Australian Book Review - November 2017, no. 396

Arts issue

Readers of ABR – and our contributors in particular – appreciate how much cultural philanthropy has transformed this magazine in recent years. Generous donations from well over two hundred ABR Patrons have enabled us to diversify our programs, broaden our content, and pay writers much better than we were able to do in the past.

Recently, the magazine received its most generous bequest to date from Melbourne architect and theatre designer Peter Corrigan AM – a longtime reader of ABR. After studying at Yale University in 1969 and working for Philip Johnson and others in New Haven, he returned to Australia in 1974 and created the architectural pratice Edmond and Corrigan with his wife, Maggie Edmond. He taught at RMIT University for more than thirty years and was a Professor of Architecture. (RMIT Building 8 is one of his most celebrated creations.)

The 2017 Arts issue of ABR is dedicated to the memory of Peter Corrigan. It carries reviews of books on music, theatre, art and architecture, plus our annual survey of some of the arts highlights of the year as nominated by a range of arts critics and professionals. (Books of the Year follows in December.)

Our new pOetry editOr

John Hawke – poet, critic, and academic – is our new poetry editor. John is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in poetry, in the Department of English at Monash University. His poetry

collection, Aurelia, won the 2015 Anne Elder Award. He has edited two anthologies of Australian poetry. With Ann Vickery, he co-edited an anthology of critical essays, Poetry and the Trace (2013).

In addition to the States of Poetry national anthology project and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, ABR publishes two or three new poems in each issue. We pay $400 per poem. Poets wishing to be considered should direct their submissions to abrpoetrysubmissions@gmail.com.

John Hawke is also judging the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (with Bill Manhire and Jen Webb). Entries close on 3 December.

ABR FOrtieth BirthdAy FellOwship – wOrth $10,000 Next year marks the fortieth anniversary of the second series of ABR. (The first series ran from 1961 to 1974, mostly as a monthly, latterly as a quarterly.) Since June 1978, ABR has appeared ten times each year. The April 2018 issue will be the 400th in the current series.

To celebrate this milestone, we look forward to announcing a range of new programs and initiatives throughout the year – beginning with the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, worth $10,000. The Fellowship is funded by the ABR Patrons.

This Fellowship is different from previous ABR Fellowships, including Elisabeth Holdsworth’s ABR RAFT Fellowship essay on Progressive Judaism, which appears in this issue. The

John Hawke

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Fellowship is not themed, and we are not looking for a single, lengthy essay. Rather, we seek proposals from Australian critics, commentators, and scholars for four substantial contributions to the magazine – review essays, commentaries, and/or interviews – to be published in 2018. All our ABR Fellows enjoy a very special status at the magazine, and this suite of fortieth-birthday contributions will be a highlight of our publishing year. Full information about the new Fellowship appears on our website. As always, those interested in applying are encouraged to sound out the Editor, Peter Rose (editor@australianbookreview.com.au) beforehand.

Applications close on 15 January 2018. The Fellow will be named in February.

BuenOs Aires

The Literature Program of MALBA, the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires, offers five-week residencies to writers from abroad, in the form of airfare, a studio apartment in the city, and a small stipend. Applicants should have at least two published books behind them. A record of publication in Spanish translation will be an advantage. Further information at www.malba.org.ar/en/rem.

KAzuO ishigurO

The University of East Anglia must be cock-a-hoop. New Nobel Prize

Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro completed his Masters in Creative Writing there in 1980. Two years later he published his first novel. There have been only seven novels in those thirty-five years. Not everyone knows the two early Japanese novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), but they are as good as anything Ishiguro has produced. Then came the uncanny The Remains of the Day (1989). Doug Wallen reviewed his latest novel,  The Buried Giant, for us (April 2015).

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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 please). We will contact the nominated recipient (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Please note that online-only subscribers are entitled to direct online subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber)

November 2017

Morag Fraser

James Walter

Stephen Mills

Paul Giles

James Ley

Johanna Leggatt

Robyn Archer et al.

Elisabeth Holdsworth

Roger McDonald Letters

Rodney Crisp, Pat Grainger, Philip Tsaras, Barney Zwartz, Leo Schofield

Politics & Law

Edward Luce:The Retreat of Western Liberalism

Bill Emmott: The Fate of the West Mark Chou

Claire Higgins: Asylum by Boat Klaus Neumann

Julian Burnside: Watching Out John Eldridge

Society

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: Everybody Lies Kirk Graham

Essays

Laurie Penny: Bitch Doctrine

Suzy Freeman-Greene

Alex Miller: The Passage of Love Geordie Williamson

Elizabeth Tan: Rubik Cassandra Atherton

Bram Presser: The Book of Dirt Anna MacDonald

Roger McDonald: A Sea-Chase Brian Matthews

Annamaria

Irena Zdanowicz

Sally Grant

Fiona Gruber

Ian Dickson

Beejay Silcox

Francesca Sasnaitis

The uncontaminated Martin Luther

Gareth Evans’s memoirs

Disparate essays on Gough Whitlam

Peter Carey’s iconoclastic new novel

The new novel from Richard Flanagan

Brett Whiteley and his emulators

Arts Highlights of the Year

If This Is a Jew

Open Page

Memoir & Biography

Ariel Levy: The Rules Do Not Apply

Carol Middleton

Paul Watt: Ernest Newman Michael Shmith

Deborah Beck: Rayner Hoff Christopher Menz

Shakespeare

Peter Lake: How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage

Robert S. White

Architecture

Anne Watson: The Poisoned Chalice Andrew Montana

Theatre

Nicholas Hytner: Balancing Acts Brian McFarlane

Photography

Teju Cole: Blind Spot Louis Klee

Poetry

Thea Astley: Selected Poems Susan Sheridan

History

Svetlana Alexievich: The Unwomanly Face of War

Miriam Cosic

William Dalrymple and Anita Anand: Koh-i-Noor

Claudia Hyles

Fred Williams in the You Yangs

On Country

American Song

Ghosts

I Am Not Your Negro

Song to Song

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

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Sydney Ideas

Letters

Marriage equality

Dear Editor,

I voted Yes in the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. However, I tend to agree with those who consider that a survey of this nature should not be necessary. On the basis of its international treaty obligations, the federal government already has a constitutionally valid means of legislating for same-sex marriage.

Homosexuality is a perfectly natural phenomenon, just like heterosexuality. There is no such thing in nature as ‘the norm of the heterosexual union’. Both heterosexual and homosexual unions are ‘normal’. As Petter Boeckman, a zoologist at the Norwegian Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo, has pointed out: ‘No species has been found in which homosexual behaviour has not been shown to exist ... a part of the animal kingdom is hermaphroditic, truly bisexual. For them, homosexuality is not an issue.’ Boeckman observes social advantages to the free expression of homosexual behaviour and adds: ‘It has been observed that the homosexual couple are often better at raising the young than heterosexual couples.’ http://pactiss. org/2011/11/17/1500-animal-speciespractice-homosexuality/

Religion historically regards homosexual sex acts as sinful, based essentially on an erroneous understanding of ‘natural law’ (the law of nature). Religious dogma is constantly proven wrong in its interpretation of nature by scientific research.

There is a perfume of déjà vu regarding the current debate on homosexual marriage, e.g., Galileo’s condemnation for heresy when he declared in 1610 that the earth revolves around the sun. Homosexual behaviour has never been noted as a possible cause of the diminution or disappearance of any animal or plant species. There is no objective reason to discriminate against either heterosexual or homosexual behaviour as

regards the adoption and raising of children. The role of the State should be limited to the public – not the private – sphere, as per Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Rodney Crisp (online comment)

Galilee Basin

Dear Editor,

Immense gratitude, Susan Reid, for your beautifully worded commentary on the Galilee Basin and its proposed devastation (ABR, 10/17), so inexplicably backed by both the Australian and the Queensland governments.

Pat Grainger (online comment)

Maria Callas

Dear Editor,

Just a slight correction to Barney Zwartz’s review of the Maria Callas Live Remastered Edition (ABR Arts). The Lisbon La Traviata took place in 1958, not 1959. This was also the year she sang the role at Covent Garden, a recording of which also exists. However good the Lisbon performance, I can’t help wishing Warner had chosen the latter, as it is one of Callas’s most profoundly moving performances, and the sound is not bad. I have a few question marks about some of the other choices, too. Like most Callas aficionados, I prefer the 1955 La Scala Norma to the Covent Garden one, the 1958 Dallas Medea to the 1953 La Scala, and the 1957 Cologne Sonnambula to the 1955 La Scala one (also in much better sound). I wonder, too, why they went for the Mexico Rigoletto, when the studio set is one of the classics of the gramophone, and this Mexico one, both in terms of performance and sound, a bit of a mess. Surely La Scala’s 1957 Un Ballo in Maschera would have been a better choice.

Still, it’s good to have these performances more readily available, though casual buyers should be advised that the sound of some of them

(Nabucco, La Vestale, Parsifal, Armida, Alceste, to name a few) can be pretty intransigent, and requires a good deal of forbearance on the part of the listener. You have to listen ‘through’ the sound, as it were, to the performance itself. If you can do that, the rewards are prodigious.

Philip Tsaras (online comment)

Barney Zwartz replies:

Thank you, for those illuminating remarks, and also for the correction about the La Traviata

I didn’t have the space to talk about the sound quality on individual operas, but I note there has been some debate and criticism about this set in various forums, with some experts saying there are better sources sometimes than the ones Warner used. You list some operas as having poor sound, which is true compared with modern recordings, but I found the Parsifal pretty good. I had it previously on an old Cetra set, which was vastly inferior.

Basically, your advice is excellent: listen through the mud, and you will be richly rewarded.

Dear Editor,

I heard Callas live on three occasions, twice in recital in Festival Hall, London, and, more importantly, on stage at Covent Garden in the legendary Zeffirelli production of Tosca in 1964. On that latter occasion, I was in a stage box with the critic Andrew Porter and his sister Sheila, then working in the PR department at the ROH. Both had heard Callas in all of her appearances on stage there, I asked Porter if he sensed the voice was in serious decline. He had a clear memory of her previous Traviata and said that, apart from the odd hollow head note and the acknowledged wobble when she sang forte, the impact, musical and dramatic, of those earlier performances remained undimmed.

Leo Schofield (Online comment)

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Australian Book Review

November 2017, no. 396

Since 1961

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Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

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VLADIMIR ASHKENAZY’S SHOSTAKOVICH TRIBUTE

Experience thrilling music of struggle & hope!

10–18 NOV / SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

Belshazzar’s Feast

A concert for those who love the power of the human voice. Enjoy two choral blockbusters, side by side; the decadent Belshazzar’s Feast by William Walton and a new oratorio by Peter Eötvös.

EÖTVÖS Halleluja – Oratorium balbulum

Australian premiere (sung in German with English surtitles & English narration)

WALTON Belshazzar’s Feast

David Robertson conductor

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus

Michelle DeYoung mezzo-soprano PICTURED

Topi Lehtipuu tenor (Eötvös)

Andrew Foster-Williams bass-baritone (Walton)

EMIRATES METRO SERIES

Fri 24 Nov, 8pm Sat 25 Nov, 2pm

“All that is dark will disappear. All that is beautiful will triumph”.

Dramatic Shostakovich

Featuring the bravely epic Fifth Symphony, and Ray Chen performs the stirring First Violin Concerto.

Ray Chen violin

10–13 NOV

Gripping Shostakovich

Experience one of Shostakovich's greatest creations, his Cello Concerto No.1, and the powerful Eighth Symphony.

Daniel Müller-Schott cello

15–18 NOV

Bluebeard’s

Castle

With Bach & Brahms

Bartók’s thrilling operatic masterpiece makes a spectacular finale to the 2017 season. Enjoy a gorgeous Bach cantata, Brahms’s heartfelt and delightful Alto Rhapsody and the brooding and powerful Bluebeard’s Castle

JS BACH Cantata No.82 – Ich habe genug

BRAHMS Alto Rhapsody

BARTÓK Bluebeard’s Castle

(sung in Hungarian with English surtitles)

David Robertson conductor

Michelle DeYoung mezzo-soprano (Brahms, Bartók)

Andrew Foster-Williams bass-baritone (Bach)

John Relyea bass (Bartók) PICTURED

Opera Australia Chorus (Brahms)

APT MASTER SERIES

Wed 29 Nov, 8pm Fri 1 Dec, 8pm Sat 2 Dec, 8pm

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Tectonic shifts

Presenting the uncontaminated Martin

Luther Morag Fraser

MARTIN LUTHER: REBEL IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL by Heinz Schilling, translated by Rona Johnston Oxford University Press, $61.95 hb, 613 pp, 9780198722816

Australia’s politicians may be too mired in power skirmishes to notice that 31 October 2017 marked the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s trumpet blast of the Reformation: the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, his ‘Disputation on the Power of Indulgences’, on the bulletin board of a castle church in the provincial university town of Wittenberg. Pity. Even self-serving men might learn, from one of history’s most brusquely eloquent and determined figures, how to bring about change while remaining steadfast – and shrewd – in the face of hydra-headed opposition and mortal risk.

Germany has been celebrating the anniversary all year, in every manner imaginable – from learned theological colloquia, publications, and music festivals (Luther was an accomplished lute-player, a dutiful composer, and an uninhibited musical enthusiast), to market fairs and tourist ‘opportunities’. America has paid its historical dues with a slew of publications. I doubt that Donald Trump has read them, or the Ninety-Five Theses, but, in the disjunctive way of US culture his country has certainly done so, beginning in late 2016, and grandly, with scholarly exhibitions in major institutions in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York’s Morgan Library, and Atlanta. The commemorative exhibitions re-animate and re-evaluate Luther and Reformation history through frank and comprehensive catalogues (so characteristic, this emphasis on ‘the word’ in America’s museums, as Patrick McCaughey once pointed out to me when he was director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut). At the same time, they have showcased a wealth of Reformation artefacts, including magnificent gold and silversmithing, so indicative of Germany’s fine traditions of craftsmanship but also of the crucial role mining and metal played in the political economy of Luther’s time, and indeed his own family.

Oxford University Press has done its part by publishing Heinz Schilling’s monumental 2013 biography, Martin Luther: Rebel in an age of upheaval, in a fine English translation by Rona Johnston. Schilling’s subtitle is no

mere publisher’s padding: it is a précis of his thesis, and a deft apologia for supple contextualisation: ‘Each historical person, including Luther, has a double character, formed by his own context and formative of his own context.’ Luther, Schilling insists, was not the single motive force in the changes that we call the Reformation: there were tectonic shifts being felt throughout Europe and medieval Christendom, to which Luther was heir. But rebel he also was, by force of conviction, and, in his blazingly prophetic, uncompromising way, he generated the words that ushered in the Reformation, with all its complex consequences.

Schilling, until 2010 Professor of Early Modern History at Humboldt University, Berlin, is explicit about his purpose, and about what it is not:

This book is not about a Luther in whom we can find the spirit of our own time; this book is about a Luther who was different, a Luther whose thoughts and actions are out of kilter with the interests of later generations, no matter how often they have been employed to legitimize actions in the present, and will continue to be employed to that end.

‘The uncontaminated Luther’ is what Shilling aims to present, and even granting his evident sympathy with his subject, that is what his 613 pages of dense scholarship yields: a Rembrandt-esque portrait of a challenging, rhetorically brilliant, loving, volcanic, savvy, intractable man, heaven bent on changing the world in pursuit of the truth as he understood it. Not scientific truth – Gospel truth, the evangelical truth derived from his intensive study of scripture and from an unremitting scrutiny of his own mind, experience, and conscience. Luther and Galileo (born eighteen years after the reformer’s death, and in a very different world) would never have been congenial cosearchers after truth, though Luther, gifted with a sharp sense of irony, might have found some solace in their both being declared heretics by Rome.

I used the term ‘Rembrandt-esque’ above to capture the mystery and depth of the man Schilling gives us in such unexpurgated detail (‘Shakespearean’ would also serve, to capture Luther’s tragic aspect). Luther had his own publisher–entrepreneur–painter in Lucas Cranach the Elder, a friend, fellow Wittenberger, and a man of influence whose superb artistry was matched by a formidable flair for publicity and timing. Luther’s writings, his preaching and translations of the Bible would not have had the breadth of influence they did without Cranach’s graphic genius and speed at dissemination. We know Luther’s face and his changing stature (physical and reputational) from Cranach’s depictions of him over time. But they are clear-cut, indelible images. Schilling’s Luther shifts before our eyes, never quite pin-downable, at one moment the ebullient companion, the loving husband, the next a rapier-tongued firebrand, devastating to friend and foe alike, with an excoriating power to wound. (Schilling’s detailed accounts of Luther’s friendships and sparrings, with Philip Melanchthon and Desiderius Erasmus in particular, and his interaction with his Saxon Electors, and with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, are reason enough to read the book. And if you despair of the treatment of the Humanities, or indeed of education in our ruthlessly mercantile age, then read Luther’s promotion of both and take heart.)

Snake oil is snake oil in any era. Luther’s condemnation of it is sane, witty, and irrefutable

from primary sources, his Luther is vivid, alive, his words resounding and often salutary (and justly proverbial, both in German and in translation). If the humbug of contemporary politics or the disingenuousness of church evasions about sexual abuse or the position of women disgust you (and if you are not up for the deep dive in Luther’s theology of Justification), at least read some of the ninety-five theses against the practice of selling indulgences (crudely, salvation for cash). Snake oil is snake oil in any era. Luther’s condemnation of it is sane, witty, and irrefutable.

Schilling will engage many readers (I am assuming a certain stamina) and offend others, from within and without religious congregations.

I look forward to hearing my Jesuit friends’ responses to Schilling’s claim that Luther was the indispensible precursor for Ignatius of Loyola’s subsequent reforms in the Catholic Church. But mostly I hope for an expansion of understanding in anyone reading this book. Five hundred years on, we still live with complexity, in a world where apocalyptic fury persists alongside scientific rationality and what we call human rights and values. Luther’s struggles belong to another age. But they are poignantly human. And his successes – and failures – continue to mark our own times.

The man, Luther, would remain a compelling challenge to us in any age. The theologian – well, why should anyone outside the academy or theologate continue to examine the written works of a man who belonged, as Schilling says, ‘in a premodern world that is entirely alien to us, a world in which demons and angels were a constant presence and everything on earth was part of a transcendental reality’? Or heed a man whose writing on Jews and Muslims (‘Turks’ in Luther’s terminology), particularly in the latter part of his life, exhibited a ‘merciless viciousness’ (Schilling’s description).

Why? Because the man and his writings, his implacable honesty, his fallible humanity, his ‘premodern’ worldview, and his ‘apocalyptic vision of the End Times’ with all its desperate, destructive fury, are all parcelled, indivisible, in one person. History has often cherry-picked Luther for its own ends (the National Socialists most notoriously). Schilling insists on situating this tumultuous man in his own tumultuous times, criticising the various expropriations of Luther as anachronistic opportunism. He is explanatory of Luther’s extremes without being exculpatory. And because he works so closely

Coda: I began reading Heinz Schilling’s biography sitting alone in the modest Evangelical Pauluskirche, in Bochum, an old mining town in northern Germany. On the church porch there were pamphlets advertising Reformation seminars throughout 2017. An organist was rehearsing a concert repertoire, works Luther could not have heard but would have appreciated: J.S. Bach, Buxtehude, even the French Louis Vierne. I thanked the organist afterwards. He was Chinese. Bombed during World War II, the Pauluskirche was faithfully rebuilt and opened again on Reformation Day, 1950. Affixed to the stone outside wall is a bronze plaque that must have survived the bombing. It reads, ‘In memory, on the 400th year anniversary of his birth, of our dear Dr Martin Luther. 10 November 1883. The evangelical community, Bochum.’

A few miles away, in a leafy residential street, another plaque records the names of the Jewish families who once lived there, close to the corner of Goethe and Schiller Strassen, before they were forced out, or murdered, during the period of Nazi rule. The plaque was erected by the evangelical community of Bochum. g

Fraser is a former chair of Australian Book Review

Morag

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From ‘solo flyer’ to high politics

James Walter

INCORRIGIBLE OPTIMIST: A POLITICAL MEMOIR

by Gareth Evans

Melbourne University Press, $49.99 hb, 415 pp, 9780522866445

Gareth Evans is one of the more interesting figures from the Hawke–Keating governments, not alone as a high achiever in a talented team, nor in the tenacity that saw him remain so long in the inner circle, but unusual in forging a cosmopolitan career of such substance thereafter. His political memoir demonstrates the continuity of his principal concerns – identified in the thematic chapter headings of his book – from his earliest exposure to student politics through his success as foreign minister (1988–96) to stewardship of the International Crisis Group (and many other international panels and commissions besides). It is a story spiced with both the idealism and megalomania that he concludes drive productive political engagement.

The thematic approach serves his purpose well – a focus on high politics, ideas and policy, the processes necessary to pursue them, and what he learned in their service. The method is to flag a governing idea – race, justice, cooperation, conflict resolution, for instance – then to explain why he first became preoccupied by it, all of the ways he pursued it through a succession of different roles, usually with illustrative case studies (and entertaining anecdotes about key figures and occasionally his own mistakes), and concluding with an itemised list of lessons to be drawn from his experience. This is the manifesto of a policy activist of a high order.

This summary does not do justice to how successfully Evans deploys this approach. An instance is Evans’s account of the way in which he collaborated with and orchestrated international actors in facilitating the Cambodian peace settlement (1989–91). An academic industry

has been generated by some of the ideas for which Evans and those with whom he worked were catalysts, such as the new international relations norm of R2P, ‘the responsibility to protect’ –the obligation on the United Nations and other states to intervene, breaching a single state’s sovereignty – to prevent genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. R2P is endlessly debated and elaborated, but no one explains it with the concision, passion, and conviction of Evans.

Equally, others, such as war historian and nuclear analyst Robert O’Neill, have provided compelling accounts of the dimensions of the nuclear weapons problem we face, but perhaps it needs someone of Evans’s visibility to shock us about the Damoclean sword above us, and insist that policy makers pursue disarmament. Yet it is hard to be persuaded of the case for optimism – that the potential for mistakes and knowledge that any nuclear exchange at all would be catastrophic makes any strategic nuclear deployment rationally untenable – in current circumstances. Here, Donald Trump becomes a problem: how can we count on what might be unthinkable for a rational person, given a leader consumed by delusional self-regard and pathological social dominance in confrontation with a fanatic like Kim Jong-un?

An impressive feature of Evans’s memoir is his account of political learning. We tend to overvalue strong leaders, solitary heroes who alone can solve our problems. It is salutary, then, to see Evans’s progression from the idealistic but opinionated and bumbling ‘solo flyer’ (his self-description in a 1980s interview with the late Graham Little)

sacked from a dream job as attorney general (1983–84), to a man later able to orchestrate remarkable international coalitions of people with diverse skills able together to address some of the most intractable problems of international politics.

There is, in the final chapter, a lucid description of the nature of political life and the capacities it demands, an excellent summary of Hawke’s and Keating’s strengths as colleagues and leaders, and a persuasive argument as to why theirs became the ‘gold standard’ of cabinet government. It was, essentially, because each minister was trusted to do his or her job, and collectively they relied on argument rather than authority in reaching decisions.

Yet those seeking a straightforward account of life inside the Labor government, of party games or even of Evans’s life story will find this a lapidary work. It is mostly in here, the self-deprecatory accounts of his failures in his early portfolios, and especially the highpoints, such as Evans’s heroic role in the carriage of Mabo legislation in the Senate. But the reader must pay attention and connect the threads where they fall.

In that respect the account is fragmentary, with different elements of all of the above occurring and recurring in different ways under discrete themes. It is Evans’s way of keeping our attention on high politics, rather than on the way sausages are made. But this also –

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notwithstanding his acknowledgment of the quotidian imperatives of preselection battles, factional maneouvres, careerist opportunism, and constituents’ demands – allows him to avoid some of the less salutary elements of the story. Consequently, there is no mention, for instance, of his part in the disastrous transfer of Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot to the Labor Party in 1997. Such lapses are not germane to policy or idealism.

This is the manifesto of a policy activist of a high order

There is evidence aplenty that Evans can be quixotic, endlessly curious, humorous, engaging, generous, and good company, and such qualities are manifest in this book. Yet the accounts of his capacity for combative arrogance and volcanic rage will not dissipate, and his attempts to ameliorate such reports are a nagging subtext in the memoir. He suggests that such stories have been amplified through repetition, and refers repeatedly to instances of disproportionate ‘exuberance’, misinterpreted irony, misunderstood mischief, a degree of volatility when ‘heroically ambitious’ goals are thwarted and ‘Australian’ robustness in argument.

He suggests that three things are characteristic of successful politicians (and by implication, of himself): a blend of idealism and megalomania; a degree of self-belief well beyond the norm; and ‘a missing sensitivity gene’ to what others think. These were all points he first made in that interview with Graham Little (published in Speaking for Myself, 1988). Yes, one can immediately think of instances, and it excuses Evans’s excesses to some extent. But one could not have said that about Alfred Deakin, John Curtin, or Ben Chifley, and Evans’s greatest work was when megalomania was tamed and he learned to orchestrate others in distributed leadership.

It goes to the question of egotism, which Evans admits then typically deflects with humour and self-deprecation. Yet it will not be submerged. It is manifest in the difference between Neal Blewett’s Cabinet Diary (1999) –

he is always the dispassionate observer of those in the game in which he is involved – and Evans’s works, more attuned to how others react and relate to himself.

Again, Evans’s significance as foreign minister and activist on the world stage is self-evident, as are the élite networks with which he has productively engaged – we do not need their testimonials, but here they are. He cannot resist name-checking high-flying friends and every world figure with whom he has worked, and this is also the selection principle in his choice of photographs. He has the grace to concede that none of what has been done could have happened without the many who worked with him (not to mention the support of family and friends), but it is the celebrities who are identified, rarely the staffers, professionals, and public servants integral to his achievement.

There is in this, I suspect, something of what the Henry James biographer Leon Edel called a life myth. By this he meant not simply the artifice individuals exercise to impress others, but the selfaffirming stories (with their insistent denial of hard truths), we tell ourselves. Evans would have none of his friend Graham Little’s ‘psychobabble’ as he here concedes. Yet his self-deprecatory humour and ‘exuberance’ may be a shield against recognising the hurt his arrogance and anger may have occasioned.

For all that, when the discussion gets serious, egotism is held in check and the intelligence, acuity, and considerable common sense of Evans’s analysis shines through. The memoir is at its most engaging in dealing with the confounding issues of international politics, notwithstanding its revelations about the domestic reform era of the 1980s and 1990s. If you read nothing else this year on matters like race, reconciliation, cooperation, weapons control, R2P, distributed leadership and how to do politics, read this. g

James Walter is emeritus professor of politics at Monash University. His new book, The Pivot of Power: Australian prime ministers and political leadership, 1949–2016 (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart) was published in August 2017.

Dying lodestar

The allure of nostalgia

Mark Chou

THE RETREAT OF WESTERN LIBERALISM

by Edward Luce

Little, Brown, $32.99 pb, 234 pp, 9781408710401

THE FATE OF THE WEST:

THE BATTLE TO SAVE THE WORLD’S MOST SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL IDEA

by Bill Emmott

The Economist Books (Profile Books), $32.99 pb, 267 pp, 9781781257791

Anyone who has paid any attention to the words coming out of the mouths of populist figureheads like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Geert Wilders will know this: populists traffic in nostalgia. For them, the best days are always our yesterdays – before the West was corrupted by the onslaught of progressive values, unchecked self-expression, secularisation, multiculturalism, globalisation, and the rejection of tradition. That is why they are forever promising to ‘bring back’ what has been lost and to ‘restore’ the West to its former glory. Their recent successes come down to the fact that many in these societies, feeling left behind and betrayed by their own countries, long for simpler times. In the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, for example, numerous polls showed that a majority of Americans felt that the country had ‘lost its identity’ (Quinnipiac University Poll) or that its ‘best days are in the past’ (American Values Survey). For political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, this was the pervasive sense of cultural estrangement – felt most acutely by older generations, white men, the less educated, and those holding conservative political beliefs – that led to the populist cultural backlash of the past several years.

In 2017, with Trump firmly installed in the White House and Brexit negotiations underway, nostalgia has lost none of its political allure. But what has been surprising is how it has come to define not only the populist agenda

but increasingly our response to it as well. Nostalgia is now the lingua franca of both populists and their progressive opponents. Of course, it would be naïve to think that only anti-establishment political forces profit from resurrecting a bygone era. As many have noted, both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn based their visions for the future on policies from the past; even Hillary Clinton’s 2016 slogan ‘Stronger Together’, it has been said, sentimentalised an American solidarity sadly out of step with the polarised present. Yuval Levin, author of The Fractured Republic (2016), thus believes that both the left and right look back to an idealised past when the going gets tough. The only difference between them is when and what that idealised past was.

Edward Luce and Bill Emmott, two commentators best known for their journalistic work with the Financial Times and The Economist, are no strangers to the past. Their books, which include Luce’s Time to Start Thinking: America in the age of descent (2012) and Emmott’s 20:21 Vision: Twentiethcentury lessons for the twenty-first century (2003), have a habit of documenting how a society’s past casts a shadow over its future. Their latest contributions tread the same terrain. This time, they take aim at the West and how its past practices contributed to the populist cultural backlash of 2016. But what marks out these books more than the at times scathing historical introspection is their palpable longing for a vision of the

West as it once was: liberal, democratic, equal, open, rules-based, outward-looking – in other words , everything that stands opposed to the current populist offensive. By doing so, it is clear that Luce and Emmott have each written books which, for want of a better term, might be classified as anti-populist nostalgia literature.

Ostensibly, Luce’s The Retreat of Western Liberalism sounds the alarm bells. ‘Western liberal democracy is not yet dead,’ he writes, ‘but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe.’ Not since World War II has the idea of liberal democracy confronted the challenges it sees today. Internationally, as Luce documents, the rise of nondemocratic powers like China during a decade of Western economic turmoil caps off a startling realisation: there are twenty-five fewer democracies today than at the turn of the century. The United States, Western liberal democracy’s standard-bearer, hardly helped matters during these years. Although no one could begrudge US vengeance for what happened on 9/11, Luce believes that by taking the ‘war on terror’ to citizens at home via the Patriot Act and to Iraq, which culminated in nothing except a failed attempt to promote democracy abroad, 9/11 ended up dealing a ‘twin blow to Western democracy’s allure’.

Domestically, Luce draws readers’ attention to the spectre of stagnation that has set in within many Western societies. Citing Ronald Reagan, who once said that ‘Progress is our most im-

portant product’, Luce makes the point that when society grows, people invest in the future. There is faith in institutions and in one another. But when society stagnates, people lose hope and begin going backward. That, he argues, is what has happened in contemporary America. Plagued by economic decline, growing competition for jobs, the onset of automation, America’s opioid epidemic, and rising inequality, it is little wonder that those ‘left-behind’ have become nostalgic for a dimly recalled past when progress, at least for people like them, was not just possible, but also a birthright.

Like Luce, Emmott’s The Fate of the West warns us that ‘We are living in a time when openness is under challenge, when equality of rights and treatment is in greater doubt than for many decades, and when social trust is looking frayed.’ The two ‘lodestars’ of openness and equality that the West first authored and that have since made the West what it is are both experiencing extreme strain. They are being attacked from within, by people and forces that have reaped the benefits of the West’s openness and equality to now push ‘distinctly unWestern ideas’.

The chief culprit, Emmott argues, is Donald Trump. For Emmott, the US president’s three main policy solutions – withdraw from free trade agreements, jettison security alliances, and tighten immigration – all threaten the West’s core ideals. They are a menace that will replace the West’s openness of trade with ‘a system of commerce based on threats and brute power’. They will undermine how nations, especially ‘liberal, open, friendly nations’, interact with one another. Finally, they will force longstanding allies to seek new alliances with non-Western nations, ‘breaking a basic assumption that liberal nations are more dependable and trustworthy for each other’.

So what happens now? Again, Emmott shares Luce’s view: External threats from Islamic State, China, and Russia may be considerable, but they pale in comparison to the threats produced by the West itself. First and foremost, Emmott believes, the West has to confront

its single greatest threat: inequality. For him, it is inequality that makes people feel left behind and ‘willing to support radical forces that would throw away openness purportedly to restore their sense of equality or shore up their sense of identity’.

Neither Luce nor Emmott can therefore be accused of being uncritical of current and past Western practices; both believe that the West’s greatest risks emanate from within. But they also believe that the West has what it takes to rescue itself from its current malaise, though Emmott is the more optimistic of the two on this front.

We must begin by reviving both lodestars, not one over the other, Emmott argues. Only when that happens

‘Western liberal democracy is not yet dead, but it is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe’

will the Western project as a whole be revived. Luce offers more specifics, which include recognising the West’s collective ‘ignorance of our history, indifference to society’s losers and complacency about the strength of our democracies’. That aside, Luce believes that the West must do more to reverse its current trajectory, which has recently seen many liberal democracies switch from ‘John Locke’s social contract to the bleaker Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes’. What it must not do, Luce warns, is to continue ‘looking backwards to a golden age that can never be regained’.

But that, it turns out, is what he and Emmott end up doing anyway, albeit in different ways. The pit stop that both books make at Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992) helps illustrate where they diverge. For Emmott, as for Fukuyama when the Berlin Wall fell, liberal democracy is the endpoint of human evolution and the final form of government. Nothing that has come along since comes close to rivalling the jewel in the West’s crown. Which is his way of saying: to move forward, the West must actually move backward to the end of history. This is

not just desirable, it is possible. Luce, on the other hand, is more reticent. From Moscow’s or Beijing’s or Ankara’s standpoint, he writes, ‘history is back and nothing is inevitable, least of all liberal democracy’. But it is the twofold tragedy woven into Luce’s book that, knowing ‘the search for Eden always ends in tears’, he searches for it nonetheless. g

Mark Chou is an associate professor of politics at the Australian Catholic University. His latest book is Young People, Citizenship and Political Participation: Combating civic deficit? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Life in a Submarine

‘At the age of 23 Prince Charles embarked with no great enthusiasm on a six-week training course at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth … One exercise involved performing an “underwater escape from a submarine”: a not inapt image for a life spent trapped in a role he didn’t choose doing things he doesn’t like for people who don’t much appreciate them … It would be easier to feel sorry for Charles if he didn’t feel so intensely and publicly sorry for himself.’

From Rosemary Hill’s review of two books on the Cornwalls, London Review of Books, 7 September 2017

Literary-Glitterati

From Text Publishing

Helen Garner

Happy Birthday, Helen!

Two stylish hardcovers in honour of Helen Garner’s 75th birthday.

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Celebrated biographer Brenda Niall turns her eye to a personal subject, her grandmother Aggie, and uncovers a story of a fiercely independent nineteen-year-old who immigrated alone from Liverpool to Australia in 1888.

From the Man Bookershortlisted author of His Bloody Project When the methodical but troubled Chief Inspector Gorski is called to a routine road accident he unravels a mystery with devastating consequences.

TRUE STORIES brings together for the first time all of Garner’s extraordinary short non-fiction, including her most famous essays about family, about love and sex and death, about growing up and growing old.

The companion edition, STORIES, compiles Garner’s masterful short fiction. It sings of love and longing; it illuminates the darkness and joy of life, and the unexpected events, no matter how small, that transform us.

A collection of warm, droll and highly entertaining personal essays—a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the life of cultural icon, renowned film director Bruce Beresford.

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A handsome illustrated hardback, TINKERING collates Clarke’s unforgettable, irresistible writing for radio, newspapers, stage and screen.

‘Abject failure’ Australia’s response to refugees

Klaus Neumann

ASYLUM BY

BOAT:

ORIGINS OF AUSTRALIA’S REFUGEE POLICY

by Claire Higgins

UNSW Press, $29.99 pb, 250 pp, 9781742235677

In early October 2017, Thomas Albrecht, the Canberra-based Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), took to The Guardian to register his dismay about the Australian government’s response to asylum seekers. ‘The current policy has been an abject failure,’ he wrote. ‘A proper approach by Australia must include, at a minimum, solutions for all refugees and asylum seekers sent to Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and an end to offshore processing.’

It was highly unusual for a senior UNHCR diplomat publicly to take issue with the government’s policy by penning an opinion piece in a newspaper. How extraordinary it was becomes evident when reading Claire Higgins’s Asylum by Boat about Australia’s response to Indochinese ‘boat people’. Higgins’s account draws extensively on the papers of Guy Goodwin-Gill. For many years he has perhaps been the world’s most authoritative expert on international refugee law. Now an emeritus fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and professor of law at the University of New South Wales, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Goodwin-Gill served as the UNHCR’s legal adviser in Australia. In that capacity, he contributed to the Determination of Refugee Status (DORS) interdepartmental committee, which was set up by the Fraser government to assess asylum applications.

Using Goodwin-Gill’s notes about the committee’s deliberations, Higgins highlights the ‘clear and unexpected differences’ among its members. For example, while the immigration department’s representatives voted in more than four out of five cases for Vietnamese boat arrivals to be accorded refugee status or

to be allowed to remain in Australia on compassionate or humanitarian grounds, the Attorney-General’s Department’s delegate was in more than seventy-five per cent of cases opposed to such a course of action. What is even more remarkable is the role played by Goodwin-Gill. While his views did not always prevail, they were taken seriously. From today’s vantage point, it appears even surprising that the Fraser government invited the UNHCR to join the DORS committee in the first place. The kind of stand-off between the local UNHCR representative and the Turnbull government which prompted Thomas Albrecht to voice his concerns in The Guardian, would have been unthinkable during GoodwinGill’s Australian posting.

Any history of Australian responses to asylum seekers under Malcolm Fraser invites comparisons with the government’s approach under prime ministers John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull. Higgins does not avoid contrasting past and present policies and practices. But she is careful not to let her historical analysis suffer in order to be better able to use the past as a weapon in a debate about present-day policies. That is one of the key strengths of Asylum by Boat

In public debate, critics of today’s asylum seeker policies often hold up Fraser’s approach as exemplary. The claim that his government was able to deal with ‘boat people’ compassionately and without compromising either Australia’s international reputation or its sovereignty was made, not least, by Fraser himself. Higgins interviewed Fraser, his immigration ministers, Michael MacKellar and Ian Macphee, and other key players. It is to her credit that Asylum by Boat does not rely on

their recollections, and sometimes draws attention to discrepancies between former politicians’ – sometimes self-serving – accounts and what could be gleaned from Australian government records and Goodwin-Gill’s files. The result is a nuanced account, which also shows that Fraser and his Cabinet seriously contemplated setting up detention centres for boat arrivals, and that they went to great lengths to stop Indochinese refugees from making the boat journey to Australia.

The Fraser government pursued at least four avenues to halt the flow of asylum seekers arriving by boat. It launched a substantial refugee resettlement program that targeted Indochinese refugees in camps in Southeast Asia. Eventually, they let themselves be convinced that it was better to wait to be resettled, rather than risk the perilous boat journey to Australia. Here, it should be remembered that Australia’s resettlement of Indochinese refugees began in earnest only after the Australian public became concerned about the arrival of ‘boat people’. Australia also entered into a bilateral agreement with Vietnam to facilitate family reunion; that, too, was a means that pre-empted irregular departures by prospective refugees.

The other two planks of the government’s ‘stop-the-boats’ policy were comparatively less successful. Vis-à-vis its Western allies, Australia insisted on the principle of burden-sharing; while the United States and Canada accommodated a substantial number of Indochinese refugees, Japan and most Western European nations were less willing to do so. Finally, Australia tried to convince its neighbours in Southeast Asia to discourage refugees from sailing to Australia. With Indonesia, for example, Australia negotiated an informal arrangement, which is termed the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ in Australian government records. It committed Indonesia to prevent refugees from continuing their journey to Australia in the understanding that all of them would be resettled by Australia. Sometimes the Indonesians honoured this agreement, but on many other occasions they did not.

Higgins’s book is a meticulously

researched and well-written analysis of the Fraser government’s approach towards asylum seekers arriving by boat. The problem with such a comparatively narrow focus is that relevant precedents, such as the reception and assessment of West Papuans seeking asylum in the Australian Territory of Papua and New Guinea, and the government’s overall human rights and immigration policies remain beyond the book’s purview. But Higgins points out that there is ‘a real need for further archival research and nuanced analysis’; hers is therefore unlikely to be the last history of Australia’s response to refugees in the 1970s and 1980s.

The book’s sixth and last chapter takes the story from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, and thus to the introduction of mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrived by boat, which marked a significant break from the Fraser government’s approach. Here, the scope for more analysis – to further explain that break – is most evident. The end of the ‘bipartisan accord’ that had underpinned Australia’s migration policies, features prominently – and rightly so – in Higgins’s explanation. Historians have commonly associated the end of bipartisanship with the mid1980s, when Geoffrey Blainey and John Howard questioned the Hawke government’s non-discriminatory immigration policy. But substantial disagreements over Australia’s response to asylum seekers already surfaced during the 1977 federal election campaign, when prominent Labor Party politicians tried to gain political mileage by demanding that boats carrying Vietnamese asylum seekers be turned around. Labor eventually supported the government’s policies, but not before introducing the term ‘queue jumper’ into the Australian political lexicon. Arguably, the anti-asylum seeker rhetoric of Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, and other Labor leaders laid the foundations for the ‘abject failure’ diagnosed by Thomas Albrecht. g

Klaus Neumann has written widely on issues of human rights and forced migration. His latest book is Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees: A history (2015).

Threads and templates

Disparate essays on Gough Whitlam

Stephen Mills

MAKING MODERN AUSTRALIA: THE WHITLAM GOVERNMENT’S 21ST CENTURY AGENDA

edited by Jenny Hocking

Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 348 pp, 9781925485188

In his powerful eulogy for Gough Whitlam at the Sydney Town Hall in November 2014, Noel Pearson described the former prime minister – this ‘old man’ – as one of those rare people who, though he never suffered discrimination, understood the importance of protection from its malice. Pearson speculated on the apparent paradox. How was it that Whitlam, an upper-middle-class white man, carried such a ‘burning conviction that the barriers of class and race [Pearson did not add, gender] should be torn down and replaced with the unapologetic principle of equality’?

Part of the answer might lie in Whitlam’s unique and complex relationship with his boyhood town, Canberra, a relationship explored by Nicholas Brown in this new anthology of essays about the Whitlam governments (1972–75).

Whitlam is the only Australian prime minister to have spent formative childhood years in the national capital. His father, Fred, a senior Commonwealth public servant, transferred his family to Canberra in 1928 when Gough was an eleven-year-old schoolboy. In Brown’s words, Whitlam father and son ‘walked the landscape of Canberra as both a potential city and an actual practice of government’. It was a tiny community, this national capital, with a population of 6,000 and a new Parliament House sitting gleaming in the paddock. As it grew, its planned streets and suburbs, its national buildings and institutions, its prosperous inhabitants, and its privileged identity as both author and creature of national policy, made Canberra (then and now) different.

Brown, head of history at the Australian National University, argues that

Whitlam drew inspiration from the image and the reality of the national capital, and that the city, cocooned within a federal territory controlled directly by the Commonwealth, became a ‘laboratory in which the enlightened exercise of Government could be tested and then applied elsewhere’. Returning to Canberra later as the parliamentary representative of the unsewered sprawl of south-west Sydney, Whitlam ‘had at least seen what planning could do’. Equally, Brown acknowledges the tensions and resistance between government and city that emerged when Whitlam’s legislative and administrative program came to challenge the traditions and interests of Canberra’s public service and its mandarins.

Brown is not the first to identify the debt Whitlam owed to the national capital. Indeed, the title of his essay, ‘Furnishing the Prime Ministerial Mind’, pays homage to Graham Freudenberg’s insight in A Certain Grandeur (1977). But Brown takes the argument further, exploring and separating out the strands of Canberra’s otherness: Canberra not just the national capital but also the community of individuals – politicians, public servants, policy makers, academics, and journalists; Canberra the physical site of national government and also the cultural aspiration to deploy the power of that government in shaping people’s lives.

Canberra’s prosperous security and self-conscious sense of mission, then, may well have consolidated Gough Whitlam’s discrimination-free, middleclass status, while also awakening in him that ‘unapologetic principle of equality’ identified by Pearson.

Brown’s essay is a highlight of

Travel with ABR

Munich to Berlin: art, music & literature

June 2-15, 2018

From $8,890 pp, plus airfares

Some highlights

• ABR literary event and reception at the Australian Embassy in Berlin

• Janácek’s From the House of the Dead in Munich, Verdi’s Rigoletto in Dresden, Offenbach’s Bluebeard and Puccini’s Tosca in Berlin

• Kandinsky and the Blue Rider artists of the early 20th century in Munich

• Dresden’s outstanding museums, including the Green Vault and the Old Masters Picture Gallery

• Weimar, Goethe’s city and Germany’s capital during the Weimar Republic, also home of the Nietzsche Archive

Explore some of the great German cities with like-minded ABR readers and supporters, enjoying outstanding performances of opera and orchestral music, visiting a selection of superb art galleries and exploring Germany’s literary heritage from Goethe to Nietzsche and beyond. The tour – led by ABR’s Editor Peter Rose and seasoned tour leader Christopher Menz – builds on ABR’s successful tours to the USA and the UK in 2016 and 2017.

• Bayreuth, home of Wagner’s Festspielhaus

For more information contact ABR’s official agents Academy Travel on 02 9235 0023, or visit academytravel.com.au

tailored small group Journeys

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Jenny Hocking’s anthology of academic studies on the Whitlam government that promises, in its title and blurb, to reveal neglected aspects of Whitlam’s reform agenda that continue to have relevance today. Indeed, it asserts that the Whitlam government had a ‘21st century agenda’. These are provocative promises; unfortunately, the book fails to deliver on them. That is not the fault of Brown or the other contributors. They are well credentialled and bring detail and nuance to a wide range of Whitlam-related topics. Along the way, they give us some wonderful vignettes of 1970s politics.

Melanie Oppenheimer and her coauthors, for example, have unearthed an archive of local community activism in central Victoria, as residents groups sought small grants of national funding through the Australian Assistance Plan: a revolution in public financing that delivered, as we read, teaching aids for remedial reading in Cohuna and a survey of childcare needs in Korong among others. Michelle Arrow explores the 1973 Royal Commission on Human Relationships, chaired by Justice Elizabeth Evatt, as it grappled with the complex policy and politics of ‘sexual citizenship’.

But how do such rearward glances demonstrate the claimed Whitlam ‘agenda’ for modern Australia? Are we looking for templates to apply, or implicit threads of continuity between then and now? Did the Whitlam government have such an agenda? This seems, prima facie, unlikely. Perhaps a more realistic understanding is that it sought to address, but failed to resolve, the complex policy and social issues that faced the Australia of the 1970s – such as energy policy, human relations, constitutional reform – and that still face us today. But should we look to the 1970s for keys to solving them?

Such questions would normally be addressed, in a collaborative project like this, in a preface written by the editor –a preface that explained the rationale and significance of the project, identified how each contribution adds to the argument, drew out key themes, and related them to the existing literature to show that what we are learning is actually new

and meaningful. The editor of this collection, acclaimed Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, has not provided this necessity. In its absence, the book lacks coherence and fails to substantiate the promise of the title.

Hocking has contributed an erudite essay that only serves to illustrate the broader problem. Exploring Whitlam’s constitutionally bold manoeuvre of using S57 of the Constitution to resolve a dispute between the two houses of parliament through double dissolution and joint sitting in 1974, she suggests this was critical to the success of Whitlam’s reform agenda. Quite possibly true. But how does this narrative inform our understanding of contemporary reform politics? What is the implication for ‘modern Australia’?

Someone has tried to impose coherence on the eleven essays here by labelling them chapters and grouping them under two headings, ‘Governing for the 21st Century’ and ‘From Inspiration to Implementation’. These categories are too broad to carry analytical meaning and in any case are never elaborated. So the reader is left with the publisher’s blurb on the back cover, replete with its unexamined assertions (‘more and more visionary’, ‘clearly a forerunner’). There is not even an index.

In a field that has enjoyed so much excellent scholarship in recent years, not least by Hocking herself, it is very hard to see what this collection contributes. g

Stephen Mills is honorary senior lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney.

EVERYBODY LIES: WHAT THE INTERNET CAN TELL US ABOUT WHO WE REALLY ARE by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Bloomsbury

$24.99 pb, 349 pp, 9781408894705

With the help of new data such as Google searches, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz promises to reveal our innermost secrets. ‘Everything is data!’ he writes, ‘And with all this new data, we can finally see through people’s lies.’ Everybody Lies is a technoevangelist’s search for clean answers amid the tangle of society, a glossy catalogue of online activity realised as a prized commodity in the information age.

Stephens-Davidowitz is particularly enthusiastic about the power of big data to challenge ‘conventional wisdom’, but too often his examples are contrived or naïve. Google searches for jokes plummeted in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example, demonstrating that laughter may not be the best medicine. I am reluctant to turn for revolutionary insight to someone who, prior to his research, believed that growing up in poverty rather than privilege offered a better chance of success in professional basketball because poor people have more ‘drive’. Certainly, Everybody Lies demonstrates the extent to which conventional wisdom can disguise structural inequalities. That, or the earnest authorial voice striving for the truth about the human psyche is itself a construction (or a lie?).

Everybody Lies orbits twin foci of racism and the sexuality. Both are rich subjects littered with salacious disclosures. You would really have to run the gamut of paraphilia not to blush at some elements of human sexuality illuminated by search data and nobody will be surprised by the fact that the United States exhibits a deep strain of racism and misogyny. But it is interesting to learn that internet searches for racist jokes are one of the stronger predictors of Trump support, and that there is a correlation between a higher unemployment rate and increased searches for pornography and ‘spider solitaire’. If nothing else, Everybody Lies offers fascinating insights into how we use the internet.

Kirk Graham ❖

‘Love is work’

Suzy Freeman-Greene

BITCH DOCTRINE: ESSAYS FOR DISSENTING ADULTS

by Laurie Penny

Bloomsbury

$24.99 pb, 373 pp, 9781408881613

Like Wonder Woman loping across a battlefield, arms raised, bracelets repelling bullets, Laurie Penny charges boldly into the culture wars. In Bitch Doctrine, we traverse trigger warnings, misogynistic trolls, sex work, commodity feminism, gender identity, transphobia, free speech, nerd entitlement, left-wing rape apologists, and toxic masculinity, exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump.

Naturally, ‘Orange Hitler’ gets some of Penny’s best lines. He is ‘a lacquered, lying sack of personality disorders’, and the 2016 US election campaign resembled ‘a wet dream that David Lynch might have had after falling asleep watching Fox News’. Wit is an essential part of the armour worn by Penny, a young, British, ‘genderqueer’ feminist. ‘Some of my best friends truly are straight, white men,’ she assures us late in this book. ‘Sometimes we do straight white men things together, like eating undercooked barbecue meat and scratching ourselves in front of Top Gear.’

Bitch Doctrine is a collection of columns and essays written by Penny between 2013 and 2016. After a feisty introduction (‘I’m not interested in making my politics safe and sweet and unthreatening for men’), they are grouped thematically in eight chapters. Penny is a contributing editor at the New Statesman

and writes for publications including Vice and The Guardian, but we are not told where or when most of these pieces were published. This is frustrating, as some seem dated already.

Penny’s voice is knowing, astringent, ironic, and fiercely smart. She is especially good at highlighting hypocrisies and picking holes in arguments. If men got pregnant, she writes, ‘pro-life activists’ would be called ‘forced-birth extremists’.

In one fine essay, she demolishes the monolithic ideal of romantic love and catalogues the benefits to young women of being single. Men, she writes, are allowed to think of romantic love as ‘a gift that they expect to be given’. Women, by contrast, ‘learn from an early age that love is work’.

At her best, Penny opens your mind, offering glimpses of a different way of living. In one essay, she tells of her commitment to polyamory, also known as ethical, non-monogamy. Over the past ten years she has been a ‘single poly’ with no main partner, dated people in open marriages, and been in three-person relationships. Rather than ‘marriage, mortgage and monogamy’, this version of ‘having it all’ involves ‘talking honestly about feelings’, ‘setting realistic expectations’ (and yes, ‘shagging around’).

Penny describes herself as ‘a radical’ and alludes to socialism on occasion. But while she talks breezily of the need for structural change, there is little detail on how to achieve it. Eventually, she fesses up. It is hard to talk about the leftist vision for a better world, she tells us, ‘for the simple, human reason that we’re worried we’ll be laughed at’. This seems a cop-out. Fear of mockery doesn’t bother her when wading into gender issues. I’d like to know more, for instance, about the commune where she lives. Surely given the obscene inequity of today’s housing market, transforming living arrangements will be vital to achieving social change.

I am glad that Penny is out there, making rapid-fire interventions with bracelets raised. Despite receiving death threats and being told she deserves to be raped by ISIS, she writes back to the armies of men who attack her with ‘relentless spleen’. While offering an insight into today’s backlash against feminism,

she weaves in accounts of feminists from earlier eras, connecting their bravery to contemporary struggles: women like Emily Davison, the English suffragette who leapt in front of George V’s racehorse at the Epsom Derby in 1913; and the American Nellie Bly, one of the first ‘gonzo journalists’, who got herself admitted to a nineteenth-century insane asylum to write about it.

Still, as I read this book, I found my attention often waning. The columns started to sound repetitive, regardless of their ostensible topic and the rightness of her arguments. (Toxic masculinity is destroying the world … Women’s unpaid labour should be valued … Feminism requires men giving up special privileges.) Collections of columns are easy fodder for publishers. I would like to see Penny write an original book where she goes out into the world, reporting on this dark, historical moment and delving more deeply into those resisting the populist right.

One of the weakest parts of Bitch Doctrine is the section on Trump’s ascension. Things are moving at such a crazy, dread pace that polemics written days or weeks after his election no longer matter. Like a ‘fatberg’, in Naomi Klein’s memorable words, Trump dominates the body politic, each Tweet-laden day bringing a fresh crisis. Amid Penny’s sweeping statements about misogynists, ‘frightened women’, and ‘the white patriarchy’, there is a glaring omission in her response to Trump’s victory. According to CNN exit polls, fifty-three per cent of white American women voted for him. As unpalatable as this statistic is, feminists must acknowledge and try to understand it.

Just as Penny ignores Trump’s appeal to women, there is scant acknowledgment here of men (even straight, white ones fond of chargrilled meats) who are committed to feminist ideals. Yet late in Bitch Doctrine, in an essay on Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Penny notes that come the collapse of civilisation, men and women will need to cooperate to survive. When the world burns, she writes, ‘we must learn to survive each other, because we can’t survive without each other’. g

Suzy Freeman-Greene is the arts and culture editor of The Conversation

Inverting Faust

Alex Miller’s autobiographical new novel

Geordie Williamson

THE PASSAGE OF LOVE

by Alex Miller

Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 592 pp, 9781760297343

Every author has some version of origin story: a narrative describing what it was that first compelled him or her to write, or at least what attracted them to the role. You can hear the tale harden into myth as an emerging author shapes themselves to those obligatory rubrics of selfdisclosure required by writers’ festivals. Sometimes the transition from wouldbe novelist or short story writer is so smooth as to be seamless, an osmotic passage from student of literature to practitioner. These are more likely to be authors already inculcated with the requisite cultural confidence and tutored intelligence of their caste. The children of the creative classes are those who are born to write, as others are born to rule.

But there is another, perhaps more interesting kind of author – the sort who emerges from nowhere. The progenitor figure in the modern Anglosphere tradition is D.H. Lawrence, that wild, weird, proletarian genius (in the local context, Miles Franklin offers a different yet no less compelling case, based on gender and nation rather than class). Unlike those who have been raised up in the relatively sophisticated cultural infrastructure of English literature departments or creative writing degrees, whose tendency is to address themes or subjects removed from direct experience, selfmade writers are likely to take their own emergence as a subject. They have willingly chosen their way, not inherited the possibility of the writing life. The story they have to tell, at least in part, is the story of their becoming.

Alex Miller has, for the three decades since the publication of his first fiction, been an exemplary author of the second kind. This is not to say that his themes – anger over the treatment of

Indigenous peoples at white Australia’s hands, appalled empathy with European Jewry’s sufferings during the twentieth century, fascination with artists and the visual arts, regret for the loss of certain ways of being in the world once grounded in rural or peasant cultures –are not universal in scope or political in implication. Yet, as Miller’s new novel, his twelfth, reminds us, the wider world is illuminated in his work by reference to the intimate and the local. The Passage of Love is a novel that explicitly revisits aspects of Miller’s life with the aim of shedding light on subjects beyond its biographical orbit.

Ostensibly, Miller’s writing career began in Melbourne, at the age of twentysix, after he graduated from the University of Melbourne. It is these years, and the long and arduous passage from would-be writer to published author that followed them, which provide the raw material for what is surely his longest fiction to date. It has the epic sprawl of some old-school Bildungsroman and, indeed, Thomas Mann is name-checked early on, when a German-Jewish émigré gives the narrator, a young, workingclass South Londoner named Robert Crofts, a copy of Mann’s Doctor Faustus

That novel, of course, tells the story of a composer who makes a deal with Mephistopheles, trading the possibility of romantic passion for two and half decades in which he is able to create music of uncommon brilliance. The Passage of Love inverts that narrative. Robert Croft’s story is one in which the would-be author gives up writing for over two decades in order to care for the woman with whom he becomes personally entangled. It is the story of a man whose hunger for artistic creation is stymied by a flawed marriage:

a sacred, rather than a diabolical compact, but no less implacable for that.

So much of Robert Croft’s story accords with that of Miller’s own, however, that it is difficult to shake the sense of pure memoir. A handsome young ringer, based for some years (since his teenage emigration from the United Kingdom) in Queensland’s Gulf Country, turns up in the grand Victorian capital with little more than the hat on his head. There he submits to the daily discipline of paid manual labour, feverish with inchoate desires and barely smothered rage. It seems he is suffering from ontological, as much as sexual, frustration.

While the latter is soothed via a brief affair with an older woman, a freeliving socialist, the former is addressed only when an academic, an economist at the University of Melbourne, takes an interest in Robert’s case. In two consequential interventions, the scholar first encourages the younger man to enrol at university, then introduces Robert to the woman who will become his wife. On paper, Lena Soren is a paragon of middle-class rectitude: a former head girl of Methodist Ladies College who plays piano and spends her days employed as a social worker. In truth, she is a wild and unruly spirit. Lena is immediately drawn to Robert, seeing him as the hero who will release her from the prison of probity she inhabits.

There is more than a touch of domestic melodrama, particularly in these early sections. Robert does not free Lena so much as get locked up alongside her. Having initiated an affair with Robert, the young woman admits as much to her mother, who exerts her class prerogatives to insist on a shotgun wedding. Robert is still young enough to bully and retains just enough forelock-

tugging from his Anglo upbringing. Besides, he is in lust, if not quite in love, with Lena. Reluctantly he accedes to the Soren family’s fait accompli. What follows is a slow-burning catalogue of marital breakdown enlivened only by Miller’s trademark prose, limpid and grave and stately in progression, each sentence fragment tongue-and-grooved with the next:

…when Lena looked into his eyes, what he saw was not the happiness of a bride, but a kind of sorrow, a longing and a melancholy that lay deep within her, as if the person she really was, her own person, that secret person not displayed in the portrait but left blank, would be required to fight its way to the surface from the suffocating confinement of this other existence.

After Lena’s mother dies, whatever psychic bandages are left holding her together fray and break. She runs off to Italy, obliging Robert to follow. The years to come find them based in Sydney, where the tyro author makes his first, halting efforts at a novel, based on his Queensland experiences, and then Canberra, where he takes a job as a public servant and abandons his tentative vocation altogether. It is only when the couple make one last-ditch effort to repair their relationship, by moving to a remote bush block in the Lower Araluen valley in rural New South Wales, that the creative urge rises in Robert once again. That said: it is only the final breakdown of their marriage that permits a definitive shift.

If there is weakness in The Passage of Love, it resides in the closeness between life and art. Miller married Anne Neil in 1961; the relationship eventually failed. The places where Robert and Lena lived and work rhyme strongly with those where Alex Miller and his first wife lived and worked, also. Everything down to the title of his first published short story appears here in unamended form. This knowledge creates in the aware reader a sense of uncomfortable, even voyeuristic proximity. In an autobiographical essay published in a 2011 monograph on Miller’s work, the author admits discomfort when it comes to memoir:

‘who but the self-deceived would claim to be able to write with moral detachment about themselves?’

Yet this is a novel, which, inevitably, applies its creator’s weight to the thumbscales of judgement. The other voices it contains or echoes, whether they belong to the Aboriginal stockman, Frankie, who was Robert’s first friend and the inspiration for his primary fictional efforts, or to Martin and Birte Bloch, cultured survivors of the Shoah based on Max and Ruth Blatt, Miller’s first and most significant literary supporters, or to Lena herself, a woman who rises from these pages damaged and emotionally absent, suffer from an unwarranted propinquity.

Miller’s story is long, intense, and vital, even as it notates the years of drift and unhappiness that characterise the author’s extensive prehistory as a writer. But it is desultory in the usual cleansing rituals of contemporary autofiction. Karl Ove Knausgaard, to take a major recent example, is careful to foreground the truth content of his writings from the outset – he insists his literary productions are transcriptions of real event – it is then up to us how

ghost flock

fictive we take them to be. A few interstitial chapters, told from the present by an author now deep in the autumn of life, indulging in retrospective admiration and guilt, are the only self-conscious buffer between living novelist and fictional mask that The Passage of Love has to offer. The virtues of honesty and artistic remove it claims as fiction can feel threadbare as a result.

This criticism is one that should, however, be modulated by what we know of Miller’s other borrowings from real life. We revere earlier novels by him, such as The Tivington Nott (1987) and Conditions of Faith (2000), despite the degree to which they are grounded in real persons and events. It may be that time and distance will allow us to see The Passage of Love as one more in the grand continuum of Alex Miller’s fictionalised self-examinations. With such perspective, we may see the author’s more immediate presence fade, overgrown by those universal themes first planted in the soil of the self. g

Geordie Williamson is a Picador publisher and the author of The Burning Library: Our great novelists lost and found (2011).

While women scanned the horizon, fishers and hunters tended their nets, someone etched the Lapwing crown-plumes in clay.

Abandoning hunger and its frozen ground, they soar South with the Grigale wind

Middle Sea harbingers of the Lampuki-fish moon, its halo a herald of autumn rains.

Outlines, incisions quicken those plovers’ flight through terracotta sky. A ghost flock, timeless on stone.

Annamaria Weldon

Annamaria Weldon is represented in the 2017 edition of WA States of Poetry (now online).

Trick mirror

Peter Carey’s iconoclastic new novel

Paul Giles

A LONG WAY FROM HOME

by Peter Carey

Hamish Hamilton, $32.99 pb, 360 pp, 9780143787075

On learning that the premise of Peter Carey’s new novel involved a test of automobile reliability on a round trip across Australia, my first response was to dismiss it as a thin conceit for encompassing the country’s remoter landscape within a work of the imagination. The internet, however, quickly delivered old Pathé newsreels revealing not only that this Redex Trial was a demonstrable historical event, but also that no less than 50,000 people showed up at Sydney Showground to see the cars off on their cross-country journey. Truth, indeed, can sometimes seem stranger than fiction. Didn’t they have anything better to do, even in 1954?

A Long Way from Home is a major work of fiction by the writer who will probably be regarded, in a hundred years, as the leading Australian novelist from the early part of the twenty-first century. Though Carey, long resident in New York, is sometimes regarded in the land of his birth as a suspiciously deracinated figure, the unsettling power of his best work derives precisely from the way he hollows out national mythologies of all kinds and reinvents familiar narratives as ludic fables. This is the basis of his demystification of Victorian England in Oscar and Lucinda (1988) or of Tocqueville’s idealisation of US democracy in Parrot and Olivier in America (2010), as well as of the myth of bushrangers in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). In all these cases, Carey flattens out naturalised worlds of emotional affect into systems of pastiche. Many readers hostile to Carey’s work, like those hostile to the work of his friend Salman Rushdie, are uncomfortable with the forms of structural alienation endemic to an author who envisages his objects through a strategic sense of

distance that is only partly satirical in nature. The most memorable vignettes in A Long Way from Home derive from the book’s sardonic evocation of Australian domestic culture in the early 1950s: advertising jingles, radio quiz shows, competition in rural Victoria between Ford and Holden car dealers. The fact that the first section is set in ‘Bacchus Marsh, 33 miles from Melbourne’, where the author himself grew up, enhances the nostalgic ambience, and the book is anchored by vivid portraits of car salesman ‘Titch’ Bobbs and his feisty wife, Irene, who conspire to promote their professional fortunes by winning the Redex Trial.

Yet nostalgia is not the main concern of this ambitious novel. A Long Way from Home turns much more challengingly on what the idea of ‘home’ means and how a homeland is framed and memorialised. Accompanying the Bobbs on their car journey around Australia is Willie Bachhuber, a teacher (apparently of German ancestry) who, as the book unfolds, learns more about his own genealogical entanglement with Indigenous culture, with Bachhuber’s reluctant overcoming of amnesia effectively mirroring that of the country at large. Carey deploys again the ventriloquist idiom he perfected in True History of the Kelly Gang, one that uses a first-person narrative to get under the skin of the fictional characters. He also juggles the dialogical style that characterised Parrot and Olivier by his method of alternating chapters between different narrative points of view, in this case those of Bachhuber and Irene Bobbs. This opens up Carey’s text to illuminating (if disorienting) shifts in perspective, with the theme of exile signalled in the book’s title referring not only to Bach-

huber’s own loss of his imagined ‘ancestral home’, but to a whole ontological series of geographical and philosophical dislocations. The author’s frequent use of scare quotes for words such as ‘“violent” contact’ or ‘“seed” money’ or an ‘“undulating” road’ introduces what one might call a rhetorical sense of dislocation, where disjunctions appear between a world of conventional signs and the more amorphous nature of experience: ‘The map showed a road but nothing was so definitive in real life.’ This is in accord not only with complex Indigenous relations to place and displacement, but also with the principled alienation promulgated in the book’s final sentence, which suggests how ‘our mother country is a foreign land whose language we have not yet earned the right to speak’. Carey’s use of the word ‘earned’ here implies a suffused sense of guilt, as though the author’s own apprehension of his native land from his New York exile could be seen as merely a heightened version of the ‘foreign’ condition haunting Australia more generally.

The acerbic comedy in this book, revolving around the arcane rules and regulations associated with the Redex Trial, makes for a highly enjoyable reading experience. The success of the novel’s larger ambitions, addressing as it does ‘the question of what it might mean to be a white Australian’ (as Carey himself put it), will inevitably be more contentious. The author vividly portrays the casual racism of bureaucratic Australia in 1954, but he recovers this through a retrospective method that reflects Bachhuber’s own ‘passion for atlases’ and the character’s fascination with maps of time as well as space. A Long Way from Home

consequently seeks to excavate an alternative history of Australia in the midtwentieth century, one that juxtaposes colloquial realism with an anthropological, scholarly inquiry into how Indigenous culture is measured and recognised. In the way it encompasses multiple and sometimes contradictory strands, the novel skilfully refracts, as in a trick mirror, the condition of Australia in 1954 through its parallel formation in 2017.

The whole question of how Indigenous cultures relate to white Australian history seems recently to have run into a conceptual brick wall, blocked off by imponderable questions of authenticity. In this context, what is particularly unusual and striking about Carey’s work is its use of dark, coruscating humour as an enabling device, as when Bachhuber remarks of the ‘blackfellah’ riding in his car of how he ‘could feed from this red earth as if it were a grocery store’. This ironic idiom is designed not so much to marginalise Indigenous culture as to render it part of the complex postmodern world. When the wonderfully drawn Doctor Battery, who gains his nom de plume from the way he restores car batteries through seemingly magical rituals involving the heating of corrugated iron, remarks on ‘Tadpoles swimming in his spit’, Bachhuber says that he isn’t sure if the Doctor is ‘communicating ancient Law or teasing me or both at once’. Something of that quality of hybridity, of integrating Indigenous culture with a more opaque style of self-reflexive comedy, is the force that galvanises this brilliantly iconoclastic if inherently unstable and deliberately uneven novel. The Indigenous characters here generally appear more elusive and inscrutable than the Bobbs family, while the multifaceted Bachhuber does seem at times to strain credibility. But Carey’s magical realist dimensions, like those of Rushdie, always seek alternative ways of mapping local scenarios, and by reconceiving Australian cultural history through his double idiom of demotic sympathy and cerebral distance, A Long Way from Home provocatively postulates a state of exile as integral to the constitution of the country. g

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney.

Face-off

James Ley

FIRST PERSON by Richard Flanagan Knopf

$39.99 hb, 392 pp, 9780143787242

The literature of the modern era contains any number of stories about doppelgängers, divided selves, alter egos, obsessive relationships, and corrosive forms of mutual dependence. The enduring appeal of these doubling motifs is that they give a dramatic structure to abstract moral and psychological conflicts, but they can also be used to suggest that there is something unresolvable or false about our identities. The awareness that the selves we present to others are a kind of projection or performance introduces an element of uncertainty into our social interactions. It opens up the possibilities of selfinvention and manipulation and deceit; it raises the question of whether or not we can ever truly claim to know another human being. As an unreliable character points out near the end of Richard Flanagan’s First Person, the word ‘person’ is derived from the Latin persona, meaning a mask.

It is easy to understand the attraction of these themes for fiction writers, who have professional interest in the problem of thinking their way into other people’s realities. The labour of imaginative identification requires the cultivation of a divided consciousness. At the same time, however, it actively confuses the distinction between self and other, creating an ambiguity that is potentially transformative. Is the act of creating a character a form of self-projection or selfeffacement? Does the author write the book, or does the book write the author?

These questions, and many more besides, are evoked in First Person, a novel that styles itself as a psychodrama, but finds room for musings on the themes of writing and creativity, the shallowness of the commercial publishing industry, the wonder of childbirth, and the fraudulence of the financial system. It is set in 1992. The narrator, Kif Kehl-

mann (who is recalling events many years later), is an aspiring Tasmanian novelist in his early thirties, with pressing family responsibilities and no real prospects, who is unexpectedly hired by a publisher named Gene Paley to ghostwrite a tell-all memoir. The subject of this potboiler is a con man with the preposterous name Seigfried Heidl, who has gained his notoriety by defrauding the banks of $700 million, a brazen crime for which he is soon to be tried and, undoubtedly, convicted. Kif’s job is to spend six intensive weeks in a Port Melbourne office with Heidl, extract as much biographical information as he can, and fashion the revelations into a publishable book.

The dramatic focus of First Person is the intense face-off that develops between the ghostwriter and his evasive subject. Heidl proves to be maddeningly uncooperative. He evades the simplest questions about his origins. The few stories he does tell are obviously untrue, full of blatant contradictions. ‘The challenge to reconcile such outrageous lies,’

Does

the author write the book, or does the book write the author?

Kif comes to realise, ‘lay not with him, but with you, the listener.’ Heidl’s casual disdain for the truth renders him inscrutable, making it impossible to tell if he is merely a shameless bullshitter or if he is concealing something genuinely sinister, but it also has the effect of turning him into a ‘funhouse mirror’. Kif provides a variation on the metaphor when he complains to Heidl that his story has ‘more angles than a smashed mirror … It is a novel.’

Any writer who writes a book about a writer trying to write a book runs the risk of contorting himself into an inbent position where he is, as the saying goes, up himself. First Person is not that kind of book; in fact, it is Flanagan’s most artfully constructed and thematically complex novel to date. Yes, it is an often introspective work about the doubts, personal sacrifices, creative struggles, and deformations of character that are necessary to forge a fiction writer’s

sensibility; yes, the narrator resembles the author in several crucial respects. Heidl’s outrageous flair for self-invention leads Kif to reflect upon his own comparatively meagre powers of invention, and he draws a novelist’s lessons from their encounter: ‘I was learning from him the power of suggestion rather than demonstration; of evasion rather than enlightenment; of giving only one fact – or really, just the rumour of a fact – and then letting the reader invent everything else around it.’

But Kif’s uneasy sense that Heidl is slowly taking him over, burrowing into his psyche, undermining his dimly understood ambition to become a novelist, is also used to draw out a more significant and far-reaching conflict. Heidl espouses a cynical question-begging philosophy that poses as worldliness: he denies the reality of truth and goodness, arguing that everything is a tissue of fictions – a position that conveniently excuses him from any obligation to behave with honesty and decency. The fear that grows in Kif is that Heidl is right: maybe the world really is built on lies and the famous confidence man was merely playing the system by its own rules. ‘Now I think that was precisely the point of all Heidl’s stories,’ he reflects: ‘to make me believe my life was based on illusions – the illusions of goodness, of love, of hope. And persuaded of that, I would betray something fundamental within myself and embrace his world as my real life.’

Flanagan (pace Kif) has never been all that committed to the power of suggestion, having over the course of his career displayed some distinct leanings toward the tell-don’t-show school of novel writing. As its title suggests, First Person is a work written in an ostensibly confessional and reflective mode.Yet its simultaneous awareness of the fundamental unreliability of personal testimonies is not only dramatised in the plot’s cunning twists (in its latter stages, the novel takes on the overtones of a political thriller), but on the level of style. Kif’s attempt to fashion a narrative that might transform Heidl into a ‘single, plausible human being’ is an attempt make an incoherent world coherent again, to create a lie that might nevertheless have the ring of

truth, but this ambition is repeatedly punctured by Heidl’s aphorisms, culled from Nietzsche and a fictional philosopher named Tebbe. At one point, a minor character proposes that Nietzsche’s aphorisms are best read as a stand-up comedian’s one-liners, but their acuity is such that that Kif cannot help but internalise them; the paradox encoded in their form – the confident assertion of the absence of certainty – encapsulates the moral struggle at the heart of the novel.

There is a sense in which First Person might be read, as Kif remarks at one point, as a kind of ‘parable’. It is a story about the soul-level corruption that results from a loss of faith in the indispensable notions of truth and goodness, though its lesson remains somewhat ambiguous. Kif remains caught between the necessity and inadequacy of fiction, fatally aware of the double-edged nature of creativity. He is compromised and he compromises, as we all do. Yet one of the recurring ideas in First Person is that there is an elusive and multifaceted quality to life that no story can ever adequately capture. ‘Life is permitted chaos,’ Kif remarks near the end of the novel, ‘but books have to fake the idea that life is order.’ On this point, it is appropriate that the novel’s best set-piece is the scene in which Kif’s partner Suzy gives birth to twins, an act of creation that is free of the taint of falsity and more deserving of awe and respect than any feat of the imagination. g

RUBIK by Elizabeth Tan Brio

$29.99 pb, 328 pp, 9781925143478

Invoking the Rubik’s Cube – a puzzle where twenty-six ‘cubelets’ rotate around a core crosspiece – Rubik is less a novel and more a book of interconnected short stories exploring narcissism, neoliberalism, and consumerism. At the book’s core is Elena Rubik, who dies in the first chapter with a Homestyle Country Pie in her hand. Despite her demise, Elena remains the protagonist of the novel via her robust digital footprint: people write ‘condolence messages on her profile … express[ing] their grief in 420 characters or less’, weekly newsletters amass in her inbox, she endures as a contact in her friend’s mobile phone directory, and her comments remain on internet forums. Elizabeth Tan responds to the cube’s solution of returning all sides to a uniformity of colour by emphasising the isolation, despair, and quotidian nihilism at the heart of contemporary society’s obsession with competitive self-interest and extreme individualism.

At its most impressive, Rubik explores the paradox of loneliness and alienation in a technological age of 24/7 networking and connectivity. However, this theme often extends to Tan’s creative practice, which makes the reading experience more like trawling the internet with multiple browsers, pop-up advertisements, flashing icons, and repetitive sales pitches. This is parodied in the witty ‘Congratulations You May Have Already Won’, in which penderghast@gmail.com responds to the spam ‘CLICK NOW FOR EXCITING GIVEAWAYS !!!!!!!’, but it makes it difficult for the reader to connect with any of the characters – which is mostly the point.

Satirical speculative fiction (or weird fiction, as it has been labelled) has become a more popular genre since Jennifer Egan’s kaleidoscopic A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). Indeed, Julie Koh’s masterful Portable Curiosities (2016) traverses similar terrain to Rubik, but with more bite. A quirky experiment, Rubik’s charm lies in the satisfaction derived from the disparate parts of the narratives, slowly locking into place.

Cassandra Atherton

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne.

Sobs and whispers

Anna MacDonald

THE BOOK OF DIRT

by Bram Presser

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 303 pp, 9781925240269

Within the last decade, a new wave of writers has emerged whose work is indebted to W.G. Sebald. Sebald’s name, become an adjective (‘Sebaldian’), is often used as shorthand for describing a writer’s approach to history and memory, or his or her use of images alongside word-text, or the presence of a peripatetic narrator, or the rejection of conventional generic categories such as ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’. Edmund de Waal, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Jáchym Topol, Erwin Mortier, and Katherine Brabon, to name a few, have all been critically associated with the German author.

For readers of Sebald it is impossible not to recall his prose narratives – Austerlitz (2001), especially – in aspects of Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt. Presser’s novel relates a grandson’s quest to understand the experiences of his grandparents, Jakub Rand and Daša Roubíčková, who survived deportation from Prague, first to Theresienstadt then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, and (for Daša) a factory in Merzdorf, Silesia. The novel shifts between first-person essayistic sections that describe the narrator’s search for traces of his grandparents – in the archives of Yad Vashem and Beit Theresienstadt (both in Israel), on the streets of Prague, at Terezín, and the site of the Czech Family Camp at Auschwitz – and a more conventionally novelistic narrative in which the lives of Jakub, Daša, their families, friends, and fellow prisoners are reimagined in light of these researches.

As in Sebald’s prose narratives, Presser’s novel inhabits the dynamic region between fiction and non-fiction.The narrator is also named Bram Presser. The archive, and the problems associated with memory and historical rep-

resentation are ever-present. The Book of Dirt integrates word-text alongside family photographs, reproductions of letters and archival documents, and pictures taken by the author, a number of which echo photographs that appear in Austerlitz. Like Sebald’s protagonist –whose mother was deported to Theresienstadt, and who returns to the city of his birth in search of his parents and his childhood self – Presser’s narrator wanders the streets of the Old City ‘hoping to find’ traces of his grandparents: ‘Could it be that, walking where they, too, once walked, I might feel them again, in a warm gust of air, a tightening of the hand, a familiar scent drifting from a nearby restaurant?’

The similarities between Austerlitz and The Book of Dirt are, at times, startling. However, interestingly, Presser seems to be borrowing certain narrative techniques from Sebald while using them to argue against the latter’s narrative project.

Sebald made a point of approaching sites and experiences of horror ‘obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation’ (interview with Michael Silverblatt, 2001). For Presser, by contrast, looking directly at the horror of the Holocaust is crucial to the responsibility he and his narrator have assumed. Presser makes inventories in Sebaldian fashion, but his lists are not of architectural features or varieties of moths; they are, rather, of names, ages, sites of death, types of death. Presser writes lucidly of the indignities of transportation and camp life: of beatings, rapes, starvation, and the stench of burning human flesh. He re-imagines the sounds that accompany extreme brutality:

Gasps, whimpers, sobs. The steady hum of electricity pulsing across deadly filaments. Dogs: panting, barking, scratching at wood. The swish of buckets filled with human waste. Screams, coughs. An orchestra of motors. The crunch of heavy boots … No birds. Never any birds.

Presser refrains from evoking the most notorious images. His use of ‘direct confrontation’ is concerned more with

persistent silences and an attempt to write out of the fear that ‘[w]ithin a few generations almost all of us will have been forgotten’. In keeping with this aim, Presser credits the photographs he uses, which function more as illustrations to the word-text than do Sebald’s oblique references. And in ‘A Note on Historical Sources’, Presser insists upon the need for ‘transparency and historical fidelity’, itemising the liberties he has taken with particular historical material.

Presser – a descendant of Holocaust survivors – and Sebald – the son of a German soldier – both confront the silences that have obscured the Holocaust. They do so, however, in light of differing inheritances. Sebald refused to ‘abdicate’ his responsibility for ‘the bad dive [German] history took in this century’ (interview with Eleanor Wachtel, 1997). Presser’s narrator describes his complicated inheritance thus:

We, who have been entrusted to perpetuate their memory, to uphold the great refrain of ‘Never again’ … are left impotent in their silence … We cannot ask them, our grandparents, our greatuncles and great-aunts, their friends, because, at the time, they chose not to speak and now they are gone. And we cannot find the pieces of the puzzle that make up those few years of their life, for they, too, are gone.

Like its narrator, The Book of Dirt has a complicated inheritance. It looks back to other return journeys (Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes, 1991) and forward to other third-generation attempts to makes sense out of silence (Michel Laub’s Diary of the Fall, 2014). The result of the persistent silences within inherited testimony and the inability of official archives to provide a complete record of events is a perpetual remembering and re-imagining of those ‘few years’ about which many survivors chose to remain silent. Hence the novel structure of The Book of Dirt, the shifts between archival and other researches, and the stories we make from them. g

Anna MacDonald is a Research Associate at Monash University and bookseller at Melbourne’s Paperback Bookshop.

Butterfly nuts

Brian Matthews

A SEA-CHASE

by Roger McDonald

Vintage

$32.99 pb, 288 pp, 9780143786986

As Ratty observed to Mole, ‘There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ In Roger McDonald’s A Sea-Chase,lovers Wes Bannister and Judy Compton would certainly agree, but before they achieve Ratty’s state of nautical transcendence much that does matter has to be dealt with.

Having survived the last, tumultuous period on Friday afternoon, Judy, a new, thoroughly disillusioned teacher, is ‘sobbing at her desk’, when she is suddenly and unexpectedly comforted by Ken Redlynch. He is an Education Department inspector who drives ‘a jungle-green Austin Healey sports car, the BJ8 with an exhaust note like a trumpet blast, had been married three times and was blind in one eye like a pirate’. In no time at all, Redlynch outlines how Judy can rejuvenate her teaching career. He discovers she is the daughter of Dr Elizabeth Darke, one of ‘an intellectual, freewheelingly arrogant sort of brainy family … not left-wing political the way Ken was …’ Judy accepts his offer of a lift – he drives the Healey with the top down, wearing a black Pablo Picasso beret and a ‘red neckerchief’ – and tells her about his invention, ‘the Mark II International Educator … You wedged into a tiny desk, spoke into a mini-cassette Dictaphone, listened back through hissing headphones, and watched Kodak colour slides jerk past on a small grainy screen.’ On its ‘four spindly legs like a lunar lander’, it is portable and is ‘aimed at rescuing teachers from drudgery’. Only half listening as Redlynch describes his brainchild, Judy accompanies him to the pub to meet his wife, Dijana Kovačić, an artist and teacher. At the pub she also meets Wes, who lives on Redlynch’s ketch Rattler, and they fall deeply in love at first sight. It is, we are told, the week in which

Robert Menzies – ‘the abominated Pig Iron Bob’ – died (for the record: on 15 May 1978).

Reading this rush of stuff, especially the details of the Mark II – which we soon discover runs into trouble because of some recalcitrant ‘butterfly nuts’ (butterfly nuts!! surely among the easiest of tighteners/retainers to deal with) – and learning that Judy goes bush on a mission to sell the Mark II to schools, make one wonder, made me wonder anyway, if McDonald was having us on and if I had missed some cues. Why is a writer of McDonald’s demonstrated power, imagination, and narrative command (1915, Mr Darwin’s Shooter, The Ballad of Desmond Kale) concerned to array such marginally credible characters –Redlynch, Dijana, Tony Watson – or even Wes, lumpish and dogged for much of the time but transformed at the end? Only Judy, who first appears as that standard education department cliché, the disgruntled neophyte trapped by the bond, grows beyond her own petulance, family complexities, and the machinations of the Redlynch circle among others, to appear, for the last time, transcendent and assured on her boat, the Raymond Compton, which, from a final distance, ‘coalesced into the apparition of a lovely grey swan bobbing on the water’.

The assurance and luminescence of that last image provides an answer to questions about what precisely is this novel’s abiding interest and concern. When McDonald puts out to sea, so to speak, he is in splendid form, at his most engaged and brilliant.

No other boats were out. It was a mad day. They drove broadside, leeward, with as much canvas raised as could be dared, which was little, the engine screaming and the feeble prop thrown up into the air and thrashing down again. They could see a line of surf paralleling them. A mist hung over it like a veil. Rattler was caught within two enclosing headlands of Great Exhibition Bay and would need to sail out of the bay to survive but would only be able to do so if the wind changed … They crouched, waiting, holding on, dashing bullets of sting from their eyes, wearing their

bulky red life jackets lashed tight. The wind did not change …

Through Wes, McDonald savours the sea world: ‘Boats were a universe implicated in the sea around him. If the world had a consciousness, boats were its dreams, called into action by the elements, made real in the world on waking. Boats had taken Wes over and spat him out … after a time when he’d chewed dirt as a penance [for narcissistically wrecking Rattler].’ The image irresistibly echoes Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby-Dick where he describes the end of Jonah’s tumultuous, spiritually regenerating voyage in the whale’s belly: ‘… from the shuddering cold and blackness of the deep the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun … and vomited out Jonah upon the dry land and Jonah [was] bruised and beaten, his ears like two seashells still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean …’ Like Jonah, with the sea surge once again in his ears after an outback exile, Wes begins to see the truth of things.

A Sea-Chase is a flawed story, driven by, yet too fully at the mercy of, an urgency of passions of which a yearning for the ‘vast and endless sea’ is the most powerful, and the most imaginatively successful. Narrative strands enough for several novels are tentatively advanced and put on hold, but there is something endearing and gripping about the somewhat chaotic unfolding of this story and its refusal to be resolved. Wes and Judy don’t sail off into the sunset. Ishmael-like, they simply determine, independently yet forever in tune with each other, to ‘sail about a little and see the watery part of the world’. g

Brian Matthews’s books include Manning Clarke: A life (2008), which won the National Biography Award in 2010.

The explorer

Carol Middleton

THE RULES DO NOT APPLY: A MEMOIR

by Ariel Levy Hachette

$29.99 pb, 208 pp, 978034900530

In the first chapter of her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy writes, ‘Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.’

Born in New York during the Reagan era, she is describing the world she grew up in, one in which you were told that you were in control of your life and could achieve anything. In suggesting that this world view might be narcissistic, Levy foreshadows the moment when she lost everything: her baby, her life partner, and her house.

The pivotal moment was first recorded in her award-winning essay ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’ (2013), which she wrote for The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 2008. This personal essay marked a departure from her usual profiles of outstanding people, such as Caster Semenya, Nora Ephron, and Edith Windsor. Now she had turned the lens on herself, to tell the story of how she gave birth, prematurely, in a hotel bathroom in Mongolia. It is a riveting story, slightly distanced, and told with a journalist’s verbal acuity. When I first read the essay, I was stunned by the account but not deeply moved, though I too had given birth prematurely in a similar situation, with the same disastrous outcome.

The bathroom scene became the kernel of the memoir, which explores what

came before and after the baby’s birth. Levy goes back to her childhood, to find the place where her path began. Her father played a game with her, Mummy and the Explorer, in which she chose to play the Explorer, a role she has kept up ever since, taking risks and thrusting her way around the world in pursuit of adventure and controversial stories. At an early age she decided to become a writer. This meant ‘paying her dues’ as an assistant at New York magazine in the 1990s, but she was on the road to freedom.

The idea for her first major assignment, about an obese women’s nightclub, was given the nod by the editor of New York magazine, John Homans: ‘That’ll be fun for you, Miss Ari.’ That essay also went on to become her first book. Female Chauvinist Pigs (2005) is a polemic against the raunch culture that women were embracing in the belief that it was empowering and feminist.

Gender issues and sexuality have been constant themes in Levy’s journalism, and they inform The Rules Do Not Apply. Levy examines her own sexual development, her joy in finding fulfilment with a woman, Lucy, and embarking on pregnancy in her late thirties. With clear-sighted honesty, she admits to the blindness that prevented her from acknowledging Lucy’s alcoholism and questions her own behaviour: ‘You don’t fly to Mongolia pregnant.’

Like Joan Didion, who famously said, ‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking’, Levy is on a journey of self-exploration. She begins the memoir in journalistic mode, in fine command of structure, motif, and theme. She calls her famous friends by their surnames. She has an annoying fondness for brackets. She writes at a distance from her subject, in this case herself, with a wry sense of humour. In poised, professional prose, Levy pre-empts our disapproval of her risk-taking behaviour and any charge of self-indulgence in her grief by stating upfront, ‘It’s all so overthe-top. Am I in an Italian opera? A Greek tragedy? Or is this just a weirdly grim sitcom?’

By the time she meets Lucy, the woman she marries (unofficially), she has left her flippancy behind and her

writing has become more urgent; now she uses language to uncover the emotional reality, reveal her vulnerability and describe a world in which she is losing control. She describes her first encounter with Lucy with unabashed naïveté:

She was golden-skinned and green-eyed in her white shirt, and she smiled with all the openness in the world when I walked in the door. She had the radiant decency of a sunflower. It felt as if I had conjured her out of the dark. Not just the bewitched darkness of the blackout, but all the nights that had come before then, when I went to bars and parties, searching for someone who wasn’t there. But here she was now.

Two thirds of the way through the memoir, we come upon the scene in Mongolia, much of it lifted verbatim from the original essay. It is gut-

Levy

pre-empts our disapproval of her risktaking behaviour and any charge of self-indulgence in her grief

wrenching, with a profound sense of loss. Levy’s ‘competent self’ has finally given way, taken over by her ‘bewildered self’, and she is alone. ‘Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.’

There is a subtle shift through the memoir from this competent self, the self-made journalist, to the fearless woman who faces the exigencies of nature: life and death. It takes the loss of all she loves to realise that she is not in control: certain bodily experiences, in particular, are out of our control, and take place beyond the realm of language. Giving birth is one. Remarkably, Levy has found words to describe the visceral emotions that attend birth and death. Drawing on her skills to uncover the animal nature of her womanhood, she has made the transition from journalist to author gracefully. g

Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic, and author, based in Melbourne.

Entries are now open for the

2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is now worth a total of $8,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. Online entry is available via our website.

First prize: $5,000 and an etching by Arthur Boyd

Second prize: $2,000

Three other shortlisted poems: $500

Judges: John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb

Entry Fee: AU$15 for ABR subscribers or AU$25 for non-subscribers (the latter includes a free four-month subscription to ABR Online)

Closing date: 3 December 2017

‘I am deeply honoured to have won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. My sincere thanks to ABR for continuing this prestigious prize, which is a great support for poets.’

Judith Beveridge, 2015 winner

Full details and online entry are available on our website

www.australianbookreview.com.au

ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of Ms Morag Fraser AM.

‘That hit, that buzz’

Brett Whiteley’s emulators in the dock

Johanna Leggatt

WHITELEY ON TRIAL

by Gabriella Coslovich

Melbourne University Press, $32.99 pb, 360 pp, 9780522869231

It was the late Robert Hughes who said that ‘apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world’. Journalist Gabriella Coslovich quotes him in her account of the 2016 Whiteley art fraud trial, repeating the line to one of the accused, art dealer Peter Stanley Gant, as he complains to Coslovich about the ramping of certain artist’s prices, the avaricious nature of the art world, and his belief that its chief enthusiasts are tone-deaf in their tastes and wholly obsessed with making money. Never mind that it was a business Gant himself was routinely profiting from, as Coslovich points out to him.

Whiteley On Trial is Coslovich’s detailed and impeccably researched investigation into the Victorian Supreme Court prosecution’s attempt to prove that Gant and Melbourne conservator Mohamed Aman Siddique were engaged in a fraudulent enterprise. The pair was convicted in 2016 – in defiance of a Prasad direction from the trial judge to find the defendants not guilty – but later acquitted when the prosecution withdrew the case on the eve of the appeal.

The case was highly unusual on a number of fronts. Whistleblower Guy Morel, who was not a victim of the alleged fraud, had come across the suspect paintings at Siddique’s Collingwood storeroom. Between 2007 and 2010 he secretly photographed the creation of three large paintings in the style of Whiteley. Gant maintains he sourced the paintings in 1988 from Whiteley’s assistant at the time, Christian Quintas, who died before charges were laid. The prosecution alleged that Siddique was creating the suspect paintings in an arrangement with Gant, who would then sell them as Whiteley originals. The defence, in turn, alleged the paintings in

the storeroom were mere copies. It is not illegal, after all, to attempt to copy an artist’s work. Whiteley’s ex-wife, Wendy, who was estranged from her husband during the period he supposedly painted the works, emphatically maintained that they were fakes. The defence argued that she couldn’t possibly comment with any authority.

Disputes over the provenance of paintings and their authenticity are rarely decided in Australia’s criminal courts and, tellingly, none of the alleged victims pressed charges, despite rumours circulating in the media since 2010 about the suspect paintings. Many factors combine to keep art fraud cases out of the Australian criminal jurisdiction. They are notoriously hard to prosecute, as police often don’t have the resources to devote to them – the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has shown little interest in tracking down art fakes – and victims are frequently reluctant to speak out because they either feel foolish or fear the devaluation of their investment. The first alleged victim, Sydney luxury car dealer Steven Nasteski, dropped the police matter after the $1.1 million he spent on the suspect Orange Lavender Bay, was returned, while investment banker and Sydney Swans chairman, Andrew Pridham, sought the $2.5 million he spent on the suspect Big Blue Lavender Bay in the civil courts by filing a suit against Anita Archer, the art consultant who had sold him the piece.

Coslovich includes an extensive account of the seven-day committal hearing. This would be excessive if she were writing about almost any other case, but, considering the complicated nature of the charges, the inclusion of both committal and trial evidence is illuminating. The evidence presented, after all, differs

depending on the court of law. At committal, the defence questioned the accuracy of solvency tests on the paintings, and, as a result, these tests were omitted entirely from the prosecution’s evidence at trial. Furthermore, Coslovich writes that, at the committal, photographer Jeremy James wasn’t 100 per cent sure whether the contentious art catalogue from 1989, allegedly referencing the suspect Orange Lavender Bay and Big Blue Lavender Bay, had even been published. By the trial he was unequivocal: twenty had been printed.

The notion of connoisseurship and its place in a court of law is one of the many interesting ideas teased out in the book. During the committal, defence barrister Robert Richter QC rails at the evidence of the witnesses brought in to testify that the paintings were fake, depicting their attempts at verification as little more than wishy-washy postulation with scant scientific basis. Throughout the trial, the defence team continues the line, arguing that the prosecution had fallen prey to the ‘masterpiece syndrome’ and that not everything Whiteley painted was masterful.

Barry Pearce, former head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is wonderful on the topic of what makes a Whiteley a Whiteley – the dash and energy to the paintings, the exquisite lines, the subtle shifts in texture, the momentous pace of them. A fake, he tells Coslovich, doesn’t give you ‘that hit, that buzz’. ‘The trouble is,’ Pearce says, ‘If you get up in a court and start saying this, these vicious barristers will say, “What’s this crap you’re talking about?” They’ll say it’s some esoteric language. I would refuse to go into court because it is so traumatic when you get attacked by the barristers.’

The best works of non-fiction are those in which the author is possessed in some way by her line of enquiry. In Coslovich’s case, her interest appears to be more than just an extension of her run as arts writer at The Age. She doggedly follows leads, conducts her own research into the provenance of the paintings, and, at times, seems more across the facts than the courtroom barristers. Coslovich and Gant go back years; in 2011 he sued The Age over a

series of stories she wrote. And yet he agreed to be interviewed by her on more than one occasion. Her background in journalism is a boon for the reader: she is impressively dedicated to pursuing the major players for interviews. But two key figures, Siddique and Pridham, refuse to speak to her. Coslovich’s firstperson account of the case largely works, but she waits until the end of the book to detail previous Australian art fraud cases, from the outset denying the reader important contextual information as to where the trial sits in the history of Australian art fraud convictions.

Coslovich is a seasoned arts journalist, but, by her own admission, an inexperienced court reporter. She struggles with the burden of proof resting with the prosecution, and suggests that certain defence evidence may be further proof of the pair’s guilt. If you are going to fake a painting, she reasons, you are going to fake provenance, so it is little surprise that certain facts seem to line up neatly. This may well be true, but it is irrelevant when the prosecution’s requirement is to prove beyond reasonable doubt a case of circumstantial evidence.

When placing the case within a broader context, Coslovich is acutely aware of what the failed fraud trial means for future prosecution attempts of alleged art fraud. She notes that the art and legal worlds remain as separate as ever, and that the case has not resulted in a greater accommodation for the role of the connoisseur in the courtroom, for the expert who relies not on blood traces and fingerprints but on stylistic patterns of recognition. Ten years after police investigations began, a shadow still lingers over the suspect Whiteley works, their provenance uncertain as ever. g

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist and former court reporter for Australian Associated Press.

Imprints of Water

The blue painted wall and the blue painted pipe with its throat jagged out is the first thing I photograph because I like blue and to my very shame I have liked brokenness.

In the mornings, black palms as I’m hauling the cooking wire. That’s what ash does with its aftermath and I would hold it, but it washes by.

The Grandmother is doing all the taking-care and sometimes she is sick of it. When the power heaves back on we are liquid like this morning’s butter and she hears it as a running tap.

Under the yard’s only tree is an archetype of tree dozing like a camp dog, bristling its Christmas tinsel and the children are running through the afternoon, wasting their fireworks.

She is dropping dots on canvas in an old rhythm when a sorry takes hold and we wet our faces. I don’t know how many the sicknesses and I never will.

The Daughter is scanning those bubbles in her breast in an Alice Springs clinic and they are not quiet. The Son was walking a long way without water this sadness, but it wasn’t long enough.

A psalm on a yellow door I’ve never rung the bell of. Corrugations in the red road say loud no speed is right.

Every night is a new form of sleep with the Grandmother on the outside because forms roam live to dark snatching and we should worry and don’t worry, our blankets lap and this world is rust-coloured.

Joan Fleming’s most recent poetry collection is Failed Love Poems (2015).

Joan Fleming

‘Now doth

the peerless poet’

‘Serial multivocality’ in the history plays

Robert S. White

HOW SHAKESPEARE PUT POLITICS ON THE STAGE: POWER AND SUCCESSION IN THE HISTORY PLAYS by Peter Lake

Yale University Press (Footprint), $64.99 hb, 688 pp, 9780300222715

Sir Philip Sidney in the 1580s proclaimed the superiority of the creative maker of ‘poesy’ over the moralising philosopher and historian – ‘the historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is; to the particular truth of things, and not to the general reason of things; that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine. Now doth the peerless poet perform both …’ Ever since, literary studies and history, while closely allied, have also kept a wary distance from each other. To imaginative writers and text-based critics, historians can seem literal-minded in their pronouncements on literature, treating works of art as of the same status as any other document, however mundane, and thus unable to transcend their own historical contexts to speak to later generations. Meantime, to the historian, literature (and literary historians, even of the New Historicist school), may seem maddeningly reductive and biased in dealing with complex issues from the past, in an effort to advance some ahistorical theory.

This hefty but readable book by Peter Lake, an eminent historian, does a service to interdisciplinary studies in the sister disciplines by showing that the two can be mutually enlightening rather than at odds, in dealing with Shake-

speare’s plays based on historical chronicles. Lake does protest too much that he is not primarily a Shakespearean scholar, since his expert knowledge of political issues facing Shakespeare allows him to explore with insight problems of literary significance that are only dimly perceived by literary critics.

The first lengthy and detailed chapter on ‘Contexts and Structures’ sets up a capacious model for the multiple tensions and questions in the 1590s which come to be encoded in Shakespeare’s history plays. The all-important problem facing England concerned future succession to the throne in a period when the monarch showed no signs of either begetting an heir or nominating a successor, and these issues are embedded in all their complexity by Shakespeare in the Henry VI plays and elsewhere. Also, so long as Mary Stuart lived there was a boiling anxiety about legitimacy which led to what Patrick Collinson called the exclusion crisis. This in turn was built upon deep and dangerous animosities between Protestants and Catholics in a post-Reformation setting, with farreaching consequences for English foreign policy, especially towards Spain. Beyond these issues, open discussion of a republican possibility and getting rid of the monarchy altogether was being increasingly aired. Conspiracy theories

and suspicions of treason, tyranny, and legitimacy abounded on all sides. It was a volatile mix, and Lake’s analysis shows that Shakespeare was not only entirely aware of the parameters but was also actively intervening through his plays in ways that could be readily appreciated by sophisticated audiences who were no mere groundlings but informed political citizens. Theatre itself plays an important part in Lake’s account, with audiences required to do the work of becoming conscious of the topical significances of the plays in ways that did not expose companies to prosecution or charges of treason. The result of all this is a nuanced and substantial account of the controlled ambivalence which can be seen as Shakespeare’s signature method: Lake writes of a ‘serial multivocality’ in the plays and continues, ‘My point is that, over and over again … Shakespeare’s plays do indeed open themselves up to a variety of readings’, and that their ‘multiple interpretations or applications’ were quite deliberate, controlled, and ‘intensely political’. By setting up such a comprehensive and complex net of considerations, Lake allows himself room to draw intriguing connections between some plays which are not often compared. Richard II is

usually seen as initiating the ‘Second Henriad’ (despite the fact that Shakespeare was unlikely to have foreseen this afterlife), whereas in this book it is analysed instead in the company of King John, as two different treatments of monarchical legitimacy. John has only a fragile claim to the throne and his right is constantly called into question, whereas Richard is undoubtedly legitimate but through his deeds turns into an unctuous tyrant who misuses his mastery over the ceremonial rhetoric associated with power, tenaciously clinging to a misplaced insistence on divine right. Both are overthrown, but for different reasons that hinge on different understandings of legitimacy. In this account, the plays complement each other in the central issues raised concerning claims to the throne, tyranny, and rebellion, placed in older historical contexts but with topical ‘resonances’ for Elizabethan audiences. In another example, Richard III is unexpectedly yoked with the Roman play Titus Andronicus, both providing dramatised commentary on the main problem haunting politically minded Elizabethans in the 1590s, how to orchestrate an orderly succession of monarchy in a state in which there is no overwhelmingly obvious heir and where the system is uneasily part-elective and part-hereditary. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar provides a safe vehicle for Shakespeare (and Lake) to dissect another looming contemporary debate over

Puritan arguments for republicanism against the established church’s support of monarchy which came to be articulated confidently in James’s self-interested concept of divine right. In another example, legacies of usurpation itself are seen as a hot topic covertly linking Shakespeare’s Henry V and the Essex faction in Elizabeth’s court. As citizens of Rome and Essex’s followers alike came

Conspiracy theories and suspicions of treason, tyranny, and legitimacy abounded on all sides ...

Lake’s analysis shows Shakespeare was actively intervening through his plays

to realise, honour and popularity could be invaluable political commodities only if they were exploited with adroit timing. In both cases, the central question ‘concerns the prudence of violent attempts to arrest political change and impose political form on the flux of events, even at the height of such moments of change or transition’.

Two apparently small matters of presentation might reignite some of the tensions between the disciplines of history and literature, though they are almost certainly unintended and caused by the publisher’s decisions rather than

the author’s. Speaking as a literary historian, I find the habit of quoting lengthy passages of poetry embedded in prose sentences, with each line separated by a ‘/’, has the tendency, at least typographically, to flatten poetry into something that looks more like prose, the effect of turning Sidney’s heightened ‘poesy’ into something like the historian’s ‘bare WAS’ of prosaic factuality. Where the publisher may have stepped in, lies in the recognition that to separate and indent the passages of poetry would probably have added an extra hundred pages to a book which already fills 688 densely printed pages. However, this in itself leads to my second carping and admittedly unworthy point, that historians do seem regularly to be allowed and even encouraged to write Very Long Books apparently without the imposition of word limits. Quite apart from being the bane of harassed reviewers, there is an injustice to literary scholars (unless their name is Harold Bloom) who are sternly reminded in their contracts that anything over 300 pages will not be tolerated. In this case, however, the length is justified, and pays rich dividends in helping to make Shakespeare’s history plays come alive in new ways. g

Robert S. White is Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia. Shakespeare’s Cinema of Love was published in 2016.

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Arts Highlights of the Year

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, concerts, operas, ballets, and exhibitions, we invited twenty-six critics and arts professionals to nominate some personal favourites. We indicate which works were reviewed in ABR Arts on our website, and when.

Robyn Archer

While the original production of Saul (ABR Arts, 3/17), directed by Barrie Kosky, was made in Europe, this version included several Australian singers, a local chorus, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Christopher Purves in the lead role was superb.

I include David Hockney: Current (NGV) for a number of reasons. While I constantly advocate appropriate support for living artists in all genres, the visual art ‘contemporary’ bandwagon begs interrogation. Hockney said, ‘All art is contemporary, if it’s alive: and if it’s not alive, what’s the point of it?’ I’d argue that there’s as much alive in old stuff as there is in the new – and as much corpsed and pointless in the new as in the old.

Confessing bias (I was the MC and performed in it), I mention The Coming Back Out Ball (Melbourne Town Hall) not for the night itself, which was a moving hoot, but for the three-year project. Tristan is a terrific creator/performer but this work showed his dedication to the social issues facing elderly LGBTIQ people, and showcased the special ability of the arts to bring hard societal material into a joyous and celebratory space.

Ian Dickson

In a strong year for theatre, Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica (ABR Arts, 3/17) stood out. Kip Williams’s production matched the scale and sweep of Kirkwood’s enthralling play. Banished from the Opera House, Opera Australia presented two works in concert form. Nicole Car and Étienne Dupuis made an exciting pair of protagonists in Massenet’s Thaïs (ABR Arts, 7/17). Good though the much-heralded Jonas Kaufmann was as the eponymous Parsifal, the performance (ABR Arts 8/17) was dominated by Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz. Best of all was the sound of the Opera

Australia Orchestra, finally liberated from underneath the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre. Terence Davies’ biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion (ABR Arts, 6/17) could have been a sombre affair, but Davies and the magnificent Cynthia Nixon found the humour and resilience in the belle of Amherst.

Rosalind Appleby

I’ve been brooding all year on the metaphors in Dmitry Krymov’s Opus 7 (Perth Festival). The production was a requiem for lives obliterated by the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Puppetry, mime, dance, string, cardboard, and buckets of black paint constructed an immersive journey underpinned by the swagger and pathos of Shostakovich’s music. Lost & Found’s innovative Trouble in Tahiti was similarly provocative, presented so physically and emotionally close to the audience that the work took on an uncomfortable personal resonance. The opera was set in a home in Perth’s affluent western suburbs, where Bernstein’s critique of consumerism and silver screens couldn’t have been clearer to the audience watching with voyeuristic fascination from the patio. In contrast, the rippling energy of WA Opera’s The Merry Widow was sheer fun. A young, versatile cast premièred Graham Murphy’s beautiful, dance-infused production where every act was a party fizzing with romance and comedy.

Harry Windsor

The best local features I saw this year were comedies, not a genre we do well often. But Pork Pie, a remake of Kiwi classic Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), directed by the son of the original film’s director, and Ali’s Wedding, directed by tyro Jeffrey Walker, were confident exceptions, deftly made charmers bursting with colour

and a very Antipodean strain of self-importance-busting humour. In terms of international fare, the most affecting film I saw was Katell Quillévéré’s Heal the Living. Set in Paris, it’s the story of a heart transplant seen from every angle: from the point of view of the donor and his grieving parents, the recipient and her frightened sons, and the hospital staff who trundle between them. It features the scene of the year, in which three teenage boys go surfing: a hypnotic symphony of music and image that rousingly celebrates a life being lived joyously, shortly before it’s snuffed out.

Des Cowley

There were many memorable performances by jazz and improvising musicians throughout 2017. Two that stood out incorporated strong visual and theatrical elements. Pianist and composer Erik Griswold partnered with the Australian Art Orchestra and visiting musicians from China and Singapore to perform his extended suite Water Pushes Sand at Jazzlab. The dramatic work, which features both traditional Sichuan melodies and jazz improvisation, was highlighted by Zheng Sheng Li’s startling ‘face changing’ dance. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Simmons’s The Usefulness of Art (ABR Arts, 8/17), performed by a large ensemble at fortyfivedownstairs, similarly incorporated theatrical costume and design to heighten the power of this impassioned music. The Melbourne International Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 6/17) was distinguished by the first Australian appearance by pianist Carla Bley, who, aged eightyone, demonstrated why she is considered one of jazz’s finest composers.

In a year that included many films, I continue to be haunted by Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, an excoriating vision of contemporary Russia. Raoul Peck’s powerful documentary on James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (ABR Arts, 9/17), confirmed that the writer’s words remain as powerful today as when first published.

Anwen Crawford

Robin Campillo’s BPM – an urgent recreation of AIDS activism in Paris during the early 1990s –felt resonant and still timely. BPM won the Grand Prix and the Queer Palm at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, but seemed to fly under the radar at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Other MIFF highlights included Maud Alpi’s Still Life and Sergei Loznitsa’s Austerlitz, two experimental documentaries that investigate how we confront – or fail to confront – killing on an industrial scale. The former film is set inside a slaughterhouse; the latter takes Holocaust tourism as its subject. On a lighter note, Kelly Fremon Craig’s The Edge of Seventeen was a cut above the usual coming-of-age dramedy. Kelly Reichardt’s acutely observed Certain Women and Barry Jenkins’s exqui-

site Moonlight (ABR Arts, 1/17) both reached local screens at last; two gifted directors, two contemporary masterpieces.

Andrew Ford

I didn’t expect much from Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise (Sydney Festival), but was deeply moved by the evidence of his burgeoning talent. He was a real artist – obsessed and hard-working. Had he not been executed, he might have become a very good one. Also in the festival, Mary Finsterer’s Biographica was full of fine music. The actor protagonist was distracting – shouting to be heard above the singers of Sydney Chamber Opera and players of Ensemble Offspring – so I blotted him out. As a result, I can’t tell you exactly what the opera was about, but it sounded magnificent.

At WOMADelaide, The Manganiyar Classroom called to me across a crowded park. I knew nothing about it in advance, but couldn’t move until it was over. I live in the country with a seven-year-old daughter, so don’t get too much. Together, we saw Disney’s Moana at the Bowral Empire. It’s rather good. To get the full effect, watch it in a cinema next to a child trembling with excitement.

John Allison

Coincidentally, Austria provided my two most thrilling opera experiences in 2017. The Landestheater Linz’s staging of Hindemith’s Die Harmonie der Welt vindicated a great rarity by this now sadly unfashionable composer. The hit of the Salzburg Festival was the artist–director William Kentridge’s staging of Wozzeck, an unusually satisfying realisation of Berg’s masterpiece. Several of the best concerts in Britain this year have often come courtesy of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the new music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Her free-thinking flair makes her the most exciting thing to have happened to the CBSO since Simon Rattle.

While not wanting to appear unserious about my work, I cheerfully admit to planning reviewing trips around art exhibitions. My most memorable show away from this year’s international blockbusters was at Bucharest’s National Gallery, where its brilliantly curated exploration of Romanian socialist realist art –Art for the People? 1948–1965 – proved fascinating to someone interested in Balkan culture.

Michael Halliwell

Pride of place goes to Brett Dean’s Hamlet (ABR Arts, 6/17), which premièred at Glyndebourne with an allAustralian creative team. A taut, musically mesmerising version of this highly challenging play makes it one of the most significant new operas in recent years. For my second choice I conflate two recent London productions: Girl from the North Country and Woyzeck

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in Winter (ABR Arts, 9/17). The first incorporates lesser-known songs from Bob Dylan into a searing melodrama by Conor McPherson, while Woyzeck, adapted and directed by Conall Morrison, conflates the play with Schubert’s Winterreise. Both extend the boundaries of the so-called ‘jukebox musical’, fusing Steinbeck with Brecht.

Finally, a Sydney production (Hayes Theatre Co) of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, directed by Dean Bryant, gives a welcome outing to this neglected work. A cast of young singers led by David Campbell provided an evening of unfailing energy and vivid characterisation. The performance I saw was coloured by the Las Vegas shootings a few days before. America and its guns – nothing changes!

Lee Christofis

Men in a state of meltdown dominate my two top dance shows this year: The Winter’s Tale, from London’s Royal Ballet, at QPAC (ABR Arts, 7/17); and Cockfight, by Joshua Thomson, Gavin Webber, and tiny Gold Coast company The Farm, at Dance Massive, Melbourne. Created by British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and composer Joby Talbot, Winter’s Tale is the best dance drama to appear here in decades. Edward Watson, as the deranged Leontes, King of Sicilia, led a superlative cast in a strange story of deranged jealousy, brutal injustice, and gentle redemption. Cockfight is a hyper-kinetic contact improvisation work about a dysfunctional manager (Webber), who taunts and nearly kills a younger, smarter job applicant (Thomson) in a battle of wit and will. Seduction, lies, threats, and rage take dangerous flight across a sterile office. Each object, especially the phone cord, becomes a weapon as they fight for supremacy. Too brutal to watch, too funny to miss, this was Aussie Grand Guignol at its best.

Will Yeoman

Beyond Caravaggio at London’s National Gallery was impressive but also slightly oppressive. Stepping from this gloomy world into the blazing Australian and southern French sunshine of the Australia’s Impressionists (National Gallery) showing at the same time made a strong impression.

Back in Perth, the highlight of PIAF’s Beethoven and Beyond, with the LA-based Calder Quartet, was Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, with local clarinettist Ashley Smith: a performance characterised by subtle and exquisite balance and phrasing, with Smith’s floating, plangent tone and deeply expressive playing matched by the Calder’s unerring instinct for light and shade. I enjoyed Terence Davies’ masterful biopic of Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Lost and Found’s innovative, witty production of Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, mounted in a private home, and a sublime Mahler Fifth from WASO

under chief conductor Asher Fisch, who, it appears, can do no wrong.

Morag Fraser

I Am Not Your Negro is the work of art to heed in 2017. Directed by Raoul Peck and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the film is artfully compiled – a model documentary. But it is James Baldwin – that mobile face and inimitable voice – who is the compelling, prophetic presence, as provocative and unanswerable now as he was when he uttered these confronting words: ‘The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. And it’s not a pretty picture.’

Baltimore offers guided tours of The Wire’s bleak territory, but its Museum of Art revealed another side of this intriguing, evolving city when it mounted a grand comparative exhibition of works by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn (many of the Matisses came into the Museum’s collection courtesy of Baltimore’s redoubtable and philanthropic Cone Sisters). The art was breathtaking, and the documentation – encompassing both artists’ lifelong shuttle between representation and abstraction, and the subtlety of Matisse’s influence on the Californian –a curatorial triumph.

Zoltán Szabó

Two highlights came from the same genre: opera, presented by different companies. Neither work was staged, thus the artistic impression was entirely musical. In June, Pelléas et Mélisande (ABR Arts, 6/17) by Claude Debussy was performed in Sydney for the first time since 1998. At the helm of the SSO, Charles Dutoit led a mostly native French-speaking cast with restrained passion and boundless sensitivity. Debussy’s opera was much influenced by Wagner’s music dramas, so it was fitting that the latter composer’s Parsifal made a long-awaited return to the Opera House. Pinchas Steinberg conducted the excellent cast, where primus inter pares Kwangchul Youn’s mesmerising performance stood out in the role of Gurnemanz as much as Jonas Kaufmann’s singing of the eponymous hero.

A final memorable experience came from Tokyo, where András Schiff (who will visit Australia in October 2018) offered a thought-provoking and terrific juxtaposition of the penultimate sonatas of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven (ABR Arts, 3/17).

Tony Grybowski

With the closure of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera Australia grasped the opportunity to present opera in different venues across Sydney. One of these experiences was a concert presentation of Wagner’s Parsifal. It was a treat to see the Opera Australia Orchestra (usually hidden in the pit) shine on the stage of the Concert Hall.

Every five years the German town of Kassel is transformed into a magnet for lovers of contemporary art. At documenta 14, founded after World War II as a way to enable artists to join and express a voice to help rebuild a nation, it is exciting to see Australian artists on an international stage. This year, three Australians were represented: Gordon Hookey, Dale Harding, and Bonita Ely, all presenting large scale work that drew on narratives involving displacement, ecological destruction, and oral traditions of Aboriginal communities.

Bangarra Dance Theatre’s major 2017 production, Bennelong, by Stephen Page took the company to a new level – compelling and captivating with beautiful movement, dance, design, and a wonderful score by Steve Francis.

Susan Lever

After Nina Stemme’s and Stuart Skelton’s heartstopping performance of Tristan und Isolde with the TSO in Hobart (ABR Arts, 11/16), concert opera performances were again high points of this year. Opera Australia’s Parsifal was glorious, but OA’s concert version of Thaïs was delightful in a different way, with the energetic young singers Nicole Car and Étienne Depuis clearly enjoying singing Massenet’s melodic music together in the warm atmosphere of the Sydney Town Hall.

I saw two exceptional theatre productions: first, Bell Shakespeare’s thrilling interpretation of Richard 3 (ABR Arts, 3/17), with Kate Mulvany; second, New Theatre’s revival of Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous. The young performers of this play, especially Julia Christensen in the lead, found both the poetry and political power in Hewett’s classic. It was an intelligent and engaging production. If only more people had known about it.

Tim Byrne

Apart from Malthouse Theatre’s sensitive but radical production of Michael Gow’s Away (ABR Arts, 2/17) and some magnificent local choreography in Australian Ballet’s Symphony in C, this year’s best work came from sublime interpretations of major international work. Kate Mulvany was so poised and savage, so damaged and damaging as Richard III for Bell Shakespeare that she seemed born for the role. It was the most impressive performance of the year.

MTC’s production of Annie Baker’s John (ABR Arts, 2/17) was perfect; complex and meticulous, it used its cultural specificity to universal effect, and contained riveting performances from Helen Morse and Melita JuriŠić. Sarah Goodes has quickly established herself as one of the country’s finest directors.

Gary Abrahams’s extraordinary rendition of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs, with Morse joining a stellar ensemble, was so compas-

sionate, so articulate, it seemed like a totally contemporary play. Galvanising and angry, it was theatre as a monumental political act.

Barney Zwartz

Two near-perfect performances: one an opera, one by an opera singer led 2017. Listening to brilliant bass Ferruccio Furlanetto singing Russian songs by Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky in the glorious acoustic of the Melbourne Recital Centre in October was like watching a Ferrari in a go-kart rink: far too much power for the arena, with a purring richness that was seldom extended, but the interest was in the incredible delicacy and control, the fine tunings and shadings, the intimacy, the emotional conviction. Opera Australia’s concert performance of Parsifal, with superstars Jonas Kaufman and Michelle deYoung, and another massive bass in Kwangchul Youn, was mesmerising. Honourable mentions go to Victorian Opera’s beautifully crafted and performed production of Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen (ABR Arts, 6/17), Opera Australia’s ambitious and deeply satisfying account of Szymanowski’s King Roger (ABR Arts, 1/17), and the MSO’s concert performance of Massenet’s lyrical opera Thaïs (ABR Arts, 8/17), with Erin Wall in the title role.

Brian McFarlane

It’s a large claim, but I suspect that Simon Phillips’s production of Macbeth (ABR Arts, 6/17) is the best I have ever seen. In a contemporary military setting, it never struck a jarring note as it melded two eras. Without interval, it made remorseless the rise and tragic fall of its eponym.

So many films clamour for mention that it is hard to limit my choice to three. In the part-Australian feature, Lion (ABR Arts, 1/17) first-time director Garth Davis showed himself admirably versatile as well as compassionate in dealing first with the child’s agonising loss and then in rendering the decent feelings of the foster parents without descending into sentimentality. Loving, the UK/US drama of interracial marriage and its ensuing legal struggles, was note-perfect in its retelling of a poignant, ultimately triumphant, real-life story. As for ‘real-life’, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is a stunning recreation of this ‘finest hour’ in all its chaos and courage.

Peter Rose

Nothing quite matched Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s phenomenal 2016 Messiaen recital (absurdly overlooked in the Helpmann Awards) or the TSO’s Tristan und Isolde concert, with Stuart Skelton and Nina Stemme, but there were some memorable performances. Two Hamlets I saw in June couldn’t have been more different: Brett Dean’s brilliant new opera at Glyndebourne, with an exceptional cast of singers,

many of whom will return for the Adelaide Festival. Then came Robert Icke’s version of the play, with Andrew Scott’s searching, mystified prince cogitating his way through the soliloquys.

I relished Kip Williams’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (ABR Arts, 7/17), brilliantly mounted, hilarious in places, and featuring a memorable performance from Heather Mitchell.

And films? Sally Hawkins deserves an Oscar for her role as the eccentric painter Maud Lewis in Aisling Walsh’s underrated Maudie: physical acting at its best. James Baldwin, in the superbly edited documentary I Am Not Your Negro, makes present-day orators look like pygmies. Baldwin’s message, fifty years on, remains incensingly topical.

Leo Schofield

At the Edinburgh International Festival, I heard an unforgettable concert performance of Die Walküre, with a superb line-up of singers, including Bryn Terfel, Christine Goerke, Simon O’Neill, Amber Wagner, and Karen Cargill, plus the Royal Scottish Orchestra under Andrew Davis. A week or so later, Opera Australia came up with a magnificent concert Parsifal, with Jonas Kaufmann, Michelle deYoung, Michael Honeyman, Warwick Fyfe, the mighty Korean bass Kwangchul Youn, and the Opera orchestra and chorus under Pinchas Steinberg. If anything, this was musically finer than the Edinburgh performance, the half dozen Sydney Flower Maidens easily outsinging their eight Scottish Valkyrie sisters.

Other unforgettable events were the Brisbane season of the Royal Ballet and the open-air gala in Cairns; Daniil Trifonov’s dazzling solo recital at Angel Place; the ACO’s concert with the spotlight on Sätü Vanska, Timo-Veikko Valve, and Glenn Christensen; the Adelaide Festival trifecta of Glyndebourne’s smashing Saul, the third and by far the finest incarnation of The Secret River, and Lars Eidinger’s in your face Richard III. The once-great Adelaide Festival had finally its mojo back.

Diana Simmonds

In March I wrote, ‘Three of the most memorable musical experiences of my life have happened in Adelaide: Elke Neidhardt’s production of Wagner’s Ring, the State Opera of South Australia’s Cloudstreet, and now the Armfield–Healy Adelaide Festival’s offering of Barrie Kosky’s Saul.’ Meanwhile, in Sydney, independent theatre has been spectacular, with Siren Theatre’s The Trouble With Harry, and Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous. Musical theatre hub Hayes Theatre Co thrilled with Paul Capsis in Cabaret, Virginia Gay in Calamity Jane, and Emma Matthews in Melba. The rise of Red Line at the Old Fitz continued; outstanding were Doubt: A Parable, the beautiful 4:48 Psychosis, a new work from Louis

Nowra: This Much Is True (ABR Arts, 7/17), and a breakout performance from Gabrielle Scawthorn in The Village Bike. Women dominated the landscape: Kate Mulvany as Richard 3, Genevieve Lemon in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Helen Thomson in Hir, and Heather Mitchell in Cloud Nine.

Ben Brooker

Like almost everyone who saw it, I was blown away by Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s Saul, the Barrie Kosky-directed centrepiece of this year’s Adelaide Festival. The return of Adelaide’s prodigal son did not disappoint, proving a feast for all the senses. Also in this year’s Festival was Wot? No Fish!! (ABR Arts, 3/17), as intimate as Saul was epic. Based around sketches made by his great-uncle, a working-class East End Jew, British writer–performer Danny Braverman’s simply and sparklingly adumbrated family history moved me deeply. Mr Burns, a co-production by STCSA and Belvoir, brought American playwright Anne Washburn’s 2012 post-apocalyptic play, ostensibly about The Simpsons, to vivid life in a production directed by Imara Savage. I must mention Lucy Kirkwood, the young British playwright whose uncommonly ambitious dramas The Children and Chimerica I was fortunate enough to see in London and Sydney respectively. I’m excited about MTC’s production of The Children next year.

Christopher Menz

Fred Williams in the You Yangs (ABR Arts, 10/17), at the Geelong Gallery, was a model exhibition of one of Australia’s greatest artists. A judicious and thoughtfully displayed selection of just over sixty works – oil paintings, prints, gouaches – highlighted his best work from the 1960s.

Opera Australia’s concert performance of Parsifal, with a superb cast under the impressive baton of Pinchas Steinberg, was electrifying and showed how well Wagner’s music dramas present in the concert hall. Angela Hewitt (ABR Arts, 5/17) was in dazzling form during her Musica Viva tour, with intelligent, balanced programs including works by Scarlatti, Ravel, and Chabrier, as well as the obligatory Bach: this time, selected partitas.

Michael Shmith

For various reasons, Melbourne Lyric Opera’s production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea was one of my highlights of the year. As I wrote at the time, ‘the work itself is hard-edged – in soap-opera terms, more pumice stone than Palmolive. Accordingly, it duly received a swift and sinewy performance, keenly driven by [artistic director] Pat Miller, who conducted from the keyboard.’

The National Gallery of Victoria’s monumental exhibition of almost 180 works by Katsushika Hoku-

sai elevated him far above his self-deprecatory summary, ‘Old man mad about drawing’. In fact, the exhibition made one as eternally grateful to the NGV’s Felton Bequest as it did for the eternally fecund genius of Hokusai. Thanks to Alfred Felton (old man mad about art?), a woodblock print of Hokusai’s most famous work, The great wave off Kanagawa 1830–34 has been in the Gallery’s possession for 108 years.

Kim Williams

Whilst there have been many pleasures this year in music, film, and opera, there were three pieces of standout Australian theatre, all conceptually large and all produced by the STC. Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica and Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine were both directed by Kip Williams. The other was a memorable revival of Neil Armfield’s production of Andrew Bovell’s The Secret River at the Adelaide Festival. The Secret River and Chimerica had substantial casts, all too rare on the Australian mainstage in today’s straitened times for the arts. Both were cinematic in their sweep, superbly acted and designed, and hauntingly dramatic. Cloud Nine, one of Churchill’s greatest works, is another reminder as to why she is one of the theatre’s true creative imaginations and a leader. Each play is relevant to today’s polemics on human rights, diversity, and reconciliation. We have much reason to be thankful to Williams, Armfield, their casts and creative teams for making theatre that matters.

Another major personal moment was the Sam Mendes’s London production of Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman – a cast of twenty-one in an intimate but sweeping piece which was emotionally and politically shattering.

Andrea Goldsmith

Thirty years ago I saw Anthony Sher play Richard III. It was a memorable portrayal, one which became the Richard for me. When I read that Bell Shakespeare had cast a woman in the role, I was, frankly, appalled, dismissing it as part of the current trend of having female actors play Shakespeare’s major male roles. How wrong I was. It was a superb production. Kate Mulvany’s Richard was utterly compelling and showed him as wily and evil as well as humorous and seductive. Mulvany played the king in a way that revealed nuances of his character I’d never seen before. One of Bell Shakespeare’s best.

It’s a risky business revisiting old loves. In April, Patti Smith, performed the songs from Horses, her best-known album, originally released in 1975. By the end of the first song, I was on my feet, seized by the familiar music and Smith’s irresistible performance, and so I remained until the music died away. Patti Smith is seventy, she’s still creating, and she is magnificent. At home I dusted off my LP and prolonged the pleasure. g

B eing Ernest

Michael Shmith

ERNEST NEWMAN: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY by

Paul Watt

The Boydell Press $45 hb, 270 pp, 9781783271900

Recently, the chief classical music critic of The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, adroitly summarised the nebulous perils of his job: ‘Music, especially purely instrumental music, resists being described in language. It’s very hard to convey sounds through words. Perhaps that’s what we most love about music: that it’s beyond description, deeper than words. Yet the poor music critic has to try.’ Many have indeed tried and, despite the demands of daily or nightly deadlines, more than a few of them have succeeded in conveying to the general reader the essence of what they hear and see. Mr Tommasini, who attends at least three (probably more) musical events a week, is certainly one of these critics. His preparation: ‘A lifelong immersion in music.’

The true sign of a great music critic – the sort who is a master rather than a journeyman – is one whose words never stale, and whose writings can be read and appreciated years, sometimes even centuries, after their original publication. Such critics possess vast knowledge, dextrous facility with language, and, perhaps most important, an intrepid sense of adventure in discovering and championing new music. Think of such composer–critics as Berlioz and Schumann, or other giants of the form, including George Bernard Shaw, Neville Cardus, Virgil Thomson, Andrew Porter, Alex Ross, and, in particular, the English critic and

author Ernest Newman (1868–1959).

This formidably intellectual and, in his own time, highly influential critic is long overdue for a biography, and we should be grateful to Paul Watt and his diligent scholarship for providing one. There is also something parochially comforting that Watt was inspired to do so after he found a copy of Newman’s book on Gluck in Melbourne’s Grub Street second-hand bookshop in the early 1990s. Watt’s volume is a welcome addition to The Boydell Press’s enterprising Music in Britain, 1600–2000 series.

As Watt makes clear, Newman’s life was far wider than music: this book is just as much about what disciplines motivated Newman and influenced his work, setting him apart from his contemporaries. Newman, as Watt rightly points out, was not simply an English critic who wrote about English music, but a genuine pan-European whose broad vision and disciplined writings had a profound effect on European culture.‘He quickened our antennae, opened doors for us,’ wrote Neville Cardus.

The Lancaster-born Newman, who spent the first fourteen years of his working life as a bank clerk in Liverpool, was a prodigious writer, deep thinker and fluent in nine languages. Although he was remarkably well-read on his chosen subject, he never received a formal music education. In later life, he confessed that he knew ‘next to nothing’ of musical journalism ‘until I was foolish enough to become a musical journalist myself’.

Newman is best remembered for his lengthy tenure as music critic of The Sunday Times, from 1920 to his retirement in 1958 – or, in musical context, from the year Vaughan Williams composed The Lark Ascending to the year Britten composed Noye’s Fludde. Newman would have written millions of words for The Sunday Times (it must be said, he never wrote short), but that was only part of his creative output. Before the Times, there were stints on the Manchester Guardian and The Birmingham Daily Post. When, in 1918, Newman resigned from the latter to move to London, he wrote to his editor, ‘I feel that this town will never do anything in music, and I am very tired of struggling to rouse it.’

In addition to his regular music crit-

icism, Newman wrote many books, on various subjects; his musical ones include a four-volume biography of Wagner (a literary tetralogy to match The Ring), and treatises on Liszt, Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf, and Berlioz. His Wagner Nights (1949), Opera Nights (1943), and More Opera Nights (1954) remain essential references – certainly on my shelves.

Yet, for all his erudition and those capacious word counts, Newman could be concise and witty when required. I think of the rapier remarks concealed in his lengthy literary jousts with George Bernard Shaw on the thorny subject of Richard Strauss: ‘The spectacle of Mr Shaw bringing up the opinion of a British audience on a point of art as a support for his own is delicious. Oh, Bernard, Bernard, has it come to this?’ Then there is a host of other relishable Newmanesque aperçus: ‘The higher the voice the smaller the intellect’; ‘A good composer is slowly discovered; a bad composer is slowly found out’.

Bad composers – to Newman – included Debussy, whom he pejoratively considered the father of atonalism, Schoenberg, whose Pierrot Lunaire Newman described as the ‘cruellest of all musical torture’, and Janáček, ‘Only a cut above the amateur’. In fact, Newman thought modernism as ‘music as hard as nails, music as unemotionally efficient as a calculating machine’.

At times Watt’s book is weighed down by a little too much scholastic ballast. Thickets of footnotes – a necessary evil, alas – sprout on almost every page; they would have been better as endnotes. I occasionally wished that Watt’s fairly straightforward style could have displayed a little of Newman’s own elegance. But these are cavils, not concerns.

This excellent and detailed biography demands to be consulted in conjunction with Newman’s writings. Many of his books are out of print, but can be tracked down online or in dark corners of bookshops. But Newman deserves the same honour afforded to Virgil Thomson, whose collected criticism has been reissued by the Library of America. Great music never dies; nor should great criticism. g

Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor.

Serah Kohw

For those of us who believe in fate…

Aseer is someone who sees what is hidden and Serah Kohw was meant to see but wasn’t interested with the unexplained. To her, a life beyond her own didn’t exist. Until a friend opens her eyes. By travelling to other countries, Serah is introduced to something extraordinary, an experience not found in a tour brochure. But her path is diverted when her protector interferes.

Past spirits appear, and Serah has to make a decision as destiny awaits but the visions are difficult to accept. She wants to flee but to get to the future, Serah has to spend time deciphering clues from the past. And only then can YOU see… DISTRIBUTED BY DENNIS JONES AND ASSOCIATES

Contact SHP at: author@sidharta.com.au

Phone: (03) 9560 9920 Fax: (03) 9545 1742

Web: http://sidharta.com.au

SID HARTA PUBLISHERS Pty Ltd: Suite 99, No 66 Kingsway, Glen Waverley, Victoria 3150.

“What a delightful story. A fascinating glimpse into the world of the supernatural … a scary and ofren bewitching journey into the realms of past lives. For those of us who believe in fate.”

—Vivian Waring, author of When Tears Ran Dry

“The author skillfully brings together fine details of each travel experience as she weaves a magical story across continents and time. The cast of varied characters who each share spirit stories, bring their own background and aspirations into the journey whereby Serah begins to understand her past, present and future.”

—Liz Newton, author of The Jagged Edge of Joy

ISBN: 978-1-925230-03-1

Holden Hoff

Christopher Menz

RAYNER HOFF: THE LIFE OF A SCULPTOR by Deborah Beck

NewSouth

$49.99 pb, 280 pp, 9781742235325

Rayner Hoff, the most significant sculptor to work in Australia between the wars, is most admired for his sculptures in the Anzac war memorials in Sydney and Adelaide. His work was in the classical figurative tradition in which he had trained. While never part of the international avant-garde, he remained modern for his era and adapted to the idiom of art deco. Hoff’s work is known to all Australians through a logo depicting a lion with its paw on a ball, which he designed for Holden in Adelaide in 1927. While his name may be unfamiliar to many people, the Holden lion mascot, instantly recognisable even in its modified form, is still in use today. Now ninety, the Holden insignia is one of the great examples of Australian logo branding; at a time when so many cars are indistinguishable, the mascot is still the easiest way to identify a Holden.

The story of how this Manx sculptor became such a significant figure in the interwar Australian art scene makes fascinating reading. Rayner Hoff was born in 1894. In 1902 his family left the Isle of Man for the mainland, lured by better work opportunities for his stonemason father. Hoff was himself apprenticed as a stonemason in 1908 at Wollaton

Hall, an Elizabethan Robert Smythson prodigy house near Nottingham. From his earliest training he was exposed to the powerful expressive quality that an admixture of sculpture and architecture can have. From the age of fifteen he also studied at the Nottingham School of Art, where he was a successful student. After war service, Hoff continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London; his fellow students included Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. He graduated in 1922 and won a scholarship which took him to Rome for several months. Fortunately for Australia, while he was there he accepted a position as a teacher of Antique and Life Drawing, Modelling, Architectural Modelling and Sculpture at the Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School). Like many artists before and since, Hoff had had to choose between paid work and further studies. That the teaching position on the other side of the world paid nearly three times his scholarship fee must have been an incentive.

Hoff arrived in Sydney with his wife and infant daughter in 1923 and relished his new role. As a teacher he had great success at the school; he was much admired, and his demanding methods produced fine students. Hoff was actively involved in the Sydney art scene and gained many prominent commissions. His early death from pancreatitis in 1937 at the age of forty-two robbed Australia of an artist at his peak.

Hoff’s masterpiece, completed in 1934, is the sculpture components of the Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, produced in collaboration with architect C. Bruce Dellit. The most notable part of the ensemble is the centrepiece sculpture Sacrifice, Australia’s finest and most moving memorial to the Great War. In a classical idiom, with a column of women supporting a nude male figure, the sculpture combines images that represent the sacrifices of both men and women. Sadly, not all of Hoff’s sculptures for the Anzac Memorial were completed. Australian wowserism, so averse to the depiction of female nudity, deprived it of two proposed bronze external sculptures: the nail in the coffin was from the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney. As keepers of public morals, the church used expres-

sions such as ‘gravely offensive to ordinary Christian decency’ and even resorted to invoking its traditional adversary, describing the sculptures as ‘diabolic’. Hoff’s interaction with other artists is explored in some detail. There is a fine account of his friendship with Mary Gilmore, which arose when she sat for the bronze portrait, Gilmore (1934), now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Gilmore wrote: ‘Under the skin the flesh, under the flesh the bone, and behind the bone the

Hoff’s early death robbed Australia of an artist at his peak

ancestor. When I think of what you have done for this sad tired ugly face and the circumstances under which it was done I am filled with wonder.’ Through his friendship with Norman Lindsay, we learn about Hoff’s attitude to Rodin’s work: ‘he failed to fuck his own creations, and wasted cock-stands on women instead of work.’

This splendid volume is generously illustrated with a marvellous selection of photographs that, along with the text and selected quotes from contemporaries, through their letters, gives a vivid sense of Hoff’s generous personality and broad interests. Without a vast archive of primary text-based sources by the subject to draw on, Deborah Beck has used photographs as a starting point for her discussion of Hoff’s life and work. The story is plainly and engagingly told. Beck, who is archivist and collections manager at the National Art School, gives a rich contextual background to the art schools where Hoff trained and worked. There is much insight into the art scene in Sydney during the 1920s and 1930s; from this distance it seems so intimate and small. Beck’s account gives fascinating detail on the commissions, the production methods, the roles of models, the relationship between sculpture and more commercial design work, and the collaborative nature of large sculpture projects, notably the Anzac Memorial. g

Christopher Menz is a former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Grand dilemma

Andrew Montana

THE POISONED CHALICE: PETER HALL AND THE SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE

by Anne Watson OpusSOH

$59 hb, 244 pp, 978064696739

Researching Australia’s most iconic building and writing about its beleaguered history from the time Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 until it opened in 1973 might result in an indigestible plot for many of the building’s enthusiasts. Yet narrating the fraught circumstances behind the completion of the Sydney Opera House by Australian architect Peter Hall and the newly formed consortium Hall, Todd, & Littlemore is just what architectural and design writer Anne Watson has accomplished, warts and all. The outgrowth of a PhD thesis, as she readily acknowledges, this book results from forensic scholarship and is handsomely produced.

For those readers interested in the history of twentieth-century modern architectural styles, this revealing investigation apprehends Utzon’s romantic and organic modernism and fairly dethrones the hagiography surrounding him but not the SOH masterpiece. There are informative references to Hall’s work for Sydney interior designer Marian Hall Best, and to Scandinavian and American modernisms gleaned primarily from Hall’s study trips abroad, and insights into his revelations in Japan. The Australian plywood detailing in the final design of the SOH Concert Hall, for instance, was inspired by the Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa’s new Saitama Community Centre concert hall, near Tokyo, which Hall saw in 1966.

First and foremost, the book exposes and examines the poisoned chalice. Everyone, at some stage, drinks from this chalice. It was left to Hall to remove its toxic potency whilst simultaneously, and knowingly, sipping it. So what was the poison chalice? Controversially, it was the incomplete SOH building. Exit Utzon (almost), and the problems were

glaringly obvious. How does an architect make interiors for their performative function, when this should have been designed before the outward form? Should the Major Hall (renamed the Concert Hall) retain its proposed function as a multi-purpose auditorium or not? The paramount difficulty would be the interior’s conversion from an opera stage to a concert hall with a fixed proscenium arch used primarily for symphony concerts.

Should the Minor Hall (later renamed the Opera Theatre) retain its proposed primary function as a drama theatre or should it become the main opera venue? This would be difficult because the stage and pit were small and audience accommodation would be tight. The exterior having been conceived before the interiors were designed, Utzon’s project became, arguably, a modernist mishap. Interwoven with these heated questions was the future viability of opera in Australia. Was it a dead art form and if so what performing arts genres would the SOH serve? Should the building be called the Sydney Arts Centre? Fortunately it wasn’t, and the half-baked briefs from the SOH Trust were compounded by the lack of considered input from the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the strategic threats of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra to remain at the Town Hall.

Careful never to vilify Utzon, Watson emphasises how Hall’s deference included following Utzon’s preparatory procedures of model-making to investigate the master’s ideas and, significantly, how Hall attempted to find ways to translate these for the interiors and northern windows into built form. Proving impossible, these concepts were wisely abandoned. From the start, Utzon’s conceptual winning design in the 1950s was, according to Watson, a ‘sublime, but essentially unbuildable competition entry’. Indeed, the central paradox was that if pre-planning, design and control had occurred initially, Uzton’s SOH might never have set sail in the first place.

Like probing the growth of an organism, the book uncovers Hall’s efforts to make the interior spaces integrated and working respective wholes. In collaboration, Hall assiduously researched the materials, the prototypes, the acoustics, the sound reverberations, the techno-

logies, the weights and balances, the sight levels and the configuration of seating. Models were made for analysis before any part was committed to a working drawing and contracts were issued. Too often, these later stages were abandoned.

The SOH’s construction was a web of entanglement between architects, engineers, stakeholders, advisors, bureaucrats, government departments, manufactures, NSW state politicians and ministers, press reporters, designers, consultants, and acoustic specialists. The indecisions, restrictions, blunders, misinterpretations, political and power struggles, and miscommunication make for exhausting and at times disturbing reading. But again, Watson never set out to tell a pretty tale. Ultimately, she draws a balanced and instructive account of Hall’s collaborations, compromises, negotiations, resolutions, and inventions. Clearly, Hall’s task was a juggling act between aesthetics and pragmatics, architect and client, and, not surprisingly, architect and engineer. Hall arrived at solutions for the interiors and northern glass walls through an expression of their function in structure and form. Eschewing speculations about what Utzon might have achieved if the public ‘bring Utzon back’ campaign had been successful, Watson determines what Hall and his team achieved – against the odds.

Tragically, the residue from the poison chalice contaminated some of the rank and file of the architectural profession – and Hall himself. Inextricably linked, the negative responses to Hall’s endeavour and his subsequent near erasure from histories and celebrations of the SOH compromised his ongoing career and his health. With resolution, Watson weaves a strident new narrative, an unswerving thesis in Hall’s defence, on his completion of the SOH. Through his integrity and unfaltering commitment to finishing a magnificent building in the service of the arts, Hall, with courage and flair, emerges as a reasoned and expressive ‘form follows function’ architect. His achievement and legacy are made unquestionable but not beyond ongoing debate. g

Andrew Montana is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University.

Heightened times

Brian McFarlane

BALANCING ACTS: BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE

by Nicholas Hytner

Jonathan Cape $49.99 hb, 320 pp, 9781910702895

One of the most appropriate titles since Pride and Prejudice, Balancing Acts adroitly captures the drama and appeal of Nicholas Hytner’s account of his twelve years as director of London’s National Theatre. There have been several different takes on this often-controversial site of some of the world’s most riveting theatrical fare. Previous directors Peter Hall and Laurence Olivier have both had their say, as in Hall’s often contentious Diaries (1983) or in the numerous biographies of Olivier in which his own sometimes irascible views emerged beneath the ‘luvvie’ surface. Best of all to date was Australian Michael Blakemore’s evenhanded chronicling in Stage Blood (2013).

So, what has Hytner to add to this list? In charting his years at the National from 2003 to 2015, he reflects on the challenges of running such an institution. This is not just a history, nor a memoir, though there are crucial elements of each. There is a wonderful sense of a highly productive period in the National’s history, and there is an equally strong sense of Hytner’s personal involvement in the making of that history.

It is worth noting some of those eponymous tensions and their resolutions. As director, Hytner was always aware of the need to balance the claims

of artistry against those of healthy profits. As he says, when trying ‘to juggle substance with pleasure’, ‘Like the Elizabethan players, who rubbed shoulders with the bear pits and the brothels, we are part of the Entertainment Industry.’ Shakespeare was of course to be essential to the repertory, as were other classics, but Hytner knew that new plays, such as The History Boys, or large-scale musicals, or daringly different pieces like War Horse, would also be jostling for places alongside these illustrious predecessors if an eclectic ticketbuying public was to be maintained in sufficient numbers.

Within individual productions, the preoccupation with ‘balance’ again made itself felt. Sometimes, as with the Timon of Athens, he sought to juggle what the play had to say about wealth in James I’s Britain (nothing to do with Athens, he claims) and its potential significance in light of present-day financial dealings. Hytner writes: ‘… it would have taken a theatrical imagination much less opportunistic than mine not to recognise in it a satirical image of fatcat twenty-first century London’. With Hamlet, he is aware of its resonance with highly developed spy networks in later periods; in the Henry IV plays he finds potent echoes of contemporary divisions between town and country, North and South, Scotland and England.

Alert to the possible, even vital, balance to be struck between then and now, Hytner is sufficiently self-critical to note when working on Henry V that, though gaining a ‘vivid impression that Shakespeare was writing for us now’, the company had lost ‘the indisputable truth that Shakespeare was writing for his own audience, then’. Without self-aggrandisement, he can deal equally with his own aspirations, challenging as they so often are, and with what he conceives to be an error of judgement.

One of the major rewards of the book is the way Hytner takes the reader through the processes of play selection, the rehearsal room, the details of staging, and the opening night. He can lead us to gratifying recall of plays we have seen and to making us wish we’d seen those we hadn’t. For reasons now unclear, I never saw either War Horse or One Man,

Two Guv’nors. Reading Hytner’s accounts of how these two hugely popular productions came together – from initial creative sparks to opening-night sensations – I can’t adequately express my regret. The evocative detail with which he brings these to light on the page –or how Danny Boyle’s production of Frankenstein, rotated the actors playing the creature and his creator – is rare in writing about theatrical performance.

Throughout, there is a strongly felt purpose in regard to what the National Theatre means – and it is ‘national’ as well as ‘theatre’. Hytner expresses an ongoing sense of responsibility to those involved, whether creative personnel or management, as well as to the audiences. He can have reservations about an aspect of an actor’s response to a role, but these do not lead to waspish put-downs, and he is aware of how audiences’ tastes change and of their wish for varied fare. Some plays may chime with the national ethos of the moment and will be noticed for this; others may play to nostalgic longings, but they need to have more going for them than that, as he finds in the staging of his favourite musical, Carousel. One of the recurring pleasures of this book is the emergence of other key figures in the National’s history during Hytner’s incumbency. Playwrights such as Alan Bennett and David Hare, actors such as Rory Kinnear and Simon Russell Beale (two of the most revered Hamlets of recent times) are caught with precision and generosity. There is also an engaging anecdote about Maggie Smith, cast to play Lady Bracknell, and persuading Hytner to join her at lunch chez John Gielgud to hear about how Edith Evans dealt with this ‘supporting role’.

In the book’s last ‘impossible balancing act’, Hytner writes of how he was spurred ‘by the contradictory ambition to make theatre for the privileged few on the night, and to spread that privilege as widely as possible’. Those readers who so enjoy the resulting National Theatre Live presentations in cinemas today will have a field day with this book. g

Brian McFarlane’s next book is Making a Meal of It: Writing about film (Monash University Publishing, 2018).

If This Is a Jew

Progressive Judaism around the world

by Elisabeth Holdsworth

‘The foremost challenge of our time remains the passing of Jewish ethnicity, the idea that Jews are automatically joined at the hip by language, history and memory … Without doubt that era is gone … The age of ethnicity has become the age of fractured identity, where we struggle to decide what aspect of identity takes priority and when.’

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman1

For most of my life I have thought of myself as a secular Jew; fascinated by the turbulent history of the Jews, not part of synagogue life. All that changed in 2012. We were living in Goulburn, New South Wales, at the time. My husband was on the point of retirement and we were about to move back to Victoria. During winter, influenza and then pneumonia raged through the town; some people died. Despite being vaccinated, I too succumbed. One morning, I was convinced that someone had placed a ton of concrete on my chest. Something had. My next memory is of waking during the night in hospital in an isolation room, hooked up to tubes and monitors. A man was sleeping in an armchair next to the bed. I recognised him as the doctor who had admitted me, hours, days, years ago. I learnt later that he had been there most of that night pumping antibiotics into me.

‘You’re a lucky woman,’ he said. ‘During the worst of this you were trying to remember a Jewish prayer. I think you may have unfinished business. By the way, you don’t have much in the way of white blood cells. Neutropenia is endemic amongst Sephardic Jews. Your husband tells me you’re Dutch. Up to you now to figure out the jigsaw.’

Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the Americans on 1 May 1945. The ‘camp’, as my mother always referred to it, is disturbingly close to the centre

of Munich. You can hail a tram with that destination written on the front and be whisked away to a pleasant suburb. The camp is still there, a common tourist destination.

My mother didn’t return home to where my father’s family hail from in the south-west of the Netherlands until the middle of 1946. She walked most of the way, carrying a cardboard suitcase given to her by the Americans. There was nothing in the suitcase, but it stayed with her for the rest of her life. On that long walk home, mother developed a lasting gratitude to the US troops who had given her lifts, food, and chocolate.

Primo Levi said: ‘At Auschwitz I became a Jew.’2 At Dachau, my mother misplaced her religion and her sanity, and never truly regained either. Our historic city of Middelburg on the island of Walcheren had been destroyed in the same blitzkrieg that had engulfed Rotterdam. Of the two long-established communities of Sephardim and Ashkenazim, nothing remained except two cemeteries and street names such as Jodengang (Jews’ Alley). One of my earliest memories is of visiting the cemetery in the Jodengang with my mother and throwing stones at sarcophagi. These days, cats lie on the graves sunning themselves on the bones of Sephardim expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century.

My mother was sent to a sanatorium several times during my childhood. Whenever she was ‘away’, I was sent to live with my maternal grandparents. They were part of a remnant community of Sephardi Jews who lived in a no man’s land on the border between the Netherlands and Belgium in a tiny village that also sheltered Lutherans. During the war, Germans whizzed through the village, noted the Lutherans and didn’t realise there were Jews tilling the soil of their small holdings as they had done for some hundreds of years.

Mother’s parents prayed many times during the day – on rising, going to bed, before and after meals. I recall sitting in the middle of a circle of adults who were praying on the beach. They stood, heads bowed, protecting me with their legs. The wind blowing off the North Sea was so strong they were afraid I would be blown away. When the adults had finished praying they built a bonfire from driftwood and roasted potatoes or chestnuts and fish of some kind.

My paternal grandparents were Calvinists, a religion which was bound up with class and aristocracy and the consuming grief of losing three sons to the war. I, Elisabeth Miriam Esther, was the first of both families to be born after the war – and the last.

Having survived a near-death experience in 2012, I went looking for a way to express a deeper involvement with Judaism. But not too much. After all, I hadn’t followed the traditional paths of learning Hebrew or growing up within a congregation. During my childhood on our wind-swept island, there were three registered Jews: my mother, her close friend Anne Frank (no relation to the girl in Amsterdam), and me. My maternal grandparents were the only Jews I knew who practised their religion. Without a rabbi and little contact with the outside world, their faith had become beautiful, pious, and idiosyncratic.

I am a progressive Jew. I demand of Judaism that women and men are recognised equally in the life of a synagogue as clergy, office bearers, and lay leaders. I want to sit where I want in the shul and not to be segregated. As with men, I want to be able to wear a kippah (headgear) and a tallit (prayer shawl), if I so choose. Inclusiveness, and the recognition that human sexuality and gender identification have many forms of expression, is for me just part of life, and I expect it to be regarded thus in the synagogue.

I need to feel free to regard the Torah (the Hebrew Bible) as the evolutionary thought of men and women over a period of a thousand years and not the literal word of God. Accordingly, I look for an interpretation of biblical tract and Jewish law that is modern, relevant and willing to embrace change.

The World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ), headquartered in Jerusalem, is the umbrella organisation representing Progressive, Reform, Liberal, and Reconstructionist Jews. It does not represent the Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox streams. With a membership of two million, the WUPJ is the largest Jewish religious movement in the world.

The United States has the largest share of Progressive (known as Reform) Jews in the world with a membership of 1.8 million and more than 900 congregations. Interestingly, eighty-five per cent of America’s six million Jews identify as progressive in attitude. One in five, or twenty-two percent of all American Jews describe themselves as secular or cultural Jews.3

TuBishvat. Malmsbury Botanic Gardens, February 2017

I live with my husband on the edge of a hamlet (population 147) in the high country of Victoria’s north-east two hours from the nearest Melbourne synagogue. Last year, I found Kehillat S’dot Zahav (KSZ), the Goldfields Community, a synagogue without walls, centred in the Bendigo area. TuBishvat is a minor feast on the Jewish calendar to celebrate nature. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘birthday of trees’. As an interfaith initiative, people identifying with Judaism; Islam; the Presbyterian, Catholic, and Uniting churches have been invited to attend. Under a hundred-year-old oak, on a late summer day, we follow Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black from the Leo Baeck Centre (LBC) in East Kew as he leads us through the service. He notes the places where the three Abrahamic faiths coincide and accompanies us on a battered guitar as we sing.

Keren-Black, who adapted Pete Tobias’s A Judaism for the Twenty-First Century (2007) for the Southern hemisphere, is the Australasian editor of the WUPJ edition of the siddur, the prayer book known as the Mishkan T’filah4 used in Progressive synagogues. He is also the founder of several organisations that have an ecological and environmental emphasis within a Judaic framework. Generally acknowledged as one of the most progressive rabbinical figures in Australia – too much so for some – Keren-Black is a deeply spiritual man. I introduce myself and tell him I’m a Dutch Jew. ‘Sephardi,’ he says knowingly. I wonder how he knows.

At the kiddush (social meal) after the service, Rabbi Keren-Black asks me where I attend shul. I tell him that for the moment KSZ is enough. KSZ struggles to meet eight times a year. ‘That won’t be enough for you in six months,’ he predicts. A few weeks later, I decide to attend a service at LBC, convinced that I don’t need another synagogue in my life. All I need to do is waltz in and out of shuls here and there to fulfil my need to become a slightly more observant Jew. Six months later, almost to the day, I became a member of the Leo Baeck shul and attend services when I can. My husband, who is not Jewish, loves going with me – ‘for the music’.

Sunday, 25 June 2017

A startling item from The Times of Israel Daily Edition headed ‘Bowing to ultra-Orthodox Pressure’ arrives in my inbox. After years of discussions with interested parties5, the Israeli parliament has suspended a 2016 government-initiated compromise to establish a pluralistic prayer pavilion at the Kotel, or Western Wall, the potent reminder of the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce. Since the Six Day War of 1967, effective control of the Kotel has been the preserve of the ultra-Orthodox. The parliament’s decision to freeze the Kotel deal has coincided with a High Court of Justice deadline for the state to respond to petitions on its failure to implement the 2016 agreement.

North of Robinson’s Arch, south of the arch, at the

arch; these are all possible areas where leaders of diaspora Jewry had sought a place for mixed gender worship, where men and women could wear the tallit and yarmulkes together and chant from a Torah scroll.6

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s creaky coalition government rules with the support of parties who represent the ultra-Orthodox point of view, despite the statistical and incontrovertible fact that the Haredi are a minority in Israel. The government has bowed to pressure from the ultra-Orthodox parties in this matter. Anat Hoffman, chair of Women of the Wall, and executive director of the Israel Religious Action Centre (IRAC), both organisations affiliated with the Israeli Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism (IMPJ), responded: ‘The fact that the prime minister, who himself initiated and led the [2016] agreement, is retreating from that historic decision is shameful to the government and the women ministers who were exposed using their vote against women.’7 Hoffman, a fearless critic of the Netanyahu government, was arrested in 2012 for praying with a Torah scroll at the Western Wall. Also on 25 June, cabinet ministers voted to advance a bill granting the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate a de facto monopoly over conversions to Judaism in Israel – that is, the power to decide who is and who is not Jewish. This affects Jews from countries where they are no longer recognised, exercising what is known as the ‘right of return’ to Israel.

Condemnation from within Israel and around the world was swift. Rabbi Gilad Kariv, president of the IMPJ noted: ‘The government has acceded to the demands of the ultra-Orthodox parties and delegitimised the government decision that was passed in 2016.’8

The powerful Union of Reform Judaism (URJ) of North America is headed by its charismatic president, Rabbi Rick Jacobs. He has the ear of Netanyahu and visits with Mahmoud Abbas. The relationship between the URJ and the Israeli Reform/Progressive Movement is close, providing a viable alternative for Jewish life and worship beyond the strictures of ultra-Orthodoxy. In a Jewish Telegraph Agency report on 28 June, Rabbi Jacobs expressed the fear that these bills could in time affect the validity of conversions throughout the Jewish world and further erode laws to do with the right of return.

Rabbi Elyse Frishman, editor of the Mishkan T’filah, said on 5 July:

Last week, as I joined with a contingent from Women of the Wall to pray and sing at the Kotel to celebrate Rosh Chodesh Tammuz (the beginning of the Hebrew month of Tummuz), Jewish fundamentalists – men and women – screamed and blew whistles to drown out our sweet, joyful song and prayer. In months past, we had been kicked and punched by these men and women.9

On 10 July the Chief Rabbinate of Israel responded to widespread condemnation by blacklisting 160 rabbis

around the world. The list included three Australians: Rabbi Aron Moss (Chabad – Orthodox), Rabbi Ralph Genende (Modern Orthodox), and Rabbi Fred Morgan, Movement Rabbi of the Union of Progressive Judaism in Australasia. I interviewed Rabbi Morgan the day after the blacklist made headlines around the world, and congratulated him on being so honoured.

Rabbi Morgan, ‘Rabbi Fred’ to many, is a former senior rabbi of Temple Beth Israel, the largest progressive congregation in Melbourne, a man who has devoted his life to promoting a Judaism that is both accessible and modern. An urbane New Yorker, he was ordained at the Leo Baeck College in the United Kingdom and held a pulpit in Surrey for fourteen years. Rabbi Morgan is a respected figure within the community. As a progressive rabbi, he has no dealings with the Israeli chief Rabbinate.

Another name on that risible list caught my eye: Rabbi Menno ten Brink of the Liberaal Joodse Gemeente (Liberal Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam). Dutch Jewry paid a heavy price during the war. Before the war, the Netherlands had around 170,000 Dutch Jews and an unknown number of Jewish refugees. Three quarters perished during the war. Postwar migration to Palestine and a high incidence of suicide greatly reduced the remaining population.

In the seventy years since the war, Dutch Jewish figures have recovered to 29,000. There are now 3,700 progressive (Liberaal) Jews spread over ten congregations. Rabbi ten Brink leads the largest congregation. He is also the dean of the Levisson Institute, a rabbinical college closely allied to the Leo Baeck College in the United Kingdom.

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the American URJ, was not blacklisted, but several deceased rabbis were. No female rabbis made it to the Chief Rabbinate’s blacklist. The ultra-Orthodox do not recognise the possibility of female rabbis.

One ultra-Orthodox rabbi, in an interview with The Times of Israel, articulated why his community are so opposed to the non-Orthodox strands of Judaism. Nachum Eisenstein, chief rabbi of eastern Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Ma’alot Dafna neighbourhood believes progressive Judaism: ‘threatens to undermine the survival of the Jewish people’. He added: ‘Who gave you, the Reform [progressives], the authority to make up a new religion?’10

On the same day I met with Rabbi Fred Morgan, I had afternoon tea with novelist Andrea Goldsmith. She asked me if I thought Judaism might be on the brink of a schism as great as the split that affected Christianity in the sixteenth century. Several months later, that question remains pertinent and unanswered.

The Jewish religion has been developing for well over three millennia; predating Christianity by at least 1,000 years and Islam by 1,500. None of the polytheist religions present at the time of the early

Israelites survive. The adoption of a monotheistic belief system is the most radical step taken by any civilisation in the ancient world. There is no exact verifiable date or moment when the Israelites, the people we first meet in the Torah, became Jews. The term possibly arose from the Roman word Judea. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, suggests that the Torah evolved over a thousand years, in tandem with the people who came to be known as Jews. In that sense, Jews have always been progressive, forward-looking but with constant glances to the past. They had to be to survive various dispersions; the Babylonian exile, the Roman diaspora, expulsion from England in 1290 and the Iberian Peninsula in the 1490s, and waves of anti-Semitism that continue to the present day.

One Dutch Jew, descended from ‘conversos’ – Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal – shook the Jewish world. Born in Amsterdam in 1632, Baruch de Spinoza, also known Benedictus Spinoza or more simply as Spinoza, was a contemporary of Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt’s House in JodenBreeStraat (Jewish wide street) was around the corner from the Portuguese Synagogue (the Esnoga) and the Spinoza family home.

For the Jews invited to the Netherlands following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, finding themselves in a country without a monarch or sultan, ruled by a princely family of stadholders answerable to a republic comprised of seven squabbling Calvinist provinces prepared to guarantee the Jews religious freedom, must have been heady stuff. Over a period of eighty years, from 1568 to 1648, an era called the Opstand (uprising), the Dutch threw out the Spanish masters of the Low Countries and established the republic. They themselves became colonisers and inaugurated the Dutch Golden Age.

Spinoza, whose Sephardic family had arrived in Amsterdam around 1620, was considered brilliant from an early age. He came under the influence of Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel from the Portuguese Synagogue, who knew Rembrandt intimately. Manasseh established the first Hebrew printing press in the Netherlands. He noticed inconsistencies while printing the Hebrew Bible, which he communicated to the jurist and biblical scholar Hugo Grotius, and doubtless to his brilliant pupil, Spinoza.

From the age of twenty, Spinoza began associating with radical free thinkers. He considered what we mean when we use the term ‘God’ and questioned the divine origin of the Torah. Three years later, while Manasseh was away negotiating with Oliver Cromwell to allow Jews to return to England, the Portuguese Jewish community excommunicated Spinoza for heresy.

Spinoza spent the rest of his life outside Amsterdam; he worked as a lens grinder and became a noted philosopher. Seeing clearly is a metaphor that crops up again and again in his writings. Spinoza harnessed mathematical calculations for the grinding of high-

quality spectacle lenses and telescopes and to prove the strength of his philosophical propositions. ‘I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly set down.’11

Spinoza did not reject God and was not an atheist. But he did reject the notion that the Torah was divinely revealed. Consider these statements from Spinoza’s greatest work, Ethics:12

God I understand to be a being absolutely infinite, that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence. God acts merely according to his own laws, and is compelled by no one. He who understands himself and his emotions loves God, and the more so he understands himself and his emotions.

The man who emerges in Ethics has struggled with his beliefs. He offers asides for those who are confused. ‘Proceed gently with me and form no judgment concerning these things until [you] have read all.’ Spinoza pokes fun at Descartes, with whom he often disagreed, and laughed at his own austere life. Until his death at forty-four, Spinoza studied endlessly to determine the nature of the Jewish God. Nineteenth-century pioneers of Progressive Judaism such as Rabbi Abraham Geiger in Germany and theologian Kaufmann Kohler (Germany and America) acknowledged that the systematic critical investigation of the Hebrew Bible began with Spinoza. Modern Jewish writers such as Amos Oz (Israel) and Bernard-Henri Levy13 in France are anxious to accommodate Spinoza. In their book Jews and Words (2012) Amos Oz and his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger assert: ‘Baruch Spinoza [says] out loud that the biblical texts are fully and fallibly historical ... contain mistakes and contradictions, and should be read with a scientific eye, with a philologist’s magnifying glass.’

If Spinoza provided the fuse for a Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), a German Jew, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), lit the match. Born in Prussia, Mendelssohn is credited with encouraging Jews to look beyond the streets surrounding the synagogues and to engage with secular society. The Jews of his milieu spoke Yiddish, had enough Hebrew to partake of synagogue life, but did not usually speak German. Largely self-taught, conversant with Spinoza’s works, Mendelssohn translated the Torah into German written in Hebrew letters to help Jews learn the vernacular language and to better understand the Bible. He used his wealth as a textile merchant to campaign for the emancipation of the Jews and opened the gates to a flowering of nineteenth-century Jewish/ German culture.

Seesen, Lower Saxony, Germany, 1810

A line of rabbis, Christian ministers, political dignitaries, congregants, and the curious walk into the sanctuary of

a new synagogue accompanied by an adult choir singing hymns in German and Hebrew while an organ plays in the background. There is no requirement for women and men to sit separately. In the pulpit stands the philanthropist who has provided the money for this building; he has previously established an egalitarian, religiously pluralistic boarding school for Jewish and Christian children. Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) has a message: ‘On all sides enlightenment opens up new areas for religious development. Why should we Jews be left behind?’

That seminal moment in Seesen occurred when the Napoleonic era still had a few years left to run. Like Mendelssohn, Napoleon had encouraged the Jews of Europe to emerge from the ghettos. With our modern memories still clouded by the Holocaust, the sheer vibrancy of Jewish life in nineteenthcentury Germany is poignant and tragic for Jew and Gentile alike. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, and Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, were both influenced by the German–Jewish enlightenment.

The theologian, scholar, and rabbi Leo Baeck came to prominence toward the end of this period. Baeck was born in 1873 in the German province of Posen (now Poland). The subject of his doctorate was Spinoza’s first impact on Germany. Well into the Nazi period, Baeck still taught at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin and attracted other precocious talents, such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, who went on to influence American Judaism.

As president of the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (1933–38), Rabbi Baeck was the most powerful advocate for Jews. In 1939 Baeck became the second president of the World Union of Progressive Judaism, then headquartered in London. Baeck was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943 and became the titular head of the Council of Elders (Judenrat).

are more likely to commit suicide.

There is a postscript to the Baeck–Frankl story. Until 1991 the first female rabbi in the world was thought to have been the American Sally Priesand, who was ordained in 1972 at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. In 1991 a researcher discovered a cache of documents deposited in the Berlin archives in the 1940s. The documents changed the historical account. They included a certificate of rabbinical ordination which belonged to Regina Jonas (1902–44). A Berliner and a qualified teacher, Jonas enrolled in the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the academic seminary for liberal rabbis and educators, where Rabbi Baeck taught. She graduated in 1930, having written a treatise

The Theresienstadt period of Baeck’s life has attracted controversy, notably from Hannah Arendt, who accused Baeck of cooperating with the Nazis by withholding the truth of the extermination facilities from the community. Baeck believed that living in the expectation of death by gassing would make both living and dying harder to bear. He was supported in this view by the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a significant figure when I was studying clinical psychology in the 1970s and 80s. His famous postwar book, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), wherein he posited that even in the most inhumane, absurd situations human beings can survive if they locate a tiny spark of meaning, was based on research he conducted at Theresienstadt. Personally, I found that Frankl’s therapeutic method known as logotherapy didn’t work for the veterans I dealt with. On the contrary, in my experience those who feel powerless, not in charge of their destiny,

entitled, ‘Can Women Serve as Rabbis?’ Leo Baeck refused her ordination, citing possible differences with the German Orthodox Rabbinate, which he did not wish to antagonise. Jonas was not ordained until 1935, just after the Nazi Nuremberg Laws revoked her rights as a Jew. She was ordained privately by the liberal rabbi of Frankfurt am Main.

Jonas was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. In the Nazi’s model ghetto, the museum for the doomed Jewish race, Jonas worked with Frankl, the psychiatrist in charge of ‘psychic hygiene’. He assigned her to comfort the traumatised passengers arriving by train and to keep suicide watch in the psychic hygiene ward. Baeck encouraged her to give lectures on Judaism. In 1944 Rabbi Jonas and her mother were sent to Auschwitz and murdered upon arrival. Frankl spent the last months of the war at Dachau in the hard labour section. After the war, neither Leo Baeck or Viktor Frankl ever mentioned Regina Jonas. The postwar years were crowded with ghosts and the living dead who were unspeakably

Lesley Sachs and Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, of Women of the Wall, being detained by a police officer for wearing Tallit in the Kotel. Rosh Chodesh Kislev 5773, 2012 (photograph by מיכל פטל,Women of the Wall via Wikimedia Commons)

traumatised. Somehow, Regina Jonas slipped from history for half a century. As a former intelligence officer and clinical psychologist, I believe there is more to know and to find about Rabbi Regina Jonas.

According the 2016 census report, 91,022 Jews call Australia home, 6,000 fewer than in 2011. The average age of Australian Jews is sixty-nine. The Union of Progressive Judaism in Australasia (UPJ) has a membership of 12,000.

We Progressives are a small yet influential group within a declining cohort. All the more amazing and wonderful that there are so many female rabbis serving across the twenty-seven congregations affiliated with the UPJ.

Nicole Roberts is the first senior female rabbi in Australasia. She was appointed to Sydney’s North Shore Temple Emmanuel in March 2017. NSTE, as the congregation is known, is in Chatswood. I interviewed Rabbi Roberts in April. Rabbi Fred Morgan also happened to be there. Built in the 1970s, the synagogue, set behind gates and security fencing on a quiet street, belongs to the brutalist style of architecture. The two rabbis, both New Yorkers, met me in a rundown building at the edge of the site.

Rabbi Roberts – petite, reflective, sometimes intense – is a graduate of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her family was not observant apart from attending synagogue during the High Holy Days and for life-cycle events such as Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Roberts graduated from Vanderbilt with degrees in Anthropology and a Masters of Accountancy. Marriage to a nonJew who chose to become Jewish changed both partners. In their search for a satisfying spiritual life, Roberts and her husband visited many synagogues in the Nashville area and established the Nashville Jewish Organisation for Young Adults (NJOY). Then Roberts decided to pursue rabbinical studies.

At Hebrew Union College, Roberts encountered Rabbi Lawrence (Larry) Hoffman, a scholar of liturgy, gifted speaker, and prolific author. A visionary, he dared to imagine what synagogue life might be like in the future. Hoffman was seeking promising rabbinical talent and prepared to think creatively about religious practice. Nicole Roberts was awarded a valuable Tisch Fellowship, given to the most outstanding candidates. She remains connected to Hoffman. Indeed, two of his recent books include essays from Rabbi Roberts.

Larry Hoffman may well be the Spinoza of our age. In a recent work, All the World: Universalism, Particularism and the High Holy Days (2014), this questioning, pragmatic rabbi contends that when he looks around a synagogue at High Holy Day time, when Jews are most likely to attend, he sees people who have little Hebrew and don’t really know what’s going on. He is keen to explain, to embrace, to accept reality, and to do something about it.

The day I visited NSTE was Yom HaShoah, Holo-

caust Remembrance Day. The forbidding exterior of the synagogue hides a gem: the sanctuary. The windows are set high to prevent distraction, the space is oval-shaped to heighten inclusivity, the acute acoustic picks up the slightest whisper. First, girls and boys read vignettes about what life was like for Jewish youngsters in Nazi times. Then a man, born in 1939, spoke about his wartime experiences. His Polish family escaped incarceration in a concentration camp by making their way to Siberia – exchanging one sort of prison for another. When the family returned to their town, they found they were the only survivors. The gentleman came to Australia in the 1950s, worked hard, married a Jewish woman, and had a family. But he carried a constant burden. He had never learnt Hebrew, had never had a Bar Mitzvah ceremony, and always felt embarrassed when he went to shul, believing that he wasn’t a proper Jew. On his seventieth birthday, the man’s children sent their parents to Europe and Israel. He visited the village of his childhood. At the Kotel, the man was handed an English transliteration from the Hebrew. He spoke the words from the Torah assigned to him, and became Bar Mitzvah. He described his delight when he and his wife were raised up in chairs above the heads of the crowd so that they could come close to the wall.

After his affecting speech, everyone present with a personal connection to the Holocaust was invited to come to the bimah to witness the opening of the Ark, the niche where the Torah scrolls are kept. I considered remaining in my seat. I was not part of this congregation. I had never taken part in Holocaust remembrance events. My husband urged me to go up. For the first time in my life, I stood with others to bear witness. The survivor and I were the oldest of the group by many decades –before and after bookends of the Shoah.

My parents and I arrived in Melbourne in December 1959 at the tail end of the postwar migration boom. We hadn’t yet heard the term ‘Holocaust’. I still meet people, Jews and non-Jews, who date their awareness of the Nazi Final Solution to the Eichmann trial of 1961.

Horrible, banal, little Adolf Eichmann had managed to hide himself in Argentina after the war. At his trial he claimed that he was just ‘following orders’ when all along he had been the architect of the ghettoes and the master plan to exterminate Europe’s Jewry. His face, his voice, the glass booth that kept him safe from possible assassins, dominated television broadcasts during 1961. My father was still alive then. I think it was the first time he became aware of the extent of the death toll. (We owe David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, a considerable debt; he insisted that the Eichmann trial be televised, providing the cathartic moment that allowed survivors to find a voice. Eichmann was found guilty, hanged, and cremated, his ashes scattered in the Mediterranean.)

An Italian Jew of Sephardic descent was one of the earliest voices to emerge from the Holocaust. Primo Levis’s If This Is a Man was first published in Italy in 1947 and initially sold in modest numbers. In 1958 there was a new edition followed by English, French, and German translations. Levi (1919–87) writes in the preface:

It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, because of the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average life span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it allowed noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals. 14

Irony, cool rage, and incisive prose pick apart the horror with the skill of a scientist and the qualities of a sublime humanist and troubled human being. In another work, The Truce (1963), there is humour as Levi recounts his adventures after Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops. To those individuals who constantly asked him if forgiveness was possible, he said as late as 1986, one year before his suicide: ‘Indiscriminate forgiveness, as some have asked of me, is not acceptable to me.’

We had no idea when we arrived in Melbourne that Australia had a Jewish history dating back to European settlement. Between 1788 and 1852, approximately one thousand Jewish convicts were transported; there was also a trickle of free settlers. For Jews, a burial plot usually precedes the building of a synagogue. In 1817 a Jewish burial society managed to have set aside a section of the Sydney general cemetery.15 An example of a burial society preceding the erection of a synagogue may be seen at Goulburn. The cemetery was dedicated in 1848, when Goulburn had the third largest Jewish population in Australia. The synagogue was never built.

Rabbi John Levi, Australia’s first native-born rabbi, has written many works concerning the early Jewish story of this country. The culmination of all this scholarship was the mammoth These Are the Names: Jewish lives in Australia 1788–1850 (2006), an exhaustive trawl through scanty transportation records. Depending on the available records some entries are a brief paragraph, others several pages. Here is one example: ‘Nathan, Miriam b. London, 1825–1882, 1840 (arrived); Free. Single; 17 children … married Solomon Benjamin in Sydney on 11 August 1841 and set up her household in Melbourne.’ John Levi tells us ‘She was the great great grandmother of the author of this book.’16

When we came to Australia, it was easy to think that most of the Jews we encountered were postwar migrants and refugees. The first intimation of an earlier different history came at MacRobertson Girls’ High School in the 1960s. One of our texts was Alien Son (1952), by Judah Waten; his daughter Alice, a brilliant violinist,

was at the school. Once he came to speak to us. I don’t remember much of what he said, other than that he was a proud migrant – a Russian bear of a man with a deep voice. His book describes the life of Jewish migrants who arrived before World War I. The tug of war between alternating desires to fit in and at the same time to remember where you came from, the increasing distance from your parents as you begin to identify with the new country, read like a personal message. Waten’s word pictures are finely honed gems: ‘Mr Segal ... knew the Rabbi quite well. A very distinguished man from London, but a little weak in the scriptures and piety. Still – good enough for this country.’ Often the Jews who emerge from the pages of Alien Son are illiterate, or nearly so. As with my maternal grandparents, Hebrew was a language spoken by the rabbis, not by ordinary people.

When we returned to class, the English teacher told us that Waten was a communist. We were supposed to be shocked, but this news made him seem even more glamorous.

Since early colonial times, Judaism in Australia has had a moderate orthodox flavour. Despite the migration of Germans to South Australia from the 1840s onward, there was no nineteenth-century Seesen moment. The oldest synagogue is the Adelaide Hebrew Congregation dating from 1850. The only progressive synagogue, Beit Shalom, was established in 1963.

Anecdotally, progressive Judaism in Australia occupies about fifteen per cent of the space. Confusingly, other than the small ultra-Orthodox sector, many Australian Jews consider themselves to be progressive in attitude. Again and again, I have spoken to Jews who tell me: ‘I’m orthodox, but not orthodox orthodox.’ Or, ‘I’m orthodox, I never go to shul, but when I do it’s an orthodox one.’ And, ‘I’m orthodox, but I’m progressive, really.’

When I asked intellectual property specialist and philanthropist Colin Golvan QC for an interview, he told me he was not observant; that he came from an orthodox background, but that he considers himself progressive in attitude. Golvan’s parents were married in the Warsaw ghetto. After the war they made it to Paris where Colin’s brother was born and then Australia. Colin was the Australian baby. His parents worked hard in the rag trade, made a success of their lives, brought their orthodox observance with them, but sent Colin to a Presbyterian school to get exposure beyond the Jewish community. When I enquired about his level of observance, he said that he and his wife usually lit Shabbat candles, celebrated the High Holy days, visited Israel – Tel Aviv is a favourite haunt – and attended shul from time to time. Colin contemplated the possibility that if one day a grandchild might want to marry a non-Jew, he and his wife would accommodate that. One reservation Colin had about progressive synagogues was that he thought there wasn’t enough Hebrew. I suggested to Colin that he was both more observant than he initially led me to believe and much more progressive than he thought.

Progressive Judaism acknowledges that children are the cultural and genetic inheritors of both parents and treats the children of mixed-marriages as Jewish if so brought up, regardless of whether the mother or father is the Jewish Parent.

Angela Buchdahl is the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue, New York City. Like me, Rabbi Buchdahl is the child of a mixed marriage. Rabbi Buchdahl was born in South Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother. She is the first female rabbi of ‘Central’. The first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi, she heads a team of eight permanent clergy and a floating population of internee rabbis and cantors. Buchdahl’s thrilling rendition of Kol Nidre is available on YouTube.

Central Synagogue has a proud 175-year history. ‘We encourage participation from all who seek a connection to Jewish life and want to be part of our sacred

did not respond. Central Synagogue feeds many thousands of homeless people every week, and young members are encouraged to contribute as part of their social justice commitment.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is an Orthodox man, yet he is one of the most progressive voices within Judaism. In a 2015 broadcast called ‘Why I am a Jew’, Sacks said: ‘I am proud to be part of a people, who though scarred and traumatised, never lost their humour or their faith, their ability to laugh at present troubles and still believe in ultimate redemption, who saw history as a journey, and never stopped travelling and searching.’

Sacks speaks often of Tikkun Olam, repair of the world, or social justice. Think for a moment of the many Australian Jews who are generous philanthropists or of the donations from ordinary congregants who give as much as they can to aid the refugees spread across the world. Then consider where they came from, the sometimes astonishingly sad backgrounds.

community regardless of religious background, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, political affiliation, ability, age, sexual orientation and gender identity. We welcome ... all people, including those who have been historically and institutionally marginalized or excluded from the Jewish community.’17

Shabbat eve and Shabbat morning services – with a grand piano, choir, orchestra, terrific camerawork that pans around the interior of this gigantic shul, close-ups of clergy or congregants reading from the Torah – are broadcast live to one hundred countries. If I can’t get to a synagogue on Shabbat, I follow one of these services.

Some months ago, at the end of the service, a lady pushing a trolley emerged from the front rows and wandered down the aisle in full view of the camera.Things were poking from her trolley, and she was unkempt. No one had prevented her from entering in the first place or from sitting in the front row. A few people greeted her with the traditional ‘Shabbat Shalom’. She kept her head down and

If Australia can be said to own a ‘Seesen’ moment it belongs to Temple Beth Israel in Melbourne. Two women – Lily Montagu and Ada Phillips – initiated important conversations during the 1920s that impacted on the rise of Progressive Judaism in Australia. The war to end all wars had claimed the lives of many young people and robbed others of any religious belief. As late as 1938 there were 77,000 incapacitated veterans.18 The Jewish community was not exempt and suffered commensurately. During the 1920s the magnificent Bendigo synagogue was forced to close due to a lack of numbers. Judaism was in serious decline. Ada Phillips, the widow of a wealthy solicitor, decided to do something about it.

In 1928 she visited London and attended services at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue (LJS) in St Johns Wood, founded in 1911. Claude Montefiore was president of the congregation and of the World Union of Progressive Judaism (WUPJ). Lily Montagu, secretary of the WUPJ, was a lay leader who often led the services at LJS. Since 1915, LJS had dispensed with separate seating for men and women.

Attending this liberal synagogue and meeting Montefiore and Montagu made a huge impression on Ada Phillips. On her return to Melbourne, Phillips began efforts toward forming a progressive congregation. In 1930, with a subsidy from the WUPJ, and much direct encouragement from Montagu, a fledgling congregation did indeed meet in a private house on the Esplanade in St Kilda.

In 1936, again with the intervention of Montagu, seventh-generation Rabbi Doctor Herman Sanger arrived from Berlin to lead the congregants. In 1937, Sir Isaac Isaacs, Australia’s first Jewish governor-general, former attorney-general, and High Court Justice, laid the foundation stone for an eventual synagogue, to be known as Temple Beth Israel.

Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black at a Stop Adani vigil (photograph by Julian Meehan)

Rabbi Sanger (1908–80) had a revolutionary impact on Judaism in Australia. Sanger was a pre-war Zionist in an era when the wider Jewish world (including American Reform) had no great love for the idea. Sanger led the way in interfaith dialogue with Christians. Temple Beth Israel, which has seeded progressive congregations thoughout Australia and New Zealand, continues Rabbi Sanger’s example of continuing interfaith dialogue to promote social justice for all.

During this year’s High Holy Days, my husband and I hosted a feast of audacious hospitality. In attendance were three Jews, a friend to Judaism, three Muslims, a Buddhist, two Catholics, and several Christians who are not regular churchgoers. As so often happens when Jews and Muslims get together, we ended up discussing what unites us rather than what divides us. One of the young boys, a budding muezzin, honoured us at sundown with the evening call to prayer. There was much laughter and reflection that evening as we welcomed the new Jewish year of 5778.

The bitterness and division caused by the ultraOrthodox in Israel continues. The Progressive movement in Israel stands firm and through IRAC, the religious action centre, has won some important battles in the courts. A September 2017 survey19 of Modern Orthodox Jews in the United States shows a sharp drift towards wanting an expanded role for females in the clergy, engaging with the modern world, being open to sexual diversity, and a growing distance from rather than attachment to Israel. Progressive and Modern Orthodoxy are edging closer and closer together. We can thank the ultra-Orthodox for providing an added impetus.Will it end in a schism? The Progressive movement around the world is now so far removed from the strictures of ultraOrthodox Judaism that we may be already there.

Rabbi Sally Priesand, America’s first female rabbi, said recently: ‘When I was growing up, rabbis were the ultimate authority, often maintaining complete control over the congregation and making whatever decisions needed to be made. Women rabbis made room for empowerment, networking and partnership ... Female rabbis also influenced theology, I grew up with the image of God as King, omnipotent, and clearly male ... For many years now, whenever liturgy is created, its language is gender neutral.’20

Rabbi Priesand went on to honour the memory of the first female rabbi, Regina Jonas, to whom this essay is dedicated. g

Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize in 2007 for her essay ‘An Die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’. She was born in the Netherlands and migrated to Australia with her parents in 1959. Educated in Melbourne, she had a long career in the Department of Defence. Her latest novel is Those Who Come After (Picador, 2011).

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to Rabbi Nicole Roberts, Rabbi Fred Morgan, and Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black; to the lay leaders: Dr David Kram, Dr Jonathan Taft, Michael Taft, and Albert Isaacs; to Peter Kohn of the Australian Jewish News for his invaluable advice; to all those congregants who gave of their time and knowledge. I am indebted to Australian Book Review and the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust for giving me the time and space to write this essay.

Australian Book Review warmly thanks the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust, which has funded this $7,500 Fellowship. It follows the first ABR RAFT Fellowship essay: Alan Atkinson’s ‘How Do We Live with Ourselves?: The Australian National Conscience’, published in our September 2016 issue.

Endnotes

1. Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD, ‘The Frontiers of Anxious Identity’, www.eJewishphilanthropy.com, May 2017

2. Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Liveright Publishing, 2015.

3. Pew Research Center, ‘Religion and Public Life, A Portrait of Jewish Americans’, 2013

4. Mishkan T’filah, CCAR Press, 2010

5. The Jewish Agency for Israel, non-Orthodox leaders, The Israeli Government and the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) management of the Western Wall

6. The Conservatives have had a spot to the south of Robinson’s Arch for twenty years.

7. Anat Hoffman quoted in The Times of Israel article by Amanda Borschel-Dan and Alexander Fulbright, June 25, 2017

8. The Times of Israel, June 25, 2017

9. Rabbi Elyse Frishman: ‘Applying Lessons from the Talmud to the Kotel’ on ReformJudaism.org, July 5, 2017

10. Nachum Eisenstein interview with The Times of Israel, July 4, 2017.

11. Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, translated by R.H. Monro Elwes,George Bell and Sons, 1891

12. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, Heron Books, 1969

13. Bernard-Henri Levy, The Genius of Judaism, translated by Steven B. Kennedy, Random House, 2017

14. See Endnote 2

15. W. D. Rubinstein The Jews in Australia, Australasian Educa Press, 1986

16. Ibid. p 663.

17. www.centralsynagogue.org

18. Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au

19. The Times of Israel, ‘5 key takeaways, some surprising, from new survey of US Modern Orthodox Jews’, September 30, 2017

20. Rabbi Sally Priesand in interview with Aron HirtManheimer, www.ReformJudaism.org, September 14, 2017

Counterpoints

Louis Klee

BLIND SPOT

by Teju Cole

Faber

& Faber

$39.99 hb, 352 pp, 9780571335015

The text tells us this is Venice, or more precisely Giudecca, but what we see is an empty arcade, a distant tower, and the long shadow of the photographer. It is a scene with an understated surrealism, like a painting of de Chirico, but both photo and adjacent text are by Teju Cole. Giudecca, writes Cole, means ‘“Jewry,” though there’s no proof a Jewish community ever lived here’. In the act of scanning the photo’s negative, however, this absence takes on a different meaning. ‘I get an unexpected text message from A,’ the text continues, ‘who is a doctor: “One of my patients is a holocaust survivor. 93 years old. Still has PTSD and screams at night”.’

This is one of 150 counterpoints of original photographs and ruminative fragments of prose that make up Cole’s fourth book, Blind Spot. It is a project defined by a deft observation of the everyday, an abiding interest in the woundedness of history, and an openness to the unexpected echoes amongst things. Masterfully, these features emerge through a series of textual allusions and recurring visual motifs – ladders, drapery, cars, the detritus of human presence – drawn from his travels across the globe, from São Paulo, Lagos, and

Berlin, to Brazzaville, Auckland, and Beirut.

When I speak to him about his new book, he notes: ‘the ideal of reading is to read something in a troubled way’. By questioning our received ways of making sense of the world, Blind Spot troubles in the most edifying and urgent sense; in the hope, perhaps, of recalibrating us to see and read anew.

The project began in 2011 – ‘one fine morning in my mid-thirties’, as Cole puts it – when he woke up partially blind. He was diagnosed with papillophlebitis, or ‘big blind spot syndrome’. Although the grey that shrouded his left eye has retreated, he lives with the knowledge that it may return. This incident occurred two months after the completion of his celebrated novel Open City (2011) and drew him deeper into one of its driving concerns: what are the limits of our knowledge and vision?

In Cole’s latest book, the ‘blind spot’ becomes a powerful and ubiquitous metaphor, a placeholder for everything from the shortcomings of the camera – its mechanical failures, distortions, and illusions – through to what he calls the ‘moral exigency [to] compel what was hidden to become visible’; to acknowledge that which cannot be said nor made visible at all. Yes, we may see the world, but Cole draws us back to the questions: ‘Which world? See how? We who?’

What I find immediately striking about the book, I tell him, is its distinctive use of form. ‘I have a feeling of responsibility,’ he replies, ‘not toward experimentation, but freedom. I wanted to have the courage of my own form.’ To push the conventions of a genre, even an emergent online medium like Twitter, has been an enduring feature of his work. It is what makes Blind Spot feel at once singular, of a genre of its own making, and yet so unmistakably Cole. Like his earlier works, it builds meaning through ‘disciplined association’. But ‘by the time I got to Blind Spot,’ he explains, ‘I wanted the jumps to be bolder.’ It is through these leaps and elisions that Cole’s book grapples with history and politics. The draped bulk of a vehicle in Ubud becomes a makeshift memorial to the Indonesian mass kill-

ings of 1965; five metal chairs pressed between a van and a fire hydrant standin for a Black Lives Matter protest; even the silent tranquillity of Swiss mountainscape becomes imbued with the unseen violence of the country’s arms sales and its legacy of child slave labour. What gives this technique its harrowing currency is perhaps best captured by a poem from Tomas Tranströmer that Cole is fond of citing: ‘often the shadow seems more real than the body / The samurai looks insignificant / beside his armor of black dragon scales.’

It is a project defined by a deft observation of the woundedness of history

Cole’s pairings of image and text have a quiet mystery that moves between meanings. The rhyme between the stance of two men in a park in Berlin; a woman glimpsed from behind on the streets of Manhattan – these provoke not only speculations on the lives of others, but on how others imagine our lives in turn. Early in Blind Spot, Cole offers a definition of the human being as ‘the animal that can mourn strangers’. In spite of our blind spots, the human imagination reaches out to the other, but it is an other that can see us, read us, and mourn us too.

‘What about a question on Australia?’ he says finally. Australia is not pictured in Blind Spot, but when Cole travelled here he drove out to Goroke through the Victorian plains to visit the reclusive novelist Gerald Murnane, the music of Peter Sculthorpe echoing in his ears. In the postscript to Blind Spot, he writes: ‘I am intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.’ I press him on this and he laughs. ‘Absolutely, it’s an allusion.’ From Indigenous Australians, he says, he takes an inspiration for something at the core of his project: ‘to be the opposite of a bureaucrat, to be someone who has an intense engagement with the allusive aspects of being and place’. g

Louis Klee was co-winner of the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Verbal play

Susan Sheridan

THEA ASTLEY: SELECTED POEMS

edited by Cheryl Taylor

University of Queensland Press

$24.95, 176 pp, 978072259791

Thea Astley had a way with words. Her novels are studded with arresting metaphors, atrocious puns, hilarious one-liners, arcane words, technical terms from music, geometry and logic, religious and literary allusions. Her verbal pyrotechnics can be dazzling and infuriating, in equal measure: as Helen Garner once wrote, it is a style that can drive you crazy. So it’s no surprise to learn that Astley served her writerly apprenticeship in poetry, in the arts of verbal play and condensation of meaning.

As a young woman she wrote a good deal of poetry, some of it appearing in school and university magazines, and in newspapers, but much of it never published. In this intriguing volume, editor Cheryl Taylor has selected 116 poems, representing about half the extant range to be found in the Astley archives. The earliest was published in the CourierMail when she was eight years old, the latest while she was teaching at Macquarie University in the 1970s.

The schoolgirl poems, rightly characterised by Taylor as ‘romantic effusions influenced by Wordsworth’s and Hopkins’s nature mysticism’, give way to tentative love poems during her university years. Sexual attraction is treacherous, as in ‘From Troy’, where ‘the love of a woman’s heart’ celebrated in the first part, ‘for Oenone’, becomes a curse in the second part, ‘for Helen’. Poems addressed to Laurence Collinson, the gay poet and painter whom she met in the Barjai group of young Brisbane writers, suggest attraction unreciprocated but also valued affinities. Themes of love, abandonment, loneliness, conflict are contained in translations from French and Latin, and in her experiments with the Shakespearean sonnet. There are traces of T.S. Eliot’s city visions (‘in

the streets / Night flowed its deep rivers, where traffic gleamed by …’) and of her later fascination with chance encounters (‘A woman sat beside me in the train …’).

The second section contains the work of the mature writer. It includes poems of passion fulfilled, dating from her marriage, like ‘You are my quiet music, you / My house roof under rain’. More often the poems have an ironic cast, like ‘Love in our time’: ‘Question and answer in the flesh, / Reducing to a brief schedule / Form-to-be-filled-relationship / Woman with man’.

Occasionally Astley used her poems in her novels, and there too their lyrical impulse is ironically placed, by commentary or context. In Girl with a Monkey, when Elsie quotes from her own poem, ‘This is a day for birds to cut with arcs / Wind-shifting geometry in upper sky / Tangent upon a dried-out shell of moon’, her road-builder boyfriend asks, to her disgust, ‘Is it Shakespeare?’ And in her last book, Drylands (1999), the storyteller Janet, who wanted to write like Schubert’s music, ‘so poised, walking the tightrope between the wet eye, the upcurled mouth’, quotes from an Astley poem that attempts exactly this kind of poise – and rejects it as ‘pretentious’.

Placing lyrical moments in a narrative context, or attaching them to a character or a dramatic encounter, suited Astley’s novelist sensibility. As they stand, the poems sometimes seem emotionally constrained by their formality, and in them she rarely gives rein to her capacity for the vernacular, and for shifting register from the sublime to the corblimey that often shocks and delights in her prose. Here’s a stanza that does effect such a shift:

You may be sure I know my neap Washes you in antipodal tides, Drawn by moons as gold as grins

Of amusement parks on harbour-sides ... (‘Neap’)

The most interesting and accomplished of the poems in the second section come from a collection of fortythree which, Taylor tells us, Astley intended for publication. She had gath-

ered them together in a special notebook in the late 1950s, when she was beginning to establish herself as a novelist (Girl with a Monkey was published in 1958, Descant for Gossips in 1960). This project was abandoned. Why? With typical self-denigration Astley labelled the notebook ‘mostly rejects’, but a fair number were published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC Weekly The collection may have been made at the suggestion of Beatrice Davis, her editor at Angus & Robertson, the publishing house responsible for most of the books of poetry that appeared in Australia at that time. But Astley’s collection of forty-three poems would have been probably too small to interest publishers in the days before paperbacks made it feasible to publish such slim volumes of verse.

Astley served her writerly apprenticeship in poetry, in the arts of verbal play and condensation of meaning

If Astley had published this collection of poems at the end of the 1950s, what sort of reception might it have met, in the context of Australian poetry at mid-century? She herself would no doubt have compared her work most critically with that of Kenneth Slessor and A.D. Hope. In the 1950s, those ‘years of the poets’ (as Vincent Buckley called them), the standard was high. A single year, 1955, saw the publication of Hope’s The Wandering Islands, Judith Wright’s The Two Fires, and Rosemary Dobson’s Child with a Cockatoo. Astley told an interviewer that she had made the conscious decision to abandon poetry for prose when she realised that she would ‘never be any good as a poet of any stature’. In the event, the world has profited greatly from her devoting her writing life to those extraordinary novels and stories, and the fiction in turn profited from her apprenticeship in poetry. g

Susan Sheridan’s most recent book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (Cambria, 2016).

Myriad voices

Miriam Cosic

THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Penguin Classics

$29.99 pb, 372 pp, 9780141983523

When Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in 2015, the response in the Anglophone world was general bewilderment. Who was she? The response in Russia was the opposite: intense, personal, targeted. Alexievich wasn’t a real writer, detractors said; she had only won the Nobel because the West loves critics of Putin.

Alexievich is kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian. What makes her work different, and important, is that she collects the voices of real people, collates them, and redistributes them, without imposing narrative or explanation. Even biographical information is scant. There is enough to give the speaker authority, but not enough to construe character or personality.

In her Nobel acceptance speech, Alexievich spoke of her own postwar childhood when the tired voices of village women, gathered on benches in the evening, would draw her in from play. ‘None of them had husbands, fathers or brothers. I don’t remember men in our village after World War II: during the war, one out of four Belarusians perished, either fighting at the front or with the partisans … What I remember most, is that women talked about love, not death. They would tell stories about saying goodbye to the men they loved the day before they went to war, they would talk about waiting for them, and how they were still waiting. Years had passed, but they continued to wait: “I don’t care if he lost his arms and legs, I’ll carry him.” No arms … no legs ... I think I’ve known what love is since childhood.’

The Unwomanly Face of War is about the other women, those who went to war themselves, whose voices were not heard for decades afterwards: the officers, snipers, pilots, mechanics,

and nurses whose stories she collected between 1978 and 2004.

The book was published in Russian in 1985 and sold two million copies. Only now has it been translated into English, by the widely admired team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. It is raw, anachronistic, but all the more interesting in a time of blanket propaganda from Russia, which gyrates between eras – devout Orthodoxy under the tsars, military might under the Soviets –to further its nationalist aims. It is of particular importance to women, and anyone interested in them, because it demonstrates their equality with men, even in the field of war, in a country that now negates the gender-free egalitarian ideals of the Soviet era even more than the Soviet era, in reality, did.

Alexievich is kind of a journalist, kind of a social historian

And yet, the women’s preoccupations unwinding across the pages, barely edited except for chapter headings that group them under certain topics, come as a surprise. As they lower their guard and speak freely, they often downplay their fighting role. They seem most eager to discuss the absence of love and beauty while they were in the military: those traditional pursuits or preoccupations when they had no place in war or business or politics. When we do hear of their wartime work, it is often by way of modest bragging to show how misplaced masculine assumptions were about women’s competence and bravery.

So many commanders were furious when women departed from protocol to, say, don earrings in celebration of a successful manoeuvre. ‘Have you come to fight or to a ball?’ shouted one. ‘I need soldiers, not ladies. Ladies don’t survive in a war.’ The interviewee – Anastasia Petrovna Sheleg, junior sergeant and aerostat operator – allows herself a wry comment: ‘Before the war, he had been a maths teacher …’

Double standards still dog women working in traditionally male fields, including here in Australia. But the poignancy of these women’s desire for love

and interest in hairdressing, make-up, and jewellery is a constant counterpoint to their descriptions of fighting. So is the knowledge that, however many medals they might earn, the almost incalculable male casualties during the war, plus their own physical and psychological injuries, would affect their marriageability, and thus their future, after the war.

‘He used to tell us that in war soldiers were called for and only soldiers,’ said Maria Nikolaevna Shchelokova, sergeant and commander of a communications unit, of her own commander. ‘But we also wanted to be beautiful ... All through the war, I was afraid I was going to be hit in the legs and get crippled. I had beautiful legs. What is it for a man? Even if he loses his legs, it’s not so terrible. He’s a hero anyway. He can marry! But if a woman is crippled, it’s her destiny that’s at stake.’ It is a terrible counterpoint to Alexievich’s Nobel speech.

Others talked of what we now would call PTSD. One woman, a car and tank mechanic who had worked at the front, recalls being told later by a neuropathologist that he had never seen such a wrecked nervous system in a twenty-four-year old. ‘How are you going to live?’ he asked her.

Live she did. She went to university after the war, though it became ‘a second Stalingrad’for her: ‘I finished it a year early, otherwise I would have run out of energy. Four years in the same overcoat – winter, spring, autumn – and an army shirt so faded it looked white ... Ah, fuck it all.’ g

Miriam Cosic is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.

Don’t Smile Till Easter

‘The worst kid. The best teacher. United as underdogs. Battling for justice.’

An 89,000 word Australian story, told from fifteen perspectives. Book $24.95 (inc. Aus postage); contact Adrian at Staddie Media staddie1@yahoo.com.au –ebook from Amazon

The gap

John Eldridge

WATCHING OUT: REFLECTIONS ON JUSTICE AND INJUSTICE

by Julian Burnside Scribe

$29.99 pb, 262 pp, 9781925322323

Watching Out belongs to a rare class of book. Written by a lawyer, concerned largely with law, and touching upon such legal esoterica as interim injunctions, it defies all odds in still being eminently accessible to a lay audience. It has, predictably, set off a frisson of excitement in legal Australia, where each new Burnside title is eagerly received and much discussed. Yet even strangers to the law will find it an edifying, rewarding examination of what it means to secure justice.

Like Burnside’s Watching Brief (2008), Watching Out is ambitious in scope. Its avowed aim is ‘to explore the reasons we have a legal system at all, to look at the way it operates in practice, and to point out some ways in which its operation does (or does not) run true to its ultimate purposes’. This grand design is made grander still by Burnside’s wideranging method: much of the book is devoted to traversing a diverse range of case studies, from petrol-price-fixing investigations to the landmark stolengeneration case of Bruce Trevorrow. Yet for all the risks involved in such an approach, Burnside succeeds in keeping his overarching theme in focus, and in building to a sophisticated assessment of the limitations of the legal system.

Of the many valuable insights offered in the course of exploring his theme, some of the most fascinating relate to Burnside himself, who is undoubtedly a complex figure. Despite his now-impeccable progressive credentials, he has walked an unusual path on his way to becoming one of the leading legal voices on the left. Indeed, his formative years as a lawyer were spent not at the coalface of public interest law, but instead in the rarefied environs of Melbourne’s commercial bar. It was, famously, his role as counsel for the

Maritime Union of Australia in the landmark 1998 waterfront dispute which sparked Burnside’s political awakening, and which led to his spending an increasing proportion of his time on pro bono work. Against this backdrop, then, it is remarkable to learn that Burnside’s convictions are now so strong that he has, for years, strived to answer every item of hate mail that his public pronouncements have attracted. The tone of Watching Out is lightened by several extracts from these only-somewhatliterate missives, along with Burnside’s responses. It is even more surprising and heartening to learn that, in a great number of cases, a correspondence ensued which ended with the interlocutor being persuaded of Burnside’s views.

Watching Out is at its best when addressing the matters closest to Burnside’s heart. Those who have closely followed the fraught fortunes of the push for a national human rights instrument will be well familiar with the arguments and issues canvassed by Burnside in the chapter dedicated to an examination of Australian law’s protection of human rights. Yet even the most jaded observer of this long-running debate will find much of value in Burnside’s masterful restatement of the case for such a reform. The same is true of Burnside’s analysis of the legal rights and protections afforded to refugees – the issue on which Burnside has written and spoken most fervently and eloquently. All those familiar with the long-running moral fiasco that is Australia’s treatment of refugees will be well-acquainted with the infamous 2001 incident involving the MV Tampa, which Burnside briefly revisits. Yet Burnside also weighs in upon more recent developments in respect of asylum-seeker policy, such as the constitutional challenge to the Commonwealth’s legal power to fund offshore detention, and the passage of the Australian Border Force Act (2015). The result is a humane and topical exploration of the current challenges in the struggle for refugees’ rights.

If the greatest strength of Watching Out is the acuity of its moral vision in prosecuting the cause of human rights and the rule of law, its chief weakness lies in its rosy view of lawyers and the legal profession. Burnside has long been

known for his astringent assessments of the records of parliaments and politicians on the subject of human rights. Yet he is far more forgiving when it comes to lawyers, who are, in Burnside’s view, ‘simply the mechanics who tend and implement the system for the benefit of their clients’. Although Burnside is undoubtedly right in sheeting the bulk of the blame for Australia’s abysmal human rights record to the political class, it is quite wrong to ignore altogether the fact that some elements of the legal community could do more to ensure the legal system secures justice. Indeed, as Burnside acknowledges, one significant barrier to the attainment of justice for ordinary people is the prohibitively high cost of legal advice and the relatively limited availability of legal aid. This access-to-justice dilemma is one which gives rise to regular bouts of hand-wringing throughout the legal profession, but in respect of which real progress seems elusive. Burnside is quite right in calling for a renewed commitment to legal aid on the part of governments, but the responsibility to ensure ordinary people can access affordable legal advice falls equally on the shoulders of practising lawyers.

Of course, this one lacuna in Burnside’s analysis does little to detract from the force of his work as a whole. In highlighting the gap between law and justice, Watching Out makes an invaluable contribution to public debate in respect of law reform and social policy. Burnside’s technical legal mastery is brought to bear in limpid prose imbued with a rare empathy and moral intelligence. It deserves to be read and reread by all those with a concern for justice. g

John Eldridge is a Lecturer at Sydney Law School, University of Sydney.

Caged loot

Claudia Hyles

KOH-I-NOOR: THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD’S MOST INFAMOUS DIAMOND by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand Bloomsbury $24.99 hb, 340 pp, 9781408888841

The deadline for this review was 15 August, India’s Independence Day, freedom at midnight in 1947 for India and Pakistan (whose independence is celebrated on 14 August). The British euphemistically called it a ‘transfer of power’. The subsequent division was termed Partition, an anodyne definition of the act of severing. Centuries of surrender and snatching of the Koh-i-Noor saw many transfers of power. Graphic descriptions of torture and murder in this absorbing and timely book are an early mirror for the bloodshed and horror of Partition.

The Weekend Australian of 15 and 16 July, exactly a month before the seventieth anniversary of the dual Independence, featured three articles about the subcontinent: a review of The Black Prince, a new film about Duleep Singh, the last Sikh maharaja to rule the Punjab and from whom the British took the Koh-i-Noor; John Zubrzycki’s positive review of Koh-i-Noor; and an article by William Dalrymple titled ‘Crown Jewel: The Koh-i-Noor remains a symbol of the British Raj in contradictory ways’.

Koh-i-Noor is written in two parts: ‘The Jewel in the Throne’ by Dalrymple, the latest in his brilliantly readable surveys of Indian history; and ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, India’s special designation within the British Empire, by Anita Anand. A journalist, Anand is the daughter of Indian parents whose Punjabi families migrated to the United Kingdom after Partition. Her first book, Sophia: Princess, suffragette, revolutionary (2015), is the biography of a granddaughter of Duleep Singh. In her author’s note, Anand mentions being taken to see the Koh-i-Noor as

a child of six. Her father spoke of the loss of the gem with such passion that ‘the diamond had burned bright’ in her imagination ever since.

The first historical research of the diamond was by Theo Metcalfe, a junior assistant magistrate in Delhi in 1850, just before the diamond was dispatched to Queen Victoria by Lord Dalhousie, Britain’s governor-general in India, who wrested the diamond from the ten-yearold king Duleep Singh. Metcalfe, while interested in gems, was no scholar; even he saw the weakness of his report. Informed by gem merchants, his anecdotal history encompassed 5,000 years from stories of the Hindu God Lord Krishna to more recent centuries of barbarous murder, looting, and conquest. Growing ever more mythic and fictitious, it remained unchallenged until now, almost 170 years on. Previously untranslated Persian and Afghan sources, accounts by European travellers and Sikh chronicles unknown to Metcalfe, illuminate the new history.

The Koh-i-Noor is not ‘the largest diamond in the world’ as Victoria wrote in her eight-page diary entry on the day she first saw it. Unimpressed by the gem, she wrote at greater length about the death of Sir Robert Peel. The diamond in its present form is only ninetieth on the list of biggest and best, but in terms of fascination it must be supreme.

Victoria’s mood was brighter in 1851 at Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition in Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace, the glittering building compared to the diamond, its most important exhibit. Representing the exoticism of the British Empire in the East and the major trophy of imperial military might, it was displayed within a cage, surely a metaphor for British dominance. Dull in captivity, it did not glitter, and many were disappointed. An improved display cabin showed the diamond to greater advantage, but the fiendish heat within made visitors swoon. The result a year later was drastic recutting at Garrard & Co’s Haymarket workshop, where, after the duke of Wellington’s symbolic first cut, the diamond’s mass was diminished by half at a cost of £8,000 – £1,000,000 in today’s money. The Iron Duke died eight weeks later. He was aged eighty-

three, so the legendary curse of the diamond could not quite be blamed. Leaping ahead to the Victorians bypasses the fascinating though often ghastly earlier history of the Koh-iNoor, the Mountain of Light. Struggles for empire saw duplicity, torture, and death. Mughal, Persian, Afghan, Sikh, and British rulers viewed the priceless diamond as a supreme symbol of dominance and stopped at little to possess it. Its display was designed to impress.

The diamond is ninetieth on the list of biggest and best, but in terms of fascination it must be supreme.

Emperor Akbar called foreigners ‘an assemblage of savages’, and ‘loot’ is one Indian word to enter and remain in the English language. The East India Company, an assemblage which Dalrymple calls ‘the original corporate raiders’, represented British suzerainty until 1858, profiting hugely from Indian loot. Kohi-Noor, the paramount piece of loot, the ‘ancient gem with legendary powers’, has in modern times turned ‘into a live diplomatic grenade’. India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan have all claimed ownership and repatriation since 1947, unsurprisingly refused by Britain. A Solomonic solution was suggested, not halving the baby but quartering the diamond. Solomon, as exemplary Quranic ruler and prophet king, was referenced in 1628 when Emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the Peacock Throne, the most magnificent jewelled object ever created, costing double the amount of the Taj Mahal. It provided one of the first credible references to the Koh-i-Noor which graced the throne’s baldachin, set in the head of an ornamental peacock. No longer ornamenting the armlet of an Oriental potentate, the Koh-iNoor is set in what is called the Queen Mother’s Crown. Its exhibition at the Tower of London continues, perhaps insensitively, a version of darshan, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘viewing’ of a deity, revered person, or sacred object. g

Claudia Hyles is a Canberra-based writer and reviewer.

Art | D

Fred Williams Knoll in the You Yangs c.1963–64 (National Gallery of Victoria). Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lyn Williams, Founder Benefactor, 1988 © Estate of Fred Williams

Irena Zdanowicz on Fred Williams in the You Yangs

Film

Francesca Sasnaitis

Song to Song (Roadshow Films)

Theatre

Fiona Gruber

American Song (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre)

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.

Art Sally Grant On Country (The Met)

Fred Williams in the You Yangs

by Irena Zdanowicz

For my return visit to the exhibition Fred Williams in the You Yangs at the Geelong Gallery, I decided to take the train instead of driving. Although the creeping suburban sprawl has narrowed the area without housing or industrial estates, there is still just enough left of the flat Wimmera volcanic plain and its prominent outcrop of granite hills – the You Yangs – to appreciate the task that Fred Williams undertook when he first visited the place in the winter of 1962 to draw and paint gouaches.

Once before, in early 1957, Williams had observed the hills rising abruptly from the pancake flatness surrounding them. He was standing on board the ship that was bringing him home after five years in London. The sight intrigued him, but it was to be another five and half years before he

was to go there, driven by his friend James Mollison. Upon returning home from England, he had set out to reimagine the Australian landscape, initially by reconceiving the form of the gumtree and of the eucalypt forest and glade. In the You Yangs he was faced, for the first time, with reimagining vast space and emptiness within the landscape seen from the sum it, and of pictorially harmonising this far view with the myriad incidents of nature seen at closer range. The Geelong exhibition of Williams’s drawings and gouaches done on site in the You Yangs, and the etchings and paintings made in the studio, shows us how he achieved this and how he subsequently developed it in his art. The exhibition, which has been concisely and beautifully selected and documented by Jason Smith, director of the Geelong Gallery, is installed with impressive clarity in two adjoining spaces, the works grouped roughly chronologically, with the prints shown together in the second area. The accompanying catalogue provides an eloquent text and illustrates all of the works.

Fred Williams’s way of making art was to work in series, initially through force of circumstance, as in the Music Hall works of his London years, and later, once he had reached artistic and painterly fluency, in a different sense – by experimenting with subject and motif, and by elaborating compositions, fugue-like, from different points of view, varying accentuations and formats, and using different media. Each series contained echoes of the previous group of works, as well as seeds of those that were to follow. The period during which Williams arrived at his imaginative fluency and discovered his vision of the landscape was

Fred Williams Pond in the You Yangs (1962), National Gallery of Victoria

brief; it occurred as he worked on the You Yangs series in the second half of 1962.

The exhibition opens with Williams’s earliest You Yangs watercolours and gouaches in a selection that includes those painted with the dark outlines that hark back to the landscapes he made at Mittagong in the late 1950s. Others are airy, atmospheric sketches brushed lightly and surely onto the sheet; watercolours and gouaches done in this way do not allow for corrections, and these have the brevity and suggestive power of oriental painting.

However, what they lack is the strong structural framework that Williams sought and that he had found earlier for his compositions of gumtrees. He discovered this structure in the pattern of fenced fields seen from above, with their agglomeration of vegetation at the fence lines, and their scattering of low shrubs and grasses. A gouache from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales is the pivotal work here, a composition that includes a strong vertical, intercepted at the bottom by a horizontal line or series of strokes, a conjunction of elements that might stand for fence lines or irregularities in topography. Around its geometric framework are dotted lively, but instinctively organised, dabs of paint denoting the scattered vegetation of the fields. The discovery – or invention – of this structure, marked a key point in Williams’s art, allowing it to take off into painterly abstraction while always remaining tethered, kite-like, to its subject. An experimental virtual-reality video available for brave visitors subjects one of the paintings in the exhibition to digital manipulation so as to show this process coming to life.

The highlight of the exhibition occurs in this room with the grand sequence of paintings that Williams made in the studio after the works he had done on site. These are manifestly deeply considered works painted with oil and tempera, layer upon layer, wet on wet paint, and wet over dry, with attention being paid to every brushstroke. Williams called the warm brownish colour of the prepared layer of paint on which the first series of You Yangs paintings were done ‘painter’s honey’ – a fitting description of the way the works glow in this display. The second room of the exhibition is reserved for the smaller, ‘chamber’ works, chiefly the prints that were made concurrently with the paintings. All nine of the You Yangs etchings are included in nineteen impressions that demonstrate, through their various states, the process of formal experimentation that was an intrinsic quality of Williams’s art overall.

If you have time after your first viewing of this exhibition, visit the rooms where some of Geelong’s permanent collection is installed. Here you will see how earlier painters – notably Von Guérard – depicted the You Yangs. Then go back to Williams and marvel at the originality and ingenuity of his vision. g

Fred Williams in the You Yangs continues at the Geelong Gallery until 5 November 2017.

Irena Zdanowicz was Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria from 1981 to 2001.

On Country

by Sally Grant

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These are usually impressive, often enlightening. Sometimes it can be even more rewarding (and less exhausting) to visit a show on a much smaller scale. Such is the case at the moment at The Met, where six paintings by modern and contemporary Indigenous Australian artists are displayed in On Country: Australian Aboriginal art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift. Installed in a room with four large windows overlooking Central Park – a deliberate choice by the curator, Maia Nuku – these magnificent works reference a very different landscape from the one visible through the glass. Yet the exhibition’s location skilfully acknowledges the cultural meaning of place that its paintings vitally express.

The works were a gift to the museum from an American couple, Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan. After many visits to Australia and time spent living there (Levi was the Chair in Politics at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre from 2009 to 2013), the couple have amassed a considerable collection of Australian Aboriginal artworks. Their desire for greater awareness of this artistic sphere has led to collaborations with leading American museums, including the donation to The Met of eight paintings, six of which appear in On Country. Until now the venerable institution held only one work by a modern Australian Aboriginal artist, Anatjari Tjakamarra, which it acquired in 1989, so this is a key development in expanding appreciation for modern and contemporary Indigenous Australian art in the United States.

On entering the exhibition space, located in the museum’s Modern and Contemporary wing, the viewer is immediately struck by the scale and visual power of the six paintings – two by the acclaimed artist Kathleen Petyarre (b. Utopia, c.1940), one by her granddaughter Abie Loy Kemarre (b. Utopia, c.1972), and one each by Doreen Reid Nakamarra (b. Warburton, c.1955–2009), Dorothy Napangardi (b. Yuendumu, c.1950–2013), and Gunybi Ganambarr (b. Yirrkala, 1973). During one of my visits to the exhibition, Nuku informed me that it was jointly organised by the departments of Modern and Contemporary Art, and of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, where she is an Associate Curator. While it was important for these acquisitions to be placed within the context of other international modern and contemporary artworks, she also noted her intention to clarify their continuing tie to a centuries-old tradition. The formal abstractions of Australian Aboriginal paintings have led to comparisons with Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, and while this formal commonality may aid accessibility to the works, On Country emphasises that these compositions tell a different kind of story. To this end, the display of three late-

nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century Indigenous pearl shell artefacts provide a – relatively – recent visual reference, and insightful wall panels locate the paintings historically and aesthetically, interpreting the paintings as visual mappings of sacred Aboriginal sites, or ‘Country’.

A striking example of this is Kathleen Petyarre’s Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming – Sandhills Country (After Hailstorm) (2000). This depicts the creation tale, or Dreaming, of Petyarre’s Ancestor Being, Arnkerrth, the Mountain Devil Lizard, through the careful sprinkling of gold and

ment of women walking to the sacred rock hole, Marrapinti, and of the landscape’s shifting sands; while the deep red and white dots of Dorothy Napangardi’s Karntakurlangu Jukurrpa (2002) create a startlingly complex pattern evoking the dynamic force of her ancestral Country. For the northeast Arnhem Land artist, Gunybi Ganambarr, the exchange of bark as painting surface – a centuries-old Aboriginal custom – for that of laminate in Buyku (2011) is an incisive political and cultural comment. While Ganambarr adheres to his community’s laws concerning art making by using a found object, the use of laminate focuses attention on the impact such industrial materials have had on traditional Indigenous land. Nonetheless, Ganambarr asserts the ongoing power of that land through an accumulative pattern of geometric shapes formed from incisions and earth pigments, creating a hypnotising image of Country.

blue dots on a large field of white. While this evokes the vast landscape’s multitude of sand grains, additional clustering of gold dots into a series of parallel lines, stretching from one side of the composition to another, captures Arnkerrth’s tireless journey beyond the boundaries of the canvas.

In contrast to this focus on expansiveness, Abie Loy Kemarre chooses a much smaller nature motif to record the sacredness of Country. In Bush Hen Dreaming – Bush Leaves (2003), Kemarre painstakingly repeats the image of a leaf in hues of red, orange, purple, and brown. These colour contrasts, and the pattern created by the hundreds of overlapping forms, call to mind both the leaves for which the bush hen forages and the flutter of its own feathers. It also creates the astonishing illusory effect that parts of the composition move in front of the beholder’s eyes. While many artworks in the history of art have a sense of internal movement, this is the first time that I remember blinking my eyes to check whether a canvas was straight, or whether sections bulged towards me or, indeed, moved. The sensation is what is described as bir’yun, a Yolngu term meaning shimmer, and it is a prized formal outcome, for it signifies the Everywhen; that the ancient story of the painting is still alive in the present.

Using a visual language of abstract patterning on largescale supports, this potent effect is mastered by each of the show’s other artists.

In Marrapinti (2008), Doreen Reid Nakamarra, the influential Papunya Tula painter, combines dotted horizontal and vertical lines to capture both the mesmerising move-

Not being an Indigenous Australian, I don’t pretend to fully understand, or to be able to access the sacred knowledge embodied within, the works of On Country. But the effect of the paintings’ skilfully rendered abstract patterning is such that they still powerfully convey the dynamic strength and cultural impact of an elemental natural landscape, even to the non-initiated. When I visited The Met exhibition, I happened to be reading Henry Beston’s classic book of nature writing, The Outermost House (1928). In Beston’s account of the year he lived alone in a small, isolated house on a Cape Cod beach, I came across, in one of those odd providential moments, a quote that goes some way to articulating what these works communicate, and what those who live close to nature seem to comprehend:

Dwelling thus upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy. There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed as real as heat from the sun ... I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand well enough what I mean.

At a time when those in power deny climate change, or seek to eradicate environmental protections, this small delight of an exhibition should be required viewing. Studying these paintings with the sun streaming through The Met’s windows, this elemental force vigorously confronts the beholder. Ironically, in the middle of New York City, these magnificent works bring us a little closer to the natural world. g

On Country: Australian Aboriginal Art from the Kaplan–Levi Gift continues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 17 December 2017.

Sally Grant is a freelance arts and culture writer based in New York. ❖

Buyku, 2011, Gunybi Ganambarr, ochre on incised laminate board. Gift of Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi, Spike Mafford Photography © 2014

American Song

by Fiona Gruber

Leaves of Grass , Walt Whitman’s humanistic, wheeling manifesto of the American destiny underpins Australian playwright Joanna MurraySmith’s one-man play, American Song, and the collection of poems form the credo and frame the questioning of its central character, Andy. The poems’ exploration of a world of natural beauty, sensual delight, and the limitless possibilities of a young country imbue his optimistic take on life. With Whitmanesque wonder, Andy shares his tale of early good fortune in winning the trifecta of a gorgeous girl, an adorable baby son, and, after adventures in New York and a period as a caring house-husband looking after infant Robbie, a great job in their home town.

Andy, played with an assured, Springsteen-like masculinity by Joe Petruzzi, is on stage as we enter the theatre, a stocky middle-aged man in a flannel shirt, with an open, honest face and capable hands. He is dressed for labour and the labour, a stretch of drystone wall stretching across the stage, is there to behold. (Here, Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mending Wall’ springs to mind).

The stage is littered with tools – a mallet, a hammer, a wheelbarrow – that speak of ancient skills and simple truths. It is an association reinforced by Tom Healey’s direction, which adds a rhythm to the monologue as Andy bends to choose a stone, straightens and turns, before placing it just so on the growing construction. The wall is a metaphor, of course; building a life but also building barriers; keeping some people out and others safe.

As the audience settles and the lights dim, he turns to us and asks a question. Can a wall be completely sound, Andy ponders, if the stones at the bottom aren’t quite right? If they’d been laid differently, or different stones used; would the outcome be different?

The question of chance ripples through the play. Intertwined with explicit references to Whitman is an implicit debt to Arthur Miller’s similar interrogation of his nation’s brindled values. Murray-Smith’s Andy,

like Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman, questions what it means to be a successful man, a father, a provider and protector. At the heart of both plays is a sense that those values have been devalued, even betrayed.

‘It all turns on a dime, doesn’t it? But what started it?’ Andy asks, unfolding his life story as he tries to make sense of the precise moment when things went awry. Was it because the natural order was inverted when he tended baby Robbie while his wife, Amy, finished her studies? Was he too caught up with work? Or maybe it was when he bought the gun for family protection?

As the anecdotes get darker, we see the flaws in the all-American male’s all-American dream; in MurraySmith’s powerful writing, the building of a character and the collapse of his life are explored with a driving sense of compassion and impending doom.

It is not a spoiler to say that this is a play about a mass killing. Australia last had one in 1996, at Port Arthur; America had its latest and largest on 1 October 2017, with the killing of fifty-nine concertgoers in Las Vegas. That Murray-Smith’s play should open in the same week gave it an added frisson.

The play had its world première in March 2016 at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre; it was commissioned by the company’s English artistic director, Mark Clements (who also directed the US première of Australian playwright Andrew Bovell’s Speaking in Tongues). American Song was intended to tackle the subject most likely to polarise American audiences. Andy’s ruminations on the wisdom of buying a gun and protecting his family has much more traction with an American audience than with an Australian one. It’s doubtful whether anyone in Red Stitch’s audience owns a handgun. Yet most people who see this play, whatever their nationality and whether a parent or not, can understand the weirdness of adolescence and the difficulty every parent has balancing rules with freedoms and getting the grumpy, grunting tenant who’s replaced your child to agree to boundaries.

Like Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), this story is written from the perspective of an aggressor’s parent. Although very different in tone and particulars, it also deals with the bafflement of parenthood and the impossibility of anticipating the unimaginable.

Red Stitch’s production is as solid as a drystone wall, and there are no bum notes in Murray-Smith’s ear for mid-Western Americanisms and the philosophy they give voice to. Joe Petruzzi, despite groping for lines a couple of times on opening night, is compelling as Andy, the wounded romantic who can still ask ‘what happened to Whitman’s America? There is no unified song. There is no harmony of voices.’

We are left to ponder if there ever was. g

American Song (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre), written by Joanna Murray-Smith and directed by Tom Healey, continues until 5 November 2017. Performance attended: 6 October.

Fiona Gruber is an arts journalist and producer.

by Ian Dickson

When this production of Henrik Ibsen’s most controversial play was programmed, no one could have guessed how pertinent it would appear in Australia at this moment. On the surface, this account of a bourgeois woman whose attempt to escape from a loveless marriage and a philandering husband is foiled by the Pastor she loved and the conventions of the times, who has to live a lie and finally deal with a beloved son who has inherited syphilis from his father, is of another era. After all, there is now at last understanding and help for those leaving an abusive marriage, and her son’s disease would easily be cured. But Ghosts is about more than these afflictions. The protagonist, Mrs Alving’s, speech to her nemesis, the hidebound, reactionary Pastor Manders, is the core of the play. As Robert Brustein writes, Ibsen’s ‘underlying purpose was to demonstrate how a series of withered conventions, unthinkingly perpetuated, could result in the annihilation not only of a conventional family but, by extension, the whole modern world’.

As we make our marks on the forms in the present farcical opinion poll, the Pastor Manders of Australia are thundering from the pulpit against marriage equality while the Mrs Alvings, one hopes, are moving towards a yes vote.

Ibsen wrote the play quickly and under some sort of compulsion. Writing to his publisher, Frederik Hegel, in November 1881, Ibsen said of his just-completed play: ‘Ghosts will probably cause alarm in some circles; but that can’t be helped. If it didn’t there would have been no necessity for me to have written it.’ In 1898, the year Ibsen turned seventy, at a ceremony honouring him in Stockholm, King Oscar made a slighting remark about the play After an uncomfortable pause, Ibsen burst out: ‘Your Majesty, I had to write Ghosts!’ Ghosts is Ibsen’s classic play, the one that conforms most closely to the dramatic unities of time, place, and action. It takes place on the evening and night before an orphanage, dedicated to Mrs Alving’s late husband, is due to be opened. Her son, Oswald, has returned from Paris, ostensibly for the occasion. The dedication speech is due to be given by Pastor Manders, the man Mrs Alving truly loved and to whom she fled for help when her marriage became unbearable. Terrified of scandal, he sent her back and cut off communication with her. Meanwhile, the wily carpenter, Jacob Engstrand, attempts to persuade his supposed daughter, Regina, in service to Mrs Alving, to return to town with him to act as an attraction in his planned, euphemistically called tavern for sailors.

Eamon Flack has produced a spare, powerful adaptation which he rightly plays without an interval. He is able to spell out things that, in 1881, Ibsen could only hint at: the syphilis that Oswald carries and the brothel that will be Captain Alving’s legacy. Flack has made no attempt to

update the play, understanding that its power and relevance need no intervention.

On opening night, there was a slight sense that the performances were still settling in. Pamela Rabe presents an interesting take on Mrs Alving. Instead of the usual flinty matriarch whose rigid façade crumbles as the play proceeds, her Mrs Alving is a much more vulnerable creature. The scene in which she reveals to the Pastor the truth about her marriage is usually played as an explosion of bitterness and anger. Rabe plays it more as a plea for understanding. As the terrible night unfolds, Rabe shows us a woman finally coming to an understanding of how the constraints of society have warped her life and the lives of everyone around her. Sweeping through the ashes of the destroyed orphanage and her wasted life, and ending the play in an agony of indecision, Rabe’s Mrs Alving is a creature both formidable and forlorn. If her performance at the moment lacks the ultimate tragic dimension, that will surely come as she settles into the role.

Robert Menzies, several decades ago a febrile Oswald to Julia Blake’s Mrs Alving, has graduated, if that is the correct term, to Pastor Manders. He gets the pastor’s unimaginative conservatism and sexual repression, but misses his pompous authority and ultimate hypocrisy. We don’t get the sense that this is a man of influence. In his magisterial biography of Ibsen, Michael Meyer warns against making Manders a figure of fun and Flack and Menzies certainly don’t make that mistake. However, there should be some humour in the scenes in which Engstrand hoodwinks the obtuse, selfimportant pastor. But because Colin Moody plays Engstrand straight, virtually as though he believes in what he’s saying, and because Menzies’ Pastor is almost unassuming, the comedy goes missing. In one puzzling moment, at Engstrand’s initial entrance, he crosses himself. Are we to assume that he is in fact a Catholic, something that would probably shock the Evangelical Lutheran Manders more than the brothel Engstrand plans to open?

Tom Conroy is a callow Oswald, which is no criticism. His Oswald is a man young for his years, totally unprepared for what life has dealt him. If his hysterical explosions are pitched a shade too high, he is very good in the quieter moments, confessing his terror. His almost Oedipal rapport with his mother makes for a very powerful last scene.

Regina is the one character in the play who has yet to be crushed by the society in which she finds herself. Taylor Ferguson ably charts her journey from a naïve girl dreaming of Paris to a practical, hard-bitten woman well aware of her limited options, but determined to use them to her best advantage.

Michael Hankin’s gloomy set and Nick Schlieper’s crepuscular lighting are perfectly in tune with a production that shows us the relevance of Ibsen’s play but, at present, misses out on its ultimate power. g

Ghosts (Belvoir St Theatre), written by Henry Ibsen and directed by Eamon Flack. Performance attended: 20 September 2017

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

I Am Not Your Negro

by Beejay Silcox

Movie tickets cost five dollars at the Lyric Theatre in Blacksburg, Virginia. It’s an old gem – a distinctly American marriage of Art Deco and Spanish Colonial Revival. There are red velvet seats and oak banisters; the walls are lantern-lit, and lined with tapestries from the 1930s. Eight decades of popcorn butter is burned into the air. It’s less a theatre than a time machine.

The first time I saw I Am Not Your Negro – Raoul Peck’s taut and vital Oscar-nominated documentary about the writer and civil-rights activist James Baldwin (1924–87) – I sat in my usual seat, front-row-centre on the balcony.

The view’s not great, but I like the elevated quiet. I have the luxury of choice. During segregation, Black patrons were forced into the recessed dark, hidden from the white audience below. A discreet, brass plaque on the staircase attests to this shameful past, but history can’t be screwed to the wall. ‘History is not the past,’ wrote Baldwin, ‘It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.’ With brutal clarity, I Am Not Your Negro demonstrates that America’s racist history is alive and awake: ‘The story of the negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.’

A black homosexual, perilously confined to the margins of mid-century American life, James Baldwin bore witness to his country’s unspoken cruelties: ‘I love America more than any other country in the world,’ he wrote, ‘and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.’ Criticise her he did – in essays, novels, plays, and public discourse – with words of incendiary beauty.

In this era of insular nativism, Baldwin’s words seem to carry the terrible weight of prophecy: ‘I’m terrified at the moral apathy, at the death of the heart that is happening in my country,’ he lamented more than thirty years ago; he could have been speaking yesterday. After decades of neglect, scholars, writers, educators, and activists are rightly and loudly championing his substantial legacy. I Am Not Your Negro is the most forceful attempt to bring Baldwin’s work into the public imagination.

ABR Arts

John Allison

Rosalind Appleby

Ben Brooker

Jane Clark

Des Cowley

Anwen Crawford

Ian Dickson

Helen Ennis

Andrew Fuhrmann

Fiona Gruber

Michael Halliwell

Bronwyn Lea

Susan Lever

Louise Martin-Chew

Peter Rose

Dina Ross

Zoltán Szabó

Harry Windsor

The film draws inspiration, and much of its script, from a manuscript Baldwin left unfinished. Remember This House was to be Baldwin’s magnum opus, a piercing critique of white America, anchored by the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr (all of whom were murdered within five years of each other). As Baldwin explained in a letter to his literary agent: ‘I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other, as, in truth, they did.’

Sadly, Baldwin’s progress on the project stalled. When he died of stomach cancer in 1987, he left only thirty pages of notes behind. His youngest sister entrusted these pages to Haitian-born director Peck. While Baldwin is credited as the film’s writer, Peck has masterfully combined sections of Remember This House with excerpts from Baldwin’s published works and clips from his television appearances, alongside potent contemporary footage (such as the Ferguson protests), to create a narrative in collage.

Baldwin was also a noted cinéaste. In his book The Devil Finds Work (1976), he explored Hollywood’s long history of reifying racial stereotypes of black menace and white purity: ‘Heroes, as far as I could see, were white and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.’ Interspersed with scenes from iconic films, Peck’s documentary also becomes a damning commentary on the US film industry and its role in nationalist myth-making.

America’s racial animus – on prime-time television. You can hear the unmistakable echo of his child-preacher past in his aphorisms and rhetorical flourishes: the laboured sigh, the sceptical eyebrow, the weighted pause.

What emerges is a cinematic essay in which Baldwin functions as both the film’s author and subject – a past and future Baldwin in dialogue. As a subject, we join Baldwin in his thirties, as he reluctantly returns to the United States from Paris. The civil rights movement is gaining momentum, and he has come home to pay his political dues. This is Baldwin at the height of his influence: his intelligence and elegant fury on full display. With his slim black suit, skinny tie, and ever-smouldering cigarette, he exudes a kind of aloof, feline grace – a languid, effortless cool.

An astonishing 1963 clip from The Dick Cavett Show sees Baldwin at his eloquent best, anger only sharpening his invective: ‘When any white man in the world says give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.’

This was the power of Baldwin, his ability to articulate with peerless clarity the deep-rooted psycho-logy of white

The Baldwin who narrates Peck’s film (voiced with profound tenderness by Samuel L. Jackson) is a different man. This is the late-career Baldwin of Remember This House. He is battle-weary, his comrades are long-dead, and he is being attacked by both the militant left and the hyper-conservative right. After years of poor reviews and dwindling sales, he struggles to publish; and yet he continues to write, and to hope for a future in which his country lives up to its promise. ‘What can we do? Well, I am tired. I don’t know how it will come about. I know that no matter how it comes about it will be bloody, it will be hard. I still believe we can do with this country something that has not been done before.’ I Am Not Your Negro is haunted by the ghost of that dream America and its bloody reality; for every image of past injustice, it is still tragically possible to find a contemporary pair. Peck’s film has been criticised for its silence on the role sexuality played in Baldwin’s work and life. Baldwin more than deserves to be the subject of a substantial, biographical film, but I Am Not Your Negro was never aiming to be that film. Rather, for ninety-three hypnotic minutes America’s past is lent a single and singular voice in which to speak to its present. Baldwin did not live to see the tiki torches burning in Charlottesville. He did not see Obama take the oath of office, nor Trump. He did not see Rodney King beaten or Trayvon Martin shot. He missed Black Lives Matter, and the grim tally of police shootings ticking ever-upwards – but Baldwin saw it all coming.

‘What white people have to do,’ he explained, ‘is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him ... then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.’

America has shied away from that question, as I Am Not Your Negro powerfully and painfully shows. There is no film that speaks to this political moment with greater force or fury. g

I Am Not Your Negro (Madman Entertainment), 93 minutes, is directed by Raoul Peck and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and literary critic. She recently completed her MFA in the United States.

James Baldwin (New Orleans Jazz Museum via Flickr)

Song to Song

by Francesca Sasnaitis

Song to Song is writer and director Terrence Malick’s cinematic version of the modernist literary experiment: multiple internalised viewpoints, stream-ofconsciousness narrative, chronological fragmentation, and a reality apprehended through symbolic or metaphoric conjunction. He is abetted in this project by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose muted palette of gauzy, twilit pastels is shattered by abrupt streaks of neon-green, vermillion or ultramarine, nightclub colours that are the visual equivalent of a vivid memory surfacing from a sea of vague recollection.

Song to Song is also, according to an uninspired publicity blurb, a rock and roll romance tracing four lovers through the Austin (Texas) music scene. In a nutshell, aspiring musician Faye (Rooney Mara) is in love with another aspirant BV (Ryan Gosling), but is still involved with Svengali-ish record-company mogul Cook (Michael Fassbinder reprising his role as a sex-addict), who picks up, marries, then treats abominably the damaged but sexy ex-school teacher turned waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman). But don’t expect another Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975), let alone a Taking Woodstock (Ang Lee, 2009). To hang one’s expectations on the hope that Malick might adhere to a conventional story-arc, or that there might be footage of Austin’s famous music festivals, is to invite disappointment.

‘Nothing is real,’ says Faye.

Nothing is real because Malick has chosen to explore a world of vacuous wealth, where everything is for sale, including the sex that passes for love, and everyone is absurdly skinny and beautiful. Imagine a swimming pool of sparkling aquamarine set into a verdant hillside garden, and surrounded by ornamental human beings. ‘I didn’t know why I was coming to this party,’ says BV, ‘and then I saw you –and that’s why.’ Half his words are swallowed in ambient sound, lost on the breeze as he turns away from the mic. Unfortunately, regardless of the depth of his sincerity –and Gosling makes a reasonable stab at soulfulness – it is difficult not to cringe.

‘Reaching for air,’ Faye continues, turning in circles, the camera circling her. She aspires to know the right people. ‘I want the experience ... I want to live. I want to live at

any price,’ she says. And there’s the rub. She is somehow incapacitated, stymied by desire, ambition and her inability to decide where true love and real life reside. Are fame and fortune worth the sacrifice of spirit and connection, asks Malick.

The real moments, the seemingly authentic interactions, are provided by iconic figures who are neither young nor beautiful: Val Kilmer, John Lydon, Iggy Pop. Patti Smith speaks of love and loss with disarming candour, picks up her guitar and starts noodling. ‘I can go on for hours with one chord,’ she tells Faye in what must be the best line in the film.

Snippets of contemporary music waft over the evolving scenario, but the song that lays it out is Del Shannon’s paean to loss, his 1961 hit ‘Runaway’: ‘I wonder / A what went wrong with our love / A love that was so strong / And as I still walk on, I think of / The things we’ve done together / While our hearts were young ... And I wonder ...’ Mawkish perhaps, but also oddly affecting.

Parties, drives through the countryside, motel rooms, a stage, a punch-up, sex, and love are equally weighted. The women are almost interchangeable, not so much of a type as flattened by Lubezki’s constantly moving, caressing, distorting camera angles. Even the unique Cate Blanchett, in a supporting role as BV’s rebound love-interest, looks disturbingly like BV’s mother (Linda Emond). At best this is adoration of a homogenous female beauty, at worst simply voyeurism.

Reality, time, and relationships are fluid. Voice-overs trickle information like droplets into a pool, ripples spreading out and disappearing. What are we to make of this? Are we in a kind of dream? Characters prevaricate, speaking as if they are somnambulists. We are lost in their incoherence but given time, and the accretion of details, meaning emerges. Things change. Death happens, even to the beautiful people.This is the dance of life, the camera implies.That should have been the finale, but Malick insists on a coda: return to the simple life of family, children, and hard, honest work, and you will be redeemed. It’s Malick’s evangelical mission to convince the audience of this seductive load of crock.

The pertinent question remains, does Malick achieve his goals? Having missed several of his offerings since The Tree of Life (2011), about which I had minor reservations, I had prepared myself for full immersion in the auteur’s vision, determined to allow the dreamscape to flow, so to speak. And yes, inevitably in a project of this nature, there were jarring moments. In the end, what I continue to admire is not the product but the attempt: to question, to answer imperfectly, to experiment, to be true to his concept. If Malick does not always succeed, so be it: that too is part of the process, part of being an artist, and, I dare say, part of being alive. g

Song to Song (Roadshow Films), 129 minutes, is written and directed by Terrence Malick.

Francesca Sasnaitis is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

Why do you write?

Through a love of words.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Awfully, but I was warned early not to put dreams in novels, at least nothing longer than half a line.

Where are you happiest?

In the Australian bush, with eucalyptus bark crackling under my feet; or if I can’t be there, sailing tight on the wind in a small boat in New Zealand.

What is your favourite film?

Last week it was Zach Clark’s Little Sister, about a novitiate who leaves her convent to go wild for a temporary good, then goes back into the order as calmly as a dove into a dovecote.

And your favourite book?

The Origin of Species, for its sense of drama through the character of Charles Darwin’s thinking on the page: an astonishing, simple man, telling the greatest story ever told and doing it while feeling inarticulate, not really up to it. But who else was there?

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

A writer with a love of farming, food, wine, and conversation – Eric Rolls, who died in 2007. He could pick the other two, otherwise there might be trouble.

Which word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see back in public usage. ‘Passion’ – just bring back ‘interest’ to replace it.

Who is your favourite author?

Shakespeare, the Big Bang of all books.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

Joe in Loon Lake, and the character in several other E.L. Doctorow novels who is like him, lucky in life, wise in tragedy, smart as a whip, and still only at the start of life knowing nearly everything that the rest of us struggle to learn, if ever we do.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Eloquence.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. The moment I think of an answer I change my mind.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Music played anywhere in my hearing.

How do you regard publishers?

As friends. What a question!

What do you think of the state of criticism?

It’s a valid concern of critics. But if you mean book reviewing, as long as the reviewer quotes from the book under review and describes it in its own terms, i.e. using the words of the author in quotation marks to give the feeling of it, great.

And writers’ festivals?

A privilege. Nothing is more humbling and gratifying to a writer than meeting a reader who has read their work, and this is where writers meet them, sometimes more than one, but if only one, hooray.

Are artists valued in our society?

When they deserve to be, though sometimes only after a time lag.

What are you working on now?

Job not known to self until finished, I am sorry to say.

Roger McDonald’s first novel 1915: A novel of Gallipoli (1979) won the Age Book of the Year and was made into an eight-part ABC TV series. His novel Mr Darwin’s Shooter (1998) was awarded the New South Wales, Victorian, and South Australian Premiers’ Literary Awards and The Ballad of Desmond Kale won the Miles Franklin Award in 2006. His tenth novel, A Sea-Chase is reviewed on page 31. He lives in south-eastern New South Wales, with intervals spent in New Zealand where A Sea-Chase is partly set.