of race, colour, or ethnic or national origin. This package of reforms, still the most coherent ever proposed, and the only one that is fully consistent with Australia’s international obliga-
tions, has not yet attracted referendumwinning support, and some fear that it never will. The search for common ground since 2012 has proved to be elusive and these books perform the invaluable function of helping people from different sides of the debate,and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities generally, understand each other.
Like Patrick Dodson, Megan Davis, and Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson was a member of the Expert Panel. Acknowledging that the political right would not support the Panel’s proposal for constitutional prohibition of racial discrimination, he has suggested an alternative path. The suggestion is the inclusion in the Constitution (by referendum) of an Indigenous Advisory Council. An important purpose of The Forgotten People is to provide various contributors with the opportunity to discuss this suggestion. Some combine it with a proposal for a strong Declaration of Recognition not inside but outside the Constitution, a proposal that is well developed in the chapter by Damien Freeman and Julian Leeser. The discussion in this book emphasises the (alleged) need to avoid amending the Constitution in a way that would give too much power to judges (i.e., constitutional recognition and protection against racial discrimination) and the meaningful advisory role that the Council would play in relation to federal legislation and government policy as regards Indigenous affairs.
It’s Our Country is a different kind of book. By giving Aboriginal leaders of all political persuasions the opportunity to discuss the issues using their own voices, it contributes both to constitutional reform and overcoming historical exclusion. The contrast with the framing of Australia’s Constitution in the late-nineteenth century could not be starker. Self-determination is the leitmotif of most contributions. Professors Langton and Davis write contextualising chapters that are especially powerful. The book implicitly discredits the facile but commonly held view that Aboriginal people should always speak with one voice and somehow eschew controversial political discussion. The
chapter by Patrick Dodson goes beyond the recommendations of the Expert Panel persuasively to discuss the need to establish productive new political relationships between Aboriginal peoples and Australian governments through a treaty or treaties, a process that has begun in two states.
In the pursuit of shared enlightenment, these two books reach out to each other and they reach out to us. They help us to appreciate how significant is one premise of the debate that is solid common ground and a cause of much hope: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are peoples (bodies politic) whose unique position in the Australian political system must be recognised. When other Anglo settler-majority states like New Zealand, Canada, and the United States recognised that long ago, settler–indigenous relations were internally reorganised (imperfectly) along people-to-people lines within the existing political framework. Entrenched indigenous disadvantage and political exclusion was not and is not eliminated in those states. But an essential element of the political means for working towards those and other urgent ends was created. There is continuing debate about choosing the appropriate means in Australia to which these books, edited and written by key Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, make a unique contribution. g
Kevin Bell is a justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria and former president of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. As a barrister, he frequently represented Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in native title claims, especially in the Kimberley in Western Australia. ❖
ABR Gender Fellowship
Australian Book Review seeks applications for the current ABR Fellowship.
We welcome proposals for a substantial article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms. The Fellow will be chosen by Anne Edwards, Andrea Goldsmith, and Peter Rose.
The ABR Fellowships – which are funded by a range of philanthropic foundations and ABR Patrons – are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to ideas and critical debate. All published Australian writers are eligible to apply.
The Fellowship is worth $7,500
Applications close 1 February 2017
This particular Fellowship (the first of its type to be offered by ABR) is fully funded by Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO, a former Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University and a long-time ABR Patron and board member.
See our website for full conditions and guidelines: www.australianbookreview.com.au
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The god of cheaper prices
New threats to our literary culture from the Productivity Commission
by Colin Golvan
The federal government has been promoting the innovation economy, but is considering recommendations for legal reform which will undermine the financial and cultural interests of creators. This conflict captures the tension around real reform in this area. Are they being serious? The recommendations are contained in the report of the Productivity Commission, an independent panel which reviews options to make our economy more productive, favouring free markets, and eschewing monopolistic practices.
Intellectual property laws are all about monopolies which have long existed to foster creativity and invention. With respect to copyright, the Productivity Commission has recommended the abolition of restrictions on parallel importation and the introduction of a defence of fair use in copyright in place of the fair dealing defence.
I share the widely reported publishers’ and authors’ perspective on the problems of removing the restrictions on parallel importation. Parallel importation restrictions limit the ability to import editions of books without the permission of the copyright owner. The concept is not unique in intellectual property law. There is, for example, a comparable provision in trade marks law which prevents parallel importation, or grey marketing, where the mark on the goods has not been applied by or with the consent of the Australian trade mark proprietor.
The proposed removal of restrictions on parallel importation on books will have the practical effect of significantly inhibiting the ability of Australian authors to transact in rights in different copyright territories –undermining their capacity to obtain advances on royalties with every rights sale. Advances are a key part of the earnings of many Australian authors.
Australia’s leading copyright owners will invariably be required to transact on a one-off basis with a publisher in the United States or the United Kingdom, with the work being absorbed into an international publishing program and the offering of Australian editions as a secondary consideration. There are significant risks to the integrity of our Australian literary culture, as well as the prospect of the loss of jobs and know-how in our
domestic publishing market, when key publishing decisions concerning the Australian market are coming from New York or London. And then there is the harm to our unique language as our spelling and idiom are changed to accommodate the international edition.
On fair use, I am also concerned that the open-ended nature of the fair use defence will significantly harm the important work being done by collecting agencies, in particular Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in its dealings with tertiary and other educational institutions. For many authors, CAL payments are a key part of their earnings from writing. CAL collects well over $100 million per year from educational institutions (schools and tertiary) for copying of works.
Under fair use, the collection activity of CAL will inevitably be impeded by educational institutions declaring that their copyright usage, which has been outside the much more limited defence of fair dealing and thus required remuneration to authors and publishers, ought now be permitted as ‘fair use’ and thus not within the copyright collection system. The concept of ‘fair use’ derives from US copyright law, where a centralised copyright collecting system barely functions. It is difficult to understand the point of this proposed reform. It is not at all clear what is wrong with the defence of fair dealing such that we should have a new and much broader, and essentially ill-defined, defence to infringement of copyright.
I worry about the undue emphasis in this report to the interests of consumers. This lauding of the god of cheaper prices for consumers at all costs is a mistake, especially when it comes to issues of the creation of culture. There are no ready substitutes for the small body of often poorly remunerated authors who create the works that shape our literary culture, unlike substitutes in the ordinary economy for commodity products. To me, the report is seriously inadequate in dealing with the significant national interest in the development of culture and ensuring that our creators are able to earn proper payment for their creative work. The focus of the reform agenda should not be on saving purchasers of books a dollar here or there, but on providing proper
incentives for those engaged in the innovation and creation enterprise. There is a serious lack of perspective here.
From a legal point of view, we also have a significant jurisprudence concerning fair dealing which has been extensively reviewed by the High Court. The defence of fair dealing is well understood, and it works. Fair use would create a new regime of inquiry. There is a false economy around the idea of legislating in this area in the hope of making copyright works more available for use when there is no good case being mounted for undue restriction on access under the present law.
I do not see the advantage in these proposed reforms. The present system is well understood and works well.There is no imbalance requiring correction in addressing the interests of creators and users of copyright works. There
is also no demonstrated incapacity to acquire copyright works because they are too expensive. Any sojourn on the Amazon website will assuage concerns about the expense of copyright works. Given the current pricing, it is a wonder to think that anyone involved in the production (as distinct from electronic distribution) of books is being properly remunerated.
Australia is a small country with a proud and independent literary culture. If we are to have these kinds of interventions from the Productivity Commission, then it might be as well to get input from a Cultural Commission. g
Colin
Golvan QC specialises in copyright law. He is the Chair of ABR
Two poems by Judith Bishop
The Grey Parrot
after the painting The grey parrot by Walter Deverell, National Gallery of Victoria
The far city must make itself known even here in the sitting room and barred by winter branches. The skyline
with its towers square as pillars built of blocks could be here as much as then and there and is
in any case beyond hearing. Long withdrawn from the city that oversees life to a home
where rapt stillness is a cultivated guest and the ghost of light leavens the chores of daily bread, she would come to lend her features to ideas she understood could be treated most faithfully in art that generates no propulsion other than this same descent into pleasure gently shared between minds – those branched apart by evolution, or merely space and time
Judith Bishop won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2011.
Home
Be our heart’s north, daybreak in our daughters’ breath, be the radiance that listens as we gather for the singing of the wood.
Here is night. Somewhere, to someone, fear is coming: dark calls out the human animal. Somewhere, in someone, the animal runs forth.
By night the wood sings. In its radiance we find ourselves altered. Somewhere in the night our hearts settle and the breath alone keeps watch.
Executive decision
David Rolph
THE TIM CARMODY AFFAIR: AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST JUDICAL CRISIS
by Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Gabrielle Appleby,
and Andrew Lynch NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 245 pp, 9781742234991
With a few notable exceptions (Michael Kirby springs to mind), judges in Australia do not have a high public profile. Many non-lawyers would struggle to name a judge currently serving on an Australian court. The lack of public profile is not really a problem. In fact, it should be viewed as a benefit. What judges do should be more important than who judges are. Publicity about what goes on in open court is important. As Lord Chief Justice Hewart famously observed, it ‘is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should be manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’. The principle of open justice is crucial to the proper administration of justice. Publicity about individual judges is less so.
The lack of public profile for judges starts from the time of their appointment and, for most of them, continues throughout their time on the bench. Judicial appointments in Australia are barely newsworthy and rarely controversial. There will be a press release from the attorney-general, a mention in an email newsletter from the bar association or the law society, sometimes even a short item in a newspaper. Notwithstanding the importance of the judiciary as a branch of government and as an upholder of the rule of law, most judicial appointments go largely unheralded.
The appointment of Tim Carmody as the chief justice of Queensland in July 2014 by Campbell Newman’s Liberal National Party government was different. It gave a number of Queensland judges, not only Tim Carmody, a public profile. It also drew public attention to
the usually opaque process of judicial appointments.
Carmody replaced the long-serving Paul de Jersey, who had been appointed as governor of Queensland. At the time of his appointment, Carmody had been chief magistrate of Queensland for a little over nine months. Although Carmody had been a Family Court judge for approximately five years, there was a perception that he was too inexperienced to take the job at the apex of the administration of justice in Queensland. There was also a perception, based particularly on Carmody’s actions and statements in support of the tough antioutlaw motorcycle gang legislation, that Carmody was too politically aligned with the Newman government. For justice to be administered properly by an independent judiciary, perceptions matter.
Despite (or perhaps because) of the resistance shown by significant sections of the judiciary and the legal profession, Newman proceeded with Carmody’s appointment. It quickly became apparent that Carmody was unable to command the confidence and respect of the judges with whom he had to work on the Supreme Court. In under a year, Carmody had resigned his post.
The Carmody Affair documents in meticulous detail the appointment of Carmody, his tumultuous tenure as chief justice, his resignation, and its aftermath. Written by three legal academics, one from the University of Queensland and two from the University of New South Wales, it is a thorough and accessible account of this important episode in recent Queensland history, and of judicial politics more generally. The subtitle of the book, ‘Australia’s Greatest Judicial Crisis’, may overstate the importance of the Carmody affair. It may be the latest, but can it really claim to be the greatest? The travails of Lionel Murphy may have a justifiable claim to that title. There is no doubt, though, that the Carmody affair raises important questions about the relationship between law and politics in Australia, which are thoughtfully canvased in this book.
As the authors acknowledge, the Carmody affair is a particularly Queensland one. The controversy is in part
explicable only against the backdrop of the Newman government. Coming to power in an electoral landslide, Campbell ‘Can Do’ Newman set about shaking things up after more than a decade of Labor regimes. Without the impediment of an upper house, Newman had few restraints. The Carmody affair in turn triggered a deeper, underlying anxiety about the potential for debasing public institutions in Queensland. It raised concerns about a return to the Bjelke-Petersen style of government. In this context, it was no surprise that Tony Fitzgerald, Chair of the Commission of Inquiry into Official Corruption in Queensland in the late 1980s, emerged as a critic of the appointment of Carmody as chief justice.
As the authors equally suggest, the Carmody affair raises broader questions of relevance throughout Australia. Perhaps the most significant one relates to the process of judicial appointments, which is at the heart of the Carmody affair. Unlike other legal systems in the English-speaking world, which have a variety of mechanisms for appointing, recommending, or exercising oversight over the appointment of judges, Australia, at a federal, state, and territory level, still allows the executive a wide, largely unfettered discretion in making judicial appointments. This approach often works well, as is demonstrated by the many uncontroversial judicial appointments it has produced. When things go wrong, however, the risks associated with placing the decision in the hands of so few become apparent. Once appointed, it is difficult to remove a judge. There is good reason for this. The independence of the judiciary is a vital feature of our system of government. Removing a judge should not be made easier. The solution is to ensure a rigorous appointment process. As the authors of The Carmody Affair point out, this is an important matter of public policy which requires further consideration in Australia. g
David Rolph is a Professor of Law at the University of Sydney, and the author of several books, including Defamation Law (2016). He was the editor of the Sydney Law Review from 2007 to 2013.
Settler society
Maria O’Sullivan
NOT QUITE AUSTRALIAN: HOW TEMPORARY MIGRATION IS CHANGING THE NATION
by Peter Mares
Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 357 pp, 9781925355116
Migration is widely regarded as one of the most important policy issues on the global agenda. Not only does it have economic implications for states, it also poses certain challenges for the political and social fabric of countries. In particular, what does the act of migration say about the continuing social bond between migrants and their countries of origin, and that between the migrant and the country to which they have migrated? At what point does a migrant become part of the political and social world of their new country, and how should law and policy recognise this?
In his new book, Not Quite Australian, Peter Mares deals with an aspect of this question by examining the increasing use by Australia of temporary migration, including workers on 457 visas, international students, working holidaymakers, and refugees holding temporary protection visas (TPVs).
In focusing the book on this issue, Mares makes a valuable contribution to existing knowledge about Australian migration programs. Much has been written about Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Indeed, Peter Mares has contributed to this debate through his excellent book Borderline (2001). While the refugee debate is undoubtedly a pressing one, there are also important aspects of temporary migration which require policy and public attention, and Mares fills an important gap in the literature.
In addressing these issues, Mares begins from the premise that Australia has traditionally been a ‘settler society’. That is, the historical focus of immigration has been for nation building, and Australian multiculturalism has been ‘citizenship centred’. Now large num-
bers of temporary migrants are entering Australia. As Mares notes, these temporary migration categories are uncapped, and sometimes these entrants reside in Australia for extended periods.
Mares is concerned about two potential outcomes of this shift away from the settler-society model. The first is that a growing number of temporary migrants will become active and engaged members of Australian society for an extended period of time without necessarily being able to access permanent residency or citizenship. The second is that an increasingly large and significant share of Australia’s population and labour force will be made up of temporary migrants. He then asks an important question which operates as a central theme of his book: what impact does this have on the concept of an Australian liberal democracy?
In answering these questions, Mares presents compelling case studies of the dangers posed for individuals on temporary visas. These include issues of which many readers will be aware, such as the exploitation of workers, but also highlight lesser-known problems, for instance, reduced entitlements for workers compensation, emergency payments, and other gaps in the protections of the law.
In addition to highlighting the problems with temporary migration, Mares (helpfully) makes recommendations as to how policy can be improved. Two key recommendations are that temporary migrants would be entitled to become permanent after a period of eight years, and that a cap should be placed on temporary migration (as we do with permanent migration).
There are a number of positive things to say about the way in which Mares approaches this material. First, his prose is extremely accessible and engaging. His use of case studies and interviews with migrants strengthens his analysis and gives it authenticity. He also exhibits good knowledge of the leading international authorities on migration, referring to leading migration scholars such as Joseph Carens and Michael Walzer, which grounds the work in an ethical context. Because of its topicality and the ease with which Mares communicates his ideas, the book will be of interest to the general public, as well
as to journalists, academics, and policymakers.
However, there are aspects of his analysis which may have benefited from a more nuanced approach. For instance, in discussing TPVs, Mares recommends that refugee status should be permanent once refugee recognition takes place (or at least after two years on a TPV). However, some have argued that protection for refugees should not be seen as a means of permanent residence in an asylum host state; that is, that there is no absolute link between refugee status and a right of permanent immigration. The analysis of this issue by Mares would have been strengthened by acknowledging this counterargument.
Secondly, while I recognise that Mares clearly limits his analysis to a focus on Australian democracy, some reference to the broader debates about the effect of migration on countries of origin would have given some context to his conclusions. Temporary migration can confer significant benefits on developing countries by giving individuals an opportunity to acquire education and skills, and then return to their home country. What then are the implications of Mares’s proposal to frame temporary migration as a pathway to permanence in Australia? Will it provide incentive for skilled people to stay in Australia rather than to return to their home country and contribute politically, socially, and economically to their own democracies? Although I concede that Mares does not set out to write a text on migration and development, the broader effect of his proposals could have perhaps been addressed in his conclusions to provide a fuller picture of the global context in which migration policy operates.
Nonetheless, Not Quite Australian is an important and timely contribution to the debate about how Australia should handle the migration of people to its territory, and I highly recommend it. g
Maria O’Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law and an Associate of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law at Monash University. She teaches Administrative Law, Public Law, and International Refugee Law. ❖
Kevin Rabalais
At the outbreak of World War II, the British novelist Anna Kavan began a journey around the world that brought her, ultimately, to New Zealand. Her two years there in a landscape that she describes as ‘splendid’ but also ‘sinister’ and ‘frightening’ inspired Kavan’s most famous novel. The surreal and post-apocalyptic Ice (1967) emerged from a mind that found itself adrift, while the world waged war, in the ‘menacing strangeness of an alien hemisphere’, as she writes in ‘New Zealand: An Answer to an Inquiry’ (Horizon, 1943). In that article, Kavan chronicles her time among people who ‘look mad and heroic because they have courage to go on living at all in the face of that alien terror and loveliness, nothing between them and the South Pole’.
Kavan sought novel characteristics among the citizens in this ‘new country, a country so full of splendour and strangeness’. She didn’t like what she found. In the same decade she discovered ‘something lacking’, the New Zealand poet Allen Curnow held similar notions. ‘Strictly speaking,’ he wrote in 1945, ‘New Zealand doesn’t exist yet, though some possible New Zealands glimmer in some poems and on some canvases. It remains to be cre-
ated – should I say invented – by writers, musicians, artists, architects, publishers; even a politician might help – and how many generations does that take?’
There are the facts of a nation. We cite dates, the ‘founding’ by whites, other epochs that came long before the first waves of pale skin; wars; industrial and scientific progress. Such feats, easy to recite, form a country’s skeleton. There is, however, something much more difficult to define – the kind of history that reveals itself through the achievements of a nation’s arts. Triumphs in the fields of art, music, and literature form nothing less than an emotional history, a kind of story-truth that cloaks itself around the skeleton of fact.
‘We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it,’ Lawrence Durrell writes in Justine (1957). It is no surprise, then, to discover that writers work within the fate of their own geographies. The inaugural New Zealand Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire, said he believes that while the West looms in the American imagination, the Outback resides, always, at the back of the Australian psyche. On these same lines, he cites his country’s proximity to Antarctica – that ‘alien
terror and loveliness’ – along with its geographical remoteness as occupying a permanent realm in the New Zealand consciousness.
Another aspect of that consciousness: New Zealand writers work inside the borders of a small nation. It is, to borrow from a Lloyd Jones title, a land ‘at the end of the world’, a country .64 the size of California, with a population of less than four and a half million people. ‘But what is a small nation?’ Milan Kundera asks in ‘The Tragedy of
Writers work within the fate of their own geographies
Central Europe’ (New York Review of Books, 1984). ‘I offer you my definition: the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it.’ This latter sentiment may explain the vibrancy of New Zealand literature and the urgency of its readers. At once aware of the high quality of the country’s writers, these readers also understand that they are the first and, at times, final audience for the work of their countrymen and women. A disproportionate number of them work at worldclass levels.
Penguin has released a uniform hardcover series of six novels, each published between 1986 and 2000, which fit that latter category. Each received the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction. The authors, household names among New Zealand readers, grant us a privileged
THE NEAR AND THE FAR: NEW STORIES FROM THE ASIA-PACIFIC REGION
edited by David Carlin and Francesca Rendle-Short Scribe
$27.99 pb, 271 pp, 9781925321562
At the 2016 Melbourne Writers Festival, Maxine Beneba Clarke received a standing ovation for her opening address in which she pushed for greater diversity in literature. ‘Something powerful stirred,’ she said of reading the few books with diverse characters available to her as a teenager, from Sally Morgan to Judy Blume. ‘These were stories about difference and sameness, about home and unbelonging. They were my stories.’
The anthology format presents a unique opportunity to represent diverse authors and literature in meaningful ways. The product of WrICE (the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange Program, led by RMIT University and Copyright Agency), The Near and the Far travels a long way, literally and figuratively, in achieving this. (Clarke’s own contribution ‘Aviation’, by the way, is a highlight.)
Comprising fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essays from emerging and established participating writers in the collaborative residency program, The Near and the Far is wide in scope. The authors hail from the Asia-Pacific region, otherwise bound only by their participation in WrICE, many in places far from home. ‘It felt like cheating,’ reflects Joe Rubbo (each inclusion is followed by a comment from the author) of penning his suburban-Australian story ‘Trampoline’ during the 2015 residency in Hoi An, when, in fact, it nestles quite skilfully alongside the likes of Suchen Christine Lim’s revelatory family tale, Xu Xi’s amusing vision of life before Google, Melissa Lucashenko’s affecting story of unfathomable loss, Omar Musa’s account of an unlikely friendship, and Jennifer Down’s closing story of the bond between siblings amid familial chaos.
The reflections that follow each inclusion are jarring at times – better to collate such in an appendix – but this is a small gripe in an otherwise impressive anthology, sure to stir something powerful (to borrow Clarke’s wording) in many a reader.
Sara Savage
glimpse into the land, history, and temperaments of the country. The subjects range from the Maori oral tradition (Potiki by Patricia Grace, $29.99 hb, 226 pp, 9780143573784) to family saga (The Singing Whakapapa by C.K. Stead, $29.99 hb, 344 pp, 9780143573777) and the creation of national myth through the adoration of rugby (The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones, $29.99 hb, 203 pp, 9780143573791).
Several arresting aspects weave through these six novels. We witness a remarkably divergent range of styles and voices from these writers, who cause us to readjust our understanding of the possibilities of the form. Along with this aspect comes another common thread, namely a sustained examination of landscape, language, history, culture, and identity. In Stead’s complex and engrossing The Singing Whakapapa , Hugh Grady devotes his energies to understanding his life and times by researching ‘all the lives who came before, shading back in time and across seas’. Grady moves from ‘real history, which was, so to speak, in the public domain, in favour of his family story, his “singing whakapapa”’.
Another story of whakapapa – the Maori term for genealogy – that sings in originality, Patricia Grace’s Potiki unfolds through the voice of the childprophet Tokowaru-i-te-Marama. Grace, along with the novelist Witi Ihimaera and poet Hone Tuwhare, is one of the leading voices of Maori literature. Interviewed for this article, award-winning New Zealand novelist Paula Morris calls Potiki ‘a landmark in Maori literature, not just because Grace refused to include a glossary, demanding that the NZ reader embrace te reo Maori in order to enter the world of the novel. It is both lyrical and political, and explores myth alongside social issues about land and dispossession.’ With its poetic intensity, Potiki reveals the ways in which the past infiltrates the present. It reads like a tale that has been handed down through the generations, waiting to be consigned to paper.
Many New Zealanders grow up reading the young adult novels of Maurice Gee, whose eerie The Burning Boy ($29.99 hb, 354 pp, 9780143573760), set in pro-
vincial New Zealand, is one of many in this series that deserves an international audience. Like much of the work of Ian McEwan, The Burning Boy revolves around the repercussions of a single violent event. As Morris suggests, ‘If Gee had been born British, he would have won the Man Booker Prize by now.’ Another novel set in provincial New Zealand, The Skinny Louie Book by Fiona Farrell ($29.99 hb, 323 pp, 9780143573753), gives us some of the most memorable characters we encounter in this series. It begins when Skinny Louie – fifteen and pregnant, paternity doubtful – gives birth in the public gardens of a small town on the night before the queen’s visit in 1953. Farrell’s début adds a Kiwi sensibility to magic realism.
Among these writers, Lloyd Jones – whose Mister Pip (2006) earned a place on the Booker Prize short list –has experienced the most international success. His earlier novel, The Book of Fame, segues between prose and verse as it imagines the 1905 All Blacks, the first of such squads to sail for the other side of the world, where its athletes come to dominate opponents. Jones writes in a collective voice, a first-person plural that seeks to understand the identity and meaning of a country that, seventy years after Curnow’s comment, continues to fashion itself through history and myth, fact, and invention.
We see this in Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Phar Lap’. Manhire writes of ‘this chestnut colt, / foaled in Timaru’ whose ‘hide is in Melbourne, / the heart in Canberra. / The bones are in Wellington’ and who died, he writes, ‘of absence’ –absence from the land itself, a country whose size and population may cause many to overlook it while its writers continue to produce work as though no other centre could exist. These novels, all published within a fourteen-year span, reveal a fraction of the richness and breadth of what the country’s writers have given us. They remind us of all that cannot be accounted for in statistics, those truths that we seek in fiction and what the best of it provides. g
Kevin Rabalais’s books include Novel Voices, The Landscape of Desire, and Conversations with James Salter
The Tempest is a play set on a ship. In the first scene, the ship is wrecked. ‘All lost … all lost.’ The play is over. The play begins again. To one side of the stage, on an island a girl is watching. She is defined by watching: ‘O I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.’ The girl has been watching what we have been watching; she is a watcher on the stage, and she is the play’s new beginning. The play opens, this second time, with a kind of creation story. For the first time, her father, Prospero, tells Miranda how she came to be where she lives. It is an old story: a brother’s betrayal, a long journey at sea, a miraculous survival. This strange, subtle, unsettling scene plays out on stage the relationship between a storyteller and his listener, whose name means ‘wonder, admiration’. The story comes to life in her, and the drowned sailors crawl from the sea.
This scene between Prospero and Miranda figures the change in Shakespeare’s later plays from considerations of history – character, power, and circumstance – to considerations of time, its wreckages and renewals. The change is perhaps comparable to the development of total theatre: the power of these plays depends not on the internal logic of their stories but on the unfolding of strange and marvellous effects. A woman brought back to life from her coffin, a live bear on the stage, a statue which comes to life: as Paulina says in The Winter’s Tale, ‘It is requir’d / you do awake your faith’. These late plays are now called romances, which in Shakespeare’s time were old, marvellous, digressive adventure stories. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest: all are plays of long sea voyages, fantastical chance, and sudden violence, characters thought dead brought back
to life; all but Cymbeline have at their heart the relationship between fathers and daughters.
Hag-Seed takes its place in the Hogarth Shakespeare project which (from the press release) ‘sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today’. Hag-Seed is Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. She tells it as though it were realism. Her Prospero is called Felix, artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival. After the prologue, in two brief chapters, Felix summarises how he came to be where he is. His wife died after giving birth; his daughter Miranda died at the age of three. In his grief, he decided to stage The Tempest. At that point, his trusted producer Tony went behind his back, had him sacked, and took his place. Felix spent years hidden away with his rage and grief. At long last, under a false name, he started to direct plays in a men’s prison. It is through his staging of The Tempest that he seeks revenge. His revenge is the action of the book.
With his prison cast, he writes up on a whiteboard what the play is about. ‘I’ll start with the keynotes,’ Felix continues. ‘These are the important things to look for when we’re figuring out how to present this play.’ Using the blue marker, he writes: IT’S A MUSICAL… music used for what? MAGIC: Used for what? PRISONS: How many? MONSTERS: Who is one? REVENGE; Who wants it? Why?
Atwood is always a clever and amusing writer, edgily self-aware. Her retelling of The Tempest is itself built around these ‘keynotes’. ‘The island is a prison,’ says Felix, and Atwood’s novel is set for
the most part in a prison. Hag-Seed is not so much a retelling of The Tempest as an essay in novel form on its keynotes. But Felix has written nothing on the whiteboard about fathers and daughters, wonder, recovery, renewal, or forgiveness. In the First Folio, The Tempest was printed as the first of the Comedies. The Tempest took inspiration from a true strange story: in 1609 a fleet of nine ships on their way to the colony of Virginia met with a storm. This storm separated the ship Sea-Adventure from its fleet. The leaky ship foundered on the rocks of Bermuda. All on board were saved. In his True Reportory of the Wracke, which Shakespeare almost certainly read, the survivor Strachey noted of these islands:
such tempests, thunders and other fearefull objects are seene and heard about them, that they be called commonly, The Devils Ilands, and are feared and avoided … Yet it pleased our mercifull God, to make even this hideous and hated place, both the place of our safetie, and meanes of our deliverance … whereas indeed wee find them now by experience, to bee as habitable and commodious as most Countries of the same climate and situation …
Atwood’s descriptions of the prison setting are the strongest part of HagSeed, along with the songs that her prisoners make up. But in The Tempest the island is only a prison insofar as a play is a list of themes. The island is also the ‘meanes of … deliverance’ of Prospero and Miranda. For Caliban, it is a
bounteous kingdom, and home. ‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs that give delight …’
There is remarkably little in Hag-Seed of what is natural, a word rich in meaning in Renaissance England: untrained, blood-tied, fertile, generative. But the
Atwood is always a clever and amusing writer, edgily self-aware
generative work of time is at the heart of The Tempest. After the first wreck, the play continues forward in time. Like The Tempest, Hag-Seed opens with a disorienting scene. After that, though, its story goes back in time: its driving force is not renewal but explanation. Miranda is dead from the start. ‘MAGIC: Used for what?’ writes Felix.
Miranda haunts Hag-Seed. Felix communicates not with the living girl but with the ghost of her. In this, perhaps Atwood recalls Daphne du Maurier’s memorable and disconcerting novella The Breakthrough (1966), in which the soul of a dead child is trapped in a kind of life-support machine in communication with another person. Miranda’s ghost remains an uncertain, flimsy presence in Hag-Seed, and this makes the novel a strangely limited reading of the play. Giving up a ghost from the past is not the same as handing a child into her future. ‘REVENGE’, writes Felix on the whiteboard. For Prospero, though, revenge is part of a wider work of renunciation. He marries his daughter to the son of an enemy. She will live in the enemy’s kingdom. ‘O brave new world,’ says Miranda, as the play ends. ‘Tis new to thee,’ says Prospero.
In the late plays, in the archetypal relationship between fathers and daughters, Shakespeare works out his drama of time and renewal. He brings Time the Chorus onto the stage with an hourglass to open the second part of The Winter’s Tale: ‘since it is in my power / to o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom’. Time turns his hourglass: the play passes over sixteen years; it turns from the court of Leontes to the summer
festival of his lost daughter Perdita. In Hag-Seed, with Miranda dead, time’s great hourglass never turns over.
Why kill off Miranda? Perhaps, in turning her into a ghost, Atwood is reflecting on Miranda’s odd, exclamatory way of speaking: ‘O wonder!’ This is the trouble with turning one of Shakespeare’s late plays into a novel of character-driven realism. Considered in such terms, Miranda is hard material to work with. So would the character of Time be. Marina in Pericles, Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, and Miranda in The Tempest: the young women are in these late plays like a force of nature: strong, eloquent, triumphant, they have an archetypal simplicity. Their mode is astonishment. They say simply what they mean. This is the quality that Auden captures in his brilliant poetic commentary on The Tempest. In The Sea and the Mirror (1944) , Auden’s poem for Miranda is fittingly at once lucid and riddling: ‘My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely, / And the high green hill sits always by the sea …’
Atwood is a diverting, clever, spirited writer, and Hag-Seed has all these qualities. As a retelling of The Tempest, though, it makes me wonder why the Hogarth Press did not instead ask Atwood to retell Measure for Measure. g
Lisa Gorton is a former Poetry Editor at ABR. Her latest novel is The Life of Houses (2015).
Quote of the Month
‘It is surely impossible to view the ghastly freak show of the US presidential election without apprehension that we are witnessing the decline of a civilisation and the death of the virtues that made America great … The polarisation of US politics reflects an infantilisation of the culture.’
Paul Kelly, writing in The Weekend Australian, 15–16 October 2016
Night
and day
Fiona Wright
THE SCIENCE OF APPEARANCES
by Jacinta Halloran Scribe
$29.99 pb, 296 pp, 9781925321579
‘Twins,’ Jacinta Halloran writes, have ‘a special place in worlds both mythical and real’. This line, in the beautifully poetic prologue of The Science of Appearances, is a small but salient foreshadowing for fraternal twins Mary and Dominic Quinn. Both of them struggle across their lives to find their own special place in the world, and make sense of the myths of family, inheritance and belonging that might constrain or explain precisely who they are.
Dominic and Mary, who grow up in rural Victoria, are described throughout the book as yin and yang – they frequently imagine ‘their pre-birth selves’ floating top-to-tail in the womb in the shape of this symbol; their mother calls them ‘chalk and cheese’ and ‘night and day’. They are both bright and earnest children, and deeply sensitive, although Mary’s temperament is artistic, and Dominic is geared towards science –two opposing, but not dissimilar, systems for analysing and understanding the world. Their world is punctured suddenly one afternoon by an unexpected death in the family.
This incident marks both siblings –‘that was the day my childhood ended’, Dominic recalls, while Mary draws endless pictures of the roses sent in sympathy as they bloom and decay in the front room, a motif that she will pick up and return to in her painting as an adult. It also forces them both to adopt new responsibilities and start working to keep the family afloat. The people they encounter in their jobs put them both on their paths – Mary quickly and grimly, Dominic with far more patience and good providence – to leaving for Melbourne and their independent adult lives.
The divergence in the twins’ stories at this point is not just due to the differences in their temperaments and
loyalties, but also, of course, to their different genders. Halloran explores the different constraints and expectations placed on them with great sensitivity and subtlety. Mary, headstrong, daring, and passionate, still struggles to make her way in the art world, and through relationships with men, who dismiss her talent and fierce will alike; whereas Dominic is taken seriously, granted numerous opportunities, and rewarded at the city university. Halloran is never heavy-handed with these contrasts – her characters are too well-shaped by the times in which they live to reflect too much upon this, although Mary has occasional stirrings of dissatisfaction, especially as she befriends other women artists. These include the brilliant sculptor Joyce Bremner, who tells Mary, in a line that rings ‘so true it seems unlawful’ that ‘men are always going to assume their work is good … It’s their default position’, whilst encouraging Mary to pick up a paintbrush of her own.
The greatest pleasure of The Science of Appearances is its remarkably poetic prose – poetic both because of its rhythmic lyricism and because it so often relies on small details and remembered images. Dominic, for example, remembers Mary’s hands twisting her hair into a ponytail or the red darns in their father’s socks; Mary remembers domestic tasks from their country home, including slicing up an apple, focusing in on ‘the tiny spurt of juice as the green skin was breached and the white flesh exposed, the pits and ridges of the wood against which the apple was split’.
The book is punctured by these small moments of intensity, each carrying an acute emotional valence that Halloran allows to resonate. Together, these work together to disrupt any easy linearity within the novel – time and memory are not simple here, but endlessly recurrent, endlessly present. Halloran cheekily alludes to this in an early interaction between Dominic, who is studying genetics, and his fellow student – and later girlfriend – Hanna, whose major subject is psychology. Dominic tells Hanna that his interest in genetics comes from the fact that ‘it’s the future’, and she responds by pointing out that ‘psychology is about the past’.
Here too there is another kind of symbolic doubling, allowing Halloran to explore ideas of legacy, memory, promise, trauma, and pain.
This does mean that the narrative pace of the novel is, by necessity, meditative – meandering and slow – and while this makes for a lushly atmospheric read, it is also occasionally frustrating, especially towards the middle of the book, when the twins are lost both to each other and to themselves. The eventual unravelling of secrets at the end of the book feels too neat against the openness and languor of everything that comes before. The balance between the poetic and narrative impulses of the novel does not always find its equilibrium. But this in no way detracts from the pleasure and the beauty of the novel.
The Science of Appearances is a fascinating book, complexly patterned and richly detailed, and particularly adept at building vibrant places – be they Kyneton or St Kilda or Coburg – that feel lived-in and personal. It is keenly interested in the operations of memory, our imaginings of the future and understanding of the past, and the ways in which these things can shift and change across a life. Above all, it is a story about family, in all of its different permutations, and about love – and the kinds of redemption that both of these might offer. g
Fiona Wright’s book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the 2016 Kibble Award. She has poems in the New South Wales States of Poetry anthology on the ABR website.
Joe Cinque’s Consolation
by Jake Wilson
Early in Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), there is a striking description of Anu Singh, the Canberra law student arrested in 1997 for drugging her boyfriend, Joe Cinque, with a cocktail of heroin and Rohypnol. In court one morning, Singh uses the interval before the judge’s arrival to tie back her hair. Most observers would scarcely register this commonplace act, but Garner homes in, giving a blow-by-blow account of what she sees as ‘an almost indecently intimate and histrionic display, a series of age-old feminine gestures’.
Garner, it hardly needs saying, is an extraordinary writer, and what she does is qualitatively different from the usual run of crime journalism. She writes not as an expert in law or criminal psychology, but as a literary artist – equipped with a rare sensitivity to nuances of dress, speech, and body language, and with the faith that such details can reveal the essence of a personality or a moral condition.
At the same time, Garner stresses her own unreliability as a narrator, questioning but refusing to abandon her instinctive emotional responses: pity for Cinque and his shattered parents, rage towards Singh – who reminds her of the worst aspects of her younger self –and baffled horror at the friends who knew of Singh’s plans and did nothing to stop them. Thus the book tells two stories in one: the story of Cinque, Singh, and their circle; and the story of Garner’s quest to fit together the pieces of the puzzle.
A first feature directed and co-written by Sotiris Dounoukos – who himself studied law in Canberra in the 1990s – this adaptation takes a different tack. Dounoukos has drawn inspiration from many of Garner’s courtroom observations. In the university library, Maggie Naouri as Singh ominously ties back her hair just before photocopying texts on suicide and poison. But the film unfolds in linear fashion, ending with Singh’s arrest and excising the book’s urgent firstperson voice: where Garner is frank about what she thinks of Singh and her alleged co-conspirator Madhavi Rao, Dounoukos leaves it to the audience to pronounce judgement.
On the surface, the result is not far removed from the mechanically fictionalised docudramas that are a staple
of Australian commercial television, though the studied style indicates the blankness is at least partly intentional. Suburban houses and university lecture halls are framed symmetrically from afar, making us see Canberra as a closed world that keeps reality at bay – like Harvard in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) or Versailles in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Dialogue scenes are often wilfully stilted, the actors occupying fixed, separate positions as if tossing a ball across an abyss, while Dounoukos cuts back and forth.
These choices seem to be intended to hold us at arm’s length, but in any case there is little danger of us identifying too closely with anyone on screen. By most accounts, Cinque (Jerome Meyer) was a kind, easygoing fellow whose only mistake was to fall for the wrong girl, but none of this makes him very compelling from a dramatic point of view. In both book and film, the spotlight is mostly on Singh, depicted here as both a depressive and a classic histrionic personality. She is always trying to create an impression, whether hosting a dinner party or scowling as if those around her were responsible for her suffering. The effect of Naouri’s interesting performance is that of a good actress playing a bad one.
More interesting still is the ethnically diverse but middle-class student milieu, seen as decadent but not glamorously so. With his spectacles and gelled hair, Saul the heroin dealer (Jacob Collins-Levy) could be the frontman of a Christian rock group. Dounoukos’s deadpan approach introduces an element of black comedy not present in the book, as life-or-death discussions are interspersed with casual banality (‘Do you guys want to grab some brunch or something?’). Time seems to have stalled, with adolescence over and adulthood not yet begun; stuck on the treadmill of study, the characters find reality and fantasy hard to differentiate, and leap at any chance for excitement.
The most intriguing character is Rao (Sacha Joseph), the motherly, outwardly commonsensical friend who supports Singh nearly all the way in her crazed scheme (initially framed as a supposed suicide pact). In some respects, she is the true villain of the film, yet her motives are even more mysterious than Singh’s: suppressed rage, a need for control, a yearning to escape a staid persona? Doukounos provides some hints, like the glimpse of Rao dancing in a shower of glitter at a ball the night of Cinque’s death, and gazing the next morning at a leftover sequin. But where Garner finds significance everywhere, this imperfect but unusual film suggests understanding might finally be out of reach – to the point where it is hard to draw any certain moral. g
Joe Cinque’s Consolation (M) is directed by Sotiris Dounoukos, written by Dounoukos and Matt Rubenstein, and produced by Consolation Films. Arts Update is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
Jake Wilson reviews films regularly for The Age.
Carnotopia
Dion Kagan
TRANSGRESSIONS IN ANGLO-AMERICAN CINEMA: GENDER, SEX AND THE DEVIANT BODY
edited by Joel Gwynne
Columbia University Press (Wallflower Press) $49.95 pb, 256 pp, 9780231176057
As long as there have been moving images, people have fretted about cinema’s special dexterity at breaching sexual and social norms. We now have sophisticated tools to help us understand these breaches and the anxieties they trigger, and the privileged relationship of these dynamics to certain film genres and cycles. For example, women’s home-wrecking desires menaced the unconscious universe of Hollywood erotic thrillers during the 1980s and 1990s in films like Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992). Thanks in part to the work of thinkers in feminist and queer films studies, we know much about these film’s relationship to a broader culture of feminist backlash.
‘Transgression’ may have been a particular fixation of 1990s scholarship and identity politics, but as a lens for examining sex/gender regulation it still has much explanatory power, even in our permissive times. Transgressions in Anglo-American Cinema often does what this work does best, which is identify trends in popular culture that hint at larger structures of regulation in everyday life.
Some of the deviants of this collection are new-fangled personifications of old transgressors. Judi Dench’s unforgettable turn as the embittered Barbara in Notes on a Scandal (2006) is an unapologetic rehash of the psychotic spinster figure whose unfulfilled lesbian desires have made her a predatory monster. But, as Eva Krainitzki argues, the film’s horrified fascination with the ‘unwatchable’ ageing woman responds to a contemporary fixation with ‘graceful’ and sexless ageing among older women. The psychotic woman is an
antidote to that, a source of symbolic erotic possibility: Krainitzki suggests we can appropriate Barbara’s scandal of disgraceful ageing for its queer and gender-transgressive appeal.
Two essays examining what Alistair Fox dubs ‘The New Anglo-American Cinema of Sexual Addiction’ are best read together. Fox offers a taxonomy: McQueen’s Shame (2011) and Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013), among others, scrutinise characters stuck in ‘patterns of intensifying escalation’, spiralling toward humiliation, misery, and self-destruction. It is a largely despairing genre; if redemption is offered it is in ‘relational sex’ (that is, love) and the provenance of the film is more likely the United States. As for analysis, Fox frames the sex-addiction cycle as part of the sex panic about ‘pornification’, and as another type of backlash against sexual revolution culture gone too far. Fox is wrong to suggest that these films are ‘devoid of titillation’, and he overlooks some revealing genealogies in Eurosleaze, the French cinema of brutal intimacy, and decades of queer cultural production across media forms. It might be telling, for example, that so many of these sex addicts are straight men, echoing recent public scandals about sex-addled celebrities, and the hand-wringing about men’s exposure to pornography. The insatiable straight man is a problem for masculinity because his capacity for endless encounters and his loss of selfcontrol moves him beyond the territory of heroic virility into the at-risk realms reserved for prostitutes and promiscuous gay men, and thus sexual epidemics and, again, the spectre of emasculation. Fox would have done well to consult queer theory and early AIDS cultural criticism: a contextualising essay on contemporary sex addiction cinema that ignores queer experience is galling precisely because it images homo and hetero as part of separate cultural orders unaffected by the very same conditions of existence.
Fox’s taxonomy works nicely to present the raw material for Mark Featherstone’s ‘carnotopia’ analysis in the next chapter, where an insatiable sex drive is the miserable logic of late capitalism –the reduction of the human sexual
relation to a ‘soulless, base, commodity exchange’. It would be another rehashing of an old (Freudian, Baudrillardian) idea, if it didn’t address the intimate life of neo-liberal sex in fresh, resonant, persuasive ways. Featherstone’s ‘carnotopia’ is an interesting and potentially breakthrough concept because it acknowledges that sex-as-capital is both liberating and utterly ruinous in its effects – utopian and dystopian all at once. It turns out that the real terror in Anglo-American cultures is our ambivalence about sexual freedom.
The second half of the collection considers the relentless anxiety about the sexuality of the young and the underage. Amy Chambers looks at films like Little Children, Hard Candy, and Mysterious Skin that upend some cherished sexual definitions: the monstrous evil of the sex offender/paedophile and the sexual innocence of the child. Joel Gwynne, the book’s editor, introduces a new figure – the Lindsay Lohan/Britney Spears-style ‘crash and burn girl’ – that might help to refine an understanding of the endless oscillation between ‘can do’ and ‘at risk’ in the hysteria around the tween/teenage girl and her precocious shopping and sex practices. Gwynne is good and so is Chambers; DemirkanMartin’s reading of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River as homophobic parable of spoiled masculinity is on the money but makes the same argument Joe Wlodarz made in ‘Rape Fantasies’ (2001) fifteen years ago, with no mention of Leo Bersani’s germinal theory on masculine spoilage, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’ (1987). If it had only paid more attention to the director’s recent films, the penultimate essay on queer adolescents in 1990s, Gregg Araki might have added something new and seemed less out of place.
As with most scholarly essay collections, this is a mixed bag, but as a snapshot its editor’s interest in ‘articulations of queer heterosexuality’ is sharply in focus. As a gender-fluid, non-reproductive, pleasure-oriented force in contemporary cinema, heterosexuality has never been more queer. g
Dion Kagan is a researcher and lecturer in gender and cultural studies, and a regular critic on the podcast The Rereaders
Juncture in jazz
Des Cowley
CONVERSATIONS IN JAZZ: THE RALPH J. GLEASON INTERVIEWS
edited by Toby Gleason
Yale University Press (Footprint)
$44.95 hb, 276 pp, 978030214529
It is a testament to Ralph J. Gleason’s standing in the jazz community, at the time these interviews were made, that a composer of the stature of Duke Ellington would consider him a conversational equal. Says Ellington: ‘I feel like I’m on the same level with you because you have proven that you are a great listener.’ While far from a household name these days, Gleason’s contributions to music – both in jazz and popular form – were many. In 1939 he was founder and editor of Jazz Information, one of the earliest journals devoted to jazz. Several decades on, he co-founded, with Jan Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine. He produced the long-running television series Jazz Casual (1960–68); was co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival, still running today; and his many liner notes, for albums such as Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew (1970), are considered models of their kind.
Conversations in Jazz comprises the transcripts of fourteen interviews with jazz musicians, recorded by Gleason between 1959 and 1961. All, aside from the one with Ellington – which was taped for Jazz Casual – were carried out in the informal setting of Gleason’s living room in Berkeley, California. While he later plundered them for various radio shows and liner notes, the tapes languished in his house after his death in 1975, aged fifty-eight, until the early 1990s, when his family rediscovered them. Conversations in Jazz, edited by his son Toby, marks the first publication of the complete interviews. Given the combined standing of Gleason’s roster – which includes Ellington, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, Horace Silver, and all four members of the Modern Jazz Quartet – their belated
appearance, over a half a century on, is to be welcomed.
The casual nature of these exchanges gives credence to the conversations referred to in the book’s title. Gleason’s opening question, in most cases, tends to be informed by his intimate familiarity with the artist’s work, rather than reflecting any set game-plan. For Bill Evans: ‘Have you ever explored the reasons why you’re in jazz?’ For singer Jon Hendricks: ‘You can’t read or write music?’ The path each interview takes routinely flows from these opening gambits, more improvisation than notation. Despite this, a number of common themes emerge: the importance of big bands as a training ground for young players; the growth of European audiences for American jazz, partly the result of the US State Department’s sponsored tours of the 1950s; jazz as a performative, rather than a recorded, medium; and the inevitable struggle to balance musical innovation with financial security.
Several of these interviews took place at a critical point in the artist’s career. In May 1961, Coltrane, fresh from the success of My Favorite Things, was newly signed to Impulse Records, famous for their bright orange covers emblazoned with the slogan ‘The New Wave of Jazz’. Though few could have predicted the radical directions his music would take over the next six years before his premature death in 1967, he foreshadows something of these in conversation with Gleason: including his ‘need to learn more about production of music and expression’; his ‘need for another horn’; and his wanting – despite lacking experience – ‘to do a real good big band thing’. Before the year was out, Coltrane would release his augmented ensemble recording Africa/Brass, and add Eric Dolphy’s alto-voice to his Quartet for the incendiary performances recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard. Upon reflection, it seems apposite that his final studio recording, released posthumously, was entitled Expression
Sonny Rollins, on the other hand, after issuing a torrent of classic recordings in the years leading up to this 1959 interview, was about to embark upon the first of his sabbaticals, during which he famously abandoned performing and
recording, and instead practised alone, over a two-year period, on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. Rollins speaks of wanting his music to reach people, but ‘only if I can satisfy my own level’. Bill Evans, similarly, speaks of being ‘so dissatisfied with what I’ve been doing’. Less than a year before, he had played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959) –arguably the greatest album in jazz history – and had recently formed his trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. The several albums they recorded, before LaFaro’s untimely death in 1961, would forever change the fundamental language of jazz piano.
‘I feel like I’m on the same level with you because you have proven that you are a great listener.’
More than fifty years on, Gleason’s interviews can best be viewed as historical documents, and as such they form a worthwhile addition to the jazz literature of the period. Of course, with ease of hindsight, one might query the presence of a minor artist like Les McCann; and likewise muse upon the absence of figures like Ornette Coleman or Charles Mingus. Presumably, Gleason’s base on the west coast, far from the jazz centre of New York, restricted his choices to musicians residing in or touring his neighborhood.
Ted Gioia notes in his introduction that these interviews ‘date back to a decisive juncture in jazz history’. The year 1959 saw the release of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Coltrane’s Giant Steps. Ironically, this high point also signalled the end of an era when jazz held popular sway across America. With its dominance destined to be eclipsed by rock and roll in the decade ahead, jazz innovators – including a number featured in this book – resolutely went about their business, taking the music to new levels of artistry. g
Des Cowley is the History of the Book Manager at State Library Victoria.
Tristan und Isolde
by Peter Rose
‘Throughout the whole duration of the Festival, food forms the chief interest of the public; the artistic representations take a secondary place. Cutlets, baked potatoes, omelettes – all are discussed much more eagerly than Wagner’s music.’
It was hard not to think of Tchaikovsky’s words, written during the first Bayreuth Festival (1876), at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2016–17 season. Arts Update, selfless as ever, had gone ahead of the ABR US tour party, still rusticating in New Haven, for the American première of Mariusz Treliński’s production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Simon Rattle. Instead of cutlets and omelettes, picture long-trained gowns and copious bling. Despite the queasy lure of the first Clinton–Trump debate, all of New York seemed to have turned out in a gaudy re-enactment of the opening scene of Martin Scorsese’s film The Age of Innocence (1993).
With film and television stars posing for selfies, it felt like an incongruous Wagner audience, but after all the exhibitionism and hereditary hauteur – and following a rousing rendition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – everyone settled down and sat quietly and attentively for the next several hours. Hardly anyone left during the second interval, which was when the inglorious debate was due to begin. Perhaps something else was at stake here.
again that evening: his late poem ‘The Ring Cycle’, about the 1939 Met Ring, which he attended as a boy. Merrill wrote: ‘Wagner had been significance itself, / … A music in whose folds the mind, at twelve, / Came to its senses.’
Was this a kind of collective coming to our senses, despite the shrill idiocy that Trump represents?
Significance was augured, and significant it duly was – an unforgettable night of music-making with superlative performances from the two principals and a magnificent interpretation from Simon Rattle in a rare appearance at the Met that drew a huge ovation.
Mariusz Treliński – originally a filmmaker (much influenced by Fellini and Tarkovsky) – has been artistic director of the Teatr Weilki in Warsaw since 2005. This is his second Wagner (Der Fliegende Holländer preceded it in Warsaw in 2012), and only his third opera for the Met. His pairing of Iolanta and Bluebeard’s Castle in 2015 drew much praise, but Tristan – which had its world première in Baden Baden in March 2016 – was more controversial on opening night. A rump of conservatives booed at the end; mostly the audience responded warmly.
Arts Update – no admirer of directorial wackiness or superciliousness – was struck from the outset by the production’s seriousness and coherence. During the Prelude, a huge nautical compass is projected onto a scrim (Bartek Macias is the video designer); then a
That morning, in New Haven, during a tour of the newly reopened Beinecke Library, a librarian had shown the tour party some treasures from the collection. These included James Merrill’s very own ouija board and chipped Staffordshire tea cup, which the poet deployed to commune with earlier poets. We thought of Merrill
warship heaves through surging seas at the conclusion (if it can be said to conclude) of this most potent and original prelude (one in which Bernard Shaw thought he heard ‘an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers’). There was no gimmickry here, no fancification, no irreverence, no floundering around for a modish effect. In an illuminating profile in
Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme in Tristan und Isolde
the September 2016 issue of Opera magazine, Treliński told George Loomis: ‘I watch the stage through the camera’s lens, but that doesn’t mean I’m looking for realism. I believe in the primary language of images and their archetypal depth. Images have multiple meanings and can say much more than any words.’
The three-decker warship in Act One permits multiple narratives as Tristan escorts Isolde to Cornwall, where she will marry his uncle, King Marke. Penned in her stateroom, Isolde is under constant surveillance. Marc
The music tells us everything we need to know
Heinz’s lighting is evocative: mostly blacks and greys and a kind of bruised gold (until the green dawn of the Love Duet in Act Two). The costumes are martial; even Isolde affects a long leather coat for much of Act Two, before revealing a calf-length red dress when Brangäne’s furtive love potion takes effect.
Treliński’s third-act introduction of a boy representing the young Tristan (orphaned at birth and forever longing for his parents) may disconcert some, but this novelty seemed earned, implicit, and the long scene when Tristan stumbles through the wreckage of his primary house was compelling. Rather than merely subsiding after Tristan’s death, Isolde hurried things along by slashing her wrist before joining Tristan at the right of the stage – two spent lovers on a bench. Without flagging, the cast had clearly responded to this thoughtful director. Perhaps the best dramatic moment came when, love potion consumed, Tristan and Isolde wheeled druggedly and confusedly around the stage, shocked by what they had unleashed.
The music of course tells us everything we need to know. It is impossible to hurry or disrupt Wagner, such is his conviction. As Alex Ross has written, ‘Somehow, Wagner retains his identity even when all hell is breaking loose onstage.’ It was a glorious if shattering thing to hear the incomparable score played by this exceptional orchestra under the baton of Simon Rattle. Never did it seem languid or indulgent. There was crispness here, an elegant urgency, and thrilling power when the score warranted it. Perhaps the greatest moment came during the introduction to Act Three, with the solo cor anglais.
Great singers define any Tristan und Isolde, and this house has idolised some of the best. Nina Stemme’s Isolde – perhaps her hundredth, but her first at the Met – will assuredly be talked about in decades to come. Even after a decade of huge Strauss and Wagner roles, Stemme’s voice is uniquely well equipped for this role. Her Liebestod, after four hours’ singing, was remarkably powerful – a sort of miracle. Stemme is also one of the finest singing actors, always in character, listening, intuiting, alert to others. Stemme would have been a magnetic silent actress, and the
huge video projections of her are fascinating studies in themselves.
Wagner once said of Tristan that he was like a fish left out in the sun. Joachim Köhler, in his biography Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans (2004), wrote: ‘Never again was Wagner to expose himself and his heroes to such suffering, but neither was it necessary for him to do so, as they were all now prepared for it philosophically and creatively.’ Treliński offers a journey of self-discovery, a journey into Tristan’s psyche. He has said of Tristan: ‘At night he finds his inner truth as one who is fragile, sensitive, with feelings of his own. It is in the world of night that he develops his transcendental dream about perfect love, a love that is not of this world.’
When Arts Update interviewed Stuart Skelton earlier in the month, during rehearsals, he spoke of his ‘year of Tristan’. Following his début in Baden Baden (also with Rattle), he sang the role for the English National Opera (in English). The Australian Heldentenor, a commanding presence on world stages for two decades and a brilliant Siegmund in Australia’s two most recent Rings (Adelaide, 2004; Melbourne, 2013), described Tristan as his Everest – the culmination of everything he ever wanted to achieve as a singer. Skelton was in thrilling voice during Act One, and he complemented Stemme beautifully in the Love Duet (‘O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe’). Act Three is exacting for any Tristan – this hardest of tenor roles – but Skelton was superb.
Brangäne, Isolde’s companion, has some of the most beautiful music in the opera: ‘Einsam wachend’, after the Love Duet. Ekaterina Gubanova, a Russian mezzo, sang well but there was a certain diffidence at the top of the register. René Pape has been singing King Marke for years, and he is nonpareil in the role.
Done nobly, with integrity, Tristan und Isolde (the ‘true opus metaphysicum of all art’, as Nietzsche dubbed it) has a unique effect on the listener, as Wagner knew it would. While composing it, he told Mathilde Wesendock, his inamorata and muse: ‘Child! This Tristan is turning into something terrible! Only mediocre performances can save me. Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad. I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ Indeed, he admitted to ‘bursting into floods of tears while working on the score’. The harmonic audacities he wrought still have the power to transform audiences – even in the age of selfie bliss and Donald Trump.
Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton will sing highlights from Tristan und Isolde with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra on Saturday, 19 November. It promises to be one of the concerts of the decade. g
Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner is directed by Mariusz Treliński for the Metropolitan Opera. Performance attended: 26 September 2016.
Peter Rose is the Editor of ABR. A longer version of this review appears in Arts Update.
A cultured union
Sheila Fitzpatrick
VIRTUOSI ABROAD: SOVIET MUSIC AND IMPERIAL COMPETITION DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945–1958 by Kiril Tomoff
Cornell University Press (Footprint) $83 hb, 256 pp, 9780801453120
The Soviet violinist David Oistrakh made a triumphant tour of Australia in 1959, a few years after his wildly successful New York début. Along with pianist Emil Gilels and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, he was the spearhead of a campaign to show the capitalist world how cultured the Soviet Union was, and to demonstrate that their violinists and pianists were the best.
American historian Kiril Tomoff tells the story in Virtuosi Abroad, and it is one that – unusually for an American scholarly work – has quite a substantial Australian component. But more of that later. Soviet interest in high culture and its diffusion to the masses goes back to the earliest days of the revolutionary state, but it was not until the 1930s that the Soviets started to focus specifically on winning international music competitions in the West. When Oistrakh won the Ysaÿe competition for violinists in Brussels in 1937, it made the front page of Pravda. The matter was so important that the list of Soviet competitors for such competitions came before the Politburo for approval.
Soviet musicians kept winning the international competitions when they resumed after World War II. The Soviet violinist Nelli Shkolnikova, who was later to spend many years in Australia, was the victor at the LongThibaud Competition in France in 1953. But there was one competition they famously didn’t win: the first International Tchaikovsky Competition, held in Moscow in 1958, which was won by the American Van Cliburn, who made a tremendous hit with Soviet audiences. Rumour has it that this was so big a problem for the Soviet authorities that Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev’s personal approval had to be obtained, but on the basis of the archives Tomoff shows that this wasn’t so. The Soviets were actually quite pleased to give the piano prize to an American, and thus show how non-parochial they were; what slightly embarrassed them was that Soviet violinists had walked away with all the prizes in the violin section. But that’s not to say that, on other people’s turf, winning wasn’t extremely important to them. Even in the Van Cliburn case, they claimed a victory for the Russian school of piano playing, pointing out that his teacher, Rosina Lhévinne at the Julliard School in New York, had been a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory class of Vasily Safonov before the revolution.
An Australian tour for Oistrakh was first mooted in the summer of 1955, when John Rodgers, secretary of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, who was close to, if not a member of, the Australian Communist Party, contacted a Soviet cultural agency to convey the ABC’s interest in inviting Oistrakh to perform in Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide the next year. That didn’t come off, but when Oistrakh finally did come in 1959, Rodgers and his wife hosted a reception for three hundred guests. It’s a slightly ambiguous story, though, because it’s not clear whether it was Rodgers’s leftist credentials or his entrepreneurial vigour that brought him into the picture. On top of that, as Tomoff notes in a footnote citing Phillip Deery, some have suggested that Rodgers was actually an ASIO agent.
Music was the part of the great Cold War competition with the United States that the Soviets undeniably won, at least in the 1950s. Their performers won laurels wherever they went. Even Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, in the long run, won the competition for the hearts of international concert audiences over Americans Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber, not to mention high modernists like Milton Babbitt. In the 1950s there were no major Soviet artistic defections, although the Soviets kept some performers at home out of prudence, like the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter, whose mother was an emigrée and whose Soviet-German father had
been shot by the Soviets during World War II. They worried about Richter, too, because they counted him as a bachelor, hence more likely to defect (he had, in fact, a long-time de facto wife, the singer Nina Dorliak, but the authorities’ refusal to acknowledge her suggests that they had heard the rumours he was gay). Jews also felt discriminated against in the selection process for international competition and tours, although this did not prevent many Jewish performers, from David and Igor Oistrakh to Bella Davidovich and Nelli Shkolnikova, winning international competitions for the Soviet Union.‘You send us your Jews from Odessa, and we send you ours’, was the joke about Soviet-American cultural exchange attributed to Isaac Stern.
In the mid-1970s things started to turn sour. The defection of the dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov shifted the terms of the cultural public relations competition sharply against the Soviet Union. Finding herself largely banned from foreign tours, Shkolnikova defected to Berlin in 1982. Her first appointment in the West, on the invitation of John Hopkins, was to teach in Melbourne at the Victorian College of the Arts. Other Soviet performers continued to tour and impress international audiences, but the magic was gone. The Soviet Union was still seen in the West as producing the greatest musicians and dancers. But it was also seen as alienating them because it was such an awful place in which to live and yet it endeavoured to strong-arm them into staying. g
Sheila Fitzpatrick was a founding member of the Australian Youth Orchestra in the 1950s. Her most recent book is On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015).
Australian Book Review in the United States
Australian Book Review ’s sixteen-day US tour – led by Peter Rose and Christopher Menz – took us from Washington DC to New York City. It was the first of its kind undertaken by the magazine. Our aim was to take ABR on the road with a party of keen readers and supporters. The tour began at the Australian Embassy in Washington, where the Editor was in conversation with Geraldine Brooks (newly gonged at the Ambassador’s residence an hour earlier) and Anna Funder, before a capacity audience.
Along the way we visited writers’ homes (Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Edith Wharton’s opulent The Mount), great libraries (Morgan, Beinecke, Library of Congress, the New York Public Library), and several new or reopened art museums, including the Met Breuer and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the magnificent Art Museums in Cambridge, as well as several museums that weren’t known to everyone in the group (Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Phillips Collection, Wadsworth Atheneum, Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Yale Center for British Art, and the Clark in Williamstown, with Tadao Ando’s superb new extension)
Top: The tour group in Concord; Middle: Geraldine Brooks AO, Ambassador Caroline Millar, and Anna Funder; Bottom: At the Clark in Williamstown
There was also much theatre and opera, all in a spirit of enquiring conviviality. We met writers, librarians, publishers, journalists, curators, and diplomats. Two highlights on our penultimate day in New York were visits to the offices of the New York Review of Books (where Peter Rose and Robert Silvers exchanged copies of their magazines) and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose president and publisher, Jonathan Galassi, spoke about his new books and his keen interest in Australian writers.
Buoyed by the response to the tour, ABR is planning a UK tour in June 2017. This Shakespeare-themed tour will take us to Lewes (for the world première of Brett Dean’s Hamlet at the vaunted Glyndebourne Opera Festival), Stratford-upon-Avon, then London. The tour (shorter than the US one) will combine literature, art and architecture, music and theatre – and there will be a major public literary event in the capital. Full details will be available in December, but early expressions of interest can be sent to tours@australianbookreview.com.au.
Top: Peter Rose and Robert Silvers; Middle: The Dickinson family plot, Amherst; Bottom: The Mount, Lenox
Striped sunlight
Doug Wallen
GRANT
& I
by Robert Forster
Hamish Hamilton
$35 pb, 352 pp, 9780670078226
Long before earning a place as one of Australia’s best-loved bands, The Go-Betweens sprang from the close creative pairing of Grant McLennan and Robert Forster, who met as students at the University of Queensland. As Forster makes clear in this tender memoir, he wanted McLennan in the band not because of his musical ability – he had never played an instrument – but because of their intense friendship and shared appreciation of literature and film. ‘We’d come to The Go-Betweens as romantics, me teaching my best friend bass,’ writes Forster. When they began playing together at the end of 1977, McLennan was much more interested in cinema than in music (‘He burnt for the screen’). But McLennan quickly mastered the bass before graduating to guitar and authoring many of the band’s most enduring songs (including ‘Cattle and Cane’ and ‘Streets of Your Town’). The Go-Betweens went on to release nine studio albums. Forster and McLennan were working on a tenth when McLennan died after a sudden heart attack in 2006.
This isn’t Forster’s first time writing outside of songs: He won the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing during his long run as music columnist for The Monthly, and also wrote The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected music writings 2005–09 (2009). He is a devotee of biography and knows the form well; here he maintains enough briskness
to cover his childhood in less than a chapter and to chart The Go-Betweens’ personal and professional exploits with the same poetic vigour that defines their songs. Flowery though his prose can be, Forster knows the value of expressing things simply and letting their truth reverberate: ‘These were my favourite pages of a biography come to life, but they proved harder to live than to read.’
Taking the band to London, Sydney, and beyond, Forster and McLennan experienced the usual vagaries of the music business, in their case hoping for a hit but settling for critical acclaim. Playing eloquent guitar-pop marked by a plucky burnish and layered uplift, the pair established what they called ‘that striped sunlight sound’ – their answer to Bob Dylan’s self-described ‘wild mercury sound’. ‘It was a Brisbane thing,’ Forster recalls, ‘to do with sun slanting in through windows onto objects in a room, and the feelings that evoked.’
Starting out as a scrappy trio singing wobbly odes to librarians and literature – taking their name in part from L.P. Hartley’s famous novel – the band evolved into a quartet and finally a quintet, with the addition of violinist Amanda Brown. The Go-Betweens attained their current cult status through gradual word-of-mouth over several decades; their influence has spread far and wide, especially in Australia, where a new generation of bands are pairing luminous guitar hooks with bittersweet strains of Australiana. But they were more subtle and complicated than their signature brightness might indicate, and their lyrics stowed quiet, distressed revelations such as this one from ‘Cattle and Cane’: ‘But I still don’t know what I’m here for.’
Forster ticks all the boxes one would expect from a music memoir, right down to the inevitable rise-and-fall arc. But he also opens up about the shifting relationships between band mates, including his romantic involvement with Lindy Morrison, whose idiosyncratic drumming helped make the band so unique, and McLennan’s subsequent relationship with Brown. Yet, as the title announces with marquee-level directness, Forster focuses most of all on his time with McLennan, building on the
generous body of personal memories he has documented while curating retrospective collections and concerts for the band.
Indeed, some of the dramatic changes in Forster’s own personal life –starting a family, contracting Hepatitis C from shared needles in his youth, going sober in the mid-1990s – share equal weight with his ongoing interactions with McLennan, whether they are separated by hemispheres or both living back in Brisbane, as they were when McLennan died. On the topic of moving his family back to Queensland, Forster tellingly writes: ‘If our relocation pleased Grant it was hard to know –another in the sea of things that went unsaid.’
Such gaps in communication were characteristic for McLennan, even with his closest friends. ‘We hugged, something we rarely did,’ recounts Forster of the band ending their first incarnation in 1989. But even after the success of the pair’s reconvening under The GoBetweens name in 2000, McLennan remained a dark horse to Forster’s grounded family man: ‘He spoke of depression, the first he’d put a word to what had been festering in him for years.’ Of course, McLennan had other ways of unburdening himself: ‘Music was his confession box.’
As with the band’s songs, Forster’s account is melancholic, cheery, and self-deprecating all at once. It is often unruly and mischievous as well. Rather than presenting a stock-standard Australian success story, Grant & I offers up the tangled lives of two kindred spirits who decided to make music together. Younger readers who only know The Go-Betweens as canonised legends with a major bridge in Brisbane named after them can discover how long the band toiled in obscurity before securing that lasting recognition.
In 1996, French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles ran a cover story on The Go-Betweens that asked, ‘Is this the most underrated group in the history of rock?’ Forster, wry as ever, quips: ‘A fair question. You know my answer.’ g
Doug Wallen is music editor of The Big Issue
PETER PORTER POETRY PRIZE
Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of $7,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. Online entry is available via our website.
First Prize: $5,000 and Arthur Boyd’s The lady and the unicorn, 1975, an etching and aquatint from the publication of the same name which Arthur Boyd produced with Peter Porter. This print is donated by Ivan Durrant in honour of Georges Mora.
Shortlisted Poems: $500
Judges: Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, and Felicity Plunkett
Closing date: 1 December 2016
Special offer
Subscribe to ABR Online (RRP AU$50) and enter one poem for just $55, a saving of $15. Additional entries cost only $15.
ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Ms Morag Fraser AM. www.australianbookreview.com.au
Binge or nothingness
The duplex needs of Clive James
Peter
Goldsworthy
PLAY ALL: A BINGEWATCHER’S
by Clive James
‘Ywrites, and so entertaining at its core, ‘that the spontaneous response of the delighted consumer outranks the more ponderous consideration of the professional student of culture’. As such, he adds, ‘I tried to hang on to the sense of irresponsibility when I sat down to write.’
NOTEBOOK
Yale University Press (Footprint), $35.95 hb, 214 pp, 9780300218091
ou might ask how a man who spent his days with the major poems of Browning could wish to spend his evenings with the minor movies of Chow Yun-fat,’ Clive James asks, rhetorically, in Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook, then provides a near-tautological answer: ‘It’s a duplex need buried deep in my neural network.’ In mine, too, although my love of screen trash comes from childhood deprivation; we were never allowed an ‘idiot-box’. Mum might sneak next door to watch Peyton Place, but Dad viewed (so to speak) the then-new technology as mind rot. It has ever been thus. The first scribes of cuneiform or Linear A were no doubt crucified for destroying human memory, and every advance in mass entertainment/communication since, from the printing press to the novel to radio to movies, has met with the same criticisms. Our still-newish magical pocket devices are the most recent focus of those ancient anxieties. In James’s words: ‘It’s as if classic literature had faded into the mind’s background, and images en-
countered on the screen had become one’s first frame of cultural reference.’ His particular anxiety is that for the next generation they might be ‘the only frame of reference’.
There was an idiot box in my boarding house when I escaped to Adelaide, and I fed my neural need
with endless episodes of Star Trek and Mission Impossible and the wonderful Callan, punctuated by the odd twinge of guilt that I was neglecting my medical studies. James’s new book offers a free study pass, albeit a few decades too late. Watching television is such fun, he
This leads to a fruitful conflict with his other core premise, one shared by many: that the current ‘long-form’ cable-television serials are where much of the best writing of our era is to be found. (James McNamara’s essay ‘The Golden Age of Television?’, published in the April 2015 issue of ABR, explores the reasons behind this renaissance.) James’s book, then, is both a quick romp through various boxed sets, and a simultaneously serious, if never ponderous, commentary. He can’t help the left-field aphorisms – ‘Sartre unaccountably failed to note in his book Being and Nothingness that “binge” and “being” are anagrams of each other’– but he also has serious criticisms of, say, the visually ravishing Mad Men. Extended visual ravishment is one of the alluring properties of the boxed set, particularly those, like Game of Thrones, that come with the full palette of computerised special effects. Hollywood director Jim Wynorski (Sorority House Massacre II; Ghoulies IV) claimed that ‘breasts are the cheapest special effect in the business’, and Game of Thrones displays a disproportionate number of breasts, but it is the power of modern computerised imaging – the most powerful mimetic art we have short of virtual reality – that repeatedly astonishes. James is not particularly interested
Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones (HBO/Foxtel)
in special effects; he long resisted Game of Thrones because he couldn’t imagine watching a show with dragons in it. ‘The essential difference between a good box-set drama and a comicbook movie’s relentless catalogue of mechanised happenings is that the first leaves you with something to discuss, and then discussion becomes part of the experience; the second does all your reacting for you.’ In the end, he succumbed to the drama of the show. Dragons notwithstanding, it leaves a powerful residue of things to discuss.
Here’s one. Rereading (quaint habit) Aeschylus’s Agamemnon recently (first episode in the first-ever boxed set, The Oresteian Trilogy), I arrived at the spot where the Chorus describes Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a favourable wind for his ships, and found I had to stop reading. This was not because of the play itself; Greek tragedies in general prefer to tell, not show; their murders and mayhem take place off stage. In Agamemnon this is even more pronounced: the Chorus breaks off the narrative, finding even the telling too unbearable: ‘The rest I did not see / Nor do I speak of it.’ My problem was that I could see it, all too clearly, courtesy of Game of Thrones. Iphigenia’s last cry – ‘Father!’ – instantly conjured up King Stannis Baratheon’s sacrifice of his daughter – at the stake, no less – and her plaintive cries of ‘Father!’ as she burns.
My point is not that Game of Thrones mines and reworks ancient myths and stories – of course it does, often cleverly – but that cinematic images, especially traumatic images, have a deep hold on our imaginations.
James writes brilliantly and at length of Game of Thrones, but also of one of the masterpieces of the long-form genre, The Wire, a series packed with ‘outstanding things’ and ‘so full of life – who wouldn’t want to get drunk with Bunk’, but which in the end also leaves him with an ‘abiding image’: ‘of The City of the Dead ... the nailed-up slum houses full of lime-dusted corpses’.
The emotional power of such images is only part of the power of the boxed set – and not part at all of a dialoguedriven show like The West Wing, another
of James’s favourites – but in many of the shows it adds to an ambitious noholds-barred ‘show-not-tell’ program, a realism freed from network constraints. ‘As well as artistic freedom,’ James McNamara argues in his essay, ‘cable gave HBO another advantage: blood, sex and profanity.’ It also offered more freedom to confound our Hollywood-bred expectations. Comparing The Sopranos to various film predecessors – especially The Godfather – James notes that ‘our expectations have been sentimentalised by the movies’, whereas ‘the boxed-set, with more time to explore psychology, has done something to save us from the kind of uplift that lowers the IQ’. He’s right, at least in this case. The Godfather indulges our attraction to what The Book of Common Prayer calls ‘the glamour of evil’, whereas The Sopranos is more a species of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. This is one of the many ‘gates of discrepancy’ between our expectations and the larger-canvas possibilities of the new ‘long-form’ that James is keen to explore.
Game of Thrones opens gate after gate of discrepancy, beginning with the shock beheading of Sean Bean – the apparent hero of the show, a kind of medieval Atticus Finch – in the first season. Perhaps the premature death of Stringer Bell in The Wire is an antecedent, destroying our faint hopes that at least one of the doomed might escape the drug-addled quagmire, but Game of Thrones continues to kill off our favourites (and unfavourites; like God, George R.R. Martin is an equal opportunity executioner) without warning. Martin’s argument is twofold: firstly, in real life, that’s what happens – i.e. arbitrary shit –but also, more interestingly, what are the stakes for readers (or viewers) if not all characters are in real jeopardy? Where is the suspense?
In The Wire, all the characters will die, sooner or later, even if they first shift to fill a niche vacated by another’s death. The Baltimore of this boxed set is a boxed-in ecology of wickedness; the ending of the final season is a profound summation of this: Dostoevskian in its pessimism, to risk a ponderous phrase. I didn’t see that end coming, but immediately realised it was the only psycho-
logically possible ending. Which is the paradoxical heart of great storytelling: continuing surprise at plot or character developments, which simultaneously, or perhaps a millisecond later, seem psychologically inevitable. And often in retrospect, blindingly obvious: why didn’t I think of that? James doesn’t share my enthusiasm for Breaking Bad, a masterclass in such narrative, but he has plenty to say about it and everything else from Mad Men to The Americans to The Borgias: surprising and often funny insights which strike you as true a millisecond later. Other gates of discrepancy open throughout the book: between the film Saving Private Ryan, say, and its spin-off series, Band of Brothers; and – a recurring theme – between our unconscious type-casting of actors, and the traces those preconceptions leave on new roles.
Having been one of the best television commentators of the pre-boxed set era, he has now seen more cable series than most people half his age, if only because he regularly binge-watches four of five episodes per Saturday night. The result is a very different book from his recent more ‘responsible’ – but never ponderous – Poetry Notebook (2014), but of course we need both, duplex needs of that kind being buried in most brains, if too often one suppresses the other. Which begs the question: who will be the first television writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? Or – on the subject of binge addiction – the first writer of video game scripts? I guess the answer is still blowin’ in the wind. g
Peter Goldsworthy’s most recent book is The Rise of the Machines and other Love Poems (Pitt Street Press).
Magnetic swing
Yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence among artists
Miriam Cosic
THE
ART OF RIVALRY: FOUR FRIENDSHIPS, BETRAYALS, AND BREAKTHROUGHS IN MODERN ART
by Sebastian Smee
Text Publishing, $34.99 pb, 416 pp, 9781925240351
It seems a particularly masculine take on the processes of art to examine the way rivalry spurs on creativity and conceptual development. Yet this is not the book the Boston Globe’s art critic, Sebastian Smee, has set out to write. ‘[The] idea of rivalry it presents is not the macho cliché of sworn enemies, bitter competitors, and stubborn grudgeholders slugging it out for artistic and worldly supremacy,’ he writes in his introduction to The Art of Rivalry. ‘Instead, it is a book about yielding, intimacy, and openness to influence.’
Smee has nonetheless chosen some pretty macho subjects among the four pairs he considers: Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon; Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas; Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. So sensational were some aspects of their lives – including priapism, suppressed homosexuality, masochism and sadism, glorified paedophilia, alcoholism, mental illness, narcissism, intense personal and professional jealousies, and more that Smee’s text veers towards tabloid in content. So fine are his writing and his critical perceptions, however, that his book is an important one. General readers will certainly find it fascinating, and art historians too might find priceless new nuggets in it.
Freud was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and high-level intercession had enabled his family to escape Hitler’s Germany in 1938. From the age of ten, Freud attended privileged schools in England; he grew into a young man Smee describes as ‘mercurial, ardent and unpredictable, attracted by danger, and, to most people who encountered him, extremely attractive’. He was his mother’s favourite among her three sons, and
Smee describes him as acting with the ‘flair and impunity, but also the tenderness and sensitivity, of someone whose mother adored him’. Smee’s admiration perhaps causes him to overlook the serial betrayals of Freud’s romantic life.
Bacon, the son of a retired army captain who ran the family with military precision, did not have such a blessed childhood. Annoyed by young Francis’s sickly demeanour, and perhaps sensing his son’s emerging homosexuality, Francis’s father arranged to have his grooms horsewhip him, in order to ‘make a man of him’. Bacon was thrown out of home at fifteen when his father found him dressed in his mother’s underwear.
Thirteen years separated them, and by the time the two artists met Bacon was beginning to establish a reputation for unsettling imagery of human bodies, often twisted and unfinished, often eerily suspended in space, the paint thickly laid on, which owed as much to photography and film, Smee points out, as to continental modernism. Freud, who was only twenty-two at the time, was awed both by Bacon’s work and by his work ethic, as well as his expansiveness, generosity, derision, and general wildness, and began visiting his studio regularly. Bacon’s partner, Eric Hall, was jealous of Freud and ‘came to loathe him’, though the consensus seems to be that the two artists were never physically intimate.
‘Influence is erotic’, Smee writes, adding that Bacon bankrolled Freud for a long time. ‘And yet, even as he admitted Bacon’s example, he now found himself caught up in a struggle to hold his own course.’ Smee is soon showing us, mostly through conjecture, how the influence worked both ways, including the
younger man’s precisions on the older man’s work.
If Bacon’s work was urgent, passionate, often ugly but always persuasive, Freud’s was cold, almost callous in its distance from emotion. Smee refers to Freud’s ‘increasingly aggressive attack on sentimentality’. That Bacon, who was an alcoholic, suffered terribly, including violence, in his long-term relationships with other men, and that Freud dominated the women in his life seems evident in their canvases, though Smee doesn’t draw the comparison.
Bacon says that as he grew older he realised that he didn’t need extreme subject matter but could find sources for his painting in his own life. Smee sees evidence of shifting influence in this. ‘Certainly Bacon’s focus, from this time forward, on constantly reiterated portrayals of a small group of intimate acquaintances strongly suggests the influence of the young man.’ Yet by the early 1970s their relationship was as good as over, and Smee has some terrible quotes from both of them on money and professional jealousy. Freud called Bacon ‘bitchy’ and ‘bitter’.
One example will have to suffice, but Smee draws out the interpersonal aspects of all the rivalries in similar manner. The brawling Pollock versus the debonair de Kooning; the socially conventional Manet versus Degas, who was always too interested in under-age ballerinas (another point Smee all but overlooks); the hesitant Manet versus the gigantic appetites of Picasso: the red thread running through all these relationships is a magnetic swing between attraction and repulsion, precision and
boldness, care and risk taking, in temperament and in art, within each pairing, even as all involved were pushing the boundaries of modernism.
Despite his previous scholarship on Freud, Smee delivers the most interesting art criticism in his very good chapter on Picasso and Matisse, even though one might think there was little left to say about either artist. The freshest chapter seems to be that on Manet and Degas: Smee’s forensic skill reveals sides of both men that this writer, at least, had not fathomed. The American expressionists are endlessly fascinating, if only for the surprise of their rise in the New World, but in Smee’s hands the Pollock–de
Kooning chapter is riveting. [Disclosure: Sebastian Smee was appointed national arts critic under Miriam Cosic’s arts editorship at The Australian and remained in the position throughout her tenure.]
In a nod to the spirit of the times, Smee explains why he chose only male artists. The relationships of great women artists with other artists were too tainted by romantic entanglement to fit the brief. Women did not, apparently, have intense relationships with mentors, collaborators, supporters, prodders, or protégés they weren’t having sex with. Lee Krasner looms large in the Pollock chapter, not as an artist in her own right but as Pollock’s enabler, and her status as harri-
dan to many in the American art world is repeatedly mentioned. The powerful New York dealers who handled Pollock and de Kooning and happened to be women – Betty Parsons,for example –get passing mention and no exploration of their skill as promoters or salespeople. Well, this is the way the world is, as most women are keenly aware and most men are not. Set it aside, for Smee’s book is full of interest and elegance and compelling insights into formative moments in, not just art, but Western culture more broadly. g
Miriam Cosic is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.
Zero Degrees
Rags of snow unmelting on the southern lawn. Those younger ones, whose death turns on the hair’s-breadth incidence of accident, avoid this perduration of slow misrecognition.
He dreams his cotton blankets are combusting, but won’t press the hospital buzzer because the nursing staff are occupied extinguishing flames. That vandals have broken into the cupboard of the genial stroke victim in the bed next door who says only, ‘Here it is’. That children are being shorn in the corridors. That a chaotic darkness has fallen on working class districts erased for the concrete husks of a hulking and labyrinthine construction: apartments for immigrants and foreign students, with mirrored windows
replicating glare to the suburban boundaries. The view is of a miniature city in a bottle of smoke, car pollution mingling with vaporised frost. An extended family of currawongs gathers
expectantly for the faintest turn of leaf litter. He requests that his communist newspapers be hidden in case they are reported – but doesn’t say by whom –and remembers an article he once wrote for The Nation about poverty in the Blue Mountains: a young mother with three clenched children, all without jumpers, the temperature never lifting above zero degrees. Soon a plush Pullman carriage will arrive to transport him to the plains for further tests, flashing through all the usual stations: Bullaburra, Linden, Warrimoo.
John Hawke
John Hawke is a poet, anthologist, and senior lecturer at Monash University.
Arts Highlights of the Year
To highlight Australian Book Review’s arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year’s memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and art exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate some favourites. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Update on our website, and when.)
John Allison
Creeping nationalism has been one of the more depressing aspects of 2016, but at least most leading opera houses are opening their artistic borders rather than shutting them. My year of highlights began and ended with two striking examples of this, with Polish National Opera inviting an outsider (David Pountney) to direct Stanisław Moniuszko’s Haunted Manor for the first time and the Hungarian State Opera doing the same with Zoltán Kodály’s Spinning Room (Michał Znaniecki). In between, the first production at Covent Garden of George Enescu’s Oedipe (by the Catalan collective La fura dels baus) represented a turning point for this Romanian masterpiece. Happily, this year has also seemed to bring more productions of Bohuslav Martinů’s operas outside the Czech lands than ever before. The only setback for Czech music I heard was Simon Rattle’s patronisingly distorted performances of Anton Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Proms – one of the year’s turkeys.
The most memorable concerts were more intimate affairs at the Wigmore Hall: the Heath Quartet’s sensational Bartók cycle at the Wigmore Hall and an evening of Beethoven songs with baritone Matthias Goerne and period-pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Beethoven really created the first song cycle in An die ferne Geliebte, but few performers show how, in addition to his longing for ‘the distant beloved’, the call of the mountains and meadows echo his Pastoral Symphony.
Robyn Archer
Orava Quartet played the Shostakovich String Quartet No 8 in the BBC Proms salon series at Melbourne Recital Centre. These young men are the real deal, and they performed the work with all the intensity it deserves. We’re used to seeing this work played so well by other vigorous quartets such as Brodsky and Kronos, but Orava are the next generation and it’s so good to see a young Australian quartet taking its music so seriously.
There is a unique collaboration between Gavin Webber (dancer, choreographer co-founder of contemporary
dance company The Farm) and Kayah Guenther, a young man who has Downs Syndrome. With a highly respectful approach, of the kind that Back to Back Theatre exemplifies, this is tough and uncompromising dance in which no quarter is given. Both dancers give their all in a highly physical exchange. When Kayah steps forward and says, haltingly, ‘When I dance I feel strong. I am a strong man’, there’s not a dry eye in the house. You’ll have to travel far to see the next performance – at the Puerto de Ideas in Valparaiso, Chile in November 2016.
Shifting Sands was a large-scale community event for Bleach on the Gold Coast. Directed with characteristic authenticity and flair by Donna Jackson, the event combined paddle-boarders, oral history, local Indigenous people, the Queensland Ballet, synchronised swimmers, and some cool music to document the life and times of the beloved Currumbin Estuary. Held at dusk, it was a beautiful work which celebrated a place and its people with grace, fun, and awe: an object lesson in terrific community process resulting in an excellent end-product.
Ben Brooker
2016 was not, for me, a stellar year for new Australian theatre. My highlights were international – the deeply moving non-professional cast of 600 Highwaymen’s wordless The Record at OzAsia – and musical: Robyn Archer’s fierce and funny Brecht/Weill revue, Dancing on the Volcano, at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival; the State Opera of South Australia’s production of George Palmer’s Cloudstreet (Arts Update, 5/16); and James Morrison in concert with his youthful big band, the prodigiously swinging Academy Jazz Orchestra.
Neil Armfield’s King Lear at Sydney Theatre Company, with Geoffrey Rush masterful in the title role, did not disappoint (Arts Update, 11/15). I had looked forward to Machu Picchu at State Theatre Company of South Australia, but its reteaming of director Geordie Brookman and playwright Sue Smith from 2014’s superb Kryptonite did not see lightning strike twice. But let’s face it – most everyone had their work cut out for them in what was a bleak year to be an artist in this country.
Lee Christofis
Northern hemisphere choreographers dominated the 2016 Australian dance calendar, beginning with the Pina Bausch Company’s Nelken (Carnations) at the Adelaide Festival, and Spanishborn Rafael Bonachela’s Lux Tenebris for Sydney Dance Company.
The Australian Ballet presented short works by three of the world’s most illustrious artists – William Forsythe, Jiři Kylián, and Christopher Wheeldon – but memories of these were but all but eradicated by John Neumeier’s Nijinsky, created for the Hamburg Ballet, which he has directed for forty years (Arts Update, 9/16). Nijinsky is a monumental experience for dancers, musicians, and audiences alike, as it delves into the fantasies and psychotic episodes through which the greatest Russian dancer of his day recounted his glamorous career and his decline
into madness. Rarely have the dancers of The Australian Ballet been so drilled and galvanised, dancing beyond their experience into such contrasting worlds of war and terror, as well as the beauty and sexually ambiguous ethos of the Ballets Russes.
On a much smaller scale, existentialism, absence, and longing have fueled Rafael Bonachela’s recent works for Sydney Dance Company, nowhere better than this year’s Lux Tenebris. Nick Wales’s dense, moody score underpins the vital ways Bonachela has begun to complicate his stage pictures. Lux Tenebris was as exhilarating as it was emotionally commanding, and the dancers of Sydney Dance Company, who always look wonderful under Bonachela’s direction, revealed themselves as heroes of a completely different class.
In cinemas, ‘live’ screenings from the Royal Ballet delivered treasures in spades: revivals of two Frederick
• Ashley Hay on ‘mongrel trees’
• Colin Golvan on parallel importation
• Peter Rose interviews Stuart Skelton
• Ian Dickson on Edward Albee
• Catherine Noske on Westerly ... and more.
theatrical
oct 10 - dec 18
www.lamama.com.au/explorations
Cristiano Martino as the Faun in Nijinsky, The Australian Ballet (photograph by Jeff Busby )
Ashton choreographies: Rhapsody and Le Deux Pigeons; and a new Frankenstein by Liam Scarlett, whose A Midsummer Night’s Dream was sold-out hit for Queensland Ballet in April (Arts Update, 4/16). The Australian Ballet has announced it will screen its Sleeping Beauty (Arts Update, 9/16) in 2017, but it will need to find more talented, local choreographers if it wants to show new, home-grown product to the world at large.
Ian Dickson
The Brisbane Baroque festival may have ended chaotically with stories of unpaid artists, but it included several excellent concerts and its imported production of Handel’s Agrippina was an undoubted highlight, fully deserving the several Helpmann awards that came its way. Laurence Dale’s witty production played up the black comedy of Grimani’s libretto, and the cast was uniformly excellent.
An equally excellent cast, combined with Kip William’s compelling production, made STC’s version of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (Arts Update, 6/16) an unforgettable experience. Sunset Song was quintessential Terence Davies, long, slow, beautiful, and ultimately extraordinarily moving (Arts Update, 9/16).
It was good to welcome back to the stage two splendid performers, Keith Robinson at Belvoir and Marta Dusseldorp at Griffin, though it is to be hoped that the next project Dusseldorp takes on is worthier of her talent than Benedict Andrews’s wilfully obscure, overheated melodrama Gloria.
Andrew Fuhrmann
I was also very impressed with director Tanya Gerstle’s production of Mill on the Floss at Theatre Works (Arts Update, 8/16): a powerful ensemble piece with a provoking feminist theme.
Tony Grybowski
Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony holds a special place in my life. As a tuba student at the Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne in the early 1980s, the Resurrection Symphony was the ambitious 1985 repertoire for the Conservatorium orchestra. Fast forward about six years and I was working in a management role at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra when the late Stuart Challender embarked on a memorable cycle of symphonies as part of his tenure as Chief Conductor of the SSO. It was therefore very special to return to the mighty Sydney Town Hall and hear that work with the current Chief Conductor, David Robertson, on a Sunday afternoon in July.
In contrast, I was honoured to step into the world of central Australian artists at the Annual ‘Desert Mob’ Exhibition, Symposium, and Market Place at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs. The gathering puts a spotlight on and brings together a showcase of artists from the thirty-nine Indigenous arts centres across central Australia. There are very few experiences that mix a gathering of artists and art lovers who can meet, talk, and learn about the culture of this stunning region, as well as presenting an opportunity to purchase a valuable piece of work at the market place.
Michael Halliwell
One of the most memorable performances I saw this year was at a half-full theatrette in Brunswick – the Mechanics Institute – where André De Vanny was doing Swansong, the award-winning dramatic monologue by Irish actor and writer Conor McDermottroe. It was an absolute tour de force, but one that got lost in the mad ruck of this year’s Fringe Festival.
This year I decided to forswear all theatre presented at both the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Malthouse, the idea being that occasional abstinence works as a cure against the creep of cynicism. I did, however, break my pledge in order to see the adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock directed by Matthew Lutton (Arts Update, 3/16), a gothic nightmare which I enjoyed immensely.
2016 seems to have been a Così fan tutte year throughout the world, but the Opera Australia production by David McVicar was the highlight. This most difficult opera to bring off successfully was given a searching, elegant, vocally resplendent, and ultimately moving series of performances in Sydney (Arts Update, 7/16). A production of the Mozart opera at the Vienna Volksoper drew on an imaginative concept: staging it as a student rehearsal of the opera, but ultimately failed to deliver, abandoning the concept during the first half (Arts Update, 7/16). My musical highlight was the performance of Schubert’s masterpiece, Die Winterreise, performed by Matthias Goerne, with projections by William Kentridge, as part of the Sydney Festival in January (Arts Update, 1/16). It was stunning both musically and visually.
Così fan tutte Opera Australia (photograph by Prudence Upton)
Philippa Hawker
I loved German writer-director Maren Ade’s epic and comic Toni Erdmann, which I saw at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Ade lets the relationship between a father and his adult daughter play out in awkward, hilarious, often protracted detail, in a work that seems excessive and perfectly balanced, brutal and generous at the same time. I would also single out MIFF’s program Gaining Ground, consisting of six films directed by women in New York in the 1970s and early 1980s, ranging from the deadpan comedy of Elaine May’s A New Leaf to the feminist near-future uprising of Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames. Curation at its best.
Paul Kildea
Dancers feel vibrations through a sprung floor. Orchestral musicians too: double basses sawing away on a decent stage, say. This same visceral sensation was there in Opera Queensland’s Snow White, where Silvia Colloca as the Queen lay on the ground wailing like a singer in a Fado tavern, the sound cutting through us all, the show cumulatively reeling us in.
Writer Tim Dunlop would approve, for in his book Why the Future is Workless he ring-fences artists from the enormous changes taking place in the way we work. In punchy, elegant prose he writes optimistically of shifting practices and priorities – if only we can all get our heads around it.
Liza Lim’s opera Tree of Codes, based on the cut-out book by Jonathan Safran Foer and premièred in Cologne, is a virtuosic, mesmerising exploration of memory and time, of colour and sound, simultaneously a challenge to the genre and a pretty good roadmap. We need to hear her more.
David Larkin
son on the podium in Sydney Town Hall.
Within the world of opera, the Met broadcast of Strauss’s Elektra showcased a fabulous cast of singers headed by Nina Stemme in the final production of the late Patrice Chéreau: an effectively minimalist staging which humanised the monstrous characters. At home, George Petean was outstanding in the title role of Opera Australia’s Simon Boccanegra , and Nicole Car and Anna Dowsley shone in David McVicar’s stylish production of Così fan tutte.
For 2017, Jonas Kaufmann in OA’s concert performance of Parsifal, and Martha Argerich’s belated Australian début with SSO are unmissable.
Brian McFarlane
In what has been an often-rewarding year for cinema, Terence Davies’ Sunset Song, for my money, just pips at the post such strong competitors as Brooklyn (Arts Update, 2/16), the tonally perfect adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel, and Simon Stone’s daring relocation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck to a modern-day rundown setting in rural Australia: The Daughter (Arts Update, 3/16). Davies sets his film in pre-Great War Aberdeenshire. With his wonderful flair for evoking time and place, he chronicles the life of a teenage girl as she copes with a puritanical father, a bullied mother who dies too early, and a husband who will be traumatised by his wartime experiences. This may sound gloomy, but the overall effect is both elegiac and quietly hopeful.
My highlight of the Sydney Festival was an utterly compelling performance of Dusapin’s ‘O Mensch!’ cycle by baritone Mitch Reilly and pianist Jack Symonds. Beautifully lit and directed, this Sydney Chamber Opera production turned the work into an expressionist monodrama.
The new Verbrugghen Ensemble under John Lynch gave a stunning rendition of a radically downsized Fourth Symphony by Mahler, which revealed fresh aspects of an old favourite. Continuing the Mahler theme, the in-form Sydney Symphony Orchestra delivered a monumental Resurrection Symphony with David Robert-
Two theatrical experiences stand out. The Bell Shakespeare’s Othello achieved that rare melding of the poetic and the conversational among its uniformly fine cast (Arts Update, 7/16). At fortyfivedownstairs, Wit was a stark and confronting study of a woman dying from ovarian cancer, played with lacerating lack of compromise – and, indeed, with wit – by Jane Montgomery Griffiths.
James McNamara
On television, I hugely admired The Night Of (HBO, Arts Update, 9/16), The Kettering Incident (Foxtel, Arts Update 9/16), and Stranger Things (Netflix), whose child actors – particularly Millie Bobby Brown – gave wonderful performances.
My theatrical performance of the year is called ASSSSCAT. I know it sounds odd, but in American comedy circles ASSSSCAT has the canonical ring of Bell
Agyness Deyn as Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song (photograph by Iris Productions/The British Film Institute)
From The Readings Prize judges:
‘a good story, beautifully written’
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‘a stimulating, thought-provoking and immensely satisfying book’
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‘a wise novel with a wonderful sense of music and passion’
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‘an impeccably written and incredibly relevant novel’
Tom Hoskins
‘highly recommend for fans of Anne Tyler, Stephanie Bishop & Elizabeth Strout’
Nina Kenwood readings.com.au
Shakespeare or Monty Python. It is the flagship improvisational comedy show of the Upright Citizens Brigade, a theatre responsible for a staggering array of talent – Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, and Zach Galifianakis, to name a few. Every Sunday night in Hollywood, film and television actors come together to improvise a comedy on stage. It is, consistently, brilliant – with a full-house shouting laughter at a show that crackles with wit, has a polish you would expect from scripted comedy, and the intellectual sparkle of a cast composing lines as they deliver them in bravura comic performances. ASSSSCAT is truly exhilarating theatre.
Christopher Menz
Two major exhibitions – Degas: A New Vision (National Gallery of Victoria, Arts Update 7/16) and New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919–1933 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Arts Update, 10/16) – offered refreshing and innovative takes on their subjects. Degas was curated by former Louvre Director Henri Loyrette and showed the full range of this most creative and inventive of artists, from his student work to the late paintings, and included his remarkable photography and a fine selection of sculpture. New Objectivity – expertly curated by Stephanie Barron – presented a brilliant and at times confronting thematic display of paintings, prints, books, photographs, and film from the Weimar era.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s Melbourne recital of Olivier Messiaen’s majestic cycle for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, was one of the great concerts, amply justifying its 2016 Helpmann Award for Best Individual Classical Performance (Arts Update, 3/16). Aimard enthralled the audience with his artistry and technical mastery of this keyboard marathon.
Peter Rose
Several productions confirmed Sydney Theatre Company’s status as the country’s pre-eminent theatre company, notwithstanding regime change and the abrupt ouster of its new artistic director, Jonathan Church. Two productions stood out: King Lear, still running in the New Year. Directed by Neil Armfield and starring Geoffrey Rush, this was a loss-filled and nihilistic Lear, one that eschewed grandiloquence. The STC complemented the world-wide Arthur Miller revival with an inspired production of All My Sons. Director Kip Williams drew consummate performances from his players.
Bravo to the MSO for programming Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Arts Update, 8/16), not heard in Melbourne since 1971. Hard-pressed choristers and soloists may not lament its infrequency, but Andrew Davis (more galvanic than usual) led a revelatory performance of the Mass.
Few present will ever forget Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus. Virtuosic in the extreme, this was a mesmeric performance that somehow transcended pianism.
Mariusz Treliński’s new production of Tristan und Isolde, at the Metropolitan Opera, was similarly unforgettable (Arts Update, 9/16 and page 31). Nina Stemme confirmed her ranking as one of the finest singers of the age, Stuart Skelton was consummate, and Simon Rattle drew great playing from the Met’s phenomenal orchestra.
Leo Schofield
Australian Chamber Orchestra’s performance featuring the magnificent Russian-born, Vienna-based pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja was one of unalloyed pleasures of a year packed with peerless pianism. Grandest of grandes dames of the piano, Leonskaja’s matchless Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9, the so-called Jeunehomme, was flanked by elegant arrangements by Timo-Veikko Valve of the sextet from Capriccio and Beethoven’s late quartet Opus 127. This was programming at its best, and under guest leader Roman Simovic the ACO seemed to find new energy, new tonal colours.
Two opera productions stood out for me, David McVicar’s wholly satisfying and delicious take on Così fan tutte for Opera Australia and (interest declared but quality attested to by four Helpmann Awards) Brisbane Baroque’s Agrippina.
Michael Shmith
The most inspiring highlight of 2016 was the Australian Youth Orchestra’s marvellous concert in August, conducted by Manfred Honeck (Arts Update, 8/16). Normally, the AYO gives its Australian concerts before its international tour – but, for a change, this one, in Hamer Hall, occurred just after the orchestra returned from Europe and China. Therefore, the repertoire (an explosive showpiece from Carl Vine; Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G; Mahler’s First Symphony) was well and truly played in. Honeck is a great conductor, but also a fine teacher. The travelling pianist, Hélène Grimaud, was utterly at home in the Ravel.
Film Festival, the most valuable tribute to a single director MIFF has mounted for many years. (The only thing missing was the man himself.) Lewis’s violently coloured, emotionally fractured slapstick comedies still have the power to divide audiences, but those who see him as a chauvinist dinosaur need to look again: his Jekyll and Hyde variant The Nutty Professor (1963) now plays like a ruthless satire on the twenty-first century men’s movement, suggesting that inside every mild-mannered nerd is a raging misogynist trying to get out.
Claims that television has taken over from cinema as a serious artform are premature, to say the least. Still, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Better Call Saul and Louis CK’s internet experiment Horace and Pete were as engrossing and formally inventive as any of the new films I saw on the big screen this year.
Jacki Weaver
One of the best nights I’ve ever spent in the theatre was in New York with this year’s stunning revival by London’s Young Vic Company of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Mark Strong was breathtakingly fine in the lead; he was surrounded by a super-strong ensemble. I also loved Stephen Karam’s play The Humans, with a brilliant Jayne Houdyshell. This year I have watched eighty-four films! Two I loved are Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster and Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen in career-best performances respectively.
Barney Zwartz
I was fortunate enough to see Nina Stemme, possibly the finest Strauss soprano at present, in a new Elektra at the Metropolitan Opera with Waltraud Meier as Klytemnestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, in a posthumous production by Patrice Chéreau. Simply riveting, such as come seldom in a lifetime.
I was away for Opera Australia’s autumn season and, at this writing, the revival of the Melbourne Ring has yet to be forged. But I took particular joy from Victorian Opera and Circus Oz’s Laughter & Tears, which imaginatively paired Pagliacci with a delightful commedia dell’arte pasticcio. Praise, too, to Melbourne Lyric Opera’s adventurous performance of Malcolm Williamson’s 1963 opera Our Man in Havana (Arts Update, 9/16).
Jake Wilson
Easily the most spectacular film event of 2016 was the Jerry Lewis retrospective at the Melbourne International
In the same musical stratosphere was French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus at the Melbourne Recital Centre: refined spirituality, deeply moving.
I must also mention Opera Australia’s Luisa Miller in Melbourne (Arts Update, 2/16) and Così fan tutte in Sydney, both with the stunning Nicole Car, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven festival of all five piano concertos over four concerts, with British pianist Paul Lewis bordering on the miraculous.
Coming up: Opera Australia’s Ring in November and December. g
Riz Ahmed as Nasir ‘Naz’ Khan in The Night Of (HBO/Foxtel)
Eclipse
Christopher Menz
NEW OBJECTIVITY: MODERN GERMAN ART IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC, 1919–1933
edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann
Los Angeles County Museum of Art USD$75 hb, 360 pp, 9783791354316
The Weimar period in Germany –spanning less than fifteen years following the end of World War I through to the coup d’état by the National Socialists in 1933 – was crucial in shaping modern Germany. The nation was in a ruinous state because of its wartime defeat, and crippling reparations; then came the Wall Street crash, high unemployment, and hyper-inflation. The political outcome at the end of the Weimar Republic was catastrophic for Europe as a whole. The poles of radical and conservative politics, social upheaval and rapid change mirrored through its art, formed the subject of a fascinating exhibition and accompanying catalogue, first in Venice, then at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where I saw it earlier this year).
The term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) gained currency when used as the title of an exhibition shown in Mannheim in 1925 – Neue Sachlichkeit: Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus (New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism) – and the label has stuck. In the 1920s, New Objectivity covered a wide field, which is reflected in the diversity of art and artists. Artists of the New Objectivity were not united by a manifesto or particular style or technique: they distanced themselves and their work from expressionism and subjectiv-
ity, focusing on representation, and in many cases showing a renewed interest in the art and techniques of the past. As Stephanie Barron describes it, New Objectivity was characterised by ‘observation of the modern environment that was sober, unsentimental, and significantly divorced from the palette, painterliness, and tendency toward exoticism and impassioned subjectivity popular in the previous decade’.
Barron and Sabine Eckmann have assembled a team of more than a dozen contributors to cover the wide expanse of the topic. Barron’s excellent introduction contextualises the art of the Weimar era and New Objectivity. Rather than focus on styles, chronology, or a few well-known artists – George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Christian Schad, all of whom are well represented with fine works – the show and the volume are comprehensive and diverse; both explore multiple themes and introduce many new artists.
The book and exhibition follow the same structure, dividing the material into five key themes: ‘Life in the Democracy and the Aftermath of War’, ‘The City and the Nature of Landscape’, ‘Man and Machine, Still Lifes and Commodities’, and ‘New Identities: Types and Portraiture’. In addition, the book has several fascinating essays that cover a range of topics, including: ‘New Women, New Men, New Objectivity’, ‘The Politics of New Objectivity’, ‘New Objectivity and “Totalitarianism”’, ‘Writing Photography’. This allows for stimulating thematic essays and results in an immensely satisfying experience for the reader. Juxtaposition, which can seem clumsy in exhibitions – chiefly when paintings are hung adjacent to photographs – came off brilliantly here.
In a masterful selection of photography, August Sander is well represented, with several images from his People of the Twentieth Century series. Other photographers whose work deserves to be better known outside photography circles include Aenne Biermann, Hans Finsler, and Albert Renger-Patzsch. The latter, despite Walter Benjamin’s negatively intended criticism that he had the ability to ‘endow any soup can with cosmic significance’, proves to be
one of the most arresting photographers of the era. All three photographers use powerful modernist aesthetics of composition and lighting to present images. Their apparent cool ‘objectivity’ and frequent use of abstract form do not negate the artists’ strong interest in the surrounding world. Like the paintings, they are firmly of their epoch.
Even more disturbing than Otto Dix’s series of anti-war etchings, Der Kreig (War), are the images by Dix and others on the sex murder (Lustmord) theme. Sex murders of prostitutes became so prevalent in Germany during the late 1910s and early 1920s that they became a genre for artists. Barron does not shy away from presenting this confronting part of post war Germany. She also includes images of the maimed and broken. Germany’s progressive approach to sexuality is covered and includes some remarkably frank images of same-sex couples. Given the Nazi’s pathological hatred of any ‘deviant’ sexuality, it is surprising that any of this material from the Berlin’s gay scene of the 1920s survived at all.
Among this rich offering, it is the paintings that stand out, and many of the most famous works by artists of the New Objectivity are included. There are the distancing ironic images of bourgeois society by Dix and Beckmann, the bleak views of postwar Germany offered by Grosz and Georg Sholz, and some extraordinary portraits by Christian Schad.
It is impossible not to read a book covering this period without knowledge of what followed. There is a portrait by Kurt Günther of an intense selfcontained blond boy who must be destined for the Hilter Youth at the very least; Renger-Patzsch’s supposedly neutral photographs were greatly favoured by the Third Reich; Otto Dix was dismissed from his teaching position in 1933, and his work was removed from German collections and featured in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. New Objectivity provides an arresting visual record of the art that preceded Germany’s most inglorious years. g
Christopher Menz is a former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Halcyon days
Francesca Sasnaitis
INSIDE THE ART MARKET: AUSTRALIA’S GALLERIES: A HISTORY 1956–1976
by Christopher Heathcote Thames & Hudson
$49.99 hb, 368 pp, 9780500500705
Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956. Two characters step from an Americanstyle automobile and, in true Hollywood fashion, sweep the penurious artist Arthur Boyd into a contract with the fledgling Australian Galleries. The man with the romantic Ronald Colman moustache is Thomas ‘Tam’ Purves. The woman with the Mae West smarts is his wife, Anne. And the rest, as they say, is art history.
Heathcote traces the development of numerous galleries in Australia’s capitals, several with links overseas, and introduces more personalities, interconnections, and rivalries than it is possible to unravel here. The author shapes what might have become an unwieldy tome with succinct chapters that lead the reader from a wider historical perspective to the more intimate particular. As Heathcote makes clear, his focus on the long-running Australian Galleries was dictated by the fact that the Purveses were the only ones who gave him full access to their archives and to the invaluable record provided by Anne Purves’s unpublished memoir.
There were galleries operating before the Purveses opened their doors on Derby Street in Collingwood, once an inauspicious working-class neighbourhood, but most were attached to other businesses – antiques, furniture, bookshops, restaurants – and catered to conservative and conformist tastes. What the Purveses brought to the Melbourne scene was an enthusiasm for the ‘new’ expressionist painters and an unprecedented professionalism. Their innovative, some would say ruinous, business
model included not charging their artists rent; selling work on commission; maintaining a permanent stable and stockroom, strict accounts, and provenance records; and offering certain artists modest stipends, paying for their materials and framing, and inviting them to stay at their house on the Mornington Peninsula. Naturally, their largesse was not merely altruistic but part of an astute marketing strategy.
Other galleries followed suit, but the return on investments was far from guaranteed. Shows by Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, and their coterie did well, but others like John Brack, Fred Williams, and Ian Fairweather were not so successful initially. The enthusiasm of art dealers might not have swayed public taste or re-educated the public eye but for the support of art critics like the Melbourne Age’s Patrick McCaughey, Herald columnist Alan McCulloch, and ‘the perky young writer Robert Hughes’ from Sydney, subjects for another history perhaps.
Following the mining boom of the 1950s, Australia became an aspirational nation. According to Bernard Smith, art became a means towards national selfidentification. Collecting art was akin to acquiring status and a mark of superior taste. By the mid-1960s, ‘those who took an interest in art were perceived as intelligent, forward-thinking and enlightened members of the community’, and Australians’ reputation for insularity (and vulgarity) had been somewhat eroded. It is hardly surprising that the evolution of the domestic art market should parallel the economic and cultural development of Australian society.
Heathcote writes from his experience as a newspaper art critic and an aficionado of the gallery milieu, and his account is peppered with juicy descriptions of flamboyant characters, spectacular openings, fabulous frocks, and polka-dotted ties; art scene gossip and carping; exhibitions that created a furore; bidding wars and auction houses that played their part in inflating the value of Australian art; and conversations to which Heathcote could not have been privy but which he endows with a sense of immediacy.
It is as if Heathcote were the proverbial fly on the wall at every significant moment in this twenty-year history, a testament to the scope of his research, the many interviews he conducted as far back as 1988, and the degree of trust his long association with the arts has engendered in the artists, gallerists (the latest term), writers, and collectors. Most importantly in a volume starkly lacking reproductions, apart from the handsome author portrait by photographer Sonia Payes, Heathcote brings the vibrancy and dynamism of the originals to his description of traditional paintings, to the innovations and idiosyncrasies of modernism, and to revolutionary conceptual and installation art.
Australians’ reputation for vulgarity had been eroded
If I have any quibbles, it is not with Heathcote but with history. Women’s names are scarce. Heathcote has been assiduous in mentioning female artists, but women generally fare better as facilitators (proprietors and dealers) than as makers. He touches only briefly on the exclusionary boys’ club atmosphere of the mid-twentieth century, and the changes wrought by feminism and an awareness of sexual politics. My interest waned as the colourful individuals of the previous decades made way for the bureaucrats of the 1970s, the number of galleries trebled, and the government stepped up with increased grants and prizes. What must have been a windfall for artists does not necessarily make for scintillating narrative. Nor can the subsequent economic recession match the urgency and anxieties of the halcyon days.
All that remains is a slow drift into the 1980s and its new breed of gallerist, more canny but also more arrogant and self-congratulatory. It is a dispiriting note on which to end. Heathcote has certainly fulfilled his aim to ‘dispel illusions’ about art dealing with this dynamic account of a compelling period in Australian art history. g
Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD student in Creative Writing.
THE LOVE OF A BAD MAN
by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Scribe
$27.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925321555
Throughout history, women have been seduced by men who are mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Many of the world’s most notorious murderers and con artists have attracted loyal, besotted, and often very young female accomplices. The twelve stories in Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s collection, spanning the twentieth century, evoke the lives of real women who were all sucked into an abyss of murder, fraud, and violence under this spell. Some are well-known, including the seventeen-year-old politically naïve Eva Braun, who caught Hitler’s eye when still at school; and Myra Hindley, the ‘Moors Murderess’, who cold-bloodedly killed five children with her lover, the psychopath Ian Brady, convinced they could get away with the perfect crime. Others have been relegated to history’s footnotes, such as the so-called ‘Manson Brides’, or Veronica Compton, an aspiring actress and playwright who began a passionate correspondence with jailed serial killer Kenneth Bianchi and committed a copycat crime in order to prove his innocence.
Woollett has researched her subject matter well, but captures the individual voices of her deluded heroines with mixed success. Sometimes the reader is completely absorbed, yet for the most part Woollett’s gaze remains emotionally uninvolved. There is a clinical detachment to the writing, even depicting horrifying bloodshed or rape. A short glossary summarises the crimes, but confusion occasionally arises due to the reader’s lack of familiarity with the cases, which the narrative does not dispel. This is dark, disturbing stuff and it raises unanswered questions about the women’s moral culpability and autonomy, and the addictive nature of love and desire. One wonders how accurate Woollett’s portrayals are and what the women who are still alive would make of them. For a book about obsessive love, the relationships seem curiously distanced and unengaged.
Dina Ross
When worlds collide
An ‘art-historical’ account of Indigenous Australian art
Billy Griffiths
RATTLING
SPEARS:
A HISTORY OF INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN ART
by Ian McLean
NewSouth, $59.99 hb, 296 pp, 9781780235905
This beautifully illustrated book explores the ways in which Indigenous Australians have responded to invasion through art. ‘Where colonists saw a gulf,’ writes art historian Ian McLean, ‘Aborigines saw bridges. They didn’t hesitate to be modern, but on their terms.’
The tension between old and new, tradition and modernity, is evoked in the image of the rattling spears in the title. Before battle, McLean explains, Aboriginal warriors would roll their spears against each other to create ‘a chilling sound that calls ancestors from their sleep’. The sound served to focus the powers of supernatural forces, but it was also ‘a strategic manoeuvre’ to assert authority in the fight. The art that appears in the pages of Rattling Spears is similarly potent: it keeps the past alive and makes claims upon the present.
McLean describes the book as ‘the first full art-historical narrative of Indigenous Australian art’. As opposed to other historical or anthropological overviews of the field, McLean focuses on integrating Aboriginal ‘responses to modernity’ into the language and theory of the contemporary art world. The ritual spearing of Governor Arthur Phillip in 1790 is thus reconsidered as ‘performance art’, while Bungaree’s performances in early Sydney are interpreted as ‘mock baroque satires’ redolent of ‘the sort of kitsch buffoonery that the Zurich Dadaists would make into avant-garde art ninety years later’. In Victoria, painter William Barak is celebrated as ‘a strategic essentialist’, while Tommy McRae’s silhouette sketches are analysed as ‘cosmopolitan’ expressions of ‘dandyism’. Although the text is laden with such specialist language, it
is a necessary component of McLean’s argument: these are significant artists whose work should be understood in the context of world art movements.
The book is broken into three parts: ‘Empire’, ‘Nation’, and ‘Post-Western’. The opening chapters, which move from 60,000 years ago to 1900, are curiously placeless, considering that Aboriginal art is intimately linked to country. McLean sets the tone in the introduction, citing an Indigenous busker playing didgeridoo (a northern Australian artefact) in Circular Quay as a reminder of ‘the special history of this place’. ‘This place’ is the whole of Australia, ‘modernity’ is represented by the British Empire, and the many hundreds of Aboriginal nations are forged into one ‘age-old’, pan-continental culture. In this way, the Sydney Opera House becomes, in a blurring of regional cultures, ‘a shining white Rainbow Serpent arcing up from the site of invasion’.
In being ‘art-historical’, not historical, McLean allows himself the freedom to make broad statements such as: ‘Nothing much changed in the next fifty years.’ But it is disappointing how little he engages with the existing scholarship in the fields of history, archaeology, and anthropology. As a result, he casually repeats contested dates for rock art and falls back on the largely rejected terminology of ‘shamanism’ and ‘the Neolithic’ to describe Aboriginal society pre-contact.
Yet the book never ceases to be engaging, and it gathers momentum over the course of the narrative. McLean beautifully evokes rock art as a performative act – ‘the residue of ritual’ –and later touches on the ways in which ancient motifs are echoed in contem-
porary art: how Alec Mingelmanganu, for example, brought Wanjinas to life on canvas. In ‘Nation’, McLean explores the tension between tradition and modernity in the bark painting centres in Arnhem Land, comparing the ‘anyhow’ missionary paintings made for tobacco with the more serious artworks created for visiting anthropologists. Such commissioning practices, alongside the ‘invisible hand of the artworld’, inevitably shaped the course of Indigenous art. But McLean is always quick to underline the agency of individual artists and movements: ‘Do not doubt that the Indigenous turn to abstraction is not aimed at the Western artworld with all the power and accuracy of a well-thrown spear.’
Albert Namatjira was the forerunner of the contemporary Indigenous art scene, and Rex Battarbee’s management of Hermannsburg became the model of the modern art centre. Through Namatjira’s watercolours, Indigenous art began to be recognised as ‘modern’, even though ‘his Western supporters believed that his art exemplified the promise of acculturation rather than transculturation’. But it was the Papunya Tula art movement that decisively transformed Aboriginal art from anthropological curio to celebrated fine art commodity. McLean gives us a rich assessment of the forces (both ancestral and bureaucratic) that played a hand in its founding. He argues that ‘while the Papunya art movement began 200 years after Cook landed at Botany Bay, in many respects it is an example of contact art’.
With the boom of the canvas economy in the 1980s, remote art centres became increasingly defined by the art world’s innate fascination with individual masters and masterpieces. ‘Genius, not ethnography, was the new
catchword.’ These are the strongest chapters of the book, featuring rich vignettes on remote masters such as John Mawurndjul and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. McLean also explores questions of identity through New Wave artists such as Trevor Nickolls, who resisted the label ‘Indigenous’ and described his art as
Australian artists of the 1990s’.
WRITE, READ AND EDIT
POETRY
being caught between ‘machinetime and dreamtime’.
By the 1990s, urban Indigenous art defied categorisation. Despite the increasingly divergent themes, subjects, and approaches, McLean identifies a unifying element, arguing that a ‘deep anger at historical injustice is the driving force of nearly all urban art’. He highlights Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt in particular as setting the agenda with their ‘post-Western cosmopolitanism’, making them ‘not just the most significant urban Indigenous artists but the most significant contemporary
The books concludes with an esoteric essay on ‘A Theory of Indigenous Art in the Age of Modernity’, in which McLean unpacks Richard Bell’s intentionally ambiguous quote: ‘Aboriginal art – it’s a white thing.’ This, he believes, is only half the story. Aboriginal art has played a powerful role in shaping the Western art world, and vice versa. It is a two-way process. ‘When worlds collide,’ he reflects, ‘one or both are ripped apart or there is the intense heat of fusion.’ Rattling Spears, while faltering at points, burns with the brightness of that fusion. g
Billy Griffiths is a Melbourne-based writer and historian. He is the author of The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971 (2012) and co-editor (with Mike Smith) of The Australian Archaeologist’s Book of Quotations (2015).
It breaks from the world of expectations and answers. We teach you about rhythm, poetry's time. We read poetry by the line, not the sentence and that distinction is crucial.
(864 226) E Paul.Magee@canberra.edu.au canberra.edu.au/faculties/arts-design/ courses/undergraduate/writing
Wanjina, c.4000 bpe, earth pigments on rock shelter. The Wanjinas are over five metres long. Isdell River, central Kimberley. (Photograph by Mike Donaldson. First published in Kimberley Rock Art – Volume Three: Rivers and Ranges by Mike Donaldson, [Wildrocks Publications, 2013])
The Night Of
by James McNamara
Over the past fifteen years, television has steadily eclipsed film as the medium for prestige drama.
US cable network HBO has been central to this, producing shows (The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones) that, in visual sophistication and narrative scope, helped transform television into art. HBO’s eight-part mini-series The Night Of sustains that high standard. Exemplifying the talent-shift from film, stage, and novels to television, this intelligent crime drama is created by Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Zaillian and Oscar-nominated novelist–screenwriter Richard Price, whose credits include Schindler’s List, The Wire, and Gangs of New York. It is based on BAFTA-winning dramatist Peter Moffat’s BBC series Criminal Justice (2008). That heft shows throughout.
The Night Of centres on Nasir ‘Naz’ Khan, a PakistaniAmerican college student played by Riz Ahmed, who lives with his parents, and stays teetotal as a relatively observant Muslim. Invited to a party but stood up for a lift, Naz impulsively ‘borrows’ his father’s cab. Over the following hours, Naz’s life unspools, slowly at first, then with panicky speed. When Andrea Cornish, a damaged party-girl, played beautifully by Sofia Black-D’Elia, mistakes him for a real cabbie, Naz agrees to drive her to the beach. Back at her expensive townhouse, Naz nervously takes drugs and tequila shots, and then has sex for the second time in his life. After waking in the kitchen, Naz goes upstairs to say goodnight. He finds Andrea stabbed to death. Knowing his innocence, but understanding how it looks, Naz flees. His arrest, remand, and prosecution form the show’s spine.
The creative team’s experience is clear throughout. The scripts are stunning – each scene impossibly lean, loaded with narrative and character development, yet never using a word more or less than necessary. While the cinematography occasionally risks overstatement, the visual language is sophisticated, with imagery that rewards careful viewing, and a dark, glittering aesthetic that captures Naz’s dream-turned-nightmare.
After Andrea’s death, a detailed procedural plays out, from Naz’s agonising wait in a police station, to the crime scene, morgue, interrogation room, remand cell, on to lawyers, detective-work, violent survival in prison, and then a trial over the final episodes. The narrative space of television allows the audience to see a murder prosecution in fascinating detail. Like The Wire, this close study of the justice system prompts broader comment on its flaws: racial bias, bureau-
cratic cruelty, and the huge impact of a lawyer’s talent (or lack of it). In Naz’s case, he lucks on John Stone (John Turturro), a skilled but derided gumshoe hack. For Stone, Naz’s case offers personal and professional redemption, but he is driven mainly by a fierce belief in his client’s innocence –a light point in an otherwise bleak view of justice.
Alongside the procedural, The Night Of gives space to domesticity, allowing the show’s thematic argument – the damaging effects of the justice system on all participants – to unfold. Naz’s parents, played so elegantly by Poorna Jagannathan and Peyman Moaadi, suffer racial abuse, economic hardship, and the clawing tension of a father’s belief in a son’s innocence while a mother suspects his guilt. Each major character – prosecutor, detective, lawyer – is shown in the quiet moments of their lives, and to rich effect. Central here is Stone, dramatised via his relationship with a son who loves but doesn’t respect him, his pursuit of a cure for eczema, and his allergic care for Andrea’s abandoned cat. The generous screentime given to Stone, a dual protagonist with Naz, affords a novelistic exploration of his character. This, combined with Turturro’s Emmy-worthy performance, presents a flawed but very real hero – a shift from the HBO-era’s predilection for charismatic villains.
We get that with Naz, who embodies the destructive effects of the penal system. Denied bail, Naz is remanded at the infamous Rikers prison. There, a fellow inmate, the excellent Michael Kenneth Williams’s Freddy, teaches Naz to survive: shaved head, prison tats, heroin habit, savage violence. Naz’s moral journey, while narratively weaker than Stone’s procedural story-line, is physicalised exquisitely by Ahmed, who shifts so deftly from innocence to thuggery that a juxtaposing flashback in the finale to his character in the pilot reveals a shocking change.
While laudably depicting pervasive racial and religious biases in the justice system, and providing a much-needed Hollywood corrective in lead roles for minorities, the show has drawn criticism for focusing on African-American characters as perpetrators of prison violence. Of course, the counter-argument is that The Night Of highlights the shameful overrepresentation of African-American men in prisons, and the violence this dehumanising incarceration breeds. I didn’t buy Naz’s junior lawyer, Chandra Kapoor (Amara Karan), kissing him in a cell, an act that leads to her prospective disbarment. Basing Chandra’s legal failure on romantic feeling undercut a great female character.
Notwithstanding, The Night Of is exceptional television, with novelistic scope and the best of cinematic storytelling. Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that the show ‘effectively eradicates the notion of the two-hour American theatrical movie’. When it comes to prestige crime drama, I’m inclined to agree. g
The Night Of is written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, and directed by Zaillian and James Marsh. It was produced by BBC Worldwide Productions for HBO.
James McNamara was the third ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow.
In an extraordinary year for British politics the gloriously unexpected triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party’s leadership election in September 2015 probably ranks just behind ‘Brexit’ on the political Richter scale. To recall, Corbyn is known for his far-left political sympathies, his total indifference to fashion, and his propensity to rebel against his own party while Blair was in power – over 400 times, according to my former colleague Phil Cowley. He was only nominated for the leadership by elements of his own party to give some breadth and interest to a leadership election that would otherwise have featured three identikit figures from the centre and right of the party. His chances of winning the leadership were initially placed at 1000 to one, odds which, at the time, did not seem particularly generous.
In a turn of events that made Leicester City’s triumph in the English Premier League seem predictable, Corbyn trounced the opposition in a landslide victory that has variously alienated his own parliamentary party, energised anti-austerity activists, and allowed the Conservative Party to ride out its own post-Brexit ructions untroubled by effective opposition in Parliament. How did this happen?
Rosa Prince has done an admirable job here of trying to put together at least some of the parts of the puzzle taking a two-pronged approach to give the narrative some depth: part biography to give us a sense of the man himself, and part a (usefully) breathless retelling of the key events around his election to leader. The latter part is admittedly more engaging than the former; Corbyn’s past is unexceptional and rather dull. He moved about a bit as a child
of conventionally middle-class parents, didn’t do very well at school, tried his hand at a few jobs, and ended up going into politics.
What is of more interest is that, notwithstanding his cheery demeanour and homespun radicalism, Corbyn has managed to work his way through three marriages to women who evidently shared his political convictions, but who seem to have concluded (the details are sparse) that they themselves weren’t as high a priority as his polit-ical allegiances. Given the thrust of the narrative this comes as little surprise. What strikes one here is Corbyn’s singleminded attachment to his causes: the injustice of US foreign policy; the lamentable legacy of colonialism; the necessity for state control over the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. All quite predictable for those familiar with the background; but what comes across is someone who is so certain of the justice of the causes he espouses that dialogue is shut down – to the detriment of person-
al as well as professional relationships. Corbyn is someone for whom politics is all-consuming. It is also a black-andwhite matter: one is either on the side of the angels, or one is not. There can be no compromises, no half measures, no shades of grey.
As becomes clear in the latter half of the book, it is this quality that seems to be attractive for a certain breed of citizen fed up with the Machiavellian scheming of parliamentary politics. Too many false smiles and perfect teeth, too little ‘plain speaking’, honesty, integrity. Corbyn’s near-saintly attachment to his causes seems fresh and invigorating to many. While Corbyn is not a charismatic figure nor one possessing the stage craft of a Trump or Blair, he does possess authenticity and conviction. He really does believe what he says. How do we know? Because as Prince relates, he has been saying exactly the same things over and over again since he set out in politics in the 1980s. The world may evolve and change in important ways, but Corbyn’s stance does not.
This unyielding quality is Corbyn’s chief strength as a political figure, but it is also his chief weakness as a leader of a major parliamentary party where compromise, coalition building, and dialogue with a plurality of positions are prerequisites for success. Notwithstanding, for example, Margaret Thatcher’s deeply held convictions, she was very conscious of the need to build bridges, make compromises, appease the parts of
President Barack Obama meets with Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition, at Royal Horticultural Halls in April 2016 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons)
the Conservative Party that might not necessarily agree with her – as Charles Moore’s recent biography illustrates. The paradox of Corbyn is the more successful he is with those parts of the population ready for his anti-austerity line, the less effective and disciplined the party itself becomes, and in turn the less it looks like a party of governance as opposed to a party of protest – or indeed a social movement.
On the other hand, these are undeniably strange days as far as politics in the advanced democracies is concerned. What is unfortunately absent from the text is an analysis of the wider context in which Corbyn’s rise took place. Prince does mention his productive use of social media, which offers one clue. However, little attention is given to the rise of left populism in Europe and the United States, which might in turn help us to understand why a figure such as Corbyn is gaining traction with swathes of the electorate – as of course have Bernie Sanders, Beppe Grillo, Pablo Iglesias, and all the rest. Politics is part of it. There is a constituency for a break with neo-liberalism and a return to social democracy; but there is also a weariness with technocratic politics, bureaucratic politics – a politics driven by the needs and interests of distant élites, in turn making us hungry for authenticity, conviction, principle, even where, as with Corbyn, it is expressed in an unblushingly anachronistic idiom. Whatever the case, the mix of nostalgia for a kinder age, social media, and ‘outsider’ street cred is becoming a key motif of the new politics as this episode reveals. Corbyn-esque ‘coups’ and ‘shocks’ are going to be the new normal. g
Simon Tormey is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney.
How Curtin managed the media Paul Strangio
JOHN CURTIN: HOW HE WON OVER THE MEDIA by Caryn Coatney
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $39.95 pb, 228 pp, 9871925333411
John Curtin occupies the top tier in the pantheon of Australian national leaders. ‘Expert’ rankings of former officer holders – a practice lately imported from the United States, where presidential rating exercises have been fashionable for decades – have placed Curtin narrowly ahead of other primeministerial virtuosos: Alfred Deakin, Ben Chifley, Robert Menzies, and Bob Hawke.
Curtin’s allure is not hard to fathom. Socialist, committed anti-militarist during the Great War, his political career blighted by bitter setbacks, he conquered adversity and went against type to steer Australia through World War II. In doing so, he subdued his own demons: alcoholism and a melancholic disposition. His leadership also has the stuff of heroism exemplified by his doughty insistence, against the wishes of Winston Churchill, on the return of the 6th and 7th AIF divisions to Australia for homeland defence and his sleepless vigil as the convoys transporting the troops made their perilous voyage across the Indian Ocean. And there is the tragic arc of his prime-ministerial story – careworn by the burdens of wartime office, he died in July 1945, months short of victory.
Recent studies have supplemented the wartime saviour-martyr narrative of Curtin. One portrays him as architect of the postwar economy; another argues that his finely calibrated (and tradi-
tional) vision of Australia’s geo-political destiny as an active partner within the British empire has been unduly overshadowed by the focus on his famed ‘looks to America’ message of December 1941. Now, Caryn Coatney has written a commendable book further illuminating Curtin’s wartime leadership by exploring his media management practices. It has long been recognised that the former journalist Curtin deftly nurtured a relationship with the Canberra press gallery to win their cooperation in prosecuting the war effort. Coatney, however, draws upon archival research and the oral histories and autobiographies of journalists to delve more intricately into Curtin’s novel mass communication techniques.
The book sketches the media milieu of wartime Australia. It was an era in which the public were avid press consumers, typically buying the morning daily from street corner newspaper boys. The pre-eminence of the press as a news source was, however, under challenge. In 1939, the ABC’s first federal political correspondent joined the Canberra press gallery and Australians were regularly tuning into radio news broadcasts. Picture theatres were another increasingly important news outlet, with audiences ‘watching creaking news announcements about the war’.
Coatney confirms that central to Curtin’s media management were daily informal briefings of members of the
press gallery in which he shared offthe-record information. She contrasts Curtin’s ‘egalitarian’ treatment of journalists with Robert Menzies’ aloofness towards them, which had had the effect of alienating news reporters and contributed to his first unhappy stint as prime minister (1939–41). Though Curtin’s cultivation of the press gallery was rewarded with them (mostly) maintaining confidences and sympathy with him, this did not translate into an easy relationship with press barons Keith Murdoch and Frank Packer. Their antiLabor prejudices were unleashed once the darkest days of the war passed. Murdoch waged a vitriolic but unsuccessful campaign against Curtin at the 1943 federal election. The proprietors also chafed at the Labor government’s censorship regime, colluding in an open revolt against the regulations while Curtin was overseas in 1944.
The former journalist Curtin deftly
nurtured a relationship with the Canberra press gallery to win their cooperation in prosecuting the war effort
Curtin and his sometimes ‘intimidating’ press secretary, Don Rodgers, were alive to the changing media landscape. Stanley Bruce made the first primitive forays into campaigning over the airwaves in the 1920s, while Joseph Lyons’s broadcasts projected a reassuring persona during the economic uncertainties of the following decade. Yet Coatney suggests Curtin was the first prime minister to truly command that technology. By 1942, his radio addresses were being described as ‘armchair’ or ‘fireside’ chats in a clear analogy to Franklin Roosevelt’s broadcasts in the United States. The same year, he became the first Australian leader to have a speech directly transmitted into the United States. Curtin’s international media activities are indeed another thread of Coatney’s account, although evidence of his effectiveness in that sphere is difficult to sustain.
While there was undoubtedly a cross-fertilisation of communication
techniques among the Allied leaders, Coatney argues the image-making of Curtin was distinctive. In newsreels he was presented as a plain ‘man of the people’ as opposed to the ‘aristocratic’ bearing of Roosevelt and the ‘flamboyant’ Churchill. His radio addresses were pitched at a ninth-grade reading level and spoken slowly. Yet Curtin did not condescend to his domestic audience. Preparing his December 1941 address to the nation following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, in which he made ‘Australia’s first independent declaration of war’, Curtin made a last-minute amendment to his script by borrowing a verse from the English radical poet Algernon Charles Swinburne: ‘Come forth, be born and live, Thou that hast help to give … Hasten thine hour and halt not, till thy work be done.’
Though informative and worthy, the book is not without fault. On occasions the prose is awkward and the narrative uneven. These are possibly the product of injudicious editing down from a larger thesis. Coatney’s slightly implausible assertion that ‘Curtin’s mass communication strategies provide lessons for contemporary democratic leaders’ is also unfulfilled. The discretion showed by journalists in downplaying Curtin’s failing health in 1944–45 – mirroring the circumspection of the American press on Roosevelt’s condition – emphasises how relatively quaint was their media age compared to today’s communication blitzkriegs. Curtin’s achievement in mastering that era is nonetheless undiminished. g
Paul Strangio is an Associate Professor of Politics at Monash University. His most recent publication is Settling the Office: The Australian prime ministership from Federation to reconstruction (2016). ❖
FREEING
PETER: HOW AN ORDINARY FAMILY FOUGHT AN EXTRAORDINARY BATTLE by Juris Greste et al. Viking $35 pb, 320 pp, 9780670079315
It seems appropriate in an account of justice thwarted that the name of journalist Peter Greste’s father is Juris. In 2013, Greste, an Al Jazeera journalist, was accused with colleagues Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed of conspiring with terrorists and endangering Egyptian security. A show trial followed, and Greste was sentenced to seven years in prison. He says of Juris, his mother Lois, and brothers Michael and Andrew: ‘We fought, struggled, argued and ... loved our way through the ordeal … Normal family life in other words.’
However, an extraordinary degree of resilience and strength is revealed in the intelligent voices of the family members, edited by Malcolm Knox. During the 400 days of Peter’s imprisonment, each family member worked unceasingly to lobby the Australian government, navigate the Egyptian legal system, and rally the world to pay attention. The memoir conveys the strain; the varying times when for all of them fear, rage, and despair would take over.
Juris, a Latvian refugee whose father was forcibly conscripted into the German army during World War II and died in a prisoner-of-war camp, appears as a figure of profound influence in the memoir, imbuing his sons with stoicism, a sense of adventure, and a belief in justice. These traits are evident in Peter’s strength, self-discipline, and reluctance to be labelled heroic. Prison life (boring, not brutal), the importance of food and exercise for Peter’s sanity, and the tension between him and Fahmy, are described with economy and insight. What stands out most is the incomprehension of an honourable man treated dishonourably. The alternating voices make for a sometimes repetitive style, but Freeing Peter powerfully conveys how differently individuals react to extreme circumstance, and how a strong family held together.
Kate Ryan ❖
Every encounter
Sujatha Fernandes
KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS
by Teju Cole
Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 385 pp, 9780571331390
In the opening piece of his book of collected essays, the novelist and photography critic Teju Cole feels briefly possessed by the spirit of James Baldwin who, like him, travelled outside the United States as a black writer. In every encounter, from rural Switzerland to Palestine, Rome, Rio, and Moscow, we are privy to Cole’s vantage as an embodied black subject: his seeking out of African vendors in the Lapa district of Rio, the looks he receives in Zurich, the sceptical anti-colonial instinct he brings to the museums in Rome’s Capitoline Hill.
Unlike Baldwin, Cole is not descended from slaves. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he returned with his Nigerian parents to Lagos at five months of age. He studied at college in Kalamazoo and later made his base in New York City. The essays in the book grapple with the complex notions of home for subjects like Cole who traverse cosmopolitan circuits. Like many of us who have made lives in New York City, he calls the city home even when not living there. Throughout his travels, Cole considers and reconsiders what counts as home, describing it as both a location and a state of being.
The essays in Known and Strange Things are a meditation on the locations and people one encounters through travel, but Cole also recognises the ways in which our experiences of place are shaped by the media of music, art, literature, and, most profoundly for
him, photography. The fictional nature of these media makes them no less able to conjure deep desires and attachments to place that may be more powerful than the direct experience of the place itself.
Enter Instagram. Section Two of the book, ‘Seeing Things’, grapples with the rise of social photography occasioned by the massive production of camera-phone images, the obsessive recording of every banality, and the manipulation of these photographs with filters on photo-sharing services like Instagram which use the same predictable algorithms, dank washes, and high contrasts. Nearly one trillion photos are taken every year of the same tired subjects like pretty girlfriends, meals, and sunsets. Cole turns a sardonic eye to the meaning of this trend, updating Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction to examine ‘art in the age of metastasized mechanical reproduction’. While acknowledging the complicated effects of this production, Cole laments the ‘constant exposure to illusion’ that lessens our sense of wonder at the world.
Even prize-winning photography and celebrated photojournalism have become inadequate to the task of addressing our present time and raising new questions. Cole says that the typical visuals of shocking and violent photos or viral videos may provide a jolt of outrage. Ultimately, the more they shock us, the more they enter our vocabulary of generic images that leave us in a state of what Susan Sontag calls ‘helpless voyeurism’: we are given very little sense of local context, and no indication of what to think or do in response.
In Known and Strange Things, Cole considers art’s potential to transcend the fakery and desensitisation generated by social media and photojournalism. Several of the essays explore the work of artists who seek alternative approaches, or who use social photography in subversive ways. In an essay entitled ‘Object Lesson’, Cole discusses a photo series by artist Glenna Gordon that looks at the things left behind by the Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram. One photograph of a blue blouse with the name ‘Hauwa Mutah’ written on the collar brings us into close contact with
the lives of these girls in a context where the human victims are missing. Another project called Dronestagram, created by the computer artist James Bridle, presents undramatic and clinical Google satellite images of places where US drone strikes have occurred. These images, shared by the artist on Tumblr and Instagram, are of places where people died and, as Cole says, they ‘embed the grim promise that it’s not over’.
In the third, forthright section of the book, Cole deals a forceful blow at humanitarianism as a growth industry, name-checking economist Jeffrey Sachs, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Oprah Winfrey, and TED. As a novelist, Cole says he is sensitive to the power of narrative in projecting ‘white fantasies of conquest and heroism’. In contrast to a tendency to blame awful warlords for problems of governance in the global south, or the need for white saviours to make issues palatable to Western audiences, Cole is concerned with the drive for oil and profits that sits at the heart of American foreign policy. Humanitarian disaster is a product of larger disasters like militarisation, agricultural policy, resource extraction, and US backing of corrupt and authoritarian regimes when it suits their interests.
Cole’s travels in this last section are thus an attempt to engage more fully with the local, with place, with history, in order to probe these larger disasters in the making. From his visit to the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Alabama, site of a brutal police attack on unarmed marchers during the civil rights era, to his witnessing the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and his observations of the brutality of border patrol at the US–Mexico border, Cole asks who is sanctioning these conflicts, who is being targeted, and why. For Cole, these are the new questions that art must somehow speak to if it is to remain relevant in an age of metastasised mechanical reproduction. g
Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Sydney. She is the author of several books and articles on Caribbean cultural politics, hip hop culture, and global social movements. ❖
Mental excavations
The watcher on the Palisade balcony
Brian Matthews
CITY DREAMERS:
THE URBAN IMAGINATION IN AUSTRALIA by Graeme Davison
NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 314 pp, 9781742234694
In The Oxford Companion to Australian History, of which he was a coeditor with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre, Graeme Davison begins his essay on Geoffrey Blainey by saluting him as ‘the most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and – in the 1980s and 1990s – most controversial of Australia’s living historians’. In volume one of the Encyclopaedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Geoffrey Bolton notes that Blainey produced Australian history ‘in which explanation was organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society …)’.
This is an intriguing, if admittedly artificially contrived, juxtaposition: Davison himself has been ‘prolific, wide-ranging and inventive’ and, in City Dreamers, it is fair to say that ‘the single factor’ is a dominant –though never constraining – feature of the book’s structure. ‘Factor’ is too dead a term, however, to characterise Davison’s exploitation of signature events and people to flesh out each stage of his anatomy of cities, city lives, and their dreaming. Far from conducting a sort of on-the-page PowerPoint event – that deadliest of digital age procedures in the wrong hands – his singularities cryptically signal creativity (‘Artists’, ‘Poets’), whimsy (‘Slummers’),
satire (‘Snobs’), confrontations (‘AntiSuburbans’), existential gloom (‘Pessimists’), social investigators (‘Scientists’), existential restlessness (‘Exodists’), and so on. This is a highly organised discussion which wears its careful construction lightly while keeping faith with it City Dreamers begins like a sophisticated travel book but quickly reveals its true focus as well as its author’s willingness – uncharacteristic of many first-person-avoiding social science academics – to reveal the face and the personality behind the ratiocinative gaze: ‘For many years I stayed at the same little waterfront hotel, the Palisade … It
wasn’t just habit or the panoramic view that brought me back year after year … The view I sought was not geographical but historical.’ From what became on many visits his familiar vantage point on the balcony of room fourteen of the Palisade, Davison launches his own attempt to ‘excavate the foundations of [a] long-lived prejudice’, namely that the
Australian city … was neither authentically Australian nor fully European. For more than a century this image of the Australian city as a terra nullius of the human spirit – without songs, architecture, history – lay like an incubus
A boy and his dog jump across ‘Elwood Canal’, one of more than 150 photographs collected in A Snapshot of Melbourne (The Worldwide Publishing Empire, $34.95 hb, 148 pp, 9780994569202). The photographer, Ian Kenins, has ‘long observed the people of Melbourne going about their daily rituals’
on the national psyche, a drag on the efforts of planners, architects, writers and historians to forge an authentic Australian urbanism.
His process of ‘excavation’ has many stages and different depths. It is a characteristic of archaeological digs that they turn up not only what is sought and expected, but also new and surprising relics and evidence. The same is true of what Davison calls the ‘archaeology of knowledge’, ‘mental excavation’. It reveals, for example, the enigmatic Liverpudlian Stanley Jevons, who walked tirelessly around Sydney to gather material for his social survey and whose practical and intellectual research led him ‘to contemplate a new vocation – social science’. As Davison puts it, ‘“social science” was in vogue’ in the late 1850s, but Jevons, while fascinated with ‘Social Statistics or the Science of Towns’, was equally captivated by a more intimate view afforded on his long, solitary walks, which he records in his ‘Sydney by Night’ (manuscript published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1929). As Davison suggests, this affords
a poignant glimpse of the unsociable sociologist peering from the darkness of the backstreets into the bright interior of the houses … There is a wistful note in his description of the ‘cheerful’ interiors … of families seated convivially at tables … the ‘murmur of their goodhumoured conversation’ penetrating the walls to the eavesdropper in the street.
The poignancy, the darkness, the wistfulness irresistibly recall another Sydney wanderer, the ‘unsociable’ poet Christopher Brennan, looking ‘with regret / on the darkening homes of men and the window-gleam …’
The watcher on the Palisade balcony brings this sort of personal and referential touch to all his categories. His ‘slummers’ take their inspiration from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor (1851) and their colonial avatars are Marcus Clarke and John Stanley James, pseudonymously ‘the Vagabond’. Davison enjoys but dismisses Clarke’s ‘lurid imagery’, but the Vagabond’s ‘A Night in The Model
Lodging-House’ (1876) prefigures Orwell on the same streets some sixty years later. ‘As I became a vagabond in appearance, I began to feel a vagabond in my nature,’ James muses, while Orwell, briefly failing to recognise his tramp-self mirrored in a shop window, finds ‘My “new” clothes had put me instantly into a new world.’
The triumph of City Dreamers is not only in the wealth, the sheer ordered abundance of information, reflection, speculation, and persuasive conclusions about Australian cities and their successes and discontents. It is also the deft portraiture by means of which Davison
A highly organised
discussion which wears its careful construction lightly while keeping faith with it
brings to life the characters in his urban, suburban, and to some extent Spectorskyan exurban drama. His dreamers –Jevons, John Claudius Loudon, Charles Bean, James Barrett, and Hugh Stretton among others – are the subjects of brilliantly incisive biographical sketches through which their city dreaming is threaded and contextualised. Likewise, Davison’s free-wheeling concepts –automobilism, moderns, drifters, sprawl (both the physical phenomenon and the Les Murray ‘quality’: ‘Sprawl is the quality / of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce / into a farm utility truck’), and so on – are all treated both seriously and with great good humour. Davison has a naturally engaging, effortless prose style unafraid of the vernacular (‘other writers were busy giving the nouveau riches a leg up’), and an ironic humour which occasionally shakes free of the leash (‘even loyal Melburnians had difficulty in sustaining [Melbourne’s claim to having a Mediterranean climate] on a drizzling July day with a westerly blowing down Collins street. [This illusion] survived more because its supporters sought to escape the frostiness of the city’s moral atmosphere than to adapt to its physical climate.’)
Each chapter is preceded by an italicised paragraph which sets out, like a précis, a context for, and the main details
of, what is going to be dealt with in the text that follows. This looks to me like a failure to trust the reader: Davison’s lucid exposition certainly doesn’t need this social science-style arrangement any more than it needs the unsubtle signals of changing typography.
While Davison more or less concedes that City Dreamers is a tale of two cities, the emphasis on Melbourne and Sydney is understandable and is somewhat diminished not only by his attention to Canberra and the idea of national capitals, but especially by the continuing references to London and European models. Still, perhaps Don Dunstan’s Monarto vision and other city-dreaming aspects of the Dunstan decade (‘South Australia will set the pace’) might have merited a look. Nevertheless, of all the ‘dreamers’ Davison so expertly and luminously evokes, it is another South Australian, Hugh Stretton, who stands out and is treated, I think, with special affection and profound admiration, sentiments which those of us who knew Hugh would heartily endorse.
Davison’s splendid intellectual, visual, archaeological, and imaginative journey that began on the balcony of the Palisade Hotel ends in Federation Square where ‘there is something about the spirit of the place’ that speaks to him and where, like Christopher Brennan’s Wanderer, he feels the possibility of being at last ‘at home’. g
Brian Matthews’s books include Manning Clark: A life (2008), which won the National Biography Award in 2010.
This year’s “good read”
http://www.lady-ruth-bromfield.com
Freedom to roam
Anna MacDonald
FLÂNEUSE:
WOMEN
WALK THE CITY IN PARIS, NEW YORK, TOKYO, VENICE AND LONDON
by Lauren Elkin Chatto & Windus
$35 hb, 317 pp, 9780701189020
‘As we step out of the house,’writes Virginia Woolf, in her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’, ‘we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.’ Into the anonymous crowd Woolf would have us carry that androgynous mind she champions in A Room of One’s Own (1929), a mind that is ‘resonant and porous’, one that is free and ‘wide open’ much like the mind of the walker who, away from the house, becomes ‘a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye’.
For Lauren Elkin, too, walking the city is entwined with looking, subjectivity, and, ultimately, ‘the utter, total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other’. As the book’s title suggests, Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London presents the figure of the woman walker and seeks to ‘build [for her] a genealogy, or a sisterhood’. Elkin refutes those who have argued that the urban walker, or flâneur, is inherently male:
To suggest that there couldn’t be a female version of the flâneur is to limit
the ways women have interacted with the city to the ways men have interacted with the city. We can talk about social mores and restrictions but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there; we must try to understand what walking in the city meant to them. Perhaps the answer is not to attempt to make women fit a masculine concept, but to redefine the concept itself.
Elkin sets out to do just that: to articulate a definition of the flâneuse that is independent of her male counterpart. Flâneuse takes the form of a series of portraits of women who walk – Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Sophie Calle, Mavis Gallant, Agnès Varda, Martha Gellhorn, and Elkin herself. These portraits are composed of biographical material, urban history, and close readings of the writing, artwork, and films of Elkin’s chosen flâneuses interspersed with her own experiences of reading these women and the cities they have walked. Via her engagement with their lives and works, Elkin establishes a definition of the flâneuse that incorporates the various forms of movement, trespass, and freedoms to be found by a woman at street level. For Elkin, the flâneuse ‘voyages out and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women’. It is with this emphasis upon home and belonging that we get to the heart of Elkin’s conception of the flâneuse, because each of these women is writing out of a species of exile. Rhys suffers ‘reverse exile’ and is cast adrift in her ‘foreignness’; Sand ‘refused to be placed’; Calle, lost, begins ‘following people to have something to do’; Gallant, a Canadian in Paris, is ‘a foreigner’; Varda perceives Paris through the eyes of a ‘provincial’, and the protagonist of her film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) ‘is out of place from the moment the film begins’; Gellhorn is ‘permanently home-building, permanently homeless’; Elkin, herself an American living in Paris, views London ‘with my outsider’s eyes’ and takes up residence (‘marooned’) in Tokyo’s ‘gaijin (foreigner) ghetto’; even Woolf, whom we have come to consider so at home in Bloomsbury, is at first ‘home-
sick’ for Kensington. And the remedy for homesickness, for being foreign, lost, out of place? Walking, which, helps to orient you, to come to know the city –any city – from the inside.
This is the great strength of Elkin’s book and her conception of a flâneuse who, by walking out her front door, by claiming her right to roam freely, effectively puts herself out of place, shedding, in Woolf’s words, ‘the self our friends know us by.’ The flâneur, according to Charles Baudelaire in his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1863), ‘set[s] up house’ in the crowd. Elkin’s flâneuse rather abandons her house for the crowd: ‘as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered’. Out of her (private) place, the flâneuse makes the transition from ‘being “the object of the look” to “the subject who looks”’.
Elkin focuses on the empowering potential of the city streets, and ‘the liberating possibilities of a good walk’. There are glimpses of the gendered violence often associated with the street: Varda’s Cléo asks a female taxi driver, ‘you aren’t afraid at night?’; Woolf’s Rose Pargiter encounters a leering man (‘The enemy!’) on her first independent ‘prowl’; and the book’s epilogue examines Ruth Orkin’s 1951 photograph of Ninalee Craig, surrounded by wolfish men, on a street in Florence. However, these are brief diversions from the dominant narrative of liberation and independence. Ultimately, Cléo’s taxi driver is ‘not afraid of much’, Rose makes a game of her encounter, and Craig insists that Orkin’s photograph is ‘a symbol of a woman having an absolutely wonderful time!’ In this context the omission of, for instance, Rob Bliss’s 2014 video 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman, is surprising. But this is not to detract from the importance of Elkin’s study, or the pleasure to be gained from reading it. It is to be hoped that the genealogy of walking women Elkin has begun to build in this volume will grow and that flâneuses will continue to abandon the house for the anonymity of the restless street. g
Anna MacDonald is a Research Associate at Monash University and a Melbourne bookseller. ❖
A new space
Gabriel García Ochoa
THE MAN WHO INVENTED FICTION: HOW CERVANTES USHERED IN THE MODERN
WORLD
by William Egginton Bloomsbury
$49.99 hb, 262 pp, 9781408843840
The four-hundredth anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes’s death serves as a good reminder of the influence and importance of his oeuvre, and perhaps too of our strange obsession with the decimal system. After all, Cervantes’s works will be as relevant next year as they were last, minus the fanfare. On the eve of this quatercentennary, William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction made a timely appearance. Egginton is the author of several wellknown and praised academic books, but even for a scholar of his calibre, the bold proposition in the title of his new book makes one approach it with some scepticism.
This is not a biography of Cervantes (it does not claim to be one), but rather a long essay on Egginton’s definition of modern fiction, interwoven, à la Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004) and The Swerve (2011), with the narrative of Cervantes’s life, which functions as its organising structure. Egginton spends most of the book explaining what, precisely, he means by fiction, and how Cervantes created this new ‘space’ of the mind for the modern world. In essence, he argues that fiction is what Cervantes wrote, and proceeds to explain to us why this is so.
Stepping into the realm of Cervantes’s works, in particular Don Quixote, has a dizzying effect for any reader. It is a funhouse for the mind. The heroes in Cervantes’s texts are neither paladins nor magicians; they are readers who like to think of themselves as paladins and magicians, much like us. By placing the reader in the text, Cervantes created a new space that showed us not only how different people interpret different situations, but also how we misinterpret
them. What to Sancho Panza seems to be a cluster of windmills is a throng of giants to Don Quixote, and it may be something different to someone else. In this sense, the fiction of Cervantes is not a mirror of the world, it is a picture of our subjectivities, both individual and collective. It is not so much an extension of our reality as an extension of our human condition: half factual, half imagined, partially deluded, and open to interpretation. In this new space of rumination, all manner of ideas are open to examination, morality is explored without moralising, and both truth and reality become subjective, which is, indeed, a modern way of looking at the world.
Egginton argues that Cervantes was partly able to create this new subjective space because he wrote across genres. Few people know that Cervantes wrote for the theatre. Many of the scenarios in his novels and short stories were often recycled from stage to page. According to Egginton, this allowed him to bring into his fiction a narrative style previously associated only with drama, which consisted in examining a particular situation from the points of view of different characters. Such was the case, for example with the plot of Cervantes’s play The Business of Algiers, later used in the short story ‘The Captive’s Tale’, which was eventually inserted into the first part of Don Quixote. The plurality of perspectives in Cervantes’s works was exacerbated by his need to process trauma through writing. Egginton argues that part of the success of Don Quixote, and many of Cervantes’s other works, lies in the fact that Cervantes’s adventurous life –which included the loss of the use of his left hand during the Battle of Lepanto, capture by corsairs at the command of the feared Greek pirate Dalí Mamí, and being sold as a slave to Hasan Pasha, Impaler of Christians – was, to an extent, turned into fiction. Egginton suggests that Cervantes may have processed the trauma of these experiences by writing and rewriting about them in fictionalised form, often analysing the same scenario from the points of view of different characters, exploring how things could have been for him. This reinforced the perspectivism in
his prose that was brought across from the theatre; moreover, it helped develop what Egginton calls ‘literary empathy’, which is what happens when we use literature to understand the world from someone else’s point of view, a skill referred to nowadays in academic circles as ‘cultural literacy’.
The Man Who Invented Fiction skirts the edges of novelised biography and critical essay. Egginton’s prose is engaging, his ideas captivating, and he is careful to keep his clear love for Cervantes in check. After all, hidalgolatry, just like bardolatry for Shakespeare, can quickly turn into a serious condition affecting literary scholars most particularly, but Egginton draws a clear line between his theorisations and the facts of Cervantes’ life in relation to his oeuvre. The proposition in his title, however, while furiously argued throughout the book, ends up becoming a self-fulfilled prophecy: if you define ‘fiction’ as what Cervantes wrote, and then claim that Cervantes invented fiction, there is little room to err.
Throughout the first and second parts of Don Quixote, the poor Don’s delusions are scoffed at by every character in the novel, who, like us, know that the dear hidalgo is infatuated with stories that are not real. But we tend to forget that neither are those scoffing characters, who are also the product of Cervantes’s imagination. In that case, are we readers so different from Don Quixote, if we continue to be in love with a knight of mournful countenance who was born over four hundred years ago, but never existed? g
Gabriel García Ochoa teaches Spanish, Translation, and Comparative Literature at Monash University. ❖
DISCOVER NEW TITLES
Lilly & Ian
Mouse & Dragon
Ian T. Walker
www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore
978-1-4828-3220-4 Hardback
978-1-4828-3219-8 Paperback
978-1-4828-3221-1 E-book
At 60 after returning from 3 months travel in India. Without warning an angel drops from the sky. Mesmerized, the wheel turns and after 300 translated letters the author travels to the great world of China. Here he nds that the grandmother’s lore still runs the country, that the traditions are grinding the dust from the hearts of men, that slaves are born to follow the money god, a place where love is mighty yet wields a sword of fear.
Nothing Lasts Forever
Althea Foster
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-4665-2 Hardback
978-1-5144-4664-5 Paperback
978-1-5144-4663-8 E-book
Aliens from the Fifth Space-Time
Kamille Zaiter
www.xlibris.com.au
The Blackbirding Era of Australia unfolds within the pages of this brilliantly orchestrated tale that follows Mel Milo, the son of a Samoan King, whose life of privilege takes a tragic turn when he is taken aboard a slave ship bound for Australia. In the strange, unfamiliar land, the young boy struggles to preserve his identity, survive unimaginable turmoil and, ultimately, reclaim the freedom that was stripped away from him.
978-1-5144-4182-4 Hardback
978-1-5144-4181-7 Paperback
978-1-5144-4180-0 E-book
Aliens from the Fifth Space-Time follows a group of aliens who are desperate to fix the components in their battery system otherwise they will disintegrate and not be able to return to the Fifth Space-Time Dimension, from which they came.
Kimberly Gold
Stella Perkins
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-4650-8 Hardback
978-1-5144-4649-2 Paperback
978-1-5144-4651-5 E-book
Kimberly Gold follows the trail of a family as they survive life in early Sydney. It is the story of Stella Perkins’ grandfather, whom she never met, a man who changed his name as he tried to change his destiny.
Vivid wordsmith
Jan
McGuinness
BOB ELLIS: IN HIS OWN WORDS
by Bob Ellis, compiled by Anne Brooksbank Black Inc.
$34.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781863958912
In his introduction to Bob Ellis: In his own words, Bob’s son Jack says of his father that ‘writing was his reason for being ... and through his writing he saw himself in conversation with the world’. That conversation stopped on 3 April 2016 with Ellis’s death from neuroendocrine cancer. He was seventythree. For devotees or those merely curious about his life and times, the conversation continues in the pages of this book compiled by his wife and companion of fifty years, Anne Brooksbank.
The result is a loose autobiography ranging from childhood to final musings about endings and time passing encompassing Ellis’s thoughts on politics, war, friendships, and the wider world selected from blog posts, essays, journalism, diaries, speeches, and scripts (some unpublished).
In a cover line, Guy Rundle claims that ‘Bob Ellis is not merely the finest prose writer Australia has produced, he is probably the finest three or four of them.’ This reads like something Ellis might have written in one of his more florid moments, but the vintage potpourri is well chosen and goes a long way to vindicating Rundle’s claim. Ellis emerges as a superb and vivid wordsmith whose love of language is palpable. He writes admiringly of Barry Humphries’ ability to skewer the moment with an exact and nuanced choice of words. It is a skill he shares laced with his own brand of wit, insight, and, yes, morality, because Ellis cares deeply about the things that matter.
However, Ellis’s reputation as a shambolic, malicious, boastful, womanising, drunken bully overshadows his prodigious contribution to our culture.
We have him to thank for scripting breakthrough iconic Australian films including Newsfront, Fatty Finn, Man of Flowers, My First Wife, Goodbye Paradise, and the autobiographical The Nostradamus Kid. It was he who coined the term ‘true believers’, a fitting description for Labor Party tragics like himself and the title of a television mini-series he cowrote about the Party’s history.
It is an overshadowing to which Ellis actively contributed. Retentive baby boomers will recall public fallings-out –dating back to the 1970s, most notably with David Williamson and conducted as the riveting airing of much dirty linen in the pages of Nation Review.
Unlikely as it seems now, Bronwyn Bishop was once regarded as a future prime minister. When she moved into Ellis’s electorate of McKellar, and in the absence of a Labor Party candidate at the 1993 federal election, Ellis ran against her to everyone’s vast amusement but Bishop’s.
1998 was enlivened by the pulping of Ellis’s political memoirs Goodbye Jerusalem following a defamation case mounted by Tony Abbott, Peter Costello, and their wives. It cost Ellis’s publisher Random House $277,500 and Ellis a sideswipe from the Federal Court’s Justice Miles, who observed that the person whose reputation had suffered most was the author’s.
This very public humiliation was eclipsed a year later when married scriptwriter Alexandra Long confirmed Ellis as the father of her baby. A media frenzy ensued as Ellis refused to do a DNA test and various accounts unfurled, among them Ellis’s revelation to radio 2BL breakfast listeners of his oral sex defence. It was written for him by his wife. After tests, Ellis conceded fatherhood.
Henceforth, Ellis remained outspoken but less ubiquitous. The damage was done. In a more forgiving and less constrained society there had been a place for such ratbaggery. During an era now lamentably past, there was scope for satire in experimental theatre, our burgeoning film industry, ABC television, and publications like Nation Review and the National Times. It is in this context that Ellis should be assessed. As
revealed in this posthumous book, he is also in every way a product of his background.
The child of an ardent Seventh Day Adventist mother and ALP-loving father, Ellis was raised on the New South Wales north coast. Like many children enthused by their parent’s passions, he found the ALP and the entire political scene bewitching. In adulthood he became Labor’s highly partisan, selfappointed historian, though never a member; the church not so much. It was replaced at Sydney University by what Jack Ellis describes as his father’s true religion – love of theatre, films, and their transformation of ideas into magic. But the Adventist’s sense of doom and theatrical hyperbole informed his adult conspiracy theories, dire predictions of political calamity, and loopier moments. In a poetic tribute to Ellis, Les Murray has Ellis fleeing Sydney to escape nuclear annihilation during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Similarly, his foolhardy fight against Bronwyn Bishop was less Don Quixotesque and more as the saviour of McKellar and the nation, at least to his own mind.
Ellis never lost his sense of smalltown country kindness and community lovingly evoked in his musings on childhood, nor the mass of insecurities they exposed him to on reaching the sophisticated cosmos. He found a compromise in the cocky-chewed house he shared with his wife and three children at Palm Beach indulging his love of the local fauna. Ellis’s descriptions of his habitat bring the place to life, as do his travels to the Wider World.
Given the contents of this book, Ellis’s legacy should be that of a distinctive and entertaining diarist–commentator on culture and politics. It is recommended on that basis, together with Ellis’s many collected writings, notably his profile of Joh Bjelke Petersen in So It Goes (1999), an immersive account of being beguiled by the old showman and a demonstration of how it takes one to fall for one. g
Jan McGuinness is a Melbourne journalist and author. Her profile, ‘Being Bob Ellis’, appears in the Spring issue of Meanjin
RESOLUTION
by A.N. Wilson
Atlantic Books
$29.99 pb, 278 pp, 9781782398288
Resolution is the loosely fictionalised story of Captain Cook’s second voyage, begun in 1772, in search of the mythological Great Southern Continent. Told through the eyes of seventeen-year-old German linguist, artist, and writer George Forster, son of the expedition’s naturalist, Reinhold Forster, it is replete with rolling swells, treacherous reefs, perilous storms, and sightings of unknown lands, not to mention scurvy, sauerkraut, cannibals, and albatross pie. As a Boys’ Own adventure, it is irresistible. It is also the story of George’s Prussian marriage, twelve years earlier, to Therese Heyne, a German woman who would go on to write the first novel with an Australian setting – based on George’s own best-selling account of his voyage. By now, however, the marriage is over. As marriage partners, Wilson tells us, George and Therese were ‘a pair of misplaced library books’: he belonged in Travel, she in Fiction. Interweaving these stories is no small feat, as the trajectory of George’s stranger-than-fiction life takes him from the Russian Volga to the Antarctic Circle to Prussian Mainz to revolutionary Paris. A.N. Wilson’s narrative style veers between fiction and biography, which can be disconcerting, and his prose is clumsy at times – odd for such an experienced writer. But George is an endearingly humble character, and if the cascade of lands and decades and philosophies and civilisations is bewildering at times, it is clear that it was no less so for George himself. His life encompassed both a journey to the edge of the known world and the end, at the hands of revolutionaries, of civilisation as he had known it. As for Cook, he is never less than the hero George needs him to be: brave, strong, considerate of his men, and unfailingly courteous to the ‘primitive’ peoples whose lands he unhesitatingly claims for Britain ‘for ever’.
Ann-Marie Priest
Philosophical polymath
Essays from the reliably contentious Peter Singer
Ben Brooker
ETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD: 86 BRIEF ESSAYS ON THINGS THAT MATTER
by Peter Singer
Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 336pp, 9781925355857
In its original meaning, the word ‘philosopher’ simply meant ‘lover of wisdom’. At a time when theories of knowledge were still in their infancy, it was applied to thinkers – often, by the standards of the day, polymaths – who were able to turn the light of their intellects onto a vast range of fields: physics, chemistry, political science, ethics. A philosopher thus defined could not exist today, such is the dramatic specialisation of knowledge that has taken place since Socrates could credibly hold forth on topics as varied as democracy, theatre, astronomy, love, and epistemology.
Invited to nominate a contemporary equivalent of such a figure, many would consider Peter Singer. Since the publication in 1975 of the foundational Animal Liberation, Singer has established himself as both a leading exponent of utilitarian ethics and a reliably contentious public intellectual. In the introduction to his latest book, Ethics in the Real World, Singer describes the shifting ground of philosophy in the academy, its movement, under pressure from the student-led radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from a discipline concerned primarily with theory and semantics to one that could also encompass practical ethical questions. These students, of which Singer was one (at Melbourne University and then
Oxford), demanded that their courses reflect the important issues of the day, prompting their lecturers to: ‘[recall] the example of Socrates questioning his fellow Athenians about the nature of justice, and what it takes to live justly, [summoning] up the courage to ask similar questions of their students, their fellow philosophers, and the wider public.’
In a career spanning five decades and the publication of twenty-three books, many of them bestsellers, Singer has remained committed to the ideal of, in his words, ‘address[ing] issues that matter to people outside departments of philosophy’.
The effect of the eighty-six short essays in Ethics in the Real World – some previously published as newspaper articles, though most reproduced from Singer’s monthly column for the Project Syndicate news service, which he has been writing since 2005 – is to consolidate familiar lines of argument rather than to break new ground or signal any major shifts in Singer’s thinking. Divided into eleven themed chapters, Singer has trod much of this philosophical terrain before: animal suffering and rights, euthanasia and abortion, and, continuing the theme of his last two singlyauthored books, The Life You Can Save (2009) and The Most Good You Can Do (2015), the movement known as effec-
Peter Singer (Text Publishing)
tive altruism, which aims to mitigate world poverty through evidence-based charitable donations.
The topics that feel novel, such as artificial intelligence (‘Rights for Robots?’ co-authored with Agata Sagan) and ethics in sport (‘Is Doping Wrong?’, ‘Is It OK to Cheat at Football?’) are vividly illuminated by Singer’s trenchancy and clarity of expression. We have come to expect a certain amount of moral contrarianism from Singer, but these two last essays demonstrate that he is equally adept at reasserting a commonly held view (that cheating at football is morally indefensible) as exposing the unexpectedly weak cases for others (that performance-enhancing drugs should not be allowed in cycling or other professional sports). As Singer makes clear at the book’s outset, many of these essays, written for the widest possible audience, do not flow from utilitarian positions.
Those who choose to emphasise Singer’s more controversial assessments will find fresh grist in Ethics in the Real World. In the chapter titled ‘Beyond the Ethic of the Sanctity of Life’, Singer’s challenging views on the permissibility of killing newborn babies, first advanced to international outcry in the widely translated Practical Ethics (1979), are restated with few concessions to his critics. Singer’s views on infanticide have always made for uncomfortable reading, and they do so again here in three essays that address the issue of abortion in the developing world, and whether the lives of premature babies and those with ‘hopeless’ prognoses should be prolonged at all costs. ‘We have no obligation,’ Singer writes in ‘The Real Abortion Tragedy’, ‘to allow every being with the potential to become a rational being to realise that potential’.
Such provocations are offset by musings on the Melbourne City of Port Phillips’ attempts to make social wellbeing a policy focus, and on Singer’s taking up surfing in his fifties (‘too old ever to become good at it, but young enough for surfing to give me a decade of fun and a sense of accomplishment’). In the final essay, originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011, Singer looks back on his mushroom-
clouded childhood and the awakening of his political consciousness by the folly of the Vietnam War. As for the moral progress we have made in the intervening years, Singer gives a mixed assessment. He writes: ‘So we are passing on to the next generation a world in which the risk of nuclear annihilation has receded, sexism, racism and even speciesism are on the retreat, important areas of wilderness are protected, more children than ever go to school, and extreme poverty and infant mortality are falling.’ But the threat of dangerous anthropogenic climate change looms larger than ever. Our failure to decarbonise the economy in response to an impending crisis we have been aware of since at least 1992, Singer laments, will give future generations reason to curse us.
‘There is a view in some philosophical circles,’ Singer notes in the book’s introduction, ‘that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.’ Lucidly conceived and written, the brief essays in Ethics in the Real World attest to Singer’s enduring facility for wise, clear-headed enquiry into some of the most pressing issues we face. It is not a manifesto for utilitarianism, but a convincing case for philosophy’s continued engagement with ethical questions that matter in the real world. g
THE WINDY SEASON by Sam Carmody Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781760111564
Boat, pub, boat, pub, boat, pub: in the fictitious Western Australian fishing town of Stark, residents divide their days between these two brutally masculine locales, and readers will be hard-pressed to decide which is bleaker. Is it the crayfish boat, with its ‘pong of bait’ and ‘hostile company of the breeze’, or the rural tavern, where ‘the trebly call of dog racing’ soundtracks the boozing of ‘men who looked scarcely alive’? And what’s worse, to be circled by sharks or surrounded by meth heads; to be tossed about by vicious waves or to have your face carved open by a pint glass? ‘Stark wasn’t the sort of place one stayed long’, we’re told, which begs the obvious retort: who the hell would stay there at all?
In his début novel, Sam Carmody sheathes this pointy question (why do people stay in hopeless places?) inside a more conventional mystery: a man has gone missing, and his younger brother, Paul, arrives in Stark to retrace his steps. At first, Paul is more of a daydreamer than a clue-hunter, and his introduction to the fisherman’s life is amusingly inept and spew-splattered. As he gets tougher, however, his probing of the town’s druggy underbelly begins to put him in danger.
Those expecting a slice of taut, rural noir – Winter’s Bone with yabbies, perhaps – may be disappointed. This is a slow burner, a novel unafraid to wallow in the daily grind, and it is powered by Carmody’s subtle portrayal of how lives fizzle out, suffocated by memories and regrets and what one character calls ‘rear-mirror syndrome’. Ultimately, the story is about Paul, and about that anti-climactic moment in a young person’s life when they crest adolescence, only to find that adulthood is just an endless cycle of boat, pub, boat, pub, boat, pub … Alex Cothren
Ben Brooker is an inaugural Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellow.
Crooked path
James Dunk
FINDING SANITY: JOHN CADE, LITHIUM AND THE TAMING OF BIPOLAR DISORDER
by Greg De Moore and Ann Westmore Allen
& Unwin
$32.99 pb, 335 pp, 9781760113704
Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.
Finding Sanity, the story of the discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar, is told with mild triumphalism, despite lithium’s sometimes crooked path. It takes the form of a biography of its discoverer, John Cade, an Australian doctor. The narrative of discovery becomes something still more profound: Cade, argue his biographers, revolutionised twentieth-century psychiatry by supposing a physiological basis for a mental illness and identifying an element that would treat it.
There is some irony here. The use of lithium is in some respects a swing back to much older understandings of body and mind which saw the two as inextricable. Treatments sought to rebalance this system – a system not well understood. Early sections of the book describe the galling conditions in the asylums where Cade and his father
worked. These were produced by a swing to psychological thinking from the late eighteenth century, driven by the idea that mental sufferers would respond better to gentle instruction, ordered environs, and occupational therapy than to any quantity of purgatives and emetics. This emphasis was sublimated by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Certain of his followers held that even severe psychotic symptoms could be traced back to psychological trauma, and treated by variations of the ‘talking cure’.
Australian psychiatrists were smitten with Freud; John Cade was not. Cases he treated while interned at Changi, a place made vivid in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), convinced Cade that many people with manic depressive or schizophrenic symptoms were ‘sick people in the medical sense’. He scribbled imprecations in the margins of Freud’s books. ‘Not true. Simply not true’ appeared next to a particularly egregious claim. When, as a rising psychiatric star, Cade was asked to give the prestigious Beattie Smith lectures at the University of Melbourne, he declared, against his wife’s advice, that Freud had ‘cast a blight upon the minds of men’ that would last another half century. The psychiatrists present looked at the ceiling, groaned, and smirked; one put it down to Cade’s Catholicism.
This is strong, thorough biographical writing, woven from multiple perspectives, humorous and fascinating. Following biographical convention, the authors map Cade from his mother and distant psychiatrist father through his youth, dwelling with him in Changi, and, after his return, highlight his discovery of lithium, and rise to professional prominence, before his death from cancer in 1980. Conventional inclusions – family holidays and personal idiosyncrasies – work to produce the image of a man. Some details are revealing: Cade enjoyed pig shooting and wrote his children bawdy limericks while touring the hospitals of Europe. Biography is pressed into the service of medical discovery, but hovering at the margins is the suspicion that the discovery was in fact a fluke. Cade’s
methodology was rudimentary. Early in his research career he spent a good deal of time injecting the urine of manic patients into guinea pigs, and then burying them. When he finally made the dramatic observation that the rodents were calmed by lithium, De Moore and Westmore find that they were probably suffering from lithium toxicity. They also note that Cade, who tried lithium himself before giving it to human patients, also experimented with calcium, magnesium, titanium, rubidium, beryllium, cobalt, nickel, zinc, tungsten, molybdenum, and selenium. Strontium made him particularly sick. Cade joked that he had eaten his way through half the periodic table. Only lithium worked. Was Cade a brilliant medical thinker or simply a determined, and brave, experimentalist? Jean Cade told his biographers that her husband was ‘not even a researcher’s bootlace’, and while they suggest that she may have been repeating a throwaway comment of his, they write elsewhere that well after his 1949 discovery Cade still ‘regarded himself as very much a novice’ in medical research.
If Cade was, indeed, an indifferent researcher, he still discovered lithium. While the authors leave space for readers to evaluate the costs of his experiments themselves (several patients, including Brand, died of lithium toxicity in trials), the book celebrates ‘the taming of bipolar disorder’. Its work on the human brain is still not fully understood, but it has elevated countless lives out of the depths described in Brand’s story and implied in the grim corridors and vexing straitjackets of the old asylums. The many sufferers who wrote touching letters to Cade in his retirement and to his family after his death recognise a salvific intervention. This book, then, is a nuanced celebration of intuitive experimentation and medical boldness. Timid research, John Cade would tell his students, does not lead to great discoveries. g
James Dunk is a historian and writer living in Sydney. His doctoral thesis was titled ‘The Politics of Madness in a Penal Colony: New South Wales, 1788–1856’.
by Sean Rabin Giramondo
$26.95 pb, 335 pp, 9781925336085
The cover of Sean Rabin’s first novel, Wood Green, depicts a foggy eucalypt forest at dawn (or dusk), and a ghostly figure in the glow of torchlight. With the added element of the story’s setting – a secluded town nestled in the shadows of Mount Wellington, Tasmania – one could be forgiven for assuming that Wood Green is ‘yet another bush gothic’, instead of a modern and humorous discourse on small town life and writing itself.
Michael Pollard, a thirty-something academic from Sydney, arrives in Wood Green to work as secretary to the ageing, reclusive author Lucian Clarke, the subject of his PhD thesis. Their affiliation is interspersed with frequent pot-smoking sessions, musical and culinary interludes, and ponderings on writerly life, but is often strained by the demands of the cantankerous Lucian, who gives Michael the task of sorting through a lifetime of notes and books, whilst concealing a hidden agenda.
This element of mystery is one of many carriers of Wood Green’s narrative that skips along energetically, due in no small part to the short chapters, but also to Rabin’s aptitude for naturalistic dialogue between the novel’s ensemble of characters. Of particular note are the amusing chapter-long monologues by cab drivers that act as effective vehicles – pardon the pun – for insights into modern Tasmanian culture. Despite some faults in the opening chapters, including uneven characterisations and an inclination to over-explain trivialities (for example, a flight attendant’s heavy makeup in the opening chapter), Wood Green is an engaging read, culminating in a satisfying conclusion. As one cab driver notes to Michael, while describing his own novel in progress: ‘it won’t be about escaped convicts or hunting Tasmanian Tigers’, a quote which could have featured in the blurb for Wood Green.
Dilan Gunawardana
ON THE BLUE TRAIN
by Kristel Thornell Allen & Unwin
$29.99 pb, 344 pp, 9781760293109
On the Blue Train is Kristel Thornell’s reimagining of Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance in 1926. Thornell might have let her imagination fly, given that both Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle involved themselves in the nationwide search for the missing woman, but instead she has stuck close to the established facts: Agatha was grieving over her beloved mother’s recent death when her husband Archibald asked for a divorce; there was a fracas; Agatha’s car was found abandoned; she vanished and was discovered ten days later, using the surname of Archibald’s lover, at a spa hotel in Harrogate.
Thornell conjures a chivalrous Australian admirer with a passable English accent, and deploys Christie’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of stereotypes to give authenticity to his tepid romance with Agatha. Christie readers will be reminded of Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), the novel that Christie was agonising over around the time of her disappearance, and will not be surprised that Thornell’s heroine has an alternating skittish, languorous, and distant gaze. Those less tolerant of Christie’s idiosyncrasies, may find that Thornell’s ‘piquant’ ladies, ‘well-tailored’ frocks, ‘irreproachable tweeds’, elderly couples who wear their age ‘rather pertly’, and the ‘most respectable roast beef sandwich’ overstate the trademark.
On the Blue Train shares a creative female protagonist restricted by her social milieu with Thornell’s first novel, the Vogel Award-winning Night Street (2010), a study of the artistic, emotional, and sensual life of painter Clarice Beckett. I have always suspected that Christie in person would have been far less amusing than her work, and wonder whether Thornell was hampered by that realisation. Nevertheless, as Christie has provided me with decades of entertainment, I had hoped for something more intriguing for Agatha than a guilty admission of desire, a stumble into an embrace, and one illicit kiss.
Francesca Sasnaitis
BLACK BRITISH: A NOVEL by Hebe de Souza Ventura Press
$32.99 pb, 277 pp, 9781925384901
Set against the milieu of India’s recent emancipation from British rule and the indelible scars left by the country’s 1947 partition with Pakistan, Black British subverts the classic migrant tale. Instead of detailing a middling family uprooting their lives in search of economic opportunities on foreign shores, it features an affluent Goan family at its centre. They are looking to leave India because their wealth, language, and British-led traditions have grown incongruous with that of the larger population. This sense of privilege is acknowledged throughout the novel, with occasionally heavy-handed passages dedicated to contextualising the discrepancy between the Indians consigned to occupy the lower strata of society and the ‘black British’ with vestiges of the colonial rulers stamped on their beliefs and values system.
The story is narrated through the eyes of Lucy, the youngest daughter. The plot oscillates between her childhood and the present day; the classic device of outlining one’s story to an outsider forms the somewhat flimsy fulcrum through which the past unfolds. A tapestry of richly imagined characters occupies the spaces within Lucy’s memory, and the decaying inherited mansion where the family sits banished from the larger community becomes the romantic backdrop to many of Lucy’s mishaps, adventures, and awakenings.
Feeling like a foreigner in her own hometown in northern India, Lucy’s alienation is contrasted against a country trying to renegotiate its identity in the aftermath of an oppressive age. Notwithstanding the powerful themes at play, however, the story meanders over the course of almost two decades and lacks dramatic tension. That aside, the setting is a particular strength of this novel, with the climatic vicissitudes and vivid hues of Kanpur providing the perfect backdrop through which to chronicle the collapse of a family dynasty
Sonia Nair
WOOD GREEN
which pOets have mOst inFLuenced yOu?
Before I knew about poetry it would have been the Grimms, plus Orson Welles reading ‘The Happy Prince’. Then R.A.K. Mason, Carl Sandburg, Robert Creeley – at which point I developed a taste for clunkiness, awkwardness, tonal non sequiturs, all the way from Wyatt, Hardy, and the weirder parts of Browning, to Frank O’Hara and Stevie Smith. My poetry tastes have always been pretty chaotic: in my reading universe, Lorine Niedecker, John Betjeman, Adrienne Rich, and the Beowulf poet all rub along together.
are pOems inspired Or craF ted?
Craft always seems to me a secondary thing – at least the conscious deployment of it. But then inspiration is such a dodgy notion. I’ve never believed in bolts of lightning – but I do think you can find ways of putting yourself out in the weather when a big thunderstorm is brewing. Reading other poets is one of the ways.
what prOmpts a new pOem?
With me, it’s usually something musical, some nagging phrase. Though I’ve found vigorous commissions productive, too – they push me sideways from myself.
what’s the diFFerence Between pOetry and prOse?
My favourite definition of a poem is Valéry’s ‘a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’. Poems hesitate, whereas prose heads straight off towards meaning.
what circumstances are ideaL FOr writinG pOetry?
Sitting in a rowboat on a lake would be pretty good. But things never seem to work out that way.
which pOet wOuLd yOu mOst Like tO taLk tO – and why?
I’d like to have a really awkward conversation with Emily Dickinson. I’d enjoy the mix of suddenness and silence.
what dO pOets need mOst: sOLitude Or a cOterie?
Solitude, especially when writing. A coterie is a terrible prospect, but friendships and a sense of community matter. And not just the poets you know personally. The poets you don’t know but whose work you care for –the mighty dead as well as your contemporaries – they’re part of your community, too.
what have yOu Learned FrOm reviews OF yOur wOrk?
I’ve learned just how many strongly held views of poetry there are out there. Some people want timeless wisdom and newspaper editorials. Others want heartfelt emotion, or demand particular political/social agendas. Others yearn for something gasping and intangible like ‘lyric beauty’. In my own case, some reviewers have been annoyed to discover that the poems can sometimes be quite unlike each other, and even (inside individual poems) rather at odds with themselves.
iF pLatO aLLOwed yOu tO keep One pOem Or pOetry cOLLectiOn in his repuBLic, what wOuLd it Be?
I probably can’t have Waiting for Godot, though I’d want to fight with the genre police on its behalf. Maybe Aram Saroyan’s ‘eyeye’ could keep watch above Plato’s entrance way. It looks happy on my car number plate.
dO yOu have a FavOurite Line OF pOetry?
A three-liner, sorry: ‘Goodbye’ by Bill Knott. ‘If you are still alive when you read this / close your eyes. I am / under their lids, growing black.’
is pOetry GeneraLLy appreciated By the readinG puBLic?
I think that the reading public is a lot smarter than most poets think it is.
BiLL manhire was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate. He founded the well-known creative writing program at Victoria University of Wellington. His most recent books are a collection of short fiction, The Stories of Bill Manhire (VUP, 2015), and a Selected Poems. A new poetry collection, Some Things to Place in a Coffin, will be published in 2017.
(photograph by Grant Maiden)
Australian Book Review presents
Arts Update
‘Australian Book Review is essential reading for anyone here who is seriously interested in any of the arts.’
David Malouf
Australian Book Review is delighted to invite you to join us at the Monash University Museum of Art to celebrate the
2016
ABR Arts issue launch
The annual Arts issue highlights Australian Book Review’s arts coverage and celebrates some of the year’s best concerts, operas, films and television shows, ballets, plays, and exhibitions. We will also be introducing the new ABR Laureate:
Robyn Archer
When: Thursday 10 November (6 pm for 6.30 pm)
Where: Monash University Museum of Art Ground Floor, Building F Monash University Caulfield campus 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East, Victoria
Visit the MUMA website to plan your trip
Please RSVP to rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au
Arts Update is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
