Australian Book Review - November 2021 issue, no. 437 by Australian Book Review

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Stephen Bennetts The fight for native title Helen Ennis Max Dupain’s dilemmas Samuel Watts Failure in Afghanistan Bernard Caleo Three graphic novels Jonica Newby Delia Falconer

ScoMo’s many faces Judith Brett on an elusive prime minister

On the road again

Advances

‘The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home,’ opined Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay ‘Self-Reliance’. A few years later, in a letter to Mrs Holland, Emily Dickinson chirruped, ‘To shut our eyes is Travel.’ Clearly, neither New Englander endured a Melbourne lockdown. All we can think about at ABR, looking up from our proofs and surveying the oppressively familiar tenemental skyline of Southbank, is ‘Travel, Travel, Travel’. ABR readers and supporters seem just as keen to ‘get out of town’. The response to our first cultural tour for two years was prompt and enthusiastic. ABR Editor Peter Rose and Christopher Menz (former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia) will lead a nine-day tour of Adelaide during Writers’ Week and the Adelaide Festival (March 5–13). It filled up on day one, and we now have a waitlist. This emboldens us to plan more tours in 2022 as the eastern states emerge from successive lockdowns and as the arts community rallies after endless devastating closures. Stay tuned for news of more tours, always with literary programs and destinations as well as art museums, theatres, concert halls – and the odd restaurant. Early next month we will begin advertising an international tour planned for October 2022.

Prizes galore

By the time the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed in early October, we had received 1,329 entries – the same number as in 2020, rather creepily. Different poems, though. It was a bit of a deluge at the end, with 1,000 entries arriving in the last fortnight. Thirty-four different countries are represented in this year’s field. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January– February issue. Meanwhile, the sixteenth Calibre Essay Prize is underway, with total prize money of $7,500. Essayists have until 17 January 2022 to enter.

Book Talk

Book Talk, our new open-access online feature is intended as a kind of noticeboard for writers, publishers, booksellers, and literary organisations with news to disseminate or something to get off their chest. We welcome suggestions from those interested in spreading the word among ABR readers here and overseas. Recently, Della Rowley, Lynn Buchanan, and Irene Tomaszewski wrote about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, which commemorates the life and work of Della’s late sister and supports the writing of quality biography. The Fellowship began in 2011, soon after Hazel Rowley’s death, with modest capital of $20,000. Because of continuing donations and ‘excellent funds management’, the 2022 Fellowship

will be worth $20,000 – such a boon for memoirists and biographers. Applications close on November 16. For more information or to apply, visit the Writers Victoria website.

Hedberg Writer in Residence

Mainlanders have not been notably welcome in Tasmania for some months, but this must change soon, surely. The end of lockdown coincides with a handsome new three-month residency, to be undertaken in the first half of 2022. Offered by the University of Tasmania, with support from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, the second Hedberg Writer-in-Residence program is worth $30,000. It is open to all established writers, in any field or genre, who are resident in Australia. You have until 8 November to apply.

Free gift subscription

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Hazel Rowley

business@australianbookreview.com.au. We will then contact the nominated recipient. Terms and conditions apply. Visit our website for more information about this special offer.

Books of the Year

Lockdown is good for at least two things: platitudinising and reading. We’ll spare you the Platitudes of the Year (we know them all by heart: ‘It is what it is’; ‘We’re all in this together’, etc., etc.). Books of the Year is another matter. Find out, in the December issue, what the ABR critics have most enjoyed reading during this cloistered year. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Australian Book Review November 2021, no. 437

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Isabella Venutti Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and online comments are subject to editing. The letters and online comments published by Australian Book Review are the opinions of the named contributor and not those of ABR. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Image credits and information

Front cover: Graffiti of Scott Morrison, December 2019 (Martin Stær Andersen via Wikimedia Commons) Page 27: Siberian tiger Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) near stream habitat (captive raised specimen), Bozeman, Montana, USA (Don Johnston_MA/Alamy) Page 63: The English novelist George Orwell, c.1944 (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

ABR November 2021 LETTERS

Luke Fischer and David Macauley, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

COMMENTARY

7 19

Judith Brett Samuel Watts

ScoMo and his flow brain Failure in Afghanistan

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

Stephen Bennetts

Title Fight by Paul Cleary

HISTORY

12 13 16

Sarah Maddison Glyn Davis Robin Gerster

The World Turned Inside Out by Lorenzo Veracini The Aristocracy of Talent by Adrian Wooldridge Australia and the Pacific by Ian Hoskins

POEMS

17 44

Zenobia Frost Sarah Day

Turning the Indiana Bell Aldinga Cliffs

AFGHANISTAN

Kevin Foster

Rogue Forces by Mark Willacy

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

23 47 49 50 51 52 53

James Jiang Madeleine Gray Kate Crowcroft Megan Clement Nicholas Coppel Andrew West David Mason

Places of Mind by Timothy Brennan Real Estate by Deborah Levy All About Yves by Yves Rees No. 91/92 by Lauren Elkin Our Home in Myanmar by Jessica Mudditt The Life of a Spy by Rod Barton Into the Rip by Damien Cave

MUSIC

Andrew Ford

Long Players edited by Tom Gatti

MEDIA

Gemma Nisbet

Upheaval edited by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson

FICTION

28 29 31 32 33 34 35

Sheila Ngọc Phạm Declan Fry Amy Baillieu Paul Dalgarno Andrew McLeod Bernard Caleo Debra Adelaide

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith 7½ by Christos Tsiolkas Wild Abandon by Emily Bitto Permafrost by S.J. Norman Travelling Companions by Antoni Jach Graphic novels by Alison Bechdel, Kristen Radtke, and Mandy Ord Three new works of fiction by Campbell Mattinson, Francesca Haig, and Allee Richards

ESSAY

Helen Ennis

Max Dupain’s dilemmas

ENVIRONMENT

43 45

Jonica Newby Cameron Muir

Signs and Wonders by Delia Falconer Wounded Country by Quentin Beresford

ECONOMICS

John Tang

Shutdown by Adam Tooze

PHILOSOPHY

Nicholas H. Smith

A Philosopher Looks at Work by Raymond Geuss

JEWISH STUDIES

Alistair Thomson

The Keeper of Miracles by Phillip Maisel

MATHEMATICS

Robyn Arianrhod

The Art of More by Michael Brooks

POETRY

58 59 60

Anders Villani Joan Fleming Prithvi Varatharajan

New poetry by Jazz Money, Ann Vickery, and Lucy Van Capacity by LK Holt and Theory of Colours by Bella Li Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen and TAKE CARE by Eunice Andrada

INTERVIEW

Ivor Indyk

Publisher of the Month

ARTS

64 65 66

Francesca Sasnaitis Travis Akbar Jordan Prosser

Animal Farm Incarceration Nation Nine Perfect Strangers

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Terri-ann White

The Service of Clouds by Delia Falconer AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

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 Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

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Conceptual containers

Letters

Dear Editor, We are grateful to Tony Hughes-d’Aeth for his review (ABR, October 2021) of our co-edited volume The Seasons: Philosophical, literary, and environmental perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021), but would like to indicate some misrepresentations. The first is that the volume is ‘grounded in forms of analytic philosophy’. Among the eleven contributors, five are specialists in Continental philosophy. Paola-Ludovika Coriando is a leading Heidegger scholar. Alphonso Lingis is a pre-eminent Continental philosopher in North America. The contributions by literary scholars also almost exclusively refer to Continental philosophy. This is not a work of ‘analytic philosophy’. Hughes-d’Aeth seizes upon a passing metaphor of a ‘conceptual container’ and projects that onto an array of diverse chapters. He claims that the seasons are treated as an abstract ‘transcendental category’, when all the essays articulate the importance of embodied approaches to the seasons. One of the primary motivations for this book was the absence of the seasons within philosophical discourse, but Hughes-d’Aeth doesn’t really engage with its philosophical or even environmental aspects. In Australian literary debates, the term ‘romanticism’ is frequently employed in vague, uninformative ways. Hughesd’Aeth illustrates this in how he questions the prominence of figures from Goethe and Thoreau to Heidegger, MerleauPonty, and Rachel Carson, whom he groups as ‘romantics’ and as remaining ‘within the long shadow of European romanticism’. There is much scholarship on whether even Goethe should be conceived as a romantic or as a classicist, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are primarily regarded as phenomenologists and existentialists/ontologists. Hughes-d’Aeth specifies neither how these figures belong to one tradition of ‘romantic imagination’, nor the respects in which this tradition is problematic. His use of ‘romanticism’ thereby amounts to little more than ‘the modern tradition of Western thought’ and insinuates that the volume is too focused on European and North American perspectives. But is this the case? We were pleased by Hughes-d’Aeth’s appreciation of the three essays that engage with Australian Aboriginal seasons (especially the Noongar seasons of WA). As the volume was published in North America and one of the editors is American, this representation is significant. Moreover, these essays

all draw on major figures within the Continental and ‘Romantic’ tradition (Thoreau, Heidegger, and Bachelard) as aids in advancing a decolonised perspective. They thereby undermine the simplistic dichotomy between ‘romantic’ and non-Western perspectives that frames Hughes-d’Aeth’s critique. Two essays (by Alphonso Lingis and Joseph Ballan) respectively explore Sámi and Inuit conceptions of the Arctic seasons. Given Hughes-d’Aeth’s interest in Indigenous perspectives, it’s surprising that they are unmentioned in his review. Jo Law considers Japanese (as well as Chinese) seasons. In short, while the volume discusses Western conceptions of the seasons, much of it engages with non-Western and Indigenous perspectives. Hughes-d’Aeth raises the issue of climate change but does not consider the discussions of how attentiveness to the seasons could improve our understanding of the issue. Rod Giblett, for example, makes the thought-provoking proposal that ‘climate change’ would be better construed as ‘seasonal dislocation’ or ‘seasonal disruption’. Luke Fischer and David Macauley (Online comment, a longer version appears online)

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth replies:

It seems the editors of this fascinating volume have now written their own review to complement mine. I am glad I was able to provide them with this opportunity as, to my knowledge, there is currently no magazine which specialises in autoreviews. In my review I tried to succinctly represent the logic of the book, which is not easy in an eclectic collection such as this, where most contributors have not, in all probability, read each other’s contributions. In reading the book, there was precious little evidence of internal awareness, as several chapters blithely overlapped each other without even a passing nod. I also tried to fairly assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses for the sake of ABR’s readers. It would have been interesting if, in their letter of response, the editors were bound by the same imperative.

Correction

In Morag Fraser’s review of Tim Bonyhady’s Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium in the October issue, we stated that Mohammad Daoud Khan was president of Afghanistan in 1959. Afghanistan was then still a monarchy: Khan became president in 1973, after a coup d’état.

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6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Commentary

ScoMo and his flow brain Three portraits of an elusive prime minister

by Judith Brett

cott Morrison has now been prime minister longer than any of his four predecessors: Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, or Malcolm Turnbull. He has won one election by the skin of his teeth and faces another by May next year. So what sort of man is he and how good a prime minister? These three publications give us slightly different takes on these questions. Annika Smethurst’s The Accidental Prime Minister (Hachette Australia, $39.99 hb, 374 pp) is a journalist’s biography, well researched and able to draw on a rich lode of interviews – with Morrison and his friends, associates, and colleagues – but light on interpretation. Lech Blaine’s Top Blokes: The larrikin myth, class and power (Quarterly Essay 83, Black Inc., $24.99 pb, 125 pp) is a stylish essay which situates Morrison’s carefully crafted public persona of ‘ScoMo’ in the class dynamics of our blokey political culture. Sean Kelly’s The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison (Black Inc, $32.95 pb, 304 pp) is a tour de force, the most perceptive and complex account we yet have of our current prime minister with insights into what makes Morrison tick that I am still trying to assimilate. Smethurst’s title is something of a misnomer. True, the events of August 2018 that led to Turnbull’s ousting were unexpected. Peter Dutton’s brewing ambition had not been evident to most of us, but, as Smethurst shows, Morrison was an ambitious man with a sharp eye for the main chance. When he saw it, he took it. Though the contingencies of events and personalities might be accidental, there was nothing accidental about Morrison’s eagerness for the job that seemed to fall into his lap. Smethurst has written the first full-length biography of Morrison. The contours of his personal life are already well known: his upbringing in a close, community-minded family; marriage to his teenage sweetheart, Jenny Warren; their shared religious belief; their long wait for their two miracle daughters; their close and happy family life. Morrison reminds us of them often as touchstones of his ordinariness. Less well known, and more problematic, is his work history, revealed in detail here for the first time. His three jobs in the tourism sector, which all ended unhappily, and his more successful four years as the state director of the New South Wales Liberal Party show the strengths and weaknesses of Morrison’s modus operandi. He works hard, and he trusts the data, with a passion for polling and focus groups. He is also controlling, secretive, careless about transparency and conflicts of interest, and, before he landed the top job, prone to

going to the media over the boss’s head. Smethurst’s last chapter is on Morrison’s poor handling of ‘the women issue’, which blew up when Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins accused the government of silencing her after she reported being raped in Parliament House by a fellow staffer. Morrison’s women’s issue is not just his bumbling of the public politics, it is also about his difficulty in working constructively with women colleagues, his tendency to bully them and put them down.

he blokeyness of Morrison’s public persona is the subject of Lech Blaine’s perceptive Quarterly Essay. Blaine grew up amid true blue blokes in Ipswich, Queensland. When he looks at the bloke now in the Lodge, he sees a fake, a class cross-dresser, a well-educated, white-collar, Sydney eastern-suburbs boy trying to pass as a working-class battler. The giveaway is Morrison’s opportunistic defection from toffy Rugby Union to larrikin Rugby League as his political fortunes rose. His target is the male working-class vote that John Howard wooed from Labor and that has been crucial to the federal Coalition’s electoral ascendancy in Queensland and New South Wales. Of the 1996 election, Blaine writes that too many voters who couldn’t distinguish Labor from Liberal in economic policy voted for the party that offered them a sense of belonging and seemed to respect who they were. Cross-dressing goes both ways, and Blaine confesses to being something of a class cross-dresser himself, a working-class boy passing for middle class as he acquires an education. As with the great writer on British class culture, Raymond Williams, this gives him the double focus needed to understand how class works, and the writerly skills to communicate his insights. It also gives him family and friends for telling anecdotes, like his Liberal-voting foster brother John, who sees Labor as ‘the party of the people who went to uni’. Our class archetypes, says Blaine, are seriously outmoded, with miners earning six figure sums able to pull the class card at the slightest hint of redundancy, while women and migrants working two or three poorly paid casual jobs barely figure. Morrison is a self-described pragmatist, with few ideological barriers to adjusting his position to shifts in the political winds, including the vagaries of public opinion, which he checks often. This opens him to regular accusations of a power-hungry lack of principle. But in a democracy what voters think matters, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

their cheery platitudes, contradictions, and non sequiturs, none of which seems to perturb Morrison in the least, even when journalists challenge them. He will deny that he said things that are on the public record, say he does not listen to gossip or waste time on extreme views, is not interested in that line of enquiry, or perhaps just pick up his briefing notes, turn his back and walk off. One could conclude from this that Morrison is not very bright, but this would be too easy. He is clearly an intelligent fter reading Sean Kelly’s The Game, I doubt he does. man. Being treasurer is not for dullards and, as the 2019 victory When Chris Feik first approached Sean Kelly to write shows, he has an exceptional strategic intelligence when it comes a book about Morrison, he said no. Morrison just wasn’t to electoral matters. Hence the aptness of Kelly’s title, The Game. interesting enough; in fact, he was slightly repellent. He agreed The problem is not brain power, but where it is directed, and, more with David Marr, who said in the 2020 discussion of Kathar- worryingly for the man who is our prime minister, where it is not. First, it is not directed far beyond people like himself. Morriine Murphy’s Quarterly Essay The End of Certainty, ‘We knew enough about Morrison the man not to want to know more.’ son is firmly anchored in his own view of the world. So are we all, more or less. But Morrison is at the Then Kelly thought some more, more limited end of the spectrum. and he thought hard. We already Writes Kelly, ‘When Morrison knew that Morrison disliked scruthinks about Australia, he simply tiny. How had he convinced us that doesn’t think about people whose there was nothing worth seeing? lives are very different from his.’ In 2015, when Turnbull made And he believes there are enough him treasurer, Morrison was barely people like himself to keep him known beyond the political class. in power. Nor does he think much If he was, it was as the hard man about people beyond our shores, and who stopped the boats. He needed has never shown interest in our exa reset, and ScoMo was born, the ternal environment, though this is a suburban dad with the cheery smile lack none of these authors explores. who loves his footy and cooks a Sri Second, it is not directed much Lankan curry for the family on the beyond the present. In an interview weekend. Footy and curry, repeated with Katharine Murphy for The End over and over to guarantee his orof Certainty, Morrison describes dinariness. Kelly compares him to himself as having ‘a flow brain’. This a novelist’s flat character, able to be Donald Trump and Scott Morrison, 2019 is a pop-psychology term for the captured in a sentence or two and (Official White House photograph by Shealah Craighead) intensity of concentration on the never needing reintroduction. It was as if he were crafted by Charles Dickens, or a focus group. As he task of the moment, being in the zone when all else falls away. told Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph, people are interested Kelly is puzzled by Morrison’s capacity to deny past events, and in what you think about the footy or what you cook because wonders if he really has forgotten them. Perhaps, as he moves ‘that’s their life, that’s what they think about’. To be sure, being on, his attention fully absorbed in the present task, the past really recognisable is important for our political leaders, but it is not does drift off. He is not a man subject to haunting. Nor does all we need from them. We also need them to take responsibility, the future have much reality, if we take his slow response to the dangers being unleashed by the planet’s heating. to be competent, and to be able to think. So we have a prime minister with little understanding of Morrison’s blame-shifting is already well established. But Kelly reveals another more sinister way that Morrison evades chains of consequence beyond the management of immediate responsibility. As he cooks a Sri Lankan curry for Annabel Crabb’s issues; and even here the management is mainly that of the Kitchen Cabinet, she asks him about the difficult decisions he had marketer and public-relations guy, concerned with avoiding to make as immigration minister (2013–14). To the well-worn reputational damage rather than solving the problem. Every now answer that he was sending a message to the people smugglers, he and again, reality breaks through the image management – fire, adds, ‘What should I have done? Not stop the boats? I’m pleased disease, rape – making his limitations plain for all to see. But that in the things the Prime Minister has asked me to do, I’ve had how to understand them? That is the question, and Kelly answers some success.’ He did it because he was asked, both claiming the it with subtle, probing intelligence and lucid, readable prose. g achievement and distancing himself from it in a move that splits off his dutiful working life from his private Christian faith and Judith Brett is a political historian and commentator. Her most reits obligation to be compassionate, or at least to try. cent book is Doing Politics: Writings on public life (Text Publishing, What about competence and thinking? Kelly subjects Mor- 2021). This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing rison’s speeches, doorstops, and interviews to close reading, and cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright he concludes that they frequently border on the absurd, with Agency’s Cultural Fund. particularly when you are leading a party whose members are generally more conservative than mainstream Australians. For prime ministers, though, attending to public opinion will only get you so far, and Morrison often seems to be outsourcing his decisions to the mob rather than leading, avoiding responsibility with his habitual blame-shifting. We are left wondering if he understands what the job requires.

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

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Indigenous Studies

‘Anything, anywhere, anytime’

struggle, native title legislation also seems to fail First Nations peoples in delivering the full promise of the 1992 Mabo judgment. Gloves off in the fight for native title After discovering the huge 1.7 billion tonne Solomon iron ore deposit in Yindjibarndi country in 2007, FMG began negotiating Stephen Bennetts with the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC), as mandated under the Native Title Act 1993. The company proposed an extraordinary ‘whole of land claim access agreement’ for ‘any and all tenure desired by FMG’ for an indefinite time and unspecified project, which would have given the company ‘unfettered access to Yindjibarndi country for as little as $3 million a year and suborTitle Fight: How the Yindjibarndi dinated the group’s native title rights to FMG’s desire to conduct battled and defeated a mining giant operations “without interference or interruption”’. In line with by Paul Cleary CEO Andrew Forrest’s well-known rejection of ‘mining welfare’, Black Inc. FMG’s financial offer was also far below established industry rates. $32.99 pb, 287 pp In the words of YAC’s mercurial young CEO, Michael Woodley, n the wall of Yindjibarndi leader Michael Woodley’s FMG was demanding a blank cheque to do ‘anything, anywhere, modest office in the Pilbara Aboriginal community of anytime’. Roebourne hangs a large framed portrait of Muhammad After negotiations with YAC broke down, FMG proceeded Ali and a pair of boxing gloves. It seems a highly appropriate with its mining operations without obtaining a land use agreemetaphor for the tale of this small Aboriginal group’s thirteen-year ment with the Yindjibarndi, thus exposing the company and resistance to one of Australia’s most powerful companies, now its investors to the legal risk of future compensation claims. recounted by former Australian journalist Paul Cleary. A former FMG employee was installed as chief strike-breaker in Title Fight highlights the unequal relationship between the Roebourne Aboriginal community, undermining YAC’s barWestern Australia’s under-resourced Aboriginal groups and gaining position through an FMG-funded breakaway native title multinational giants like FMG that seek to exploit the state’s group: the Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation. vastly profitable mineral resources, Exploiting weaknesses inheroften using processes that conflict ent in Western Australia’s highly with the principles of free, prior, privatised Aboriginal heritage and informed consent, protection consultancy industry,3 FMG was of Indigenous cultural heritage, able to ‘shop around’ for heritage and the right to fair and equitable reports that suited its own agenda. compensation, which are clearly It threatened to withhold invoice articulated in the UN Declaration payments unless consultants on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples changed their heritage reports signed by the Australian governto suit FMG requirements.4 My ment in 2009. anthropologist colleague Brad Rio Tinto’s legalised deGoode was sent packing after he struction of the 46,000-year-old refused to comply. FMG later Juukan Gorge site in May 2020 engaged the services of a more highlighted the failure of Western amenable Victorian outfit, AlAustralia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act pha Archaeology, which assisted 1972 to protect Aboriginal herFMG to under-report previously itage sites of global significance. recorded Solomon Hub heritage These include not only Juukan sites by thirty per cent, according Gorge but also the Burrup Peninto state government estimates. sula, the world’s oldest and largest A battalion of FMG lawyers outdoor rock art gallery, where began exploiting loopholes in the McGowan state government the native title process and WA’s is continuing to promote largelaughable Aboriginal heritage scale industry such as Woodside’s protection regime5 to fast-track Andrew Forrest, 2013 Scarborough LNG project, despite the Solomon Hub mine in the (Chatham House via Wikimedia Commons) having nominated the area for face of YAC opposition, and set UNESCO World Heritage Listoff a litigation firestorm in an ing in 2018.1 Commonwealth heritage legislation has proved effort to put YAC out of business. In the notorious ‘50 Cent Hall’ similarly toothless, with one hundred per cent of applications for native title meeting orchestrated by FMG and attended by Anfederal protection unsuccessful or not in 2013 yet resolved.2 In drew Forrest in 2011, the company attempted to remove opposiCleary’s meticulously detailed account of the Yindjibarndi/FMG tion to granting FMG tenements by replacing YAC applicants on

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the Yindjibarndi #1 native title claim with pro-FMG Wirlu-murra applicants. Wirlu-murra supporters were paid $500 sitting fees and bussed in from as far away as Carnarvon. YAC’s video of these unedifying proceedings was posted online as ‘The Great FMG Native Title Swindle’, then removed following FMG legal representations to Vimeo, but later reposted on the website of an Indigenous media outfit operating out of Nunavut, in Canada’s Arctic region.6 In what Cleary describes as probably ‘one of the most audacious exercises of orchestration and manipulation ever undertaken by a major listed Australian company’, FMG in 2015 created a second Aboriginal corporation and organised another sham native title meeting in an attempt to stop YAC from proceeding with its native title claim for exclusive possession and compensation over the Solomon Hub mine. But YAC was to triumph in Federal Court Justice Steven Rares’s 2017 ruling that the Yindjibarndi did indeed have exclusive possession over the Yindjibarndi #1 claim area, including the Solomon Hub mine. FMG’s appeal of this decision was rejected by five judges of the Full Federal Court in 2019. A hard loser, the company made a final appeal to the High Court, which was dismissed in May 2020, with the Yindjibarndi right to exclusive possession again upheld. The intense emotional reactions of Yindjibarndi people gathered back in Roebourne to this historic announcement were memorably captured by the local Ngaarda Media unit.7 Lawyers for YAC are now preparing a compensation claim for loss of native title rights against FMG, which is expected to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. But this stunning moral and legal vindication has come at enormous cost to a community still split by FMG’s divide-and-rule tactics. The massive profits from FMG’s dramatic break into the Pilbara iron ore market have not only made Andrew Forrest the richest man in Australia (and second richest person after Gina Rinehart), but have also supercharged a veritable philanthropic bonanza; about half of the Forrest family’s income of $4.52 billion has been channelled through its Minderoo Foundation into a wide range of philanthropic initiatives. Cleary acknowledges FMG’s Indigenous employment initiatives, but highlights the contradiction between Forrest’s high-profile advocacy of human rights issues like anti-slavery and his company’s clear disregard, in its dealings with the Yindjibarndi and other Pilbara Aboriginal groups8, for human rights principles enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Forrest’s 2020 ABC Boyer lecture series perhaps represents an apotheosis in terms of his influence in the Australian public sphere, and contrasts with the significant reputational damage suffered by a number of key facilitators of FMG’s aggressive but failed strategy to smash Yindjibarndi resistance. Solicitor Ron Bower had acted for Wirlu-murra in the notorious 50 Cent Hall meeting, but in 2017 was found by the Legal Profession Complaints Committee ‘to have engaged in consistent and substantial misleading conduct’, and was suspended from practising. He lost his appeal against the ruling in 2018. Alpha Archaeology had facilitated FMG’s Solomon Hub development by recommending that no further archaeological work be done on 14 of 24 previously recorded sites, ‘contrary to the recommendations of earlier surveys, which indicated that such work was warranted because

of the sites’ significance’.9 A list of accreditations from numerous professional heritage bodies was subsequently removed from the company’s website, while FMG’s point man in Roebourne (a former hero of WA’s Aboriginal land rights movement) is now widely regarded as a pariah by his former associates. The publication of Cleary’s extraordinary tale of First Nations resistance to Australian corporate bastardry coincides with widespread opposition by Western Australian Aboriginal groups and professional associations to the McGowan government’s current Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill. Recently retired Aboriginal Affairs minister (and recently appointed Rio Tinto and Woodside board member) Ben Wyatt intended this legislation to supersede WA’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.10 Yet in September 2021, a group of senior Aboriginal leaders submitted an urgent request to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to review the Bill, arguing that it falls far short of the principles of protection for indigenous cultural heritage enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples endorsed by the Australian government.11 The fight for Aboriginal people’s cultural rights in Western Australia continues.12 g Stephen Bennetts is a Perth-based anthropologist, Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society, and co-founder of the Aboriginal Heritage Action Alliance and Friends of Australian Rock Art, which has campaigned since 2006 for protection of the globally significant rock art of Murujuga/the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region. Endnotes

1. https://www.fara.com.au/ 2. McGrath, P & Lee, E 2016, ‘The fate of Indigenous place-based heritage in the era of native title’, in Pamela McGrath (ed.), The Right to Protect Sites: Indigenous heritage management in the era of native title, AIATSIS Research Publications, Canberra, Australia, pp. 1-25 at p. 8. Available at: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/ resource-files/2016-06/apo-nid64601.pdf 3. Philip Moore (1999), ‘Anthropological practice and Aboriginal Heritage: A case study from Western Australia’, in Applied Anthropology in Australasia, edited by Sandy Toussaint and Jim Taylor (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press), pp. 229-254. 4. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/11894610/letter-from-sue-singleton-to-registrar-yindjibarndi-aboriginal5. https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/stephen-bennetts/2015/17/2015/1424128413/wa-s-new-look-aboriginal-heritage-policy-and 6. http://www.isuma.tv/yindjibarndi/fmgs-great-native-title-swindle 7. https://fb.watch/8fNZtoE6ND/ 8. https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/twiggy 9. Cleary, 2021, p 106; 232f. 10. Although approval for the site’s destruction under section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act was granted by Wyatt’s ministerial predecessor in the Barnett Liberal Government, Peter Collier. 11. https://www.edo.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/210830-Final-UN-communication-.pdf 12. https://protectaboriginalheritagewa.good.do/protectaboriginalheritagewa/Email-WA-Premier/ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

History

Heading off the revolution

colonialism – ‘the creation of “worlds” elsewhere’ – is pursued as an alternative to the upheaval of revolutionary change. What Veracini terms ‘volitional’ or ‘voluntary’ displacement stems from How settler colonialism reshaped the world the belief that migration and settlement can head off social unSarah Maddison rest. The World Turned Inside Out presents a global history of this phenomenon through wide-ranging and meticulously researched case studies. Veracini offers the reader a reconceptualisation of events and evidence that are already widely known, and gives them a new understanding of revolution in a dialectical relationship with displacement. The World Turned Inside Out: There is a cast of thousands in this book and an extraordiSettler colonialism as a political idea nary array of examples of the settler colonial impulse. While by Lorenzo Veracini Britain and its various incursions into Indigenous territories in Verso places now known as Australia, Canada, and the United States $29.95 pb, 309 pp remain central to the book, the British were certainly not alone t is now well accepted that the invasion and colonisation of in advancing their settler colonial endeavours. Veracini narrates the Indigenous territories we call ‘Australia’ are emblematic other cases, including the Welsh settlement in the Chubut Valley of a particular type of colonialism. A settler colony, unlike, in Patagonia, the Polish founding of Nowa Polska in Brazil, the say, an extractive colony (where Indigenous peoples may be ex- Finnish settlements in Sointula, British Columbia, French inploited in pursuit of resources but where permanent settlement cursions to Algeria, New Caledonia, and French Guyana, Russia does not necessarily follow), seeks to establish a new society on into Siberia and Central Asia, and many others. Here is a world an acquired territory (regardless of the means by which that ter- of change and movement, a world turned inside out by those in ritory was acquired), intentionally displacing and eliminating the search of an ‘elsewhere’ in which they might build a new society Indigenous inhabitants. In settler colonial societies, the settler free from revolution and upheaval. Yet one might also ask ‘whose world’ is being turned inside came to stay. Along with the late Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, who out rather than upside down. Or rather, whose worlds are turned upside down through this settler teaches history and politics at Swinimpulse to turn the world inside burne University, is one of the leadout? For the Indigenous and other ing theorists of settler colonialism. prior inhabitants of these newly colVeracini’s work has helped define onised spaces, the arrival of settler this new field of study, complete colonists wreaked precisely the type with the inevitable arguments and of havoc that the migrants were contestations that such field-makthemselves seeking to avoid. Settler ing invites. The foundational incolonialism has seen Indigenous sights of settler colonial theory have worlds turned devastatingly upside helped a generation of scholars to down, with disruptions that are still understand the structural barriers experienced today. this type of social formation places Veracini does not completely in the road of the struggle for jusignore the momentous upheaval tice for a settler colonial territory’s that these colonial endeavours original inhabitants. visited upon the peoples of the In The World Turned Inside Out, Welsh house, Chubut, Patagonia, Argentina, South America territories to which these societies Veracini widens his lens, looking (robertharding/Alamy) displaced themselves. As he notes, outside those societies understood ‘Displacement … begets further as settler colonies today (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and occupied Palestine) to take in a global sweep of displacement and is inevitably predicated on violently displacing settler colonial impulses, which he dubs ‘the world turned inside and dispossessing indigenous peoples and previous inhabitants, out’. The title of the book, Veracini explains, derives from Chris- something the advocates of the world turned inside out rarely topher Hill’s articulation of the revolutionary political traditions considered.’ Nevertheless, Indigenous dispossession resulting diduring the English Civil War as ‘the world turned upside down’. rectly from the settler impulse is certainly not the focus of analysis By describing a world ‘turned inside out’, Veracini emphasises – a fact that will no doubt sit uneasily with many readers. For the the distinction ‘between an inside and an outside, and between majority of writers and political actors who populate the pages metropole and settler colony’. Not the vertical disruption of of The World Turned Inside Out, Indigenous populations were, at revolution but the horizontal displacement of settler colonialism best, an afterthought, if they were considered at all. This is not to suggest that Veracini himself is dismissive of the that turns the world inside out. Revolution is at the heart of this settler colonial impulse. price Indigenous peoples have paid, and continue to pay, for the The drive that Veracini interrogates rests on the idea that settler invasion and colonisation of their territories. If the experiences of

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Indigenous peoples and nations are marginalised within this book, that is because the ideas driving voluntary displacement seem to have been, for the most part, quite extraordinarily unconcerned with Indigenous lives. Veracini makes clear that the intent of the book is to contribute to current debates about forthcoming crises, and the possibility of renewed voluntary relocations. The final chapter charts an array of experiments in more contemporary settler colonialism, from the counter-cultural to the fringes of cults, and from cyberspace to a new ‘sovereign’ in space in the shape of the orbiting satellite ‘nation’ of Asgardia. Today, of course, we observe the world’s richest men competing to advance a new settler project beyond the confines of Earth. The billionaires currently flexing their wallets with phallic excess in a bid to colonise space are the closest examples of the historical thinkers in the book, plotting their voluntary displacement from a planet doomed by the very excesses they embody. It is certainly true that our planet faces a climate catastrophe that will produce crises on a scale we can yet barely imagine. But what these examples share is the hubris and ego of men – and it is mostly men, and almost exclusively white men at that – who, rather than looking deeply into their present time and place to learn how to live lightly on this planet, how to justly share resources, how to live alongside people with different belief systems, chose instead to light out for new horizons, to turn their own worlds inside out with little regard for the peoples affected. In the end, I was left with the sense that the ideas and ideologies that have driven settler colonialism over time are somewhat fantastical. Historical figures around the world have attempted the creation of new societies to avoid impending disaster, both imagined and real. Some of these efforts were rapid failures. Others, like Australia, have embedded themselves on Indigenous territories, and continue to struggle against the unavoidable fact of their emplaced illegitimacy. Veracini, it seems, reaches a similar conclusion in his closing sentences: Setting up a polity against someone – in the case of settler colonialism, against indigenous peoples – is not like setting up a polity without them: the settler colonial polity cannot be amended by inclusion, because it is foundationally violent and dispossessory. If this exclusion is to be addressed, the settler colonial polity must be dissolved, which is a … revolution. The world turned inside out cannot keep its promises.

Here, perhaps, is the lesson we should all take from the book. If the promise of a new world is indeed an illusion, and we cannot escape upheaval by relocating ourselves and whole societies, should we not instead pay greater heed to living more consciously, carefully, and with a greater eye to justice in the present, exactly where we find ourselves now? g Sarah Maddison is Professor of Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and co-Director of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration. She is also Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She is the author or editor of nine books including, most recently, The Colonial Fantasy: Why white Australia can’t solve black problems (2019).

Trouble at the starting line Merit under examination Glyn Davis

The Aristocracy of Talent: How meritocracy made the modern world by Adrian Wooldridge

Allen Lane $55 hb, 490 pp

he Taiping Rebellion was the most disastrous civil war in history. Over fourteen years from 1850, the upheaval claimed the lives of more than thirty million Chinese people – many to violence, more to famine, plague, and displacement as hundreds of cities across the Qing empire were destroyed. Leading the rebellion was Hong Xiuquan, a poor man trying to break into the ranks of the scholar–official class, a familiar path to moderate prosperity in China. Three times Hong sat the civil service exams, and three times he failed – again, a familiar story in an exam with a success rate often little more than one per cent. Outraged by his inability to make the winning list, Hong led a revolt which tapped into widespread discontent. When the rebels captured the imperial capital of Nanjing, Hong introduced his own exams for the new civil service. Aspiring candidates were examined on Hong’s translations of Christian holy books instead of set texts from Chinese classical literature. In The Aristocracy of Talent, Adrian Wooldridge cites the Chinese civil service exams as a forerunner of the modern world. Early European visitors observed the examination halls scattered across China, with throngs of men young and old cramming as each three-year cycle of exams approached, the glittering careers in government awaiting the lucky few, the consolation prizes as a local scribe or teacher awaiting the many who failed. Children would start studying at the age of six for the chance to pass a local exam and go to the provincial centre for the national papers. Estimates suggest that two and a half million Chinese men sat each round of exams, in carefully invigilated centres across the empire. For the successful, further exams determined promotion through the ranks to the very highest offices. The Chinese imperial exam system was abolished in 1905, shortly before the collapse of the Qing dynasty. There are modern echoes, though, in the gaokao, the extraordinarily competitive exams held in June each year for entry to China’s most prestigious universities. The traditional Chinese system combined an aristocratic élite – the emperor and family – with government by mandarins, the scholars who administered the largest political entity on earth. Eventually, a similar mix emerged in the West, as the kingdoms of Europe sought technical skills and more effective administration. Prussia adopted merit-based selection into government office after its defeat by Napoleon in 1806. The French in turn AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

The Aristocracy of Talent includes a critical account of the rise of intelligence measurement – and the dilemma it raised. For if intelligence is distributed widely, then much talent is hidden by poor schooling and economic disadvantage. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of the ‘talented tenth’ – the African American community excluded from the institutions which mattered in America. With demands for positive discrimination, the sharp edge of merit became clear. In a famous commencement speech in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the historically black Howard University. ‘Freedom is not enough,’ he told the students. ‘You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him to the starting line and then say “you are free to compete with all the others” and still believe that you have been completely fair.’ The ‘him’ from Johnson is telling – university graduates then were overwhelmingly male. It would be another generation before women competed in equal numbers for a place on campus. The unease about positive discrimination and quotas which followed Johnson’s speech still troubles some. The final section of The Aristocracy of Talent documents the contemporary pushback on meritocracy from left and right. Some claim that the ideal has been corrupted by privileged access to the key sorting system of the modern age: the university. Others believe that the notion of merit is imbued with cultural biases, a view accentuated by the frequent misuse of IQ tests and dubious claims about inherent differences between races. Yet, concludes Wooldridge, meritocracy does a better job than the available alternatives in ‘reconciling the two great tensions at the heart of modernity: between efficiency and fairness on the one hand, and between moral equality and Examination hall in Peking, China, 1899 John Clark Ridpath (1899). Royal Photograph social differentiation on the other’. Gallery. Philadelphia: Peoples Publishing Co. p. 107. (Wikimedia Commons) The book closes not with the risk of a second Taiping Rebellion by disappointed exam candidates, but with Merit was closely linked to the rise of democracy, a moral the cautionary tale of Venice – once the richest city in Europe, claim that the community must find and use the best of its tal- famously open to talented immigrants, marked by constant soents, regardless of social standing. Praising hard work, ambition, cial mobility. Venetians, says Wooldridge, tired of the relentless and education became the platform of liberals in the nineteenth demands of competition and change. They closed the book of century, then the core value of British socialists throughout noble families allowed to participate in politics, restricted entry much of the twentieth. The Fabians argued that identifying, for newcomers, regulated trade, and suffered a long slow decline, training, and advancing talent was the single most important becoming, in John Ruskin’s memorable words, the ‘ghost upon role for government. Only in the 1980s, argues Wooldridge, the sands of the sea’. The Aristocracy of Talent is among the best of recent books did Margaret Thatcher ‘seize the mantle of merit from the left and attach it to the market rather than the state’. As a universal about the idea of merit, including influential works by Daniel goal, merit requires selection on the basis of talent, equality of Markovits and Michael Sandel. As in his Bagehot column for opportunity, an end to discrimination, and open competition. It The Economist, Wooldridge writes with clarity and authority. can be revolutionary, undermining traditional power structures, He is less concerned about entry to Harvard or Yale as a measure reshaping society from bottom to top as merit challenges class, of the Zeitgeist, and offers a wider focus. Wooldridge advocates merit-based societies while underscoring how often the practice gender, and ethnicity as barriers to participation. The rise of the merit principle encouraged government to falls short. He documents the anger of those who miss out and invest in education. The stress on talent was accelerated by the argues the case for greater inclusion. For the best and brightest invention of IQ tests during World War I. Soon intelligence tests are not always all they promise to be, while others remain trapped were used to stream children within schools and employed by uni- at the starting line. g versities such as Stanford to identify outstanding ability. Students in Singapore, reports Wooldridge, erect faux shrines to the ‘bell Glyn Davis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at curve god’, the distribution of human ability that rules all our lives. the Australian National University. have competitive national exams for high school students dating from the ancien régime, notably the concours généraux. These continue: in 1994 Emmanuel Macron topped the nation in French. In Britain, concern about corruption and incompetence in government ranks saw the Northcote–Trevelyan report of 1854 recommend that the nation adopt the Chinese system of exams to control entry to the civil service. Reform of the army followed disastrous British leadership during the Crimean war. ‘Someone had blundered’ when ordering the charge of the Light Brigade, as Tennyson pointed out. The practice of buying commissions was ended; henceforth exams and training would govern entry and promotion in the military.

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calibre essay prize

PRIZE MONEY

$7,500 CLOSES

17 January 2022

The 2022 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for non-fiction essays, is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental. This is the sixteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. This year, our judges are Declan Fry, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Recent winners ‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’

Yves Rees, 2020 winner

The Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-Ruth SindreyAand U S T RPeter A L I A NMcLennan. BOOK REVIEW

NOVEMBER 2021

History

Pacific tensions

the convict colony in 1788. However, the Pacific registered little on the Australian consciousness in the first decades of settlement, despite a rapidly developing network of trade links. Australia’s interactions with the Pacific ‘There were surprisingly few Australian travelogues and Robin Gerster even less fiction and poetry set in the Pacific’ in the nineteenth century, Hoskins writes. Little has changed. Since the end of the Vietnam War, many important Australian novels have been set in countries such as Indonesia, China, and India, signalling the surge of interest in Asia, fuelled by tourism from and migration to Australia. But aside from the numerous narratives produced by the war against the Japanese, Pacific nations remain comparatively Australia and the Pacific: A history unrepresented. A singular exception is James McAuley’s Captain by Ian Hoskins Quiros (1964), an epic poem about the southern voyages of the NewSouth early seventeenth-century Portuguese navigator, a work here $39.99 pb, 476 pp paid detailed attention. Perhaps the most substantial Australian ravel itineraries are significant in the world of diplomacy, responses have come in the form of academic research, includas Ian Hoskins illustrates in this panoramic survey of ing that of Greg Dening and especially Bernard Smith, whose Australia’s interactions with the Pacific. Gareth Evans, ground-breaking European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) freshly installed as Australia’s foreign minister in 1988, made revealed the role of art as a representational tool of colonial a point of visiting the South Pacific neighbourhood before pay- mastery. As Hoskins rightly remarks, Smith’s insights anticipated ing his country’s traditional obeisance to Washington and the those of Edward W. Said by many years. The relative lack of Australia’s imaginative response to the European capitals. Within a month he had visited Papua New Guinea, Nauru, the Solomons, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, West- Pacific belies the fact that, as Hoskins notes, the nation’s ‘deep ern Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and New Zealand. Evans was sending past and its modern history’ are ‘intrinsically connected’ to the a message, visibly prioritising ‘our Asia-Pacific geography over our ocean. The chronological range of Australia and the Pacific is kaleidoscopic, arcing back to the formation of the major Pacific Euro-Atlantic history’. That Australia’s future lies in engaging with the Asia-Pacific is landmasses and archipelagos themselves. The arresting opening axiomatic. But where (and what) is the Asia-Pacific? This vast and counterpoints the formation of the Australian continent, created diverse region is usually reduced to major players such as China by stupendous geological upheaval millions of years ago, with the appearance of ‘a new Pacific and Japan, and intermittently parts neighbour’ in 2015 following a of Southeast Asia. Indeed, the very volcanic eruption, when a small term Asia-Pacific has become passé. patch of land suddenly emerged The ‘Indo-Pacific’ is now touted from the sea near Tonga, its as a better means of strategising survival against the elements international alliances, being more uncertain. inclusive of a rising India and a ‘Existence in the decepway of countering the intimidattively named Pacific Ocean ing clout of China. Whatever the can be precarious,’ Hoskins favoured demarcation, the small observes. While rising seas and Pacific Island nations of Melanesia, wild weather throw the very Micronesia, and Polynesia tend to existence of some Pacific Island be neglected as dots on a map that states into question, local leaders mean nothing to most Australians, regard Australia’s politicised except as holiday daydreams. arguments about climate change In Australia and the Pacif ic, Kiribati, 2007 and its loyalty to fossil fuels with Hoskins aims to redress what he (Vladimir Lysenko/Wikimedia Commons) ‘anxiety and bewilderment’, he calls the ‘national amnesia’ about writes. One can imagine their the region. Perhaps the problem is not so much loss of memory as pervasive indifference. Hoskins sense of abandonment. Take the low-lying Melanesian nation reveals the impact of the Pacific on the European imaginary long Kiribati, long pillaged for the phosphate that provided Australbefore it was colonised, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c.1611) ian farmers with thousands of tonnes of much-needed fertiliser. to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Jonathan Swift’s Today, the Kiribati people watch their land disappear as distant Gulliver’s Travels (1726), part of which is set in ‘nations’ proximate glaciers melt and the sea rises and warms. In 2018, Prime Minister to Australia, then still unknown and skirted by navigators. Swift’s Scott Morrison spoke about Australia as a member of the ‘Pacific satirical conflation of travel with imperialism anticipated the Brit- family’, from which a China seeking to extend its influence has ish ‘claim for the Pacific half of the continent’ following Captain become pointedly excluded. But visiting Tuvalu for the Pacific Cook’s voyages of so-called discovery and the establishment of Islands Forum not long after his election triumph in May 2019,

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he dismissively refused to commit to significant action on climate, despite leading the region’s largest emitter of carbon. Pacific nations may not be ‘family’, but they do have their Australian uses. As immigration minister in the Howard government, Morrison had ‘stopped the boats’, repelling the flow of unauthorised refugees from the Middle East and Asia. In 2001, Nauru, another fruitful phosphate source that had fallen on hard times, was made an offer it could not refuse, an aid package in exchange for housing Australia’s unwanted asylum seekers. The old friend and former colony Papua New Guinea was also provided supplementary aid as a sweetener to set up the detention centre on Manus Island. Thus Australia’s vexing problem with ‘illegals’ was provided with a ‘Pacific Solution’, the unpleasantly Hitlerian echo of which seemed lost on John Howard. Australia’s repulsion of asylum seekers was reminiscent of the forced return at the turn of the twentieth century of Pacific Islanders, the last of the community of indentured labourers brought to the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, not always by choice. Rapacious entrepreneurs eyed the Pacific as ‘an oyster to be shucked’, Hoskins writes in one of the book’s most powerful chapters. The Pacific was a ‘cornucopia of commodities’, desirable products like flax and sandalwood – and people. Blackbirding, the exploitation of Pacific Islanders on the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to American slavery, and ran contemporaneously with the continued repression of Aboriginals and the rising

tide of violent opposition to the Chinese who had gravitated to Australia during the Gold Rushes. Australia and the Pacific is a welcome contribution to the fraught history of Australian regional relationships. It is voluminously documented, though one could have wished for more than the single page granted to the proactive Australian involvement in the postwar occupation of Japan, which lasted longer than the conflict that preceded it and signalled the nation’s political determination to play a constructive role in Asia–Pacific affairs. The multiple controversies over France’s nuclear testing in the Pacific from the 1960s also deserve a more extended and sceptical treatment. The anti-French brouhaha over the resumption of atmospheric testing at Mururoa Atoll in 1995, when some Australians displayed their anti-nuclear credentials by temporarily eschewing baguettes and berets, is ignored. A decade earlier, in the mid-1980s, the Hawke government’s outrage at the testing didn’t stop it from discreetly lifting its embargo on lucrative uranium sales to France at the earliest opportunity. As has become patently clear, Australia has never been as committed to a ‘nuclear free’ Pacific as New Zealand. g Robin Gerster is an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His latest book is Hiroshima and Here: Reflections on Australian atomic culture (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

Turning the Indiana Bell Imagine how the light fell on their desks. Clerks in rotation elbowed into the ’30s with their heated office coffee unimpeded.

Telephones still rang. 10,000 tons of progress swung in a month, still toilets flushed. Lunch revolved on static gossip panning Indiana backdrop. The future comes at you at fifteen inches to the hour. The future marks you for demolition. But sometimes you’re spun off-axis, feeling nothing.

Zenobia Frost Zenobia Frost’s most recent collection is After the Demolition (Cordite, 2019). Note: In 1930, engineers rotated an eight-storey Indiana Bell office building by 90°, without disrupting 600 employees’ workdays. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Category

the best new

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Commentary

Failure in Afghanistan The limits of presidential power

by Samuel Watts

hen the last C-17 cargo plane left the Hamid Karzai International Airport on 30 August with the remaining US soldiers and diplomats, America’s longest war officially came to a close. The swift return of the Taliban was a deeply distressing and tragic end to a war whose close, nevertheless, came partly as a relief. The inevitable question as to what lessons America – more particularly, its military and federal government – has learnt or should learn was followed by substantial criticism of President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and dire predictions for the future of American power and prestige abroad. The process of confronting uncomfortable realities and debating the meaning of such an event is both natural and necessary, yet the history of previous American conflicts overseas tells us that the period of actual reckoning will be brief and few lessons may be learnt. Foreign relations ranks near the bottom of issues about which American voters express concern, but regardless of their accuracy, any perceptions of Biden as incompetent or cowardly may be reinforced by blanket coverage of Taliban soldiers striding through abandoned military bases and sitting triumphantly in Kabul’s presidential palace. For some Afghans who had achieved a certain degree of freedom and stability, the consequences of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan are terrifying. In light of this tragedy, it may seem wrong to focus on such consequences for domestic US politics. Yet the political fallout of withdrawal will influence how much of his domestic agenda Biden is able to implement, not to mention how the United States conducts its future wars. Whether Republicans are able to frame Biden’s withdrawal as a failure, and whether the American public blames Biden for the failed reconstruction of the Afghan state, will be key. At the heart of this question rest assumptions about American power that dramatically underestimate the structural realities of American politics and national security policy, while overemphasising the role and power of individual presidents. It is unfair to blame Biden for a poorly conceived and executed war that predated his presidency by almost two decades, yet that is exactly what has happened – in the media and in élite circles at least. Failure – or, rather, the idea of failure – tends to haunt the office of the president, regardless of the attributes or achievements of the office-holder. Of course, there are some presidents who really were failures, who either could not or would not use the office to keep Americans and the republic safe while fulfilling their

constitutional duties (think James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, or Donald Trump). Thankfully, they have been in the minority. Most presidents work within the limits of their constitutionally determined role. CBS journalist and author John Dickerson has rightly described the office as the hardest job in the world. But contrary to what some presidential scholars have assumed, success in the job has less to do with the managerial competence of any particular president than with a far broader constellation of longer-term political factors, circumstance, and luck. Despite this, scholars of the presidency and public pollsters are seemingly obsessed with quantifying the effectiveness of particular presidents and ranking them from best to worst, with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (wartime leaders) faring particularly well. The mythologisation of these leaders and their continuing popularity in the American scholarly and popular imagination need rethinking. Not only are rankings theoretically and methodologically unsound (divorcing the presidency from its historical context, the job has changed significantly over time), they also reinforce an idea of the president as a mythic father figure who unifies and watches over the republic. The immediate consequence of this is that any president who does measure up to an imagined Washington or Lincoln is found lacking. Not long after Obama’s presidency was described by pundits as ‘historic’ it became ‘disappointing’, and this label stuck to him throughout his presidency. Of course, President Obama was always going to be less popular than the energetic campaign orator who spoke about Hope, Change, and a more united and perfect union. Obama actively encouraged Americans’ already inflated perception of presidential power; he used it to defeat Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In his rhetoric and his campaign posters, Obama positioned himself as the embodiment of a more unified and hopeful America. While Obama is not wholly to blame for public misconceptions about presidential power, neither is the American public. If blame can truly rest in one place, it is with the US Congress, which has not functioned effectively for decades. Gridlocked and polarised, Congress has been consistently unable to pass meaningful legislation on any number of issues on which Americans of both parties have generally formed a consensus. This is not a matter of opinion, but rather a fact established by a multitude of empirical studies. Senators have clung to arcane institutional rules that have prevented dynamic AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

and responsive legislation, while simultaneously disregarding traditions and norms that made bipartisan co-operation possible. As the events of 6 January 2021 highlighted, Congress is so dysfunctional that its members can’t even agree on the basic facts of what happened that day or who was to blame. This state of affairs can only be described as institutionalised insanity. One cannot blame Americans for looking elsewhere for stability and good government. Of course, the executive branch is now far more powerful than it was in the past. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, the presidency has played a far greater role in public policy and in the lives of ordinary Americans. Despite his patrician background, Roosevelt was able to foster an intimacy with the people through a series of radio addresses that provided Americans with a sense of stability and security during periods of massive economic, social, and geopolitical uncertainty. Later presidents further refined and performed the role of Comforter-in-Chief very effectively (think Ronald Reagan’s response to the Challenger disaster). In the cases of Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, a strong executive branch was used to actively shape and guide legislation through Congress, to quickly respond to national crises, and to implement much-needed social and economic reforms through federal government agencies. Yet, in both cases, the extension and use of executive power came at a terrible cost: Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 led to the internment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans, the majority of whom were US citizens. Similarly, Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War, a decision that ended his career, was both catastrophic and senseless. It was the expansion of the executive branch – supported by Congress – that led to the disastrous War on Terror and the continued occupation of both Iraq and Afghanistan, long after the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. The Authorization for Use of Military Force, effectively a blanket approval issued to the president from Congress for any and all military interventions, has enabled the United States to continually wage war without fully justifying those wars to the public. President Biden, who has often been compared to FDR and LBJ (and who, it should be said, welcomes these comparisons), has also been accused of repeating the failures of previous administrations in Vietnam, by allowing the Afghan government to crumble without the protection of the military. When I spoke with Emma Shortis, historian and research fellow at RMIT (and author of Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s fatal alliance with the United States, Hardie Grants Books, 2021), she noted the parallels between Biden and LBJ; like Johnson, Biden appears to feel ‘both bound and hemmed in by the American political system, American history and traditions’, experiencing the same tension between a more hawkish foreign policy approach and a radical restructuring of American society. The failure to properly institute a mass-evacuation strategy that could have transported Afghan interpreters, civilians, and their families from the country – or at least managed the inevitable chaos more effectively – was deeply troubling, and the blame for this undoubtedly rests not only with the president, but also with his national security team, the Pentagon, and military intelligence. Similarly, the 29 August drone strike that killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, cannot be condemned 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

enough. Believing that the car had visited an ISIS safe house and had been loaded with explosives, the US military fired their last missile of the conflict at the vehicle, obliterating the children and adults inside. Basic intelligence gathering could have established that the car belonged to a California-based international aid organisation and that the driver, Zamari Ahmadi, visited the home of the organisation’s country director – not an ISIS safe house – and was transporting water, not explosives. This was not a tragic accident but rather the horrific consequence of a fundamentally immoral approach to warfare that has been crucial to US military strategy since the war began. While the national security establishment and military leadership were frequently critical of, and in conflict with, Trump and his administration, Shortis notes that there have been ‘considerable tensions between Biden and the Pentagon’, and that ‘at least part of the reason that the withdrawal has been such an unmitigated disaster is that the Pentagon was unwilling to plan for the eventuality of an American withdrawal because that system is geared toward perpetual war and perpetual intervention’. Other analysts have pointed to Biden’s decision to continue Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan as representative of not only the end of American power in the Middle East, but also the end of a broader mission of promoting liberal democracy and Western values. Describing Biden’s withdrawal as both ‘pitiful’ and an ‘abject surrender’ in The Australian, foreign affairs editor Greg Sheridan declared that this defeat meant the death of ‘liberalism as a meaningful driver of policy’. In these debates it is hard to separate geopolitics from the stuff of culture wars. The same Western liberalism that informed democratisation in countries such as Taiwan and South Korea has been fatally wounded, according to Sheridan, by the advent of identity-politics. Shortis dismisses the idea that this represents the end of American intervention in the country, for ‘Biden is a traditionalist in the exercise of American power abroad … there are still drones flying over Afghanistan and the region and beyond’, and ultimately ‘the withdrawal is about a maintenance of American empire rather than the dismantling of it’. The question for Biden now is will the withdrawal from Afghanistan diminish his popularity with the voters? Probably not. While Americans as a whole do have an outsized understanding of presidential power and are primed to blame individual presidents for events outside their control, the war in Afghanistan has been remarkably absent from American popular culture, the media, and everyday life. However, for those serving in the military, for their families and the families of soldiers who have lost their lives, the human cost of intervention in Afghanistan (and Iraq) has never been something they could afford to ignore. Compared to previous conflicts, the bloodshed of nation-building in the Middle East has left the lives of most Americans (at least since the Obama administration) relatively untouched. It has been this remarkable lack of interest – arguably a failure of the media – that has allowed for such an extended and ultimately unsuccessful occupation. The good news for Biden is that the withdrawal from Afghanistan will likely not affect the roll-out of his agenda, one that represents the most ambitious set of social, economic, and environmental policies a president has sought to implement

Afghanistan in a generation. Some of this agenda has already been fully accomplished, some of it partly. In March 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law, a US $1.9 trillion bill that expanded unemployment benefits and healthcare coverage, provided tax credits to families and emergency paid leave for 100 million Americans, and included direct payments to individuals (among other provisions) in order to stimulate the economy. At the time this article was written, the House had already approved a US $3.5 trillion budget resolution and is set to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already received bipartisan support in the Senate. Together, these bills seek to fulfil Biden’s Build Back Better Plan. While they would dramatically increase the national debt, the bills would also expand Medicare and massively redistribute wealth and opportunities to Americans who were struggling before Covid-19. A subset of this program, the American Families Plan, is particularly remarkable in its scope and, if implemented in full, would provide for a robust social safety net that has yet to be achieved in Australia, let alone the United States. Democrats in Congress are working to pass these two pieces of legislation quickly before the 2022 mid-term elections, when there is a good chance they will lose their majority in the House of Representatives. The Democrats’ majority in the House shrank in 2020, and the first mid-term election in any presidential term usually involves a net gain of congressional seats for the party not represented in the White House. The upcoming mid-terms will similarly offer a test of widespread voter-suppression efforts in the South, and Republican-controlled state redistricting in Southern and Midwestern states, following the 2020 census. When a similar program of gerrymandering (shaping congressional seats to afford maximum political benefit) occurred following the last US Census in 2010, Republicans (who benefit from having a whiter and more rural base, and therefore control more state governments despite winning less of the national vote) swept the House, significantly limiting Obama’s policy influence. Democrats have learnt from this experience, and even during the most heated internal negotiations between progressive Democrats in the House and some of their more moderate colleagues in the Senate, there is a shared understanding that it is really now or never. The bad news is that the solipsistic nature of American politics, compounded by a pervasive belief in American exceptionalism and a national security establishment that shows no signs of learning from past mistakes, means that further foreign military interventions are likely, and that, just as in Afghanistan, they will continue for much longer than they should. The real and significant achievements of a Biden administration need to be understood within the context of a collective societal failure to recognise the limits and capability of American power abroad. This is the failure that experts, the media, and, most importantly, the American people need to grapple with, long before they critique the performance of any individual president. g Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History and a teaching assistant in both History and Politics at the University of Melbourne. He wrote about the attack on the US Capitol in the March 2021 issue. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

‘No different to Nazis’

The SAS’s reign of terror in Afghanistan Kevin Foster

Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan by Mark Willacy

Simon & Schuster $35 pb, 406 pp

n 19 November 2020, the Chief of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, released the findings of the Brereton Report, so named for the New South Wales Supreme Court Judge and Reserve Major General Paul Brereton, who led the investigation into war crimes allegations against members of the Australian SAS. The report had been a long time coming – with good reason. Over four years, Brereton and his team scrutinised more than 20,000 documents, examined 25,000 images, and interviewed 423 individuals – Afghan victims and their families, eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, and the alleged perpetrators. The final eight-volume, three-part report came in at 3,251 pages. Everybody knew it would be bad, but few had anticipated quite how confronting its findings would be. In the lead-up to the report’s release, the very notion that Australian soldiers might have committed war crimes was greeted with disbelief, if not disdain. In August 2018, then Director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, affirmed that accusations of war crimes only served to ‘diminish the respect’ that Australians had for their military. War, he observed from the safety of Canberra, is ‘a messy business’ and ‘as far as I am concerned, unless there have been the most egregious breaches of laws of armed conflict, we should leave it all alone’. Careful what you wish for. The Brereton Report uncovered ‘credible information’ of twenty-three incidents in which thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants or persons hors de combat had been unlawfully killed. Twenty-five Australian soldiers, the vast majority from the SAS, were implicated in these killings, either as perpetrators or accessories, some on a single occasion, a few on multiple occasions. Compounding their crimes, the alleged perpetrators ran a boilerplate cover-up operation to conceal their offences, planting weapons (‘throwdowns’) or communications equipment on innocent victims and then lying in unison to official inquiry teams – only too ready to accept their falsehoods – that the dead men were legitimate targets. It got worse. There was also ‘credible information’ that some ‘junior soldiers had been required by their patrol commanders to shoot prisoners, in order to achieve their first kill, in a practice known as “blooding”’. As Campbell put it in his briefing to the press: ‘Rules were broken, stories concocted, lies told, prisoners killed. Once that rule was broken, so too was further restraint.’ For obvious reasons, the report was heavily censored. Indeed, its second part, ‘Incidents and Issues of Interest’, which apparently AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

detailed each of the thirty-nine incidents and the specific allegations against the Australian personnel, constituting six of the eight volumes, was redacted in its entirety. Cue Mark Willacy’s Rogue Forces, which fills in some of the redactions, providing graphic accounts of who killed whom, how, when, where, and why nothing was done about it for almost a decade.

tually driven to speak out by a traumatic experience. Dusty, the dedicated combat medic who cared passionately for his patients, could not forgive himself when, during one raid, the Afghan he had treated was taken away and executed by one of the rogue warriors. Christina, who reviewed all video and photos captured on SAS operations, could not live with herself when the same rogue warrior instructed her to delete images implicating him in the death of Dusty’s patient. Braden, the signals intelligence operator Everybody knew it would be bad, who tracked enemy communications on the battlefield, was relucbut few had anticipated quite how tantly drawn into covering up the cold-blooded killing of a handconfronting its findings would be icapped Afghan villager. Haunted by this execution and his failure to speak up, Braden hands over the trove of images to Willacy. The rogue soldiers who rampage through Afghanistan, killing In the wake of the ADF’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2013, as rumours about SAS war crimes swirled, Willacy, a as they please, are charismatic patrol commanders with years of respected ABC reporter, filed more than twenty separate stories experience. Their rule is sustained by terror. Their subordinates detailing allegations of deviant behaviour in the SAS, building up are unwilling to speak out for fear of violent retribution on base, a larger picture of it as ‘the worst governed unit in the Army’. His if not ‘accidental’ death in the kinetic chaos of the battlefield. big scoop came in late 2019. A combat engineer who had served Through these tattooed psychopaths the SAS emerges as less a with the SAS in Afghanistan, disgusted by the crimes he had warrior élite than a tooled-up bikie gang – or, as Dusty reflected, something far worse: ‘we were no witnessed and the continued failure different to fucking Nazis really. Going to hold anybody to account for them, into a country and then just killing handed Willacy a cache of previously innocent people.’ unseen helmet-cam images. Among The extraordinary freedoms that the stock shots of helicopters swooping the patrol commanders enjoyed into isolated settlements, doors being and exploited reflect the bottom-up kicked in, fiery explosions, and intense operation of the SAS, where power firefights, Willacy discovered footage of and real authority reside not with an SAS operator, ‘Soldier C’, executing the chain of command but with the an unarmed Afghan civilian cowering experienced leaders on the ground. in a wheat field. His report for Four To some degree, their excesses can be Corners highlighting this incident cresheeted home to the complete absence ated international headlines, won him a of accountability and the breakdown Gold Walkley Award, and definitively in command authority this bespeaks. demonstrated that allegations of SAS From murder in Afghanistan through war crimes were more than rumours. violence and drunkenness on base In Rogue Forces, Willacy tells the abroad and at home, the operators story of what went wrong in Afghanirevelled in their continued ability to stan by focusing on the experiences of get away with it. Everybody knew what one SAS Squadron (No. 3 – ‘The Third was going on, but nobody did anything Herd’) on one six-month deployment about it. Why? Were the military, as in 2012. It is a neat device that enables Mark Willacy (Mark Willacy/Simon and Schuster) drunk on Anzac mythology as the a tight focus on a small and emblematic cast of characters who fall into four groups: the victims, the good public has long been, convinced that Australians were incapable of the sort of atrocities their US, British, New Zealand, and soldiers, the rogue warriors, and their absent commanders. One of the book’s principal achievements is to humanise Canadian comrades committed in Afghanistan and Iraq? Looking back on their work, the men and women who comthe SAS’s Afghan victims and remind Australians of the real casualties of this war. By restoring the victims’ names – Dad piled the Brereton Report ruefully reflected that ‘We embarked Mohammad, Haji Sardar, Mohammad Zaher Shah – Willacy on this inquiry with the hope that we would be able to report restores them to their familial and social contexts as sons, fathers, that the rumours of war crimes were without substance. None husbands, carers. In doing so, he illustrates how the coalition’s of us desired the outcome to which we have come. We are all indifference to the local people’s suffering, its refusal to accept diminished by it.’ Aren’t we just? g their common humanity, sowed the seeds of their failure in Afghanistan. Instead of winning hearts and minds, the coalition Kevin Foster is Head of the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. He has drove a steady stream of recruits into the arms of the Taliban. The book’s central focus is on the good soldiers who struggled published widely on the representation of war, military–media to help the Afghans and uphold a basic moral code but who were relations, the cultural history of the military, national identity, broken by their unwonted complicity in war crimes. Each is even- and combat photography. 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Biography

‘The momentum of the general’ Edward Said’s worldliness James Jiang

Places of Mind: A life of Edward Said by Timothy Brennan

Bloomsbury $49.99 hb, 456 pp

hen the leukaemia with which he had been diagnosed in 1991 claimed his life twelve years later, Edward W. Said left behind more than the usual testaments to a successful academic career: landmark studies, bountiful citations, bereft colleagues, and the cadres of pupils whose intellectual maturation he had overseen. More importantly, he embodied a many-sided ideal of intellectual and civic engagement that combined the vita contemplativa with the vita activa. A professor in Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature for forty years, Said was a member of the exiled Palestinian National Council and arguably the most visible advocate for the Palestinian cause throughout his later life. Among the many terms that Said either coined or made his own – ‘orientalism’, ‘contrapuntal’, ‘exilic’, ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ – perhaps none is more important than his concept of ‘worldliness’. Said was undoubtedly ‘worldly’ in the ordinary sense of the word: well travelled, cosmopolitan in sensibility, a shrewd observer of power and prestige. But he gave it a more emphatic and more general cast. As he put it in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983): ‘texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly’. This was especially worth keeping in mind with respect to critical texts produced by literary scholars – so keenly perceptive about the vintage and provenance of their sources, yet by and large oblivious to the variegations of their own terroir. One of the upshots of this ‘worldly’ insight is that much of Said’s best work – I am thinking here particularly of his essays on the state of criticism – directly addresses its context, taking the ground and climate of opinion, scholarly or political, for its explicit subject. If a large portion of the biographer’s job is to weave his or her subject back into the thick web of contemporaneous circumstance, then any biographer of Said will necessarily find themselves a little squeezed by Said’s pre-emption. Timothy Brennan’s Places of Mind: A life of Edward Said meets this unique challenge impressively through scrupulous archival research and some deft draughtsmanship of the shifting intellectual and political topography ranged over by his doctoral thesis adviser. Brennan’s biography is revealing about the complex

genealogies of Said’s books, from the enframing ambitions that never came to fruition (such as the book-length study of intellectuals and the monograph on Jonathan Swift) to the stimulation provided by writing for an Arabic-speaking audience (the case for translating Said’s 1972 essay ‘Withholding, Avoidance, and Recognition’ could not be clearer).

Among the many terms that Said either coined or made his own perhaps none is more important than his concept of ‘worldliness’ What emerges most distinctly from Brennan’s portrait are not the lineaments of a gifted ‘mind’, but rather the sheer messiness of thinking for a living, as Said’s critical instincts are tested against the practical exigencies of statecraft. The messiness partially explains Said’s affinity with Swift: for both writers, a constitutive restlessness was ignited into fierce eloquence (Swift’s epitaphic saeva indignatio) by the cruelty and ignominy of colonial domination. Said’s most ambitious arguments, such as that forwarded in Orientalism (1978), have tended to invite misapprehension (including, as Brennan has shown in Wars of Position [2006], that book’s purported relationship to postcolonial studies). Though not always airtight, they appeal by pointing the way to somewhere less plagued by partiality, all the while ‘acquiring and expressing’, as Said once put it, ‘the momentum of the general’.

Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, 2002 (Barenboim-Said Akademie gGmbH via Wikimedia Commons)

True to Said’s own critical ethos, Places of Mind is not sacralising hagiography but a thoroughly secularising chronicle. It oscillates between a defensive posture over an embattled intellectual legacy and a scepticism towards Said’s own habits of self-mythologisation. In the preface, Brennan writes that ‘we might even see today’s “post-critical” age (including in academia) as the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

establishment’s revenge on him’, an acknowledgment of the trend in literary studies away from the hermeneutics of suspicion (the arraigning of texts on charges of ideological complicity) towards a hermeneutics of attachment, of openness and pleasure (a word Said seldom fails to include in his characterisations of literary study). Said’s snubbing by the fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, who ‘turned him down for an honorary degree when others half his stature were given the honour without a second thought’ (a determination overturned under the urging of a dissenting group headed by Ian Donaldson) causes vicarious smarting. The indiscriminate diss (‘others half his stature’) is an odd lapse for Brennan, who otherwise evinces admirable coolness towards the politics of institutional prestige.

True to Said’s own critical ethos, Places of Mind is not sacralising hagiography but a thoroughly secularising chronicle But Brennan isn’t afraid to burst his subject’s self-hallowing bubble, especially in his account of Said’s early life in Cairo and his time at Mount Hermon, an élite Massachusetts preparatory school where Said was sent in 1952 after his poor disciplinary record in the British colonial education system threatened to narrow his prospects. Here, Brennan’s account supplements Said’s memoir, Out of Place (1999), which showed its author suffering under the strict disciplinary regimens of paternal expectation and formal schooling, as well as from inconstant maternal affection. Brennan reports that Said’s sisters ‘were appalled by his portrait of his parents’ and surmises that ‘the burdens of a childhood without relaxation or leisure seem more the outcome of a relentless inner drive than the work of meddling parents for whom every achievement was a flaw’. Similarly, by drawing on Said’s Mount Hermon records and correspondence, Brennan complicates Said’s sense of never feeling ‘fully a part of the school’s corporate life’, presenting his subject as ‘a rather eager participant’ and ‘positively jaunty in his letters to his superiors after graduation’. Despite his admiration for Theodor Adorno’s brand of kulturkritik, Said was very much at home in America and American culture, and it is one of Brennan’s most striking observations that ‘for all his writing on exile, [Said] was a rooted man – imaginatively in Palestine and actually in New York’. Indeed, shortly after taking up a position at Columbia, Said was introduced to the New York literati by his colleague F.W. Dupee, a founding editor of Partisan Review, and for most of his professional life Said produced a steady stream of reviews and essays for the city’s popular press (where he was decidedly less welcome after the publication of The Question of Palestine [1979]). The concept of ‘place’ recurs as a ground note throughout Brennan’s biography (as it does throughout Said’s oeuvre), which reproduces an unpublished letter to The New York Times by Said’s friend Andre Sharon in response to the aspersions cast upon Said’s Palestinian identity: ‘There were no meaningful frontiers when we were growing up, particularly mental ones [...] It mattered much less to the inhabitants that they were from Iraq or … Saudi Arabia or Oman than it did to the Foreign Office [on] 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

the Quai D’Orsay.’ It’s difficult not to notice a parallel between Sharon’s ‘meaningless’ geopolitical frontiers and the adventitious disciplinary boundaries abjured by Said: both kinds of barrier were bureaucratic fictions designed to inculcate governability rather than capture anything of the shape and texture of actual life. Said was a steadfast defender of intellectual generalism, even going so far in his 1993 Reith Lectures as to advocate for amateurism. For like the exile, the amateur had the advantage of a double perspective, being ‘both in and out of the game’, in the words of Walt Whitman. Part of this was temperamental – Said was drawn to autodidacts such as R.P. Blackmur and Giambattista Vico – but it was also polemical. Said’s growing disenchantment with post-structuralist and even some Marxist strands of critical theory had to do with the burgeoning divide between intramural institutional politics and ‘the politics of struggle and power in the everyday world’. In one of his most devastating essays, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’ (1982), Said argued that the ethos of ‘non-interference and rigid specialization in the academy’ was an extension of laissez-faire neoliberalism in the Age of Reagan. Even oppositional literary critics such as Fredric Jameson, for all their interpretative prowess and political commitments, only thickened literary criticism’s air of ‘cloistral seclusion’ insofar as these writers’ ‘assumed constituency’ remained ‘an audience of cultural-literary critics’. Elsewhere, Brennan has written with acuity about Said’s generalism, and the difficulty of pinning down a generalist’s intellectual coordinates is amply demonstrated in the chapter ‘A Few Simple Ideas’, where Brennan examines Said’s relationships to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. The first of these is given the most sustained treatment, but also gives rise to the greatest discordance. There’s something slightly dogmatic and high-handed about Brennan’s procedure in identifying the ‘liberal-centrist’ tendencies in Said’s thought and in averring that Said was ‘rightly censured’ for having ‘corralled Marx into the camp of John Stuart Mill’ in Orientalism. Whether or not Said was ‘a Marxist’, his debt to the Marxist intellectual tradition was never in question. Brennan, of course, knows this, but it is symptomatic of what Said described as the ‘self-policing, self-purifying’ tendency within academic circles that an essay like his ‘Secular Criticism’ can be dismissed by Brennan as a piece of liberal cant when its very argument is poised against the coercive (and patronising) orthodoxies underlying institutionalised affiliation. In ‘Secular Criticism’, Said offered a salutary reminder to those ‘who maintain that criticism is art’: ‘the moment anything acquires the status of a cultural idol or a commodity, it ceases to be interesting’. Said’s prominence both within and without the academy has put him at risk of becoming an approved cultural object. He lived long enough to see some of his own arguments and concepts harden into modish clichés, a process that the consciously unfashionable calls to philology and humanism late in his career could not reverse. But all Said’s interventions, from his turn against post-structuralism to his critique of Zionism, follow a consistent pattern: they refuse to allow any cause, no matter how noble its inaugurating motives, to devolve into a special interest. It is this that he meant by worldliness. g James Jiang is the ABR/JNI Editorial Cadet.

Music

‘Relentlessly present tense’ Fifty writers on the impact of music Andrew Ford

Long Players: Writers on the albums that shaped them edited by Tom Gatti

Bloomsbury $34.99 hb, 222 pp

his collection of short pieces by fifty writers is about long players in more than one sense. Not only are they discussing LPs, but also albums that have been long played. ‘I became a student, then a PhD student, then a husband,’ writes Ian Rankin. ‘Kids arrived. I moved houses and countries. Each time, when we moved, the first record on the turntable was [ John Martyn’s] Solid Air.’ And they stay fresh. For Lavinia Greenlaw, The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat ‘sounds no less original every time I hear it’; for Marlon James, Björk’s Post ‘is so relentlessly present tense, that every time sounds like the first time you’re hearing it’. ‘We listened on long car or train journeys, I put her on while walking or cooking, I played her to my family,’ writes Daisy Johnson of her first encounters with Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You. Today she finds the songs ‘as exciting as they were the first time around’. Okay, so it’s only been two years. The term ‘album’ began with classical music and 78s. Even when technology was sufficiently advanced to allow four minutes of music on one side of those heavy shellac discs, you would still need a fair few to accommodate a symphony of moderate length. They came in a folder resembling a photo album. Editor Tom Gatti explains this in his introduction, the book’s longest piece of writing. Of course, what Gatti and his contributors mean by an ‘album’ is a group of songs, and something more than the ‘two hits and ten pieces of junk’ that was Phil Spector’s description of the LP. Gatti believes one of the first proper, thought-through albums was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul in 1965, forgetting Frank Sinatra’s Capitol LPs of a decade earlier, among them In the Wee Small Hours and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! Discussing the album as artefact, Gatti rightly praises the LP cover, singling out Sgt. Pepper, though missing the significance of its printed lyrics (it was the first pop album to have them). When the LP gave way to the CD, he says, you could no longer roll a joint on its cover. Perhaps, but the hard plastic cases were better for chopping powder. Finally, and notwithstanding the unlikely return of vinyl, the artefact disappeared altogether. Gatti is deputy editor of the New Statesman, where these pieces first appeared. Most but not all are about pop albums from the late 1960s to Lizzo. But there’s also Clive James on Ellington at Newport, Ben Okri on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and John Harris on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; for Sarah Perry, it’s Sequeira Costa playing Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto;

for Neel Mukherjee, Clara Haskill and Mozart’s D minor and late A major piano concertos. ‘Did I know,’ Mukherjee wonders of his eight-year-old self, ‘that “Klavierkonzert” meant piano concerto? Did I know what a concerto was? It goes without saying that concepts such as d-moll and A-dur came later and had to be learned … but did I work out then that Clara Haskill: Klavier meant name of pianist: instrument?’ These questions are linked to the smell of his piano teacher’s room in Calcutta (‘incense, Sunday chicken curry, naphthalene’) and the sound of the 1950s recording: ‘That hint of hiss in the hinge between the solo piano’s lead and the orchestra’s following in the mighty adagio of the A major concerto – life resides for me there.’

When the LP gave way to the CD, you could no longer roll a joint on its cover Life, indeed. With any great album, by which I mean any album that won’t go away, its significance is personal. David Mitchell’s first encounter with Joni Mitchell’s Blue (on cassette) is coloured by listening to it on his Walkman coming home over the Malvern Hills. Erica Wagner connects her childhood friend’s father’s playing of Steeleye Span’s All Round My Hat on a Rhode Island porch (like Mukherjee, she was eight) with her later decision to emigrate to England. Marlon James insists that Björk didn’t save his life, but you feel she might have. But where is this music’s power? Often it comes down to a voice. For Rankin, John Martyn has the voice of ‘a whisky-soaked angel’, while Bonnie Greer can ‘hear the bourbon in [ Janis Joplin’s] veins’. Listening to Liz Fraser sing for the first time on This Mortal Coil’s It’ll End in Tears, Patricia Lockwood hears a voice ‘rooted, aerial, as flexible in its upper registers as it was rich in its middle, revolving around an unchanging axis of pitch, poured into various blown-glass containers of made-up language’. To Daljit Nagra, Morrissey’s voice on The Smiths’ Meat is Murder conjures ‘quaint English churchyards inside Victorian railings under rain; it’s the sound of an English beach crying for custom; it smells of Arthur Askey and Kenneth Williams, of the backstage dressing room when the comedy’s worn off; and when Morrissey yodels, I taste bonfire parkin’. (For the benefit of readers unacquainted with the north of England, he means a dark, treacly ginger cake eaten on Guy Fawkes Night.) Linda Grant says she never wanted to see Joni Mitchell live because she had ‘no interest in sharing her with total strangers’. But a personal relationship with music is not the same as knowing the musician. After a concert in Cambridge, Clive James exchanges smiles with Duke Ellington, but that’s it. Moments before Rankin is about to appear on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs and tell the world that ‘Solid Air’ is the one song he can’t live without, he finds himself eating lunch in the same London restaurant as John Martyn. Can he go up to him? Of course not. ‘My one and only chance,’ Rankin writes, ‘and I blow it.’ g Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster. He is the author of ten books, including a memoir, The Memory of Music, and most recently The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Media

Trouble in the Fourth Estate Finding careers in journalism Gemma Nisbet

Upheaval: Disrupted lives in journalism edited by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson

UNSW Press $39.99 pb, 360 pp

f you have even a passing interest in the state of the Australian media, you may have come across the estimate that between four and five thousand journalism jobs were lost nationally in the past decade. This estimate suggests the scale of an industry-wide crisis in which successive rounds of redundancies became a feature of life in many newsrooms as media organisations turned to cost-cutting in their struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. The figure, which originated from the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, also points, albeit more obliquely, to the human impact of such cultural changes and the thousands of distinctive individual experiences that such numbers can elide. Journalists-turned-academics Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson seek to capture some of these anecdotes in their edited volume Upheaval: Disrupted lives in journalism. Citing the loss of these jobs – ‘once considered safe for life’ – alongside not only ‘mastheads, outlets and production houses’ but also long-established ‘ways of working’, they aim ‘to bear witness to all this change through the personal stories of the workers’ who experienced it firsthand. Their book is thus less about why these changes occurred (or the mistakes that were made in responding to them), and more about what they have meant for the discarded journalists. Upheaval is based on interviews with fifty-seven journalists whose jobs were, for the most part, made redundant – voluntarily or otherwise – between 2012 and 2016. They were conducted as part of a broader research effort that involved a team of academics in addition to Dodd and Ricketson. These accounts are largely cut up and stitched together in chapters that move chronologically and thematically through the journalists’ working lives, from their early interest in journalism and first jobs to making the often difficult decision to leave (or, in some cases, having it made for them by management) and reinventing themselves in the aftermath. There is a certain nostalgia in the earlier sections, with the evocation of a world of ‘copy kids’, hard-nosed reporters, and sharp-tongued subeditors, though some interviewees are admirably forthright in sharing both positive and negative memories. (Some of the latter are presented, for example, in a chapter examining sexual harassment and discrimination in newsrooms.) Among the book’s most compelling portions are those that invite reflection on professional regrets and the challenges of reporting on traumatic events – subjects that journalists are rarely afforded the opportunity to discuss in a nuanced fashion. 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

One of the strengths of utilising the kinds of personal narratives featured in Upheaval is that they can help to humanise complex events. This impact is blunted somewhat by the way the book handles these stories. Its structure is in many ways sensible, given the volume of material that Dodd, Ricketson, and their fellow contributors presumably had to work with. But fragmenting the individual testimonies diminishes the extent to which readers can follow people through the pages and thus get to know them in a way that promotes deeper empathy and insight. The editors have sought to counteract this by including first-person accounts of specific journalists’ careers: media correspondent Amanda Meade, her Guardian colleague David Marr, and reporter turned ABC strategist and media trainer Flip Prior (who, like me, was formerly on staff at The West Australian). Allowing their stories to stand on their own helps to add specificity to the larger narrative. Upheaval doesn’t necessarily make claims to being comprehensive or exhaustive, but there are areas that feel underexplored; podcasting, for instance, is conspicuous by its absence, particularly in the chapter on post-redundancy reinvention. Such omissions hint at the potential constraints of exploring broader cultural shifts through the lens of individual experience. For example, Dodd and Ricketson note that while they aimed ‘for a 50/50 gender balance […] achieving greater cultural and ethnic diversity among the interviewees has been more difficult because of the lack of diversity historically in Australian newsrooms’. This suggests some of the limits of this type of storytelling in examining these issues. That few journalists who fit the project’s parameters were willing or able to talk about race and racism in Australian media organisations does not mean, of course, that the wider topic is not worthy of attention. At a more granular level, the parameters of the research may also account for the apparent overrepresentation of newspaper reporters (particularly those covering ‘hard’ news such as current affairs and politics) for metropolitan dailies in the interview pool, which the editors suggest arose partly from their focus on workers who had taken redundancies. Despite this, they do canvass a not insignificant range of journalistic specialties, including cartoonists, horseracing writers, magazine editors, news photographers, and radio reporters. It is worth acknowledging how much ground Upheaval manages to cover. Dodd and Ricketson write that they hoped to preserve some of their interview subjects’ ‘practical wisdom about the industry, much of which has resonance for the future of journalism’. The book will be a useful resource for aspiring journalists, as well as an engaging historical account of considerable interest to readers within and beyond the world of the Australian media. Mostly, though, it will resonate with current and former journalists. Such readers will no doubt recognise a good deal of their own experience in Upheaval: the frustrations and satisfactions of working in a newsroom; the attendant camaraderie and rivalries; the tendency for journalism to consume much of your life and identity; and the genuine grief that can accompany leaving the profession behind. g Gemma Nisbet is a former journalist and current books columnist for The West Australian newspaper. ❖

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Fiction

Muddy ambiguities Violet Kupersmith’s first novel Sheila Ngọc Phạm

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith

Oneworld $29.99 pb, 378 pp

uild Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith’s début novel, is an expansive Vietnamese saga that stretches over seven decades. Ambitious in scope, it takes in the French colonial period around Da Lat in the 1940s right through to hedonistic modern-day Saigon. The large cast is drawn together through circumstance as well as irresistible supernatural forces – Vietnamese and foreigners, spirits and ghost hunters. The Vietnam War and its aftermath continue to be profound influences on diasporic Vietnamese writing. In recent years, there has been a perceptible shift in how younger Việt Kiều – overseas Vietnamese – writers are attempting to confront this history. Build Your House Around My Body is a bold testament to this shift. Whereas Kupersmith’s first story collection, The Frangipani Hotel (2014), explored the war’s legacies in Vietnam and the United States, this novel is set entirely in Vietnam and ostensibly skips over the war, focusing on the periods before and after. The novel opens in the near present with Winnie, a twentytwo-year-old Vietnamese American, who turns up late one night at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport. Months later, she vanishes. The mystery of her disappearance – the spine of the novel – is intertwined with another young woman’s disappearance in Da Lat decades earlier. Through the use of non-linear narrative and multiple perspectives, we are taken back and forth in time as the initially unconnected stories slowly converge. Far from representing the desirable return of a prodigal daughter, Winnie’s arrival in Vietnam recalls the protagonist in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996), a young foreigner in Southeast Asia in search of … well, what exactly? A simple yearning for freedom, perhaps, though from what and to what end are never articulated. Winnie is not a foreigner, however, but Việt Kiều. Being mixed race, she even embodies her hyphenated identity, described as being neither ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western’ in terms of her physical appearance but ‘the muddy ambiguity of the middle’. We later learn that Winnie’s name itself is a confluence of the Vietnamese and English languages. Her last name, Nguyen, the most common of Vietnamese surnames, was ‘nonsoluble to the American tongue’. Nguyen became ‘Win’, eventually becoming ‘Winnie’. She is a compromised being, a woman who seems to mostly exist rather than live. Kupersmith’s exploration of the complex relationship the Vietnamese diaspora have with the homeland is both welcome and intriguing. This fertile narrative terrain remains largely under-

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explored in Anglophone literature, yet is a vital and compelling way to reckon with the consequences of civil war. In Build Your House Around My Body, the Việt Kiều characters represent a range of possible pasts and futures. Self-effacing Winnie fails at teaching English and derives little enjoyment from the abundant pleasures on offer to foreigners and Việt Kiều in Saigon, unlike her fellow Vietnamese-American colleague, Dao ‘The Devourer’ Huynh. At the end of her stint teaching English, Dao – ethnically full-blooded, with ‘true’ black hair rather than Winnie’s ‘swampy brown’ black – makes a somewhat triumphant return home to attend law school. In contrast to both, Dr Sang is a Việt Kiều who has fully repatriated. He is now well-to-do; another character notices him moving his lips in a way that indicates a ‘quintessentially capitalist manner’. For decades, Vietnam has been flush with capital brought in by Việt Kiều, but this continues to be a source of friction, reflected in the novel by the uneasy relationships that the native Vietnamese have with their overseas counterparts. There is a recurring preoccupation with bodies and, as the title of the book indicates, with bodies as foundational to ideas of home. How women’s bodies are routinely used and abused in order for men to create homes for themselves. Regardless, Vietnamese women remain remarkable agents of strength, resilience, even magic. The almost cartoonishly fearless Binh, another protagonist, is adept at catching cobras. ‘She caught it behind its head, wrapping four fingers tightly around the top of its throat.’ Tan, her childhood friend, cowers nearby and watches awestruck, even though he is a salaried police officer in Saigon while homeless Binh camps out in an abandoned rubber plantation in Da Lat. Throughout the novel, Kupersmith underscores Vietnam’s history of relationships between the Kinh ethnic majority, colonisers, and its ethnic minorities. The otherworldly JeanFrançois, for example, the bastard son of a Khmer father and French mother, represents another by-product of colonial occupation. In the earlier period, we also meet two French men in the Central Highlands who are seemingly benign, but there is no mistaking their exploitative intent as they seize land for large rubber plantations from the original inhabitants they refer to as ‘the Montagnard’. At times, Build Your House Around My Body is weighed down by overwrought and cumbersome description. The many individual storylines are difficult to follow at times; some of the stories feel under-developed. There is also a lack of bilingual dexterity, the kind demonstrated in a novel such as Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing (2020). However, Kupersmith overcomes linguistic limitations to invent a rich, imaginative world with characters who would otherwise speak Vietnamese, French, and the many languages of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. The direct consequences of colonialism and violence are brutal, and the after-effects haunt the future in both literal and figurative ways. Build Your House Around My Body suggests how restitution for the crimes of the past can be achieved by women learning how to wield the power that resides in our bodies, that this is how we can transmute and harness the fury that continues to accrue over the generations, in Vietnam as elsewhere. g Sheila Ngọc Phạm is a Sydney-based writer, editor, and radio producer. ❖

Fiction

Old man yells at cloud

instead they gave us hellsites. 7½ is largely a meditation on disappointment: failing ideological faith, failing body, failing novel. Tsiolkas also considers the greatest artistic failure of all: the Christos Tsiolkas turns to autofiction dysfunctional relationship between life and fiction. From Balzac’s Declan Fry painter Frenhofer in ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ to Henry James’s author Dencombe in ‘The Middle Years’, the work of art and art-making has often figured as a record of defeat. 7½’s narrator hopes to ‘separate my fiction from my truth’, yet finds the word ‘truth’ ‘inadequate’: ‘I am writing about my past [...] It clearly is as much memoir as it is fiction. The writing of one demands the same craft one uses for the other.’ 7½ Despite what Tsiolkas’s narrator may maintain about ‘craft’, by Christos Tsiolkas the techniques of fiction are not necessarily identical to those of Allen & Unwin memoir: the felicity demanded by memoir is largely distinct from $32.99 pb, 342 pp fiction’s imaginative licence. This difference explains, in part, why n page 20 of my advance copy of 7½, I insert a line in the two genres are distinct, quite apart from considerations of the margin: ‘Starting to sound like Sōseki’s Kusamakura the reader’s need to distinguish social realism – with its desire here’. I had met the author of the passage – a man to represent the world ‘out there’ – from questions of veracity named Christos Tsiolkas – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in peculiar to memoir and other temps perdu remembrance. Woolf, Joyce, Genet (source of 7½’s epigraph), Duras, BelMay, sidling up to the Clare Hotel breakfast bar at an enviably early hour each morning to enjoy fruit and festival conversation. low, Baldwin, Roth, Lorde (who described her ‘biomythography’ as ‘fiction built from many sources’), As my pen hovers, I wonder how that Coetzee, Murnane, Carey: all wrote from gregarious and personable figure squares their lives; none purported to be creating with the bittersweet register of this novel. anything other than fiction. Keep in mind September 25. I skip ahead to the that autofiction is a species of fiction – at book’s finale and there, at page 339, is an least, as I believe it should be, when read explicit reference to Kusamakura. A short with awareness of its conditioning fictional while later, Natsume Sōseki rears his properties. This is how these authors’ novels head again: ‘Isn’t it from such questioning succeeded: they played with the idea of and interpretation that stories begin? If borrowing from one’s life, from friends’ I am not going to begin with Morality and family’s lives, without demanding this or Politics or Race or Class or Gender interpretation, or indeed any appraisal that or Sexuality, if I am going to resist the would haphazardly draw the life in. authority of Purpose, then how should Repurposing creative narrative to serve I begin?’ Those three ‘begins’ might alert fiction and memoir only gives it the freethe reader: the conundrum of how to start dom to fail as both. Tsiolkas knows this: (‘the number three is auspicious [...] Three his second novel, The Jesus Man (1999), is also possibility and risk’) is something weaved the voices of its characters along7½ never entirely resolves. side an ‘I’ voice that felt authorial without Our narrator is an authorial surrogate. Christos Tsiolkas ever needing to imbue this narration with His name is Christos Tsiolkas. He is strug(Zoe Ali/Allen & Unwin) autofictional characteristics – sharing a gling to write a novel. Titled Sweet Thing, name and profession with the author, for it concerns Paul, a character inspired by real-life porn actor Paul Carrigan. Tsiolkas’s surrogate indulges in frequent walks and example, or metafictional gestures toward the creation of the swims, hoping to encounter beauty and counter ‘the inevitable book itself. Jump Cuts (1996), his brilliant and subtly experisag of my ageing body’. His progressive friends worry that he mental memoir-of-sorts (with Sasha Soldatow) similarly gave has gone soft in other ways: his ardour for changing the world voice to both writers without claiming to be anything other than seems to be in abeyance. ‘[P]olitics, sexuality, race, history, gender, ‘non-fiction’, achieving a kind of sustained collaborative criticism morality, the future – all of them now bore me,’ he admits. Ag- in the process. When the narrator of 7½ describes hoping for grieved by sanctimonious online posturing, he alternates between ‘safekeeping between the story I tell of Paul and the story I tell old-man-yells-at-cloud dyspepsia and reinventing Eileen Myles’s of myself ’, it is hard not to feel he would have been better served ‘Everyday Barf ’: ‘The simple nature of our craft is how to vomit telling each story in separate books. Splicing the two together these stories out on a page. [...] By defining the novelist’s art as diminishes both and flatters neither. If we call 7½ a novel, it’s an unsuccessful one: the novelising a hurling, a spewing, I am being deliberately crude, because I am is weak and continually interrupted by memoir. Call it memoir, writing at a time when the novel is unbearably timid.’ Certainly, few of us might enjoy or claim unalloyed pleasure on the other hand, and we would have to concede that its auin the accoutrements of our age. We were promised flying cars; tobiography is hampered by the half-sketched novel that keeps

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

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popping up. The only practical reason ‘autofiction’ seems to be employed here is to grant Tsiolkas an authorial surrogate who can narrate his experience of struggling to write Paul’s story in its own right. This isn’t necessarily fatal, but the story itself, a shaggy dog number, is. So I found myself wondering: what if failure is the point of 7½? Tsiolkas leaning into failure as an artistic goal? This raises the question of critical generosity: can the critic be accommodating enough to inhabit failure – to stay with the trouble; perhaps even choose, like the author, to lean into it?

Repurposing creative narrative to serve fiction and memoir only gives it the freedom to fail as both These considerations are prompted largely by the narrator’s process: he describes creating characters as akin to meeting them ‘in a mirror’. Those who refuse to emerge, he writes, are ‘trapped behind [it]’. We have been conditioned to believe that art functions as a reflection of the world, a mirror carried along a road. The line, as Northrop Frye remarked, between fiction and non-fiction is one of belief, the reader’s willingness to lend credulity to the story being told. Tsiolkas plays on our desire to know the author despite being cognisant of authorial intervention and the mediation of narrative: inviting the reader behind the scenes, gently patting the seat nearby, ushering us in. I doubt that it would disgruntle acolytes of New Criticism to note that, in describing Tsiolkas as an enthusiastic user of the Clare Hotel’s breakfast bar, I was not joking so much as making a character observation. He is an enthusiast – an avid appreciator. Tsiolkas is an antipodean D.H. Lawrence; he evinces Lawrence’s sensuous appraisal, the desire to see beneath the skin of things. Both are working-class writers intent on urging language to say something true – something unmediated, so to speak. Yet Tsiolkas’s narrator doubts the capacity of language to convey beauty in our ‘ungallant age’. Worshipping at Dionysus’s altar, he is frequently exercised by contemporary Puritanism. The bogey of the censorious audience – some vague authority figure slamming 7½ down, shouting, ‘You’re a loose canon, Christos! They’ll cancel you if this ever gets out!’ – does not justify the novel’s coy ‘oh-now-this-will-get-me-in-trouble’ poses. Tsiolkas’s surrogate declares that ‘[t]here is an ugly rancour that refutes the link between biology and sex [...] Those who rail against the biology of gender and sex are as suspicious and hateful toward the body as were the most pious of early Christian moralists’. Whatever one thinks of this – a gracious reader might grant that Tsiolkas is adverting primarily to the body, urging us not to confuse nature’s indifference with anthropocentric vanities – the phallocentrism of his writing should give readers pause. ‘[Nature] is no simpering mother,’ the narrator reflects, observing a tree trunk. ‘Manet understood her: that protruding trunk is Mother Nature’s scandalous swinging cock; this mother has power.’ Forget the Jesus guy: Lawrence wept. g Declan Fry is a writer and essayist.

30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Fiction

Wayne’s world

Emily Bitto’s baroque new novel Amy Baillieu

Wild Abandon by Emily Bitto

Allen & Unwin $32.99, 435 pp

oe Exotic. Carole Baskin. Tiger King. There was a moment in early 2020 when these were names to conjure with; when a plague-ridden world became fascinated with the outlandish behaviour of these larger-than-life Americans and their unbelievably legal menageries of ‘exotic’ animals. Now, as we inch closer to ‘Covid-normal’, revisiting this surreal world through Emily Bitto’s exuberantly baroque second novel, Wild Abandon, is an unsettling experience. Bitto’s Stella Prize-winning first novel, The Strays (2014), explored a fictionalised version of 1930s Melbourne’s bohemian art world through the eyes of a curious young girl who was briefly adopted into her friend’s eccentric family. While there are some thematic overlaps between the two novels, they are very different in style and setting. In Wild Abandon, we follow self-absorbed, twenty-two-year-old wannabe music journalist Will Free as, ‘ego-bruised by heartbreak’, he flees his Melbourne sharehouse for an impulsive journey of discovery in America. His time in New York is a whirl of hedonism and insecurity; he dines at fancy restaurants, drinks too many negronis, and does lines of ‘party parmesan’ from an Altoids tin while trying, and failing, not to think about Laura, his ex. Amid the seedy glamour and excess, Will vows to ‘journey from innocence to experience … to open himself to whatever came his way … in a dashing new habit of wild and indiscriminate “yes!”’. Following an act of betrayal, Will, now almost penniless, bolts again from New York to the small town of Littleproud, Ohio, where he meets up with a girl he knew from school and her American husband. Soon Will finds himself living with and working for the mercurial Wayne Gage, a Vietnam veteran with his own private zoo. The two lovelorn, emotionally immature men develop a bond while looking after the majestic creatures housed on the property, but it becomes increasingly clear that Wayne’s troubles run deeper than Will realises. The trajectory of the second part of the novel was ‘initially inspired’ by a tragedy that took place in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2011, when Vietnam veteran Terry Thompson set his exotic animal collection free before taking his own life. The events that followed led to incomprehensible headlines such as ‘18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio’ (from Chris Heath’s fascinating 2012 GQ article, one of the sources Bitto cites in her acknowledgments). There are strong connections between Wayne’s and Terry’s stories, but Bitto

is careful to emphasise that Wild Abandon is a work of fiction. And what a work of fiction it is. Wild Abandon is an extravagant, harrowing novel of ideas filled with granular details, an abundance of surprising similes, and freewheeling philosophical and factual digressions on everything from modern art and the American military industrial complex to the ethics of keeping animals in zoos and the callow insecurity of youth. Alongside ruminations on identity and self-discovery, Bitto weaves in details about the diets of lions, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the unexpected revelation that the Amish are the main dealers of exotic animals in Ohio. ‘Something about their faith endorses it,’ Wayne informs Will. ‘The dominion of humans over all the creatures of the earth or some other religious mumbo jumbo.’ Bitto shifts registers easily throughout, with references to Hyperborea and suovetaurilia sitting comfortably alongside reminiscences about conversations on message boards for the television show Supernatural. Wild Abandon is an eminently quotable, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking book, one that will make cocktail drinkers crave negronis (perhaps even from Heartattack and Vine, the bar Bitto co-owns in Melbourne) almost as much as it will put them off eating chicken nuggets (‘whole minced baby roosters’) and burgers (‘bone and hide and eyeball’). Bitto’s simile-rich descriptions are evocative and startling. A pickle is ‘as big as a dildo’, hungry lions and tigers mass around food ‘like giant pigeons’, office workers emerge from buildings ‘like vampires in reverse’, an artwork is ‘savage as a catheter to Will’s abraded brain cells’, while the arms of Wayne’s hoarded leather jackets ‘lay strewn about like some tentacled creature from the depths of sea or mind’. Bitto also has a knack for characterisation and telling detail; she imbues the varied players in this insightful novel with depth and individuality. Reading such lavish writing at a time when the fashion inclines more towards the minimal can be a heady experience. Wild Abandon is peppered with long, opulent, thought-provoking sentences. The elaborate, almost Dickensian, omniscient narration provides an entertaining contrast with Will’s gauche conversations with the people he encounters, although sometimes the cumulative effect of sentences like this one can be overwhelming: Will didn’t know what to do; he found himself inhabiting such a moment as those in which we look around ourselves and see not one object that is friendly or familiar, in circumstances that as little as a week ago we would have been incapable of imagining, let alone believing would be our own in so brief a span of lithe and thwart and mocking implacable time, and in the taut-stretched and overdue silence, with the pressure of the wordless night against the window, his dark burdened soul at last could run no more, and down it crumpled on the blue leather sofa.

Throughout this intelligent novel, Bitto meditates on human nature and our complicated, multifaceted relationship with animals and the natural world. The creatures of Wayne’s Wild Kingdom are portrayed with compassion and a touch of Blakean awe that is infused with rage and wider concern at what may turn out to be ‘the sure and terrible ruin of all things at the hands of man’. g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Fiction

‘Hot, red proof of life’

S.J. Norman’s impressive short story collection Paul Dalgarno

Permafrost

by S.J. Norman

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 213 pp

mbiguity, done well, has a bifurcating momentum that can floor you. The late Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, a master of unsettling short stories shot through with ambiguity, knew this and used it to pugilistic advantage, declaring that ‘the novel wins by points, the short story by knockout’. Ambiguity is likewise central to S.J. Norman’s début collection, Permafrost, seven eerily affecting stories that traverse and update gothic and romantic literary traditions, incorporating horror, queer, and folk elements to hair-raising effect. No matter how often you read these spectral tales, they simply refuse to resolve themselves definitively. It could be that things have gone spectacularly wrong and that, simultaneously, everything is okay – a see-saw in constant motion, made all the creepier by the fact nobody is sitting on either side. The stories (or rounds, to extend the boxing metaphor) feature first-person narrators about whose backgrounds we might learn something, or practically nothing. We do glean where they are in the world ( Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia), but their identity – even their gender – is obscured. We might guess that a male customer’s apology to the narrator in ‘Secondhand’ – ‘Sorry, love. Sorry’ – outs the narrator as female-identifying, but Norman is adept at toying with our assumptions, sprinkling each story with ludic grains that contribute to the book’s purposefully shifting sands. Each of the narrators is somehow isolated, whether sitting in an empty schoolyard, marooned in a block of apartments, or momentarily left behind in a gruesome tourist attraction, settings that provoke a peculiar shade of Kubrickian unease: there should be other people in these locations, maybe even lots of people, so where are they? The difficulty the narrators have connecting with others is sometimes literal (a bad phone line) and sometimes lateral (they’ve transported themselves physically or emotionally). But, in all cases, they’re on the periphery, haunted by the ‘pressurised memory’ of the past, or a ‘sense of having disturbed something’ in the present. Various entities lurk and lurch just out of frame: a volcano hidden behind the trees in Japan, a county in which the ‘dead are with you always’; books roiling with ‘the touch of invisible hands, the clamour of inaudible voices’; a piano motif emanating unexpectedly from a recording in an all-but-empty house. As one narrator tells us: ‘Humans, like other living creatures, are more palpably affected by all the things we can’t hear, than the things we can.’ 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Displacement is a big theme, communicated most obviously via the locations – supposedly cheap and cheerful country retreats that confound expectations, overseas trips that clearly haven’t gone to plan. There are always pros and cons, of course. As one character in the title story puts it: ‘sometimes not belonging is a wonderful thing. Sometimes it’s just what you need.’ But displacement also abounds in the psychological sense, with objects and visual stimuli doing heavy symbolic lifting in the form of transference and transmogrification. In ‘Whitehart’, the narrator creeps into a seemingly abandoned orchard in a woodland clearing, steals some apples, and cycles off, unperturbed that their ankles have been injured by thorns – ‘I realised I was bleeding quite badly. It felt fantastic.’ But this ‘[h]ot, red proof of life’ and the childlike transgression of stealing apples (which, as any Brothers Grimm fan will know, cannot go unpunished) commingle and re-emerge alongside other morphing details, propelling the narrative in unnerving ways. Psychogeography – in the sense of places holding the psychic charge of what’s transpired in and on them – comes to the fore most explicitly in the description of Oświęcim, the Polish town flanking the Auschwitz–Birkenau concentration camps, which is ‘occupied by the living, who co-exist with the multitudinous dead’, but it’s prominent in several of the other stories, too, with an accretion of past lives and place-specific emotions that return and impose themselves. Atmospherically, the collection swings between the oneiric and nightmarish, a deliberately uncertain melange of sleepwalking, night terrors, and potential psychosis. One of the only criticisms is that, taken together, the stories lean a little heavily on this particular ambiguity (are the characters dreaming or awake?) as our narrators fall into and emerge from ‘sleep stretched so thin with dreams it barely felt like sleep’. Many of the questions at the heart of the book relate to loss and what we do with it. Does it stay with us? Does it disappear? And if its shadow slinks from us, where exactly does it go? Such concerns are raised iteratively and implicitly throughout, culminating in the last – and by far the longest – story in the collection, ‘Playback’. This structure gives the impression of a talent flourishing, with Norman’s preoccupying themes given more space to breathe (even if, due to the tale’s spookiness, they are shallow breaths for the reader). In tone and execution, ‘Playback’ is also the closest to Cortázar’s ‘House Taken Over’, a 1946 tale in which a brother and sister attempt to live their lives unencumbered while their ancestral home is progressively ‘taken over’ by unknown entities. But the narrator in ‘Playback’ lacks even the comfort of a sibling to share in the unfolding mystery. Instead, they are accompanied by the memories of a partner who has recently abandoned them, and their late mother’s words that it is ‘possible for a living person to become a ghost’. ‘Playback’ offers the last chance in Permafrost for a clean knockout. But in this story and others, S.J. Norman demonstrates that there is often more horror to be wrought from the blows that leave us conscious. g Paul Dalgarno’s début novel, Poly, is published by Ventura Press.

Fiction

‘Did the bird talk dirty?’ Antoni Jach’s new novel Andrew McLeod

Travelling Companions by Antoni Jach

Transit Lounge $32.99 pb, 408 pp

reat art provokes by taking great risks. It goads, teases. When we recognise we’re in the hands of a master, the banal becomes profound, the sacred profane, and the grandest of truths reveal themselves in the most innocent of questions. Take Pauly Shore’s scathing 1994 cinematic rebuke of the complicity of heteronormativity in the military industrial complex, In the Army Now. In it, two gay soldiers signal their intent to defy the US Army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy and serve their country in a neo-colonial war by asking, simply, ‘Is it hot in Chad?’ For Antoni Jach, in his latest novel, Travelling Companions, the strange yet simple question ‘Did the bird talk dirty?’ becomes the loose thread from which centuries of European thought threatens to unravel. In the hands of a lesser writer, the novel could have easily come undone, but Jach performs his magic masterfully. Drawing on Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it takes the form of a travelogue in which the tales of wanderers are embedded. The novel introduces itself as a meditation on the effect of solitary travel on one’s identity: It’s time to try on multiple selves; so much easier to do when you travel – especially when you are speaking a foreign language and nobody knows who you are, or who you have become. At certain times it is desirable to be alone … At other times you have to be in company; you desperately need travelling companions to reflect yourself back to yourself.

Our nameless narrator arrives in Córdoba on 2 November 1999, and soon strikes up a friendship with two American tourists in a wine bar. They talk, as travellers do, about their lives back home and their plans for the rest of the journey. The narrator, meanwhile, is someone who prefers to listen rather than talk: an Isherwood-like character, shutter open, not thinking, merely recording. On the off chance, however, that Isherwood’s witness– narrator does spring to the reader’s mind, Jach’s protagonist soon reveals that he didn’t even bring a camera. Instead, he carries a tape recorder to capture the sounds around him as he pursues his Faustian quest for knowledge of the human condition. The wheel of fortune looms large over both our hero and the narrative. Chance encounters spur new adventures, new relationships, new stories. Before long – like a wheel within a wheel – the travellers’ tales reflect and refract through one another

and the readers find themselves tilting at the windmills of their own minds. It is from this tilting that Jach’s monstrous creation gathers momentum. While the narrator’s cheery tone and Jach’s ostensibly simple prose put the reader initially at ease, Travelling Companions soon ventures into dangerous, unexpected territories. Irritations send us searching for flaws, and once Jach has us in that mindset we find them easily enough. This novel takes us to some of Europe’s great cities but shows little more than postcards. References to terrorists, refugees, and Australia’s treatment of its First Nations peoples feel somewhat anachronistic, more 2021 than 1999. What could have been an echo of José Zorrilla’s play Don Juan Tenorio – traditionally performed in Spain on All Saint’s Day – might not ring true after all. The plot feels more like an itinerary. In fact, as one pretentious character remarks of Chekhov’s stories: ‘Nothing much happens, the characters are often boring … and when they are not philosophising they have nothing much to say to each other except everyday things.’ It becomes infuriating. Figures initially excused as archetypes topple over into vacuous, disdainful stereotypes. The pages fill with hysterical women. Clichés abound. Americans are loud and obnoxious. Poles are vodka-soaked. Italians are sleazy. Frenchmen are sleazy. Moroccans are sleazy. Lucky our narrator – a kind, fatherly, educated white man – is there to help the little women, offering a shoulder to sleep on and a guiding hand around an art gallery. The reader’s ire slips from the page towards the author himself. Jach is clearly an erudite man: surely, we think, he must know better. Surely. And so we keep reading, wondering who on earth he was writing for. Jach does, however, have a certain reader in mind, a reader he knows intimately. A failed attempt to cross the French-Spanish border at Portbou recalls – for Jach’s ‘ideal’ reader – the final days of Walter Benjamin, whose ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ and notion of the aura in art offer a useful lens through which to view it. But familiarity with such works is not a prerequisite to engage with the novel, and any smugness or pride the reader may experience at picking up on such references does not go unpunished by Jach. Further reading – or a cheeky googling – is simultaneously rewarded and condemned. What emerges from Travelling Companions is both a rhetoric of innocence and an admission of guilt for reader and author alike. This is pure carnival: no footlights separate the audience from the action. Like the priest with the alchemist in the Yeoman’s story in The Canterbury Tales – like the corporate raider in the novel who falls for the parrot she is minding – I fell for Travelling Companions. It was a sublime pleasure, and, yes, I wished it would never end. It’s banal to say great art makes you think, and it’s barbaric after Auschwitz to think of banality and not also think of evil. Is that observation itself a banality? Is banality the true evil, or is evil simply evil and banality banal? Is In the Army Now actually a homophobic, xenophobic, unfunny comedy? Was I offended by the dirty-talking bird? Is it hot in Chad? g Andrew McLeod is a Melbourne-based writer and literary critic. He holds a PhD from Monash University, focusing on the work of Machado de Assis. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Fiction

Minds set free Three new graphic novels Bernard Caleo

hat distinguishes graphic novels (aka ‘big fat comic books’) from other books is how completely the page registers movements of the maker’s hand. Before we begin the business of reading, we look, and what we see is not margin-to-margin Helvetica or Times New Roman: it’s the mark of the makers, be it Alison Bechdel or Kristen Radtke or Mandy Ord. We might even think of the making of comic books as being closer to letter writing than novel writing. Accustoming ourselves to the style of a particular graphic novelist (‘Aha! That’s how Bechdel depicts euphoria!’) is a large part

of the pleasure of reading comics – the business of aligning one’s own visual point of view with the maker’s. Perhaps this is why autobiographical works have been such a vital force behind the rebirth of comic books as ‘graphic novels’. Alison Bechdel (‘rhymes with rectal’, as she informed us at a 2014 Wheeler Centre event) is the global superstar of autobiographical graphic novels, and her star has only taken on more sparkle with the improbable adaptation of her 2006 book Fun Home (closeted gay father suicides! literary references abound!) into a musical that took Broadway by storm, was staged in Sydney (ABR reviewed it in June 2021), and, Covid fingers crossed, will come to Melbourne in 2022. Fun Home, the graphic novel, presented the torrid world of Alison’s childhood home, crafted and honed into ‘a family tragicomic’, as the calling card on the cover proclaims. Fun Home joined Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus (1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) at the centre of the graphic novel canon. All three use autobiography to dissect trauma: familial, social, historical. Bechdel’s follow-up, Are You My Mother? (2012), explored her relationship with her mother and referenced psychoanalytic theory, in particular the work of child psychologist Donald Winnicott. It was a dense, exhausting slog of a comic book. But in this year’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength ( Jonathan Cape, $35 hb, 240 pp), Bechdel deploys her delicately droll lines, written and drawn, to construct a gentler, funnier self-portrait amid her usual storm of self-criticism and sardonic wit. She asks a question at the beginning of the book: just what is it that we are seeking in the agonistic rage for ‘fitness’? She spends the book running, stretching, cycling, telling, and showing us that it’s not the body beautiful, but the mind set free. Bechdel’s art features her trademark crisp nib and ink work. Here, though, her fine lines are not highlighted by a sombre ‘spot’ colour, as per her previous two books, but are illuminated in full watercolour by her wife, Holly Rae Taylor. There is an excellent panel late in the piece that jokingly depicts the pair of them as medieval tonsured monks sitting opposite one another in their twenty-first-century scriptorium, in pandemic-imposed, drawing-board solitude, working away at the pages of this book. Excitingly, art-wise, with each chapter break Bechdel’s usually finely controlled nib work loosens into wide Zen brush lines. She’s discovering something new, and she’s taking us with her.

A page from When One Person Dies the Whole World Is Over by Mandy Ord 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

risten Radtke’s Seek You: A journey through American loneliness (Pantheon Books, US$30 hb, 352 pp) seizes on the idea that we are in the depths of a loneliness epidemic and expands this into a book-length visual essay. Because a comics page takes much less time to read than a page of text, a graphic novel running to this length will take you the same time to read as a magazine-length essay. Radtke, art director and deputy publisher of The Believer mag-

azine, was brought up in the buttoned-down Midwest, then as a young adult lived in the fever-dream cities of New York and Las Vegas, and she examines how these social experiences shaped her image of loneliness. She discusses the research on socialisation and the effects of social isolation, including Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) and, more scathingly, psychologist Harry Harlow’s cruel experiments on rhesus monkeys. As with Bechdel’s and Ord’s most recent books, the maker’s life partner features in the narrative. In Radtke’s case, her

We might even think of the making of comic books as being closer to letter writing than novel writing husband’s long-ago purchase of a gun continues to gnaw at her. Radtke creates her illustrations from photo reference and her artwork bears an unfortunate consequence of this approach. The images are accurate but stilted, and in a book about loneliness, their curiously affectless, detached nature certainly makes this a lonelier text. ‘Loneliness lives in the gap,’ says Radkte, ‘between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.’ What we want is more emotional connection with the images in a visual text, in order for that text to have greater resonance.

he autobiographical push is also important in Australian comics, and Mandy Ord is one of the great local exponents. Her one-eyed ‘Mandy’ avatar moves through a world of two-eyed humans, and this anatomical abnormality is an elegant analogue for our experience of sight: it doesn’t feel like we have two eyes, even though we can see that everyone else does. It’s also an instant identifier of her main character, as iconic as Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt. Ord has been using this avatar-figure to tell autobiographical stories for decades, but even within such a long practice, this book is a staggering high point. When One Person Dies the Whole World Is Over (Brow Books, $24.99 pb, 376 pp), longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2020, features on every page a four-panel account of Mandy’s day, one for each day of a year. We accompany Mandy at her two jobs, walking the dog, making dinner, gardening, watching The Walking Dead with her partner. The book is intimate: we accompany Mandy on her daily commutes, we see the bird on the fence. It’s epic: we are invited into the vast emotions that lurk within everyday life. It’s also microscopic in its recording of those corner-of-the-eye moments that otherwise get lost in the swirl of events. Ord’s facility with the ink brush – even the lettering is made with the brush – is such that, as in Bechdel, we feel deeply, bodily, and boldly connected to the tidal flow of the life on show. The fluid, monochrome world that Ord conjures, even when the life she is documenting – her own – is overwhelming, is an eloquent argument against loneliness. Autobiography is where the energy is in comics at the moment. By the strength of their hand-drawn work, Bechdel and Ord sweep us into their worlds, inviting insight about how to live with others, and with ourselves. g Bernard Caleo, draws and performs, and is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, on place in Australian comic books. ❖

Grief and loss

Fiction from a child’s point of view Debra Adelaide

ne of the hardest challenges for a novelist is to write a story for adults from the point of view of a child. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë set the bar high with Jane Eyre, the first novel to achieve this. The story ends when Jane is a woman but commences with the child Jane’s perspective. So effective for readers was Brontë’s ground-breaking feat that Charles Dickens decided to write Great Expectations in the voice of the child Pip, after just hearing about Jane Eyre, even before reading it. But the risks are great: creating a child narrator who knows, tells, or understands far too much for their age; dumbing down the story to fit with the character’s youth; striking the wrong notes by making the voice too childish or not childlike enough. It’s a minefield, and any novelist, especially a debutant, who pulls it off deserves praise. Thus Harper Lee, who never had to produce another book to maintain her legendary status. Campbell Mattinson’s novel, We Were Not Men (Fourth Estate, $32.99 pb, 342 pp), is far from the great heights of To Kill a Mockingbird, but it is one of the more interesting first novels I have read in ages, partly because Mattinson has confronted the challenges outlined above. Twins Jon and Eden Hardacre are just nine years old when they are thrust into a brutal adult world thanks to a shocking accident that kills their parents. This event, narrated by Jon in painful detail early on in the novel, establishes the raw traumatic base upon which the rest of their story unfolds. Both are swimmers, having been taught by their mother. After recovering from the accident, they begin training in an obsessive way, one made possible by the fact that there is a creek on the property owned by their grandmother. The novel exposes the extent of the boys’ loss as well as their particular ways of coping with grief, their intimate relationship as twins, and the therapeutic power of swimming. It proceeds at a heightened emotional pace that is rarely relaxed. Sometimes I wished the author had changed gear now and then instead of hurtling along in a way that can be tiring. Sometimes I wished he had remembered that kids are just kids who don’t always need to reflect deeply and meaningfully, but are occasionally – perhaps often – content just to be. On the other hand, suffering has propelled these boys fast into maturity, and they are burdened with a great deal. The boys verbally tiptoe around each other and their eccentric grandmother Bobbie, now their carer. If the carefully constructed and sometimes coded dialogue is occasionally strained, that is relieved by the original and lyrical tone of the narration overall. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

A now mostly lost world of suburban innocence and secrets is explored, while the natural world is cherished for its restorative power. Mattinson also digs deeply into emotional terrain, and evokes the trauma and heartache of these boys who fiercely cherish each other at the same time as being swimming rivals. The acknowledgments explain that Mattinson has spent thirty years writing this book, and it shows: every sentence has been lovingly crafted. Both Jon (the narrator) and Eden are strong characters, but it is Bobbie who steals the show with her wry, offbeat conversation, her singular approach to child-rearing, her constant challenges to the boys, and her own deep wounds from losing her beloved husband and soulmate. This is definitely a novel for adults.

he child’s point of view is also utilised in Francesca Haig’s The Cookbook of Common Prayer (Allen & Unwin, $27.99 pb, 425 pp), as part of an ensemble of voices. Eleven-yearold Teddy, one of the four principal narrators, delivers a story of grief, loss, and secrets set in Tasmania and England. The others are his parents, Gabe and Gill, and his sister Sylvie, a teenage victim of anorexia nervosa who has been in hospital for most of the past three years. A silent but strong presence is the eldest child, Dougie, who died in a caving (or ‘potholing’) accident while on a gap year in England, a fact that is revealed early. Fearing that news of Dougie’s death will shock fragile Sylvie, the parents decide that they must conceal it from her. They create a story maintaining that Dougie has only broken his leg, and has set off on a European holiday with his father, who has remained overseas for the inquest. To top it all off, Gill continues to write letters to Sylvie from ‘Dougie’ – real letters, of course, not emails, because in her locked ward there is no internet or phone connection. What could possibly go wrong? They don’t even consider when or how they will have to undo their elaborate fiction, let alone what their surviving children will make of this bizarre example of parenting. Wobbly at best, this premise becomes less convincing when Teddy is required to hide the truth from Sylvie (despite the fact that he visits her daily after school), but also from their dementia-suffering grandfather. Gill and Gabe are no slouches intellectually, but they seem not to have thought through all the consequences, though in his defence Gabe is initially inclined to challenge his wife. The first half of the novel teeters on this edge of implausibility,

but as the story developed I found myself keen to see how the disasters in this family would escalate – thankfully, not in any way that could be anticipated. Gabe and Gill’s voices are long-winded and not clearly enough delineated, and Teddy is far more capable and resourceful than his childish voice permits, but the novel is ultimately redeemed by Sylvie. She alone says little but speaks volumes. And when she reveals what she knows, and why she’s been silently trying to make herself disappear for so long, it only proves what her doctor has been trying to tell Gill for months: that Sylvie is resilient and astute.

ild improbabilities also feature at the start of Allee Richards’s first novel, Small Joys of Real Life (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 295 pp): meeting a man with whom you instantly fall in love; having sex just once, before he dies; discovering you are pregnant, then deciding to keep the baby. But all this is carried off with great flair thanks to the confident voice of the narrator, Eva, and to the tight story that is maintained despite the limited scope and settings of the action. Having given up her acting career for no good reason and alienated her agent, Eva now settles into the inevitable, binging on the television show Friends during her months of pregnancy. That series is a touchstone for the whole novel: friendships are stretched to the limits with Eva’s two main friends, Annie and Sarah, coping with her impulses and secrets in different ways, but ultimately demonstrating a fierce loyalty. This is a novel of millennial angst set in inner-city Melbourne, and there is a lot of low-key action – going out to bars and parties, visiting friends, bitching with friends, not talking to your mother. But the tight structure, month by month through Eva’s pregnancy, propels the story along without being predictable. Most unexpectedly, for her and us, Eva is a horny pregnant woman, frankly confronting and meeting her body’s desires without apology. It’s also refreshing to read a novel that embraces the large joys of life (having a baby) and the small ones (sharing cups of tea) without a skerrick of sentimentality. You probably would not want to binge on this sort of novel, but it represents quality escapism for the times. g Debra Adelaide is an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney. Her latest book is The Innocent Reader: Reflections on reading and writing (Picador, 2019).

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www.australianbookreview.com.au 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Essay

Max Dupain’s dilemmas by Helen Ennis

ax Dupain, one of Australia’s most accomplished photographers, was filled with self-doubt. He told us so – repeatedly – in public commentary, especially during the 1980s, in the last years of his life. It is striking how candid he was, how personal, verging on the confessional, and how little attention we paid to what he said, either during his lifetime or since (he died in 1992, aged eighty-one). There were good reasons why we couldn’t hear Dupain properly. In a fervently nationalistic period in Australian life, we needed him to be ‘quintessentially Australian’. We valorised him as a ‘strong individualist’, ‘down-to-earth’, ‘anti-academic’, someone who didn’t tolerate fools, had a ‘no-nonsense manner’, and was physically fit – still rowing on Sydney Harbour in his seventies. We didn’t want or need someone vulnerable, a man with ‘an anxiety complex’, as Dupain’s wife Diana described it. While the framework we constructed for understanding Dupain and his photography now belongs to a different historical and cultural period, its consequences are still with us. As I see it, we’ve locked Dupain’s photography into fixed categories and diminished the nuance and complexity of the contribution he made to Australian cultural life over a six-decades-long career. There are, of course, many potential ways forward. Rebecca Solnit offers one, writing in The Faraway Nearby that ‘empathy is first of all an act of imagination’. I found this revelatory: it helped me start imagining different kinds of narratives for Dupain and his photography. So, in a different way, did a comment from Jill Crossley who worked at Max Dupain & Associates in Sydney in 1957–58. She loved the convivial and supportive atmosphere created by Dupain and his colleagues, with everyone being encouraged to pursue their personal photographic work on weekends and to present the results for discussion. What Crossley found exceptional was the way the men responded; they openly ‘expressed their feelings’ about the photographs they shared. Throughout his life, Dupain published commentary on photography, in books, newspapers, and magazines. His début was in 1935 in art patron Sydney Ure Smith’s influential publications The Home and Art in Australia. For decades, Dupain was an articulate, passionate champion of modern photography and developed a strong, distinctive voice, opinionated, but not particularly personal. That began to change after his first retrospective exhibition, which was held at the Australian Centre of Photography in Sydney in 1975. It attracted a great deal of attention, culminating in

1980 in a one-person exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and publication of a scholarly monograph, the first on a living Australian photographer, written by the Gallery’s first curator of photography, Gael Newton. Dupain provided a living link to the past at a time when the historical consciousness of Australian photography was growing (there had been only one attempt at a history, by Jack Cato in 1955, and two new histories of photography did not appear until 1988, the year of the Bicentenary of the European invasion of Australia). But Dupain was also active in the present; he was a leading architectural photographer, a committed art photographer, and between 1979 and 1985 the photography critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. His profile reached its zenith during the 1980s. As the ‘Grand Old Man of Australian photography’, as writer Craig McGregor called him, he received extensive media coverage and gave numerous interviews. He also wrote his most extended autobiographical essay during this time; it appeared in his book Max Dupain’s Australia in 1986. In his published and recorded interviews, Dupain told us that he had been ‘full of self-doubt all his life’. He confessed that he didn’t like people, and never had. In 1991, nine months before his death, he explained to McGregor that ‘to go into a room full of strangers is a chore for me … though not as bad as it used to be, because I don’t give a stuff any more’. He publicly questioned the value of his social and professional interactions, saying, ‘I always count the time, and the cost, and I think, Christ, I could be doing better things than this!’ ‘I can effect a relationship,’ he said, ‘but afterwards I think: was it worth it?’ What he did like was ‘to do things … I hate wasting time. That’s why I’ve got so many bloody photos!’ He found travelling ‘nerve wracking’ and after World War II made only three trips overseas, to Fiji in 1955, Bangkok in 1974, and Paris in 1978 (all were for work). In a more intimate vein, he wondered aloud whether he had ‘reciprocated adequately’ in his relationship with his wife and two children and acknowledged Diana’s ‘unremitting tolerance for a husband with such “insufferable single-mindedness” [her words]’. In the writing of his own story, Dupain identified the war years as a turning point for his life and work. Among the most profoundly destabilising personal events he had to deal with were the unexpected decision of his first wife, Olive Cotton, to leave him in 1941 after eighteen months of marriage, and their ensuing divorce. His friends and colleagues, including his business partner Ernest Hyde, designer Richard Beck, and photographer AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

and filmmaker Damien Parer, were dispersed across the globe, many of them placed in harm’s way. Dupain was devastated when Parer was killed while filming the battle between US and Japanese troops on the island of Peleliu in 1944. Between 1941 and 1945, Dupain, a pacifist, worked as a camouflage officer for the Australian Department of Home Security and was based at different locations in Australia, Papua, and New Guinea, as well as the Pacific. Like so many of his peers, he was deeply affected by the long periods spent away from home, telling journalist Candida Baker decades later, ‘I can’t underscore enough how difficult it was to settle down when I came back.’ In Max Dupain’s Australia, he elaborated further on ‘the long-term shock’ he had experienced: The unstable war years, the grudging adaptation to ever-changing surroundings, the thousands of impressions both good and bad of varying environments, all added up to long-term shock. I just needed a settled emotional life for a while in order to get my life and work into a new perspective. I did not want to go back to the ‘cosmetic lie’ of fashion photography or advertising illustration …

This is a significant passage, not only because it acknowledges his loss of equilibrium in personal, direct language but also because it foreshadows the typically practical way Dupain dealt with his fraught emotional state. He decided to change direction in his work, turning to architectural photography, which he considered truer to his values and which became a mainstay of his practice from the 1950s onwards. Architecture involved less interaction with people than fashion or portraiture, which he welcomed. Jill Crossley recalled with amusement that Dupain had ‘a strong aversion to some of his clients (they probably talked too much or were boring) and if he thought we could handle them, managed to be out when they arrived’. She concluded that ‘he was a “loner” and needed plenty of space’. Various other adaptive strategies can be identified. We know, for example, that Dupain was extremely diligent and worried about every assignment he undertook ‘for days beforehand’. He liked to be as well prepared as possible for his photography – creatively, technically, practically. As he explained: Although I shoot extemporaneously a lot of the time, I prefer to have half a dozen shots in my mind. Probably I have seen them many times under different conditions and have been thinking about them. The moment will come when I shall go to them and make the photographs … I feel the contemplation of the subject brings it closer to you.

Photographer and critic Robert McFarlane regarded his commitment to his work as ‘ferocious … [and] almost painful to watch’, while the architect Harry Seidler, his long-term client and friend, considered ‘his pursuit of perfection’ to be ‘almost maniacal’. This level of intensity and meticulousness was also evident in the development of a practice of physical and psychological confinement, which Dupain outlined in 1991: ‘skittering around the periphery doesn’t interest me one little bit … [I like] to involve myself in, maybe, a small area geographically and work it out, as simple as that’. We know, too, from Rex Dupain, that his father was ‘a man of 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

habit. He liked system, order … he didn’t like being taken out of his habitual little state of being’. Max’s studio manager Jill White observed that he was ‘nervous about moving out of his comfort zone’. As many of his colleagues and intimates noted, he worked far too much, to the exclusion of a great deal else. Photographer and friend David Moore commented that he didn’t ‘want to be so devoted to the craft that it rules my life, as I think it did with Max’. By Dupain’s own estimate, he made more than a million photographic exposures during his career, a volume of activity he acknowledged as both excessive and a way of coping with self-doubt. He remarked to Craig McGregor: ‘I’ve smothered it [self-doubt] all up by being productive.’ While Dupain was frank about his working method as a way of controlling his self-doubt and anxiety, publicly he offered little insight into their psychological, emotional, or larger societal origins. He claimed, for instance, that he didn’t know why he was ‘devil-driven’, as Diana Dupain described it. He supposed ‘the will to achieve something is at the back of it all, and what’s behind that God only knows’. Perhaps the closest he came to an explanation was the recognition that his behaviour replicated his father George Dupain’s. Max felt that George, who was a pioneer in physical education in Australia and a eugenicist, was the same: ‘He had his work … and he was terribly devoted to it.’ When questioned by McGregor about why he didn’t like people, Max responded, ‘I don’t know’, speculating that ‘it may have something to do with being an only child; my parents were not over-social’, and left it at that. He particularly disliked mixing with groups of photographers, telling Candida Baker in 1988: ‘They talk about film speeds, printing paper, aperture, camera optics. Never do they mention any emotional content, or that they’ve taken a photograph because they were influenced by the “Moonlight Sonata”.’

ne of the most heightened instances of Dupain’s anxiety – when he was beset by ‘continual, nagging worries’ – was his so-called ‘Paris experience’. In 1978, Harry Seidler invited him to photograph the Australian Embassy in Paris, which he had designed and which had been completed a few months earlier. The invitation would not have come as a surprise. The two men had already worked together for twenty-five years and had a productive though often testy relationship. Seidler’s wife, Penelope, commented that they ‘always used to bicker a lot … They each complained about the other one being very difficult, but beneath that there was a big respect.’ However, despite Dupain’s French ancestry, love of French photography, interest in the high points of Western art on display in Paris, and the prospect of having the well-travelled, erudite Seidler as a guide around the city, he initially declined the commission. He had no appetite whatsoever for international travel and felt unable to resolve potential technical obstacles: how much film would he need; how would he deal with the unfamiliar European light; how would he process his negatives; what would he do about a darkroom? After what Rex Dupain remembered as a protracted ‘would he, wouldn’t he debate’ between photographer and architect, Dupain finally relented. The terms are revealing. A 1984 article reported that he ‘packed up his hampers and took his darkroom with

him – developing tanks, chemicals, the lot!’ There was so much equipment that Seidler had to obtain special permission from Qantas to transport it. Seidler also resolved the vexed issue of the darkroom facility, arranging to convert a kitchen at the Embassy so that Dupain ‘was able to operate exactly as he did at home’. Soon after his arrival in Paris, Dupain sent Jill White the first in a series of postcards that underscored his agitated state of mind. ‘Hello – and I don’t say that very cheerfully,’ he began, proceeding with a comment on what he saw as the scale of the task ahead. ‘The Embassy is an enormous building. It frightens me in its detachedness and Germanic efficiency. It’s pure Bauhaus .. . My thoughts are just to get the embassy done and get home. I don’t belong to Paris.’ In the week devoted to photographing the building, Dupain produced a series of dramatic interior and exterior shots that met, if not exceeded, the high expectations of both men and that continue to be widely published and appreciated. As was typical of Dupain’s architectural photography, they celebrate the building’s sculptural forms and are supremely confident and authoritative, but they are also very hermetic. In the absence of environmental context and detail, the viewer is obliged to react to the images rather than find their own pathway into them. While Seidler was, in Dupain’s words, ‘elated’ and ‘smiling’ at the completion of the assignment, Dupain was experiencing a level of exhaustion he had never known before. Dupain spent the second week of the trip on his own, free to do as he wished. He later admitted that ‘I’ve never been so lonely in my life’. Seidler left him with a list of sites around the city he thought he might like to visit, but Dupain kept up his longstanding practice of confinement, later explaining that he ‘selected a very small part of Paris and worked it over – I didn’t even get to Sacré-Coeur’, the popular tourist site on the right bank of the city. This behaviour astonished Seidler: ‘All he did was explore the walking circumference from our hotel! He never got to Montmartre! He only spent one day in the Louvre – after that it was all too much! He just couldn’t cope!’ White surmised that the likely reason Dupain didn’t stray was because he was ‘frightened of getting lost’. She also noted that his hotel bill for

‘Neuf oeufs’ (nine eggs) revealed that he had not broken with his long-established habit of eating the same breakfast every day, whether in Paris or Castlecrag. There are other illuminating aspects to Dupain’s ‘Paris experience’. His responses to the alien environment were extraordinarily visceral, as they had been when he had reluctantly visited Bangkok four years earlier on another architectural photography assignment. In a telegram sent to White from Paris, he declared that the tourists flooding the city were ‘here in three dimension[s]! They all smell.’ He found the ‘wild traffic’ daunting and told White: ‘Twice I have saved a person’s life and a bashed-up front end by just yelling in time.’

Dupain confessed that he didn’t like people, and never had The personal photographs Dupain took during his days alone in Paris were not exhibited at the time. However, since their incorporation into what is now known as The Paris ‘private’ series in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, they have been celebrated as an expression of ‘the essence of order, logic and harmony which lies at the core of classicism’. In one sense this is true – the images are rigorously constructed and highly ordered – but in another, they say more about alienation than classicism. They feel different from Dupain’s Australian photographs and are redolent of his position as a stranger, as an outsider. I am left with the impression that the scenes he photographed were receding from him even as he walked towards them with his camera, and that he did not find this experience pleasurable. This feeling of unease is reinforced by the dramatic play of contrasts and preponderance of dark tones. The way Dupain processed his time in Paris is also revealing. Several months after returning home, he presented Seidler with a gift of twenty-one photographs from their trip (The Paris ‘private’ series) and a letter thanking him. ‘The Paris experience,’ he wrote, ‘was wonderful and did everything to consolidate my

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thinking.’ This ‘thinking’ did not refer to the potential advantages of international travel but the exact opposite; going to Paris reinforced the beliefs he had formed decades earlier during the war. He would never travel overseas again, claiming that ‘we have it all here’. His view that nothing was to be gained by leaving Australia has a certain irony; Australian artists have commonly spent extended periods overseas and the introduction of cheap international airfares in the 1970s meant that Australians were travelling more than ever before. Dupain’s dislike of travel wasn’t so much cultural as profoundly psychological and was intimately bound up with the conception of himself as an artist. White observed that he was not someone ‘interested in seeking out the new’. His fear of getting lost physically in Paris mirrored his profound anxiety about losing himself creatively. This related to his long-held identification with Norman Lindsay’s view of artists as exceptional beings who, through ‘sheer brute assertion’, could prevail over less than desirable circumstances. In a piece published in 1980 in Light Vision, Australia’s premier art photography magazine, Dupain gave an unusually detailed outline of his philosophy of life. Working as a professional photographer in insular Australia has been my self chosen lot. In such a ‘cultural backwater’, as Norman Lindsay expressed it, mental stimulation is anything but over-plus … So one is thrown up against one’s inner resources, and visual excitement comes from over there by proxy in picture books and printed text … Direct influential impact is at half strength capacity. I think this is a good thing if one has the courage and endurance to sustain and promote his individuality by sheer brute assertion of belief in himself.

The implication is clear: Dupain was one of the exceptional men able to meet the challenge. God help those who can’t muster this will unless they migrate, absorb and return to us, temporarily stimulated and refreshed, but possibly as other human beings lost to their real selves in the wilderness of the world’s pictorial paradise.

To avoid what he saw as the risk of exposure, contamination, and the potential catastrophe of losing his real self, he had no choice but to stay home. He found historical precedents that justified his position, declaring that ‘Rembrandt never left Amsterdam and there’s no evidence to show that Shakespeare ever left Stratford. … So why should I leave Australia?’

o far, I have discussed Dupain’s own perspective on his life and work, but what has been our role in the ‘making’ of Dupain and his photography, both in his lifetime and in the nearly thirty years since his death? This brings me to another aspect of empathy, the notion of complicity. We – writers, curators, and the broader public – are agents who fashion particular narratives about artists and their work. In Dupain’s case, sometimes there was mutual agreement between him and his audience – an intersection of common, vested interests – but sometimes there wasn’t. What has become clear is that we have created a circular 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

situation in which we keep looking at the same images – a tiny number given the immensity of Dupain’s oeuvre – and are still preoccupied with contextualising his work in terms of modernism and nationalism. Art historian Ann Elias – a rare exception – discusses the neglected area of Dupain’s photographs of flowers, which certainly invite greater attention. Dupain himself was vague about what constituted Australianness in photography, and his views changed only slightly over time. Immediately after World War II, when he was particularly reflective and keen to act on ‘a fresh outlook, new ideas and possibilities’, Dupain argued for a documentary approach, what he referred to briefly as ‘factual photography’. The task, he declared, was to ‘see and photograph Australia’s way of life as it is, not as one would wish it to be’ and ‘to show Australia to Australians’. To this end, he envisaged a national photography that involved working in the outdoors rather than the studio (which he associated with ‘fakery’), and embraced the qualities of sunlight and ‘naturalness and spontaneity’. Later, he was more inclined to emphasise the importance of a subjective element in photography and what he called an ‘emotional factor’, but he stayed consistent in praising an Australian way of life irrespective of how clichéd such a view had become and how limited his own experience was. He told broadcaster Peter Ross in 1991, for example: ‘We have got a way of life that just does not exist anywhere else that I’ve been [my emphasis]. The tempo of life is much more congenial.’ Ross suggested the core of Dupain’s success was his ‘celebration of the physical life that we lead in this country’. This brings me to Sunbaker, the most widely reproduced and discussed photograph in the history of Australian photography. Most recently it was the subject of a 2017 exhibition Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker. I don’t intend to elaborate on it here, except as an instance where our need for the image usurped Dupain’s. A little background is necessary: in 1938, on a camping trip with his friends to the South Coast of New South Wales, Dupain exposed some negatives of Harold Salvage, an English friend, sunbaking on the sand. He selected one of these images, which he titled Sunbaker, for inclusion in his monograph Max Dupain (1948). That image subsequently dropped out of circulation and there was no knowledge of its variants until 1975, when preparations were underway for his retrospective at the newly opened Australian Centre for Photography, the flagship for art photography in this country. Dupain presented several hundred prints for the consideration of the curators, ACP director Graham Howe and David Moore. Among them were architectural studies and documentary photographs from earlier decades, which Dupain considered to be his best work, but not Sunbaker. Mindful of his organisation’s brief as the Australian Centre, Howe was ‘looking for something that said “Australia”’ and pressed Dupain on the whereabouts of Sunbaker, his favourite image in the 1948 monograph. Dupain’s response was telling: ‘He said that he wasn’t keen on it, and besides, he had lost the negative.’ He did however acquiesce to Howe’s request to print up other negatives of the same subject, and it was one of these, subsequently known as Sunbaker, that Howe ultimately selected for the exhibition poster and promotional material. Howe attributed its subsequent fame to the media and more specifically

Meat queue, 1946, by Max Dupain, gelatin silver photograph, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982 1983.2211

to ‘how an audience loves an image that reflects something that is familiar to their own experience. All Aussies have laid on the beach like that and know that particular sensation of sun, water, sand and the sound and smell of the ocean’. It is often said that artists are poor judges of their own work and their preferences are frequently overridden by their professional collaborators, curators, commercial gallerists, publishers and so on. But it must be emphasised that Dupain was very ambivalent about the elevation of Sunbaker within his own oeuvre and within Australian art photography more generally. He frequently tried to downplay it. He told me in a 1991 interview that its production was a ‘simple matter’ and that he believed it had ‘taken on too much, so much so that you feel one of these days they’ll say that bloody Sunbaker, there it is again’. (That said, between 1975 and 1982 he produced around 200 prints of Sunbaker for sale.) Crucially, he also tried to direct attention away from Sunbaker and on several occasions nominated Meat queue (1946) as a much better photograph; he had included it in the group he presented to the curators of his 1975 show. Taken in a butcher’s shop in Sydney when meat rationing was still in force, in Dupain’s words, it shows: four or five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world, waiting for their turn. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I’m focused up all ready to go, see pure luck. She breaks the queue and the dame next to her [gives her] a pretty demoniac look …

Meat queue, like Sunbaker, monumentalises the human figure. It has the physicality, authority and graphic power characteristic

of his most recognisable works. However, it was a curious choice in a number of respects. It was another old image rather than a contemporary example, and it depicted people rather than architecture or the landscape. Most significantly, it doesn’t champion either an explicitly Australian way of life or a national photography, both of which were so closely associated with Dupain. Indeed, it appears to contradict his own views of a distinctively Australian modus operandi defined by working outdoors in the harsh Australian sunlight. Arguably, Meat queue relates more to a specific knowledge of photographic history, notably the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and others who relished the role of chance in their image making. If one of the women had not broken the queue, there would have been no photograph. The level of success in thoroughly Australianising Dupain was clearly evident by the 1980s. In an article for The British Journal of Photography, 1982, Josef Grosz wrote: ‘to understand Max Dupain, it is, to my mind, essential to know the “feel” of Australia’. He concluded that ‘in some ways Max is Australia’. This conflation reached its apotheosis in the obituaries for Dupain published in the mass media in 1992. In one of the most incisive, in the UK newspaper The Independent, Peter Ride claimed that Dupain’s ‘greatest work’ was ‘of everyday subjects: illustrating a lifestyle and sense of leisure which pin-points exactly the way Australians thought of themselves’. Of the man himself, Ride stated that his characteristics typified the image of an Australian male of his generation. He could be very blunt and straightforward and exuded both a vigorousness and an easy going manner. These were the sorts of qualities that he seemed to illustrate in the situations he photographed. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Sunbaker, c.1938 prtd c.1975, by Max Dupain, gelatin silver photograph, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982 1983.2209

In 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics, Sunbaker achieved a new level of fame after its licensing to Qantas for use in their ‘The Spirit of Australia’ publicity campaign. The irony was that its maker disdained travel.

ne of my favourite books is David Malouf ’s The Conversations at Curlow Creek, because of the way the two principal characters become unopposed at a crucial juncture. The physical space they occupy falls away and another opens up in which ‘the normal rules of separation, of one thing being distinct to itself and closed against another, no longer applied’. Malouf ’s metaphor of an ‘open’ space is useful in illuminating what is simultaneously an abstract and concrete process – trying to imagine different ways of thinking and writing about Dupain’s photography that recognise his vulnerabilities, fears, contradictions, and failings, as well as our own. There is of course a larger point to such an endeavour, and it’s also open-ended: how can our reimagining of Dupain’s photography amplify our understandings of Australian society, art, and culture in his lifetime and since? I am not an apologist for Dupain. His attitudes to race, eugenics, masculinity, and feminism have been rigorously critiqued by writers such as Geoffrey Batchen and Isobel Crombie, and there is still much more to be done. Nor am I seeking a biographical reading of his photographs, a practice that is inherently reductive 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

and simplistic. But, at the same time as registering his predilection for the monumental and monolithic, for imposing himself on his subjects and making photographs that are assertions rather than invitations or ruminations, I am starting to notice other things. Strangely enough, this takes me back to Meat queue and the quiver of energy, which Dupain described as chance, caused by the simple action of a woman breaking the queue. That uncontrolled, uncontrollable quiver keeps reappearing in Dupain’s photography, up to the last. In one of his many late flower studies, Cattleya orchid, 1991, a petal flutters just enough to escape sharp definition. When Peter Ross interviewed Dupain in 1991, he speculated that he was looking for ‘a sort of solidity’ in his photography, ‘trying to find some sort of order out of where we live’. And a few months after Dupain’s death when broadcaster Phillip Adams asked Gael Newton what he was like, she gave the memorable answer, ‘Rock on the outside, water on the inside’. g Helen Ennis is Emeritus Professor, ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. Her book Olive Cotton: A life in photography won the Magarey Medal for Biography and the Non-fiction prize in the Queensland Literary Awards in 2020. ‘Max Dupain’s Dilemmas’ was shortlisted for the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. The State Library of NSW is digitising the Max Dupain Exhibition Negative Archive. A list of references is available online.

Environment

Apocalypse now

Delia Falconer’s new essay collection Jonica Newby

Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss by Delia Falconer

Scribner $32.99 pb, 290 pp

eading Richard Flanagan’s searing allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Delia Falconer’s new non-fiction book, Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss, in rapid succession was a surreal, slightly unmooring experience. Both authors lucidly capture the dreamlike state of disbelief and horrified fury with which we’ve watched the world slide terribly into the 2020s. Both are part of an outpouring of new language, new stories, new ways of expressing our reactions to the barely imaginable scale of realities we can no longer ignore: fire columns that remind NASA of dragons; a pandemic that conjures news scenes we had thought the province of cinema. As our poor human cognition struggles to catch up, scientists become poets, novelists become scientists. It seems as though language and culture are reaching a phase shift, a tipping point, and it’s this head-spinning transition that novelist and essayist Delia Falconer vividly charts in her exquisite new collection of essays. In the opening essays, Falconer shares how diametrically her own view of the world has tilted. Where once she would scan the empty waters of Woolloomooloo for fish and assume seasonal variation, now she wonders if the fish have all gone. Where once a swim in a lovely bay was a simple joy, now thoughts veer to how high the water will rise when the ice caps melt. ‘Is it true the world’s going to die soon?’ asks her young daughter. Falconer struggles for a convincing answer. What Falconer captures so movingly is the queasy vertigo many of us are experiencing as we contemplate how much the world has changed, or how much our perception of it has – newly charged with portent, with intimations of disaster, and yet almost unbearably beautiful, as if the prospect of unfathomable loss has imbued everything with wonder and meaning and intent; ‘as if,’ Falconer reflects in the titular essay, ‘we’re entering a new era of signs and wonders’. And what wonders. An exquisitely preserved prehistoric wolf cub released by thawing permafrost. The footprints of vanished Roman villas revealed by unprecedented drought. Falconer explores the emotional complexity with which we receive these images – should we be beguiled, horrified, or both? Is this abundance of beauty like the epicormic growth that spurts desperately from a burnt tree? The fireworks ‘unleashing its biggest rockets and most glittering cascades in its final moments’? Are they signs of a dying earth? Alongside are the sudden, bewildering losses: sixty per cent of endangered Saiga antelope found dead in a single spring ‘as

if a switch had been turned on’. Formerly billion-strong clouds of Bogong moths completely gone by the summer of 2018. This eerie listing of disappearances recalls the abrupt disappearance of limbs and people that characterises Flanagan’s allegorical cri de cœur; both writers beautifully portraying an oscillation between anguish and dissociated numbness.

What Falconer captures so movingly is the queasy vertigo many of us are experiencing as we contemplate how much the world has changed For Falconer, her permanently altered world view feels like a rebirth of animism – to the deep notion that the world is alive and has agency (how did we teach ourselves otherwise?). If it does, it is screaming in pain, in one case literally. One of the more vivid images is of scientists observing that ‘icebergs are melting more loudly and emitting “excruciating” sounds’, while the lead author of another phonic study of ice-melt laments ‘These … are the songs of a changing climate.’ Even scientific culture is shifting – the colourless language of craft no longer seems adequate to the task. From reflections on feeding birds, analyses of literary trends, to Falconer’s Covid and fire diaries, the essays are complex, ambitious, rewarding. Personal vignettes ground the reader with recognition (‘Yep, been there – I’ve thought that too …’) while providing scaffolding for a cornucopia of intellectual treasures: unexpected facts, insightful connections (why do we love vampire films?), philosophy, fairy tale and myth. It kept me turning the pages, looking for ‘wonders’, enjoying the next hit – a friend who thinks her house is haunted because it keeps manifesting lumps of coal, a writer who suggests that many ghost sightings were hallucinations caused by coal-gas fires. Thus the difficult, the unpalatable, is absorbed. These examples are from ‘Coal: An unnatural history’, a standout chapter for me. It’s a well-travelled topic, but Falconer’s take is fresh. On a family trip to Parliament House in Canberra, her children are invited to look for ‘Shawn the Prawn’, an ancient creature embedded in the handsome black limestone of the grand Marble Foyer, which, we soon learn, owes its black colour to carbon. From there, we launch into a rollicking retelling of Australian history through coal. Did you know that the first European ship to reach the east coast was originally a merchant collier, or that the Awabakal people of the Hunter region used coal to waterproof canoes? A quote from a 1913 article by Australian writer Mabel Forrest made me laugh in wry recognition: ‘A woman’s life … is like the earth that stores the coal, all its accumulated years of love and tenderness fuel for a man’s brief burning hour of passion.’ Many of the book’s recurrent themes are expressed here. Deep time – reminding us of the mind-bending aeons it took to create the ‘products’ we so swiftly consume. The bitter-sweet uneasiness of raising children now. Without giving too much away, there’s a shock reveal – Shawn the Prawn is not who we think he is – highlighting the symbolism of lying to children in the very halls of power; the site, as we are reminded chillingly, of a federal minister, a future prime minister, holding up a lump AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

of coal and saying, ‘Don’t be afraid.’ Glamour, in the sense of an old faery spell or enchantment that prevents us seeing what’s really there, is another recurring theme, explicitly so in ‘The Opposite of Glamour’, where the dizzy enchantment of social media, the fetishising of ever-faster consumption, the parallel narrative of infinite abundance, blind so many of us to the unspeakable costs of our sparkling lifestyles – a Mordor of indentured slaves, a collapsing natural world. The potentially fatal nature of this bewitchment is expressed most mordantly in the final essay, ‘Everything Is Illuminated’, in which Falconer points out that the uncanny, phosphorescent beauty of Luminol, used to solve murders in the popular television program CSI, literally casts a glowing glamour over death. Early in 2020, I drove through coal-stricken forests to visit my mother in Mallacoota. On the way, mindful of not exacerbating anyone’s trauma in that fire-massacred town, I called my friend, disaster psychologist Dr Rob Gordon, for advice. He said, ‘One

definition of trauma is that it irreversibly shatters an assumption about the world we didn’t know we had.’ On reflection, that’s what we’re all going through now. The last four years feel to me like a mountainous cognitive shift, with a big pointy summit-spike on the eve of 2020, when, as if in a prophesy, our summery beaches turned apocalypse red, before a pandemic sealed the sense that the world will never be as it was. Our changing climate is changing us. Our language, our culture, our imaginations are adjusting as our poor brains struggle with ‘irreversibly shattered assumptions about the world we didn’t know we had’. Delia Falconer’s mesmerising Signs and Wonders helps us to process the disorienting complexity of living in this time of great beauty and loss. g Jonica Newby’s latest book is Beyond Climate Grief: A journey of love, snow, fire and an enchanted beer can (NewSouth, 2021). ❖

Aldinga Cliffs for Gabriella Smart

There’s no getting away from things. There is driving, then walking miles along a quiet coast on a rising tide – with the back-of-the-mind consciousness that in an hour or so the sea will have reached the cliffs of shale with their pebble threads to denote other epochs of Earth events and that you will be wading in water on return. There is walking the distance to see the Monarch butterflies mating, their wings like stained glass windowpanes, and you wonder who is upside down, the male or the female, and do they notice, and you think of the fine detail of pleasure that such creatures achieve in coitus, assuming there is allure and pleasure for them to come together at all, the western light of the sun going down over the ocean lighting up the orange mosaic inside the black craze and you have to draw attention into that feral beauty and not notice it is sea spurge and invasive weeds that are their lover’s beds in the cove in the cliff and that the cliffs themselves

are being eaten by ocean and wind and rain, by runnels and rivers that have not soaked into earth because the land for miles has been razed of its trees and scrub and native grasses, and overgrazed so that topsoil has followed rainwater down to the sea. Again, you give your attention to the mating Monarchs, and when the light evaporates them, you look instead at the colours and pattern and texture of the shingle beneath your feet, a sacred ground it might be, with its volcanic stones suffused with golden hieroglyphs, or wrapped with white silk on black or pink or navy blue, the embossed, the smooth, the Japanese, the expressionist, the Fred Williams and Clarice Becketts, meanwhile the sun sliding close to the horizon like a Beckett sky itself, and you try to avoid or appreciate the way it lights up plastics: drinking straws and bottle tops, nylon strings and frayed ropes, hairbands and bits of bags. At all times there is this living with what some of us have done, there is this under-the-skin knowing and a constant trying to say that it will all work out, trying not to let hope crack like ancient stones, like the lead lines in the stained-glass pattern of the Monarch wings –

Sarah Day Sarah Day’s most recent collection is Towards Light (Puncher and Wattmann, 2018). 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Long in the making

The Murray–Darling ecological crisis Cameron Muir

Wounded Country: The Murray–Darling Basin – a contested history by Quentin Beresford

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 426 pp

t the height of the Millennium Drought (2001–9), I took the late Deborah Bird Rose to my favourite childhood swimming hole near Dubbo, on the Wambool (Macquarie River). The banks had eroded and a flood had washed the sandy beach a hundred metres upstream, burying trees halfway up to their crowns. Weeds flourished in the churned ground, and scum floated on the shallows. Nothing seemed safe from degradation. Farther west, on the Barka (Darling River) near Bourke, we passed private water storages lining the banks of the river for kilometres. The scalded land was strewn with rubbish and discarded machinery. Wind blew dust into our eyes. At our feet, a dead sheep lay in an irrigation channel. ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is broken country.’ Rose thought for a moment, then turned and said, ‘No, it’s wounded.’ It was a reminder to afford nature its potential to heal. The need for healing motivated Quentin Beresford to begin researching his book on the contested politics of the Murray–Darling Basin: Wounded Country. Like many Australians in the summer of 2019, he was shocked by the images of mass fish kills downstream from Menindee in far-west New South Wales. Politicians had been promising to ‘fix’ the system for decades. The rollout of the multi-billion-dollar Murray–Darling Basin Plan was mired in controversy, with little to show for its cost – if anything, the rivers appeared to be in worse condition. How had things gone so wrong? Beresford argues that to understand today’s disastrous state of the rivers we must turn to the past. The topic would seem a natural fit for Beresford, given his most recent books on environmental politics, The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd (2015) and Adani and the War Over Coal (2018). His new book begins with colonial surveyors Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, the men charged with mapping the interior in preparation for its exploitation in global imperial trade networks. They were among the first Europeans to record accounts of their contact with Aboriginal people of the region. Their journals illustrate dominant ideas of the time – separation between humans and nature, the superiority of European culture – that would set the stage for frontier conflict, the marginalisation of First Nations peoples, and racist

political frameworks that still persist. A third of the book is devoted to the violent and protracted dispossession of the region’s more than forty Aboriginal nations. The treatment of Aboriginal people caused deep political divisions in the colony. The squatters who benefited from violence used their growing wealth and political influence to ensure perpetrators rarely faced consequences. Simultaneously, the settlers waged a ‘war on nature’ backed by the state. Whole communities would join frenzied slaughters that ‘thrilled participants’. One station owner calculated that he had overseen the destruction of 30,000 kangaroos. Hundreds of thousands of dingoes were killed for a government bounty. Frontier violence and the ‘war of extinction [that] was unleashed on native wildlife’ were underpinned by cultural attitudes and a desire to subdue, conquer, and simplify complex social-ecological systems into spaces for commodity production. This is an argument others have made in recent years, and it is valuable to have a thorough exploration of these connections in this book. Australians can only build better future

Floodwaters surrounding the woolshed on Dunlop Station, Darling River, New South Wales, 1886 (Charles Bayliss/National Library of Australia)

relationships by first acknowledging the truth and consequences of this history as well as the ongoing trauma and ecological disruption it caused. Beresford makes a persuasive case that those nineteenthand early twentieth-century experiences ‘established the model of vested interests capturing the political system’. So too did the pattern of ignoring expert and scientific advice for political expediency: he details the repeated pleas from naturalists, scientists, agriculturalists, traditional owners, and some landholders to shift from ecologically destructive policies and practices. As the book charts the ideologies that shaped the region, from yeoman agrarianism to the culture wars under John Howard and Tony Abbott, Beresford enlivens the narrative with telling quotes from Trove’s growing collection of digitised newspapers. Representing an area as vast and diverse as the Murray– AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Economics Darling Basin in one book is a challenge. Queensland rain doesn’t flow past the town I grew up in, nor many others in the Basin; life for the community in Wilcannia, for instance, is different from life in Canberra, the Basin’s largest city. After all, the idea of the Murray–Darling Basin itself is largely bureaucratic. Reading Wounded Country, you get the sense that what unites these places is their history of turmoil and heartbreak at the hands of crony capitalists. Wounded Country is not an environmental history, as the introduction states. Unlike Charles Massey in Call of the Reed Warbler (2017) or Kate Holden in The Winter Road (2021), both of whom read their way into the field and brought their readers with them, Beresford doesn’t engage with the existing environmental history literature except to extract data or stories from a handful of works. There are plenty of pithy quotes from former independent MP Tony Windsor, for example, but not one from historian and farmer Eric Rolls. The chapters list staggering figures of destruction, such as hectares lost to erosion or salinity, but the environment is more often a backdrop to the politics. An author more attentive to place would know Walgett and Brewarrina are upstream from Bourke, not downstream; the Macquarie Marshes aren’t near Bathurst – they’re nearly 400 kilometres inland from there, between the town of Warren and the Barwon River. The Covid-19 pandemic dashed Beresford’s plans to travel along the rivers from Queensland to South Australia. Perhaps this journey would have provided an additional layer of ecological and social intimacy. Beresford is a political scientist by training, and political analysis is where the book’s strength lies. Wounded Country is an absorbing and lucid account of the catastrophic history of political and bureaucratic mismanagement of one of the world’s great river systems. In particular, the rich sources available for the past decade, demonstrating flagrant and persistent undermining of environmental and social goals for the benefit of a privileged few, sometimes bordering on state corruption, will provoke anger. Perhaps it will help keep up the pressure for reform. Public attention to the plight of the inland is sporadic. It is a story that should be told over and over to give this wounded country a chance to heal. g Cameron Muir is co-editor of the literary anthology Living with the Anthropocene: Love, loss and hope in the face of environmental crisis (NewSouth, 2020).

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46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

‘We ain’t seen nothing yet’ Documenting 2020’s convergent crises John Tang

Shutdown: How Covid shook the world’s economy by Adam Tooze

Allen Lane $35 pb, 366 pp

ow will the year 2020 be remembered? No doubt the headline event was the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered schools, factories, and hospitality services, leading to a contraction of per capita income for ninety-five percent of the world’s economies. For Europe, the acrimonious exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union would serve as a stark reminder of how fragile supranational institutions are in the face of popular fury. Following the murder of George Floyd, similar rage at police brutality marked a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which preceded a combative presidential election that denied Donald Trump a second term. And the world endured one of its hottest years on record, with surface temperatures reaching nearly one degree above the 141-year average as fires burned through Australia and the United States. Adam Tooze documents these convergent crises in his fastpaced and highly readable book Shutdown, asking whether they signal the ‘death knell of neoliberalism’. For him, the pandemic above all uncovered the deficiencies of existing government policies, such as disaster preparedness and safety-net provisions, that represented a form of ‘organized irresponsibility’ in favour of markets. In taking extraordinary economic measures to respond to the pandemic, governments shifted the Overton window on the role of the state and their adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy. Within this general theme, Tooze deftly weaves in details like the statistical value of an American versus European life ($10 million and $3.6 million), the magnitude of the pandemic’s recession (Britain’s worst in three hundred years), and the uneven growth in fiscal spending between high- and low-income countries (8.5 versus less than two per cent). The book’s ambition is both its weakness and its strength despite an uneven coverage of wide-ranging topics, which occasionally distract from the main thesis. While Tooze frames his narrative with the idea of multiple crises, the pandemic is his deus ex machina, and he devotes the first four chapters to describing the state of international health policy, the emergence of the coronavirus, and the initial responses in China and Western nations. The global coverage is also consistent with the book’s subtitle, ‘How Covid shook the world’s economy’, contrasting the positions of populist leaders such as Trump, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Britain’s Johnson, and Mexico’s López Obrador against East Asian and western European regimes all in real time. However,

Tooze does not sustain this analysis in later sections and instead turns his focus to US financial markets and policymakers. While it is undeniable that the US dollar and treasury bonds are lynchpins of the international economy, would non-American readers be interested in specific pieces of legislation or esoteric fiscal and monetary policies for nearly a quarter of the book? Tooze does identify the international implications of several policy innovations that were used to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, such as the adoption of heterodox central-banking tools in emerging markets as well as quantitative easing in developed ones. These examples suggest, however, that the pandemic was less a calamitous shock to neoliberalism and free markets than an amplification of pre-existing trends covered in his earlier book Crashed (2018). It was Japan in 2001, not the United States in 2020, that pioneered the use of quantitative easing, and the flexibility in denominating debt in developing countries’ own currencies was a lesson learned from upheavals such as the 1997 Asian financial crisis. While Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which posits that governments can monetise their own currency-denominated debt with few inflationary impacts, has recently become more prominent, it remains unproven in the medium run. As the Japanese experience shows, MMT may not be effective or sustainable for advanced economies with structural constraints like an ageing and shrinking workforce, which Tooze does not address. Given the amount of detail about monetary policy, it is surprising to see much less coverage on the health aspects of the pandemic, such as vaccine policy. Despite a chapter on the race to develop vaccines, there is little elaboration about the use of novel mRNA technology, the negotiations between governments and pharmaceutical companies, the inequality in access by ability to produce or pay, vaccine hesitancy, or the communication of health safeguards. Is neoliberalism supported or undermined when governments subsidise private firms to produce public goods like vaccines without requiring that the intellectual property be made available? Does Jerome Powell deserve more hero worship than Anthony Fauci for reassuring their audiences, the salient difference being that one spoke to corporate élites, the other to the wider public? Even less discussed is the relationship between the pandemic (and its response) and climate change, which is arguably one of the main failures of neoliberalism. Tooze states early in the book that ‘climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand’ and mentions six times the concept of the Anthropocene, i.e., the geological epoch of humans’ impact on the environment. His argument in connecting infectious disease to environmental degradation is indirect and relies on the assumption that strong government responses to the former can be used for the latter. The green agenda had made progress in 2020 in both Europe and China, such as their respective announcements of carbon neutrality by 2050 and 2060, but how these relate to ideological changes among policymakers due to the pandemic is not obvious. Whether Americans would have elected as their president Joe Biden, given his stronger position on environmental policy, is also unknown amid a pandemic that shifted voter priorities. This interpretation of causality, that the pandemic changed the scale of policy intervention, is one that can only be tested

with time. Tooze makes both brave pronouncements and some misfires by writing a book about a pandemic before it has ended. While he suggests that the economic contraction in Latin America presages a new lost decade, more recent forecasts have since estimated that the region will grow by 5.2 per cent this year. Similarly, the bellicose language used by government leaders to justify their extraordinary responses to the pandemic indicates that they expect public spending will taper once the war is over. Will the world see an ideological revolution, perhaps unified by a sense of purpose or recognition of an ability to tackle big problems, or a return to pre-pandemic normality? Or is there a middle ground in which existing institutions do not collapse but adapt and are resilient to challenges like those in the past year? This is an open question that Tooze leaves with his readers: ‘We ain’t seen nothing yet.’ g John Tang is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne. Memoir

Silk-lined complacency

Deborah Levy’s trilogy ends disappointingly Madeleine Gray

Real Estate

by Deborah Levy

Hamish Hamilton $22.99 pb, 297 pp

eborah Levy published the first volume in her ‘living autobiography’ trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, in 2013. Five years later came The Cost of Living. Now we have the finale, Real Estate. Each book is an autobiographical interrogation of women’s middle age in which Levy ambivalently considers the place of the woman writer in the contemporary world. Things I Don’t Want to Know is a novella-length response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946), and its purpose is reasonably clear. Levy takes Orwell’s premise that good writing must be politically motivated and suggests that her own writerly motivations cannot be so distilled, because the presumption is that while a man writes about life in general, a woman writes about herself in particular. The condescension the woman writer experiences in life will, of course, filter into her literary concerns. Levy recalls Virginia Woolf, who hypothesised, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), that due to material limitations women’s writing might necessarily have to be different from men’s: ‘At a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For protagonist to ‘follow her own desires’, for she is sick of women being minor characters. She then goes on to note that the interruptions there will always be.’ In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy is white, fifty-some- Hollywood-types who want to turn her books into films are not thing, and beginning to experience considerable traction in her enamoured of this idea. Do these observations make Real Estate fiction-writing career, on the back of a Booker shortlisting. She feminist? For most of the book, Levy travels to writers’ festivals and travels to Majorca to write, and reminisces about her childhood in apartheid South Africa. In The Cost of Living, Levy is white, wins lots of literary awards and becomes obsessed with silk. fifty-something, has divorced her husband, and is reckoning ‘When I replaced the silk with the cotton sheet on which I had with newfound singledom while her career continues to flour- slept all my life, it suddenly felt very harsh on my skin.’ She ish. In Real Estate, Levy is almost sixty years old, and her book’s cooks gourmet meals and enjoys guava ice cream. She thinks central conceit is that, though she would like to own a mansion, about being single at her age and decides that she is okay with it. real estate is expensive, and as a single woman writer, albeit She commits to the motif of ‘unreal estate’ – that is, the posa successful one, her economic situation remains relatively sessions she imagines herself owning, but does not. In keeping with this theme, she makes such astute precarious. observations as the following, about keys: The world is different in 2021 to what ‘There is always something secret and mysit was in 2013, and not just because of the terious about keys. They are the instrument global pandemic. In 2013, the #MeToo to enter and exit, open and close, lock and movement had not yet swept the globe. unlock various desirable and undesirable Trump’s presidency had not roused an concerns.’ international series of Women’s Marches It turns out real estate has been a and popularised intersectional feminist metaphor all along. Levy ends the book by discourse online. Para-academic, autobiconsoling herself that her writing is her real ographical tomes on feminism and late estate. She says, ‘Language is like a building capitalism (think Roxanne Gay’s Bad site. It is always in the process of being Feminist [2014], Jia Tolentino’s Trick constructed and repaired. It can fall apart Mirror [2019], and Lola Olufemi’s FemDeborah Levy (Penguin Random House) and be made again.’ inism, Interrupted [2020]) did not fill the The year is 2021. A celebrated, sixtycounters of independent bookstores the English-speaking world over. Rachel Cusk was yet to publish year-old, straight, white, widely published female author coming Outline (2014), let alone Transit (2016) or Kudos (2018): white, to the freeing conclusion that her words are her capital seems middle-class, writerly introspection with a quasi-feminist bent at best laughably naïve. In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy recontextualises Orwell’s essay sub-headers as her chapter titles, was not yet the genre du jour. In many ways, then, Things I Don’t Want to Know was ahead and then examines how her own experiences in these realms have of its time. Despite Levy’s penchant for cringe-worthy metaphors not accorded with his. In doing so, she evidences the gendered (‘I suddenly knew why the lids for honey and ketchup and peanut expectations that inhere in Orwell’s claims. But Real Estate makes butter were never in their right place in our family house. The no such formal interventions: sections are simply divided by the lids, like us, did not have a place. I was born in one country and cities in which Levy spends her time. Queer Latina author Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In grew up in another, but I was not sure which one I belonged to’), Things I Don’t Want to Know was a culturally relevant book. It was The Dream House (2019) also uses the metaphor of property for complex and confident, and it also had some level of self-aware- thinking about memory and self-construction. For Machado, ness. Levy was genuinely invested in thinking about why and this metaphor manifests in an entire re-visioning of the memoir how she wrote, how her gender and age inflected expectations form. In the Dream House’s section titles, such as ‘Dream House of her writing, and how her experience spoke to more structural as Bildungsroman’, ‘Dream House as Legacy’, and ‘Dream House as Public Relations’, refract generic expectations about what gendered inequities. In Real Estate, Levy is no longer as concerned with how her constitutes the foundations of memoir. Levy’s living autobiography series began with much promise, own struggles might relate to broader injustices. Nor does she seek to examine how the difficulties she faces might be different, but Real Estate feels rushed and out of touch. It might be time and likely amplified, for women who do not share her racial and for Levy to put down the mirror and pick up Machado’s book educational privileges. Levy is concerned with herself, but she instead. She could read it while eating guava ice cream, made offers little reason for readers to be similarly concerned. The with the ice-cream maker she was given for her sixtieth birthday, potentially galling, self-important writerly affectations that I which she spent in Paris in a rent-free apartment paid for by a accepted in her previous works as charming idiosyncrasies no fellowship. g longer act as asides. In Real Estate, self-importance reads as the Madeleine Gray is a writer and critic from Sydney. She was a 2019 rule rather than the exception. Alongside laments about the state of the London property Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics Fellow, a 2021 Walkmarket, Levy imagines what characteristics she might bequeath ley Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism finalist, and is a 2021 recipito the female protagonist she is now imagining. She wants this ent of the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund grant. 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Memoir

Living the questions Making gender legible Kate Crowcroft

All About Yves by Yves Rees

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 319 pp

ves Rees’s memoir All About Yves charts their experience of coming out as trans. The book documents the challenges of the transition in a colonial society built for and around the gender binary. Rees invites the reader into their everyday life. The point is to make their ‘gender legible in a world that refuses to see it’, and the author sets out from this premise. On the back of mounting tension during their adolescence, a realisation arrives on holiday in Canada after taking the psychoactive THC. Waking to the dawn light, Rees hears a voice in their head: ‘You’re not really a woman.’ By afternoon, Rees has a tattoo of a Rilke quote in German on their wrist: Lebe die Fragen (‘Live the questions’). Social media is used as a scrapbook and tool through which to be seen and acknowledged, as well as to find and create communities. The relief and joy of connecting with transgender models, bakers, writers, and students on Instagram are palpable for Rees; the feeling of finding their people. The chapter ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ (which won the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize) delves into those teen years and upbringing in the author’s family of origin and speaks of the ‘pallid feminism dished up in the Howard era’. Here are Rees’s first recognitions of not fitting in. The book contains repeated descriptions of self-starvation, ‘revelling’ in the feeling of hipbones on concrete. In a later chapter, Rees fantasises about ‘slicing’ off their breasts. These images evoke hagiographies. All About Yves will offer solace for those experiencing ambiguity about their gender, and readers are left asking how societal systems could be restructured for the gender diverse. The essay ‘Trapped in a Body’ is a useful starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the history of gender diversity and its lineage in indigenous cultures. Rees, a historian and academic by trade, notes that some 168 indigenous languages in the United States have terms to describe a person who is neither woman nor man. One of these words, nádleehí, of the Navajo Nation, includes masculine women, feminine men, and intersex people, and means ‘constant state of change’. The idea of living the questions, of becoming as a principle, is seen through different lenses. The goal is not a quest but rather one of experiencing, living, and being comfortable with the in-between. Despite the author having changed names from Anne to Yves, the former stays around, having done much of the legwork for the latter’s research career. For all the difficulties of having two names, Rees says ‘a part of me revels in the contortions of

two selves. There’s a glorious theatre, a strange kind of liberty, in having multiple identities at my disposal.’ Within a medical model that views deviation as illness, the gender binary is enforced in both theory and practice. The idea here is: if you’re not one, you must be trying to reach the other. But neither side is where the author belongs. ‘I can no longer live as a woman, but nor do I desire to enter the parallel universe of men.’ Rees describes having to perform a certain role to gain the diagnosis they need to live the way they feel. This role follows an outdated script: ‘I mention the skateboard; omit the pink T-shirts and fairy wings. The full truth is so messy, too messy.’

The point is to make their ‘gender legible in a world that refuses to see it’ Rees receives a diagnosis of severe gender dysphoria. This opens the option of medical transition, the framework structured around the binary. This is not the path for Rees: ‘I am not a man. Gender is fluid, and some days I’m more masculine than others, but never do I belong in the world of men.’ They concede: ‘There’s no point escaping one ill-fitting costume just to adorn myself in another.’ Here Rees tacitly raises questions about the medical model and its ability or otherwise to recognise and accommodate a fuller range of lived realities. In this world, it seems even relatively basic sexual fantasies are pathologised. Imagining oneself with a penis penetrating a woman is termed autoandrophilia, a ‘condition’ associated with transsexualism (wait until mainstream medicine discovers strap-ons). The chapter ‘Screen Time’ is compelling for its insistence on positive representation and the repercussions for the trans community if the depictions are negative. Visibility alone won’t change power dynamics. (Rees quotes Anne Boyer on this.) Changes of perception and attitude are needed whereby trans experiences are presented as part of the human experience. ‘There is a danger in ignoring the body. It knows things, deep in the guts.’ The chapter ‘They’ is a lesson on not using the wrong pronouns and on the emotional pain produced from mis-gendering. Rees’s mother is one of the stars of the book, having introduced them to feminism. ‘My mother was a Libber, I am a trans person, but beneath those labels we’re fighting the same fight.’ Inspired by her child, Rees’s mother asks them to call her Grace rather than ‘Mum’, a name used solely inside the child–parent relationship. Rees notes that their mother is still becoming – ‘she reminds me it’s never too late, not for anyone’. In the final chapter, ‘Destination Trans’, Rees returns to the root of it all. The Latin term trans means both ‘across’ and ‘beyond’. Trans stands alone, beyond gender or sex: ‘beyond the binary, beyond the categories, beyond the rules and prescriptions. Always becoming, forever unresolved.’ There is a sense that the imaginative possibilities in the defeat of patriarchal systems are only just beginning to unfold. g Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge where she won numerous awards for criticism and poetry. Her first book is forthcoming with Hachette. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Memoir

Glittery routes

An unavoidable bus route in Paris Megan Clement

No. 91/92: A Parisian bus diary by Lauren Elkin

Tablo Tales $22.99 hb, 128 pp

he closest I have ever come to expiring from heat exhaustion was not during one of Melbourne’s oppressive summers. It was not in north-east Victoria as bushfire smoke choked the air and even the kangaroos abandoned the grasslands. The closest I have ever come was not even on the continent of Australia. It was on the number 26 bus as it crawled up the Rue des Pyrénées on a sweltering June day in Paris. Whether on a wet autumn afternoon or a fiery day in summer, no matter the season, the bus in Paris is always too hot. It is also too loud, too cramped, and usually nausea-inducing. There’s a reason it was Zazie dans le Métro, not Zazie takes the 47 to Châtelet. Yet for many of us who inhabit Paris the metropolis, rather than parachuting down into Paris the playground, the bus is an inevitability and thus a unique window onto a city and its denizens. All the life of a Paris bus is present in No. 91/92: A Parisian bus diary by Franco-American writer Lauren Elkin, who also recently translated Simone de Beauvoir’s newly published ‘lost novel’, The Inseparables. A series of diary entries composed on her iPhone as Elkin commuted to her teaching job twice a week in 2014 and 2015, No. 91/92 chronicles city life as seen through a steamed-up window. Elkin is a wry observer, a witty companion on an undeniably Parisian journey. While waiting for her citizenship application to be approved, she thrills, as many of us would, at ‘having been mistaken for a French girl who might know anything about scarves’ when a fellow passenger seeks her sartorial advice. (Try as I might to resist Paris clichés, it is a simple fact of life that the city’s men and women are in on some secret about the tying of scarves that has passed the rest of the world by.) On a Thursday afternoon in October, ‘a man in a hat looks out the window and says “sarkozy”’. At the same time, Elkin could also be any of us, anywhere, dragging ourselves to work earlier than we’d like to, ‘blood still heavy from sleep’. Here in these notes are the manspreaders, the noisy Americans, a texting nun, the tired mothers with children who want to lick the walls. Here are the eccentrics – ‘It’s 8.30am and there is a woman in business attire crunking on the bus.’ And here is our delicious, silent judgement of fellow passengers: ‘Thursday morning / Your glittery sandals are awful but the rest of your outfit is good.’ In my first year in Paris, I too picked up the 91 bus at Elkin’s stop of Port-Royal Berthollet and rode it to the Gare de Mont50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

parnasse. I too rolled my eyes at the endless 21s that whooshed past before the 91 finally arrived (‘My hero’). Presumably like any other 91 traveller who reads this book, I wait patiently for the arrival of a man ‘so smelly I had to stand back up’. He duly arrives on page 63 (and again on page 89). Like Elkin, I also rode that bus in the aftermath of horrifying terrorist violence; in her case the 2015 Charlie Hebdo

Whether on a wet autumn afternoon or a fiery day in summer, no matter the season, the bus in Paris is always too hot attack, in mine the massacre at the Bataclan just months later. When she begins her bus diary in 2014, she promises to keep ‘a public transport vigil’. This idea of a vigil changes meaning in the days after the attack when, she notes, ‘I keep crying on buses.’ We all did. An event like this, Elkin writes, ‘casts daily life in a dangerous hue, when you thought you were just going about your business’. No. 91/92 explicitly takes its cue from Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1974), in which he tries to record everything he sees from his table at a café on the Place Saint-Sulpice. But it also echoes Elkin’s previous book, Flâneuse (2016), a cultural history of women who walk in cities from Paris to London, Tokyo to New York. In Flâneuse, Elkin interweaves her own experiences of urban walking with those of Jean Rhys, Georges Sand, Virginia Woolf and others who went before her. Literary ghosts are still present in No. 91/92, but here they follow Elkin as she traverses the city, not the other way around. No. 91/92 is often more effective in achieving what Elkin sought to do more explicitly with Flâneuse: track the way women move through a city, observing it, being shaped by it, praising it, cursing it, exhausting it. During its course she gets pregnant, and in her elaborate dances for seats, her growing revulsion at the manifold scents of Paris and her fellow passengers, her fatigue as she rides for a single stop to save energy, we see that the act of commuting, just like that of walking, is inescapably gendered. Her pregnancy turns out to be ectopic – ‘that’s greek for what the fuck’ – and we also follow her, still on the bus, as she deals with the loss, recovers from her surgery, avoids her students’ questions about where she’s been. It’s devastating to read, but it also forms part of Elkin’s wider point: when we ride the bus, we do not know if the person opposite us has lost their pregnancy, has had Covid, was at the Bataclan. We do not know if they are playing Candy Crush on their phone, texting their mother, or writing an experimental diary about riding the bus. And yet we ride side by side, together and apart, sometimes cursing public transport but still going where we need to go. ‘I believe this is called community,’ Elkin writes. g Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. Her reporting has appeared in the Guardian, Bloomberg, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Al Jazeera among other publications.

Memoir

Life in a dictatorship Snapshot of a lost Myanmar Nicholas Coppel

Our Home in Myanmar: Four years in Yangon Jessica Mudditt

Hembury Press $29.95 pb, 318 pp

ur Home in Myanmar: Four years in Yangon is an Australian woman’s account of her four years living and working in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar. In 2012, Jessica Mudditt arrived there with her Bangladeshi husband; they were looking for adventure and a way to pay for the experience. This is Jessica’s story: how she found work with an English language newspaper, her experiences as a foreigner, her fractious relationships with expat colleagues, the struggle to find suitable accommodation, the shock of her summary dismissal, her money and visa problems, and her subsequent work with the British Embassy, before freelancing and working as foreign editor at the much-derided state-run newspaper, the Global New Light of Myanmar. Through the recounting of her trials and tribulations, we learn snippets about Myanmar and its long-suffering people, ruled for more than fifty years by a paranoid and self-serving military dictatorship. Mudditt touches on events and persons from Myanmar’s past, sufficiently for a reader unfamiliar with the country to gain some understanding of how and why Myanmar was in that shape. Mudditt, who witnessed Myanmar at a time of dramatic change, conveys well the drama of a nation emerging from years of repression. She shares the palpable excitement of not one but two visits by President Barack Obama and then the first fully contested democratic elections in more than fifty years. The dark undercurrent of racism against people from South Asia is felt personally through the lived experiences of her husband, who was ultimately unable to renew his visa because of rising anti-Bangladesh and anti-Muslim sentiment. Mudditt’s four years in Myanmar, which partially overlapped with my four years as Australia’s ambassador, were quite different

from mine. Hers is a tale of an enterprising journalist making her own way with few resources, mixing with and learning from other expats. I lived in the same city for some of the same time, but didn’t face her challenges with accommodation, transport, or finances. I had my own challenges, but they were professional rather than personal, and I had a team to help me. While I was engaged in government-to-government communication – the core business of diplomacy – Mudditt was editing stories or writing feature articles. We lived parallel lives. Our Home in Myanmar is not a history of Myanmar or an academic analysis of the country’s many challenges, although it does manage to provide a lot of information about the country. As the title indicates, it is primarily about her life and her home in Yangon. This book captures an extraordinary period in Myanmar’s tragically short-lived transition to democracy, when, for a few years, hope replaced fear. There is no shortage of academic and think-tank analysis of the incomplete transition, but this is the first book in English to recount what it felt like to live through that ecstatic period. Mudditt was there when hope and freedoms reached their imperfect peak. Shortly after Mudditt left in September 2016, the military, led by Commander in Chief Min Aung Hlaing, launched attacks on Rohingya communities in Rakhine State, burning villages, committing other human rights abuses, and forcing more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, where, five years later, they continue to suffer in squalid refugee camps. In February 2021, Hlaing mounted a violent coup against the democratically re-elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, imprisoning her and thousands of others, killing more than nine hundred protesters, sharply curtailing internet access, forcing media outlets to close (including the one that first employed Mudditt), and throwing the economy into a downward spiral. The Myanmar that Mudditt knew and writes about so eloquently is gone. This makes her book all the more valuable as a snapshot of what has been lost. It is a picture of what Myanmar might once again become, as well as highlighting the undeniable need for Myanmar to be a more inclusive society. She and I have now both left Myanmar, but the vast majority of its people don’t have that option and face an uncertain period of military dictatorship, again. g Nicholas Coppel was Australia’s Ambassador to Myanmar from 2015 to 2018 and is Adjunct Associate Professor (Practice), Monash University. ❖

RECOVERING CONVICT LIVES A Historical Archaeology of the Port Arthur Penitentiary “peels away the layers of time to reveal the hidden history of everyday life in a penal station” Prof. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, author of Closing Hell’s Gates

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Memoir

The good lie

An unsung Australian prophet Andrew West

The Life of a Spy: An education in truth, lies and power by Rod Barton

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 304 pp

embarrassed its friends in a foreign spy service. The first time Rod Barton understood the mendacity of the Central Intelligence Agency was in Indochina, and the revelation centred on something as mundane as shit. It was 1981 and, with degrees in microbiology and biochemistry, he was a junior analyst with Australia’s Joint Intelligence Organisation. On the Thai– Cambodian border, he was interviewing refugees who had fled when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 to drive out the genocidal Khmer Rouge.

When did the rationale for the Iraq War go from being a mistake, to a self-deception, to an outright lie?

hen did the rationale for the Iraq War – which beIt is worth noting that the Washington Post reported in Sepgan in 2003 and still rumbles today – go from be- tember 1980 that the United States would continue to support ing a mistake, to a self-deception, to an outright lie? the Khmer Rouge as the representative of so-called ‘Democratic When did it dawn on the Bush Jr administration and its key Kampuchea’, despite its murder of an estimated two million peoallies in London and Canberra ple. Among the refugees were that the ostensible reason for ‘resistance fighters’ who claimed the invasion of Iraq had disapthe Soviets were supplying peared, probably literally, under the Vietnamese with a yellow, the sands of Mesopotamia? By powdered chemical weapon. The the time of the invasion, SaddCIA had collected samples of am Hussein’s regime possessed this powder and had detected, no weapons of mass destruction it claimed, mycotoxins. The that could threaten another CIA and State Department country. The Iraqi dictator may declared it ‘yellow rain’, a sly have desired such weapons, parallel to the Agent Orange but a combination of internathat the United States had used tional sanctions and the mere to destroy swaths of Vietnam. fear of retribution thwarted his But mycotoxins would cause plans. blindness, and not a single case At the centre of the effort to had been reported. A Harvard uncover the truth was an Ausprofessor soon uncovered the tralian scientist and intelligence truth. ‘Through private invesofficer, Rod Barton. His new tigation,’ writes Barton, ‘he had book, The Life of a Spy, methoddiscovered what all beekeepers ically builds the case that what know well: bees often defecate began as genuine fear in the in swarms and their faeces West about Saddam’s plans for a often falls to the ground in nuclear, biological, and chemical sticky droplets like rain.’ The arsenal ended as an exercise in CIA had collected dried bee old fashioned arse-covering. poo. The CIA, invested in the Barton spent close to ten narrative of Vietnam sprayRod Barton (Black Inc.) years in and out of Iraq, working its own version of Agent ing mainly for the United Orange, tried to discredit the Nations as a weapons inspector. He was an officer with the professor and Barton. It never corrected its mistaken intelligence. Defence Intelligence Organisation and an adviser to the ‘The CIA is not an organisation to be easily crossed,’ Barton CIA. But – and this is telling – he was never fully trusted by observes. the ideologues at Langley, where the CIA is headquartered. Fourteen years later, Barton is back on the weapons beat, Barton simply did not share their penchant for the ‘good lie’, having earned respect for his work on Somalia’s recovery from the untruth that justified the supposedly grander plan. civil war. The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) When Barton could not find any weapons of mass destruc- on disarmament seconded him from Australia’s Defence Inteltion, he wanted to do something radical – say it. It would end ligence Organisation to work in Iraq. Saddam had been driven with his own government freezing him out because he had from Kuwait in 1991, but the US-led forces left him in place. 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Iraq was under severe sanctions, and legitimate fears remained about its weapons aspirations. Barton joined UNSCOM with an open mind. He is typical of many who questioned America’s rationale for going to war with Iraq again, this time in 2003. They were credible, experienced people, often diplomats and scientists deeply experienced in dealing with weapons. They were anything but the anti-war rent-a-crowd that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard decried. They held no brief for the Iraqi regime, and, as Barton reveals, they were exhaustive in their hunt for weapons of mass destruction. But they knew when – and why – to stop hunting. In the mid-1990s, Barton did discover some haphazard attempts to cultivate a chemical and biological program under the guidance of a smart, British-educated scientist, Rihab Taha. Known as ‘Dr Germ’, she oversaw the build-up of alarming quantities of bacterial growth that could be used in anthrax. ‘Dr Germ’ and her menacing husband, General Rashid, were evasive and obstructed the weapons inspectors. In 1995, the Iraqis, desperate to end sanctions and knowing the threat of armed action, admitted that they had tried to build an anthrax program. The inspectors ultimately found that even if Iraq did develop chemical and biological agents, it had no capacity to weaponise them or to deliver them beyond its borders. In 2000, Barton told an Australian parliamentary inquiry that Iraq was effectively disarmed. Then came 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States, but Barton believes they created the momentum for the Bush administration to invade Iraq eighteen months later. Bush made a series of false claims about UN findings on Iraq, and Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, produced his dubious ‘Dossier’ about Saddam’s supposed weapons capabilities. In the aftermath of the invasion, Barton would return to Iraq for a final tour of duty and confirm what he already knew. The Iraq Survey Group, set up by the Americans to find the weapons and to which he was attached, was effectively a CIA operation and here the situation turned from the deceptive to the farcical. Two of the analysts working on the operation (Barton calls them ‘Laura’ and ‘Sharlene’) were constantly missing deadlines for their reports on how the search was proceeding. They were fudging their findings. ‘Soon I discovered that they had each made major contributions to the pre-war intelligence assessments in Iraq,’ he recalls. ‘My guess was that they now did not want to write anything that might contradict these assessments. Careers are made and lost on such matters.’ We know how this story ends. We know that, briefly and desperately, the Bush administration and its apologists tried to refashion the Iraq invasion as a humanitarian intervention to end Saddam’s dictatorship. And we know they bequeathed a chaos that led to the self-styled Islamic State, a force that would surpass Saddam, the Taliban, and even Al Qaeda in its brutality and depravity. Rod Barton was a prophet, unsung. This book is his testament. g Andrew West is a journalist, author, and presenter on ABC Radio National.

Joyful latitude of risk Life lessons from Australia David Mason

Into the Rip: How the Australian way of risk made my family stronger, happier … and less American by Damien Cave

Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 311 pp

n 2016, New York Times correspondent Damien Cave moved his young family to Sydney to establish a foreign bureau for the newspaper. As he writes in his new book, Into the Rip, the experience has been transformational, teaching him among other things that ‘None of us is trapped within the nation we come from or the values we picked up along the way’. Despite political and economic alliances, Australia and the United States are not clones of each other, and in many ways Australia proves ‘the healthier model’ for a society. Cave learned these life lessons, he reports, through ‘the combination of fear, nature and community spirit’. Cave’s book is part memoir, part reportage of social trends, part meditation on the meaning of risk. ‘In so much of Western culture,’ he writes, ‘we have drifted into physical comfort and psychological insecurity. We have prioritized attention, feelings and speech, not conduct. Our phones and algorithms promote connection but serve up isolation. Every day, we choose convenience over uncertainty, overvaluing pleasure and ignoring what hardship has to teach.’ To those for whom hardship, economic or otherwise, is a given, Cave’s narrative might seem a precious luxury, but his book serves as a useful reminder of Australia’s blessings and America’s troubles. We must all learn to live with uncertainty, and there is no better teacher of these lessons than nature, a fact modern societies too often deny. Cave relates his encounters with the sea, the surfing and lifesaving culture of Sydney’s beaches, where children and adults learn resilience, care for one another, and respect for forces they cannot control. This cultivation of risk may seem strange to some readers. Cave and his wife, Diana (also a journalist), had taken risks before, reporting from Iraq in a particularly bloody year of warfare. He also ran the Times bureau in Mexico City, a place with its own dangers. Australia seems by comparison one of the safest places on earth, but Australian culture gently nudged him to face up to his Americanness, the blinkered egotism of a country that perpetuates myths of its own exceptionalism. He admits mistakes as a reporter, weaknesses as a father and husband, the way American individualism and careerism had made him a man he no longer wanted to be. Cave finds danger in his ignorance of the sea, which his family confronts by learning how to swim properly, to surf and practise lifesaving techniques. But he also finds it in horrors like the Christchurch shootings (perpetrated by a white Australian) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

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and divergent responses to the pandemic, events that are harder to reconcile with one man’s personal growth. His children join Nippers, his wife risks new ventures in business and writing, and he steps far out of his comfort zone to go for Bronze in lifesaving. They mix with other people, learning from Australia’s more collective world view to overcome their fears. Cave indicts societies that ‘let their children stay fragile by avoiding imperfection’. The values of self-esteem perpetuated in many US schools have reached ludicrous levels. ‘So many of the people we had encountered in Miami and in Brooklyn were both terrified of physical danger for their children and desperate to keep them perpetually happy and worthy of praise.’ American schools and universities are demonstrably more prone to grade inflation and the paternalistic coddling of students, trends that Cave traces to the psychological theories of figures like Nathaniel Branden, an ‘acolyte’ of Ayn Rand. I am older than Cave, and remember a more resilient America. My family were mountaineers and sailors, affirming his point that nature is the best teacher, though at times a harsh one – my older brother died while mountain climbing. Still, I would never deny anyone the joyful latitude of risk. Cave grew up in a culture of alienation, every person for themselves, stressing career and individual accomplishment – the sort of American egocentricity that makes Australians roll their eyes. His story bends toward humility, revelation, and, ultimately, new life through activity and change. Reporting on a wonderful immigrant named Zurbo who lives in Tasmania, Cave finds himself playing Aussie Rules – lightyears away from American football. ‘For the first time,’ he writes, ‘I fully understood a game I had only watched. I also saw how quickly nervousness and the pain of embarrassment could be transformed to improvement and fun, especially if there was someone to apprentice with.’ On a more disturbing level, the Christchurch attack forces him to confront the racism common in both the United States and Australia, the way both societies have been slow to recognise white male terrorism. ‘The attack’s aftermath had pushed me beyond the personal – it made me desperate to know why humans get risk wrong so often’. He could have said more about risks that Americans undergo due to gun violence and the denial of basic health care to many citizens, but his training as a journalist makes him reluctant to preach. Cave could also have devoted more space to the importance of Aboriginal culture, its crucial lessons about a proper relation to nature and what other writers have called the soul of the continent. Set Into the Rip next to William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days (2015), and you may find Cave’s book rarely breaks the bounds of good magazine journalism. The sea in Cave’s writing is less an awesome presence than a backdrop for a story of personal change. Yet his book touches on matters that I, too, as an American immigrant, find myself discussing with my Australian friends and family. Where has American society gone wrong, and can Australia avoid the danger of going the same way? He admits to being ‘unaware, and American’, and I know just what he means when he says, ‘We all need to get better at living’. g David Mason is an American writer and permanent resident living in Tasmania.

54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

Philosophy

On not getting out of bed Examining the nature of work Nicholas H. Smith

A Philosopher Looks at Work by Raymond Geuss

Cambridge University Press $18.95 pb, 195 pp

ne consequence of the pandemic is that it has led many people to imagine themselves as someone else. Those whose work has dried up – actors, musicians, curators, librarians, flight attendants, and so on – have suddenly had to adapt to a world that has no place for the things they do and thus no place for people like them. What if this new world is not just a temporary blip, but the shape of things to come? Who will I be in this future world? It is not just those who consciously identify themselves with their work that might ask such questions. If I am a tradie or a hairdresser whose business is on the brink, I face an upheaval in my life no matter how important being a tradie or a hairdresser is to my identity. If I need to find a new means of income, my life story is going to change. I can then imagine different stories panning out, different versions of my future self. Whether we think of work as a self-defining activity or merely a source of income, there seems little doubt that work is a central feature of our lives. For better or worse, it goes a long way to shaping who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. This should be obvious, but it is not how Raymond Geuss, emeritus professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, sees it. In fact, Geuss takes work to be a thing of the past, a matter for ‘historical anthropology’ rather than ‘treatment of current events’. It isn’t always clear what exactly we are supposed to have left behind. Sometimes it seems to be industrial labour, factory work of the kind Geuss’s father did. It’s true there isn’t much of that around anymore, so long as we leave to one side China, Vietnam, or that little corner of the globe. At other times, it is the work common to agricultural peasants and industrial labourers that has been consigned to history: strenuous ‘by the sweat of thy brow’ stuff that produces the necessities of life. It’s a moot point whether hunter-gatherers and shepherds also did work in that sense on a regular basis. Geuss speculates about how our hunter-gatherer ancestors were duped into thinking a life of endless toil would be an improvement on their congenial cycle of hunting, feasting, and lengthy naps. I wasn’t sure of the lesson to be drawn from this discussion. If I struggle to get out of bed in the morning, I might take solace in the thought that my hunter-gatherer ancestors were all lazy. But I’d be much better off getting up. Geuss believes that our attitudes towards hard work are obsolete, and he has a dim view of the work ethic. In this he

resembles another Cambridge philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Russell famously wrote in praise of idleness, even though he was a complete workaholic himself. Geuss tells of the fierce work ethic instilled in him as a child. His father had him believe that the whole of human life should be lived ‘on a production basis’: no ‘posturing, fancy reasoning, excessive expression of feeling, etc’. Avoiding those things might not be such a bad idea, but to take the ‘ethos of steel production’ as ‘the ideal to which one should aspire in all respects and all domains’ is pushing it a bit far. Geuss also considers the social structures of work, and the attitudes we have towards them, to be largely anachronistic. We tend to think of work as following a hierarchy of jobs, careers, professions, and vocations. Geuss makes some interesting observations on this hierarchy, but he has a peculiar view of where housework fits into it. Housework isn’t a job, he argues, not because it is unpaid, but because it isn’t packaged into discrete units and has no natural endpoint. I wonder what boy scouts doing bob-a-job would think about this. Having been one myself a long time ago, I had no trouble cleaning a step for one bob, cutting privets for another, and so on. Thinking of housework as a series of distinct jobs also strikes me as a good way of dividing the housework: dishwashing and vacuuming for me, clothes washing and cooking for you. The fact that this work needs to be repeated every day and in some sense is never finished surely makes it even more important to treat domestic chores as discrete, job-like packages of work. A fair distribution of labour and its rewards is as crucial for justice in the household as it is in other spheres of life. Work is a paradigmatic site of struggle against injustice, but there is barely any discussion of it in Geuss’s book. Geuss rightly calls out the laughable view that we live in a meritocracy where those at the top, the super-rich and powerful, get what they deserve. But desert is an indispensable part of the just ordering of any cooperative effort. If I do more than my fair share of the housework, for example, and this isn’t recognised or compensated in some way, I suffer an injustice which I am entitled to get angry about. The injustice of unrecognised contribution abounds in workplaces as well as households, and it is often the same people who suffer it. Geuss concludes with a bleak but not unfamiliar vignette of the future of work: robots taking all the jobs, mass unemployment, contingent and micromanaged work for the rest. Some trends are taking us in that direction, others aren’t. We should look at where those other trends might take us before giving up hope. g Nicholas H. Smith is a happily out-of-work philosopher living in Sydney. ❖

Tired of words, words, words? Follow us on Instagram instead. instagram.com/australianbookreview AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Memoir

‘Take a step forward’ An eloquent Holocaust story Alistair Thomson

The Keeper of Miracles by Phillip Maisel

Pan Macmillan $32.99 hb, 214 pp

ot many people create an archive. For almost thirty years, Phillip Maisel led the testimonies project at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre ( JHC).Maisel’s memoir is his story of surviving the Holocaust and becoming ‘the keeper of miracles’. Maisel’s Holocaust story is crafted in simple yet eloquent prose, ‘in a language I am still perfecting’ (a native speaker of Lithuanian, Polish, and Yiddish, Maisel began to learn English on the ship to Australia in 1949). He relates appalling details of racism and ideology that are familiar yet shocking. With his Jewish classmates in Vilna, he must sit on the left of the classroom so the teacher knows to mark them down; though the Soviets who annexed Lithuania in 1940 were not anti-Semitic, Maisel is ruled ineligible for higher education because his is a wealthy family. Once the Germans invade, Maisel lives the everyday trauma of the Jewish ghetto and Nazi labour camps. He describes the ‘senseless orderly cruelty’ of camp guards who force prisoners to stand for hours in snow and rain as they count the roll, and then count again, ‘while all around you your friends are collapsing’ and dying. He recalls the terrible moment when, after the joy of reuniting with his brother and twin sister after the war, he learns that their beloved father was one of 2,000 Jews massacred by the Nazis the day before their camp was liberated. This ‘greatest tragedy of my life’ is also ‘one of my biggest regrets’: the last conversation he had with his father was a bitter disagreement about the merits of communism. Maisel also recalls moments of kindness and care: the Lithuanian soldier who does not sound the alarm when he discovers Maisel and his family outside the Vilna ghetto; the German foreman who knows Maisel is desperately weak with typhoid and likely to be shot but saves his life by pretending he is at work; the Dutch, French, and Belgian gentiles on a death march in 1945 who respond to the SS command, ‘All Jews, take a step forward’, by stepping forward themselves until the furious SS ‘finally gave up and rode off ’. Maisel explains that these ‘miracles’ of survival were not simply luck or divine providence: they were ‘humanity in its purest form … Every “miracle” I have experienced boils down to one thing – a human being making a decision to reject hatred and fear, reaching out to help another, to save a life.’ On an especially bleak day, as five labour-camp friends shared their daily ration of three potatoes, one man lamented, ‘None of us are going to survive this.’ Maisel responded, ‘If any of us make it, 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

we will tell the world what the Germans did. We will hold them responsible for all of this.’ They promised then shook on it. ‘We would not be forgotten.’ Maisel acknowledges that people usually survived the Holocaust because they could be useful to the Nazi war effort. He was saved when a friend found him a job in a garage. Knowing nothing of cars, Maisel’s determination to learn the skills of a car mechanic, in a mobile garage that fixed German trucks, would save his life many times over. After the war, Maisel found work in the same garage, repairing Allied rather than German vehicles. When the garage was taken over by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, Maisel’s proficiency in several languages led to a job interviewing refugees. He learnt the skill of interviewing, how to spot dishonesty but also how to recognise trauma and ‘give people space to speak’. In 1949, Maisel and his sister joined their uncle in Melbourne. ‘I wanted to move as far away as possible, to the other side of the world.’ Here he would marry and share the joy of daughters and grandchildren who were living proof that Nazism had not triumphed. Like many migrant parents, he worked two jobs, night and day. His daughters saw him so rarely they took to writing him letters. He could not talk with his family about his wartime experiences. How could they comprehend? With other survivors, ‘we could speak of nothing else’. In retirement, Maisel volunteered at the Jewish Holocaust Centre, a museum and archive established by Melbourne’s survivor community in 1984. He joined the JHC’s ‘ad hoc’ oral history project, conducted his first video interview in 1992, and was soon running the project, interviewing almost every day and sitting in on interviews recorded by other volunteers to provide moral support and help survivors ‘keep track of dates and places’. Driven to honour his wartime promise ‘to tell the world’, Maisel also knew that six million deaths were almost impossible to comprehend. ‘However, it is possible to identify with one person, with one individual story.’ The Phillip Maisel Testimonies Project contains 1,700 life-history interviews about the Holocaust, the pre-war society of European Jewry, and settlement in Australia. Among the tens of thousands of Holocaust oral histories recorded around the world in recent decades, this Melbourne collection stands out in several ways, shaped by Maisel’s influence. Many recordings are in the mother tongue, ‘with an eloquence and accuracy that can otherwise escape them’ in English. Maisel and his narrators ‘shared a frame of reference’, about ‘hunger’, for example, that enabled deep listening and evocative remembering. Alert to the vagaries of memory and not wanting to give ammunition to Holocaust deniers, Maisel was prepared to gently challenge a story that did not seem right. ‘Are you sure it happened the way you are remembering it?’ Often the narrator would think again and offer more careful detail and more complex remembering. Passing these stories on to the next generation will be, as Phillip Maisel concludes, ‘the greatest miracle of all’. g Alistair Thomson is Professor of History at Monash University and President of Oral History Australia. He is the author of Anzac Memories: Living with the legend (Monash University Publishing, 2013)

Mathematics

The point of mathematics An engaging book for our maths-shy age Robyn Arianrhod

The Art of More: How mathematics created civilisation by Michael Brooks

Scribe $32.99 pb, 320 pp

ere you one of those reluctant mathematics students who complained, ‘What’s the point of all this?’ If so, rest assured: Michael Brooks has made a compelling case for the role mathematics has played in making ‘civilisation’ possible. If you still need convincing, he also discusses research suggesting that doing maths is good for your brain. Brooks – famous for The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook (2017), and with a PhD in quantum physics – uses a wide-ranging historical canvas to show how various mathematical breakthroughs have led to sophisticated systems of commerce, architecture, agriculture, art, technology, and, unfortunately, war. The obverse holds, too: these pursuits led to the development of mathematics, for Brooks cites evidence that we did not evolve to do complex maths. In fact, it seems our brains haven’t even evolved an innate ability to handle numbers larger than three – hence the title, The Art of More. Brooks suggests that such skills may have been kick-started when astronomer–priests wanted to predict times of flood or omen, and rulers and merchants needed to measure fields, weigh goods, and keep accounts for taxation and trade. Brooks begins with the revolutionary book-keeping power of basic arithmetic. After exploring numbers, he moves to geometry, gradually introducing more sophisticated concepts in loosely chronological order. Some of these oblige us to go back to memories of Year 12 mathematics, but the book is rich in historical anecdotes and surprising mathematical applications that will absorb anyone interested in history, maths, and technology. The Art of More follows in the tradition of mathematician Morris Kline’s landmark Mathematics in Western Culture (1953). Kline was one of the first to promote interest in the connection between mathematics and culture. He was also an inspiring writer, whose seminal book still thrills readers today, albeit with due recognition of its limitations, including his exclusively Western focus. By contrast, Brooks provides a carefully balanced view of the multicultural heritage of modern mathematics. Also, unlike Kline, Brooks is keen to emphasise the nexus between mathematics and profit, machines, and weapons – he doesn’t give much time to mathematical creativity and beauty. Perhaps it’s a sign of our neoliberal times. Yet Patrick Bangert’s whimsical report, published in the Australian Mathematical Society’s Gazette in 2004, suggests that many mathematicians themselves think their subject has more to do with patterns, language, art, or logic than with applications.

Similarly, earlier this year, Ole Warnaar reported in the Gazette on feedback from the Society’s members regarding proposed revisions to the Australian Mathematics Curriculum: criticisms included its excessively utilitarian approach. It’s certainly exciting to apply mathematics usefully, and Warnaar applauds teaching such skills, but he also laments that ‘not enough effort has been made to try to convey the intrinsic beauty of mathematics’. This quote also expresses my main criticism of Brooks’s ambitious book. (There’s also the odd mistake, and occasionally nuances are sacrificed for the sake of a good story.) Perhaps I’m being romantic, but ‘civilisation’ surely includes the opportunity to appreciate an elegant proof, even if it has no immediate practical application? Besides, it took nearly a century for Einstein’s beautiful mathematics to find an everyday application (GPS), to take just one example. Brooks nods to beauty, and delves a little into science, but his focus is business and technology. Still, these are vital subjects, and Brooks is not aiming for a complete history. He knows how to tell a good yarn, too, no mean feat for a popular book that actually includes some mathematics. He has a nose for interesting stories and unusual angles, such as the role of algebra in the success of Google, FedEx, and the sleek, aerodynamic design of French cars; why Silicon Valley was ‘literally founded on’ imaginary numbers; the role of calculus in fighting AIDS and winning the Battle of Britain, and, conversely, the role that ignorance of calculus played in the Global Financial Crisis; and the misuse of statistics in criminal trials. Indeed, Brooks shows that mathematics underpins almost every aspect of modern life, depending as it does on technology, finance, business, and statecraft that require the handling and interpretation of increasingly huge amounts of data. Brooks’s cast of characters includes the quarrelsome sixteenth-century mathematicians Jerome Cardano and Niccolò Tartaglia. The latter accused the former of stealing his method of solving cubic equations, a big deal in a modernising world where mathematical ability was a prized commodity. After much vitriolic correspondence, the matter was to be settled in a public duel – not with swords but with a problem-solving competition. Cardano refused, but his loyal student and collaborator Lodovico Ferrari stepped in. I won’t give away who won. Then there’s the eighteenth-century algebra teacher who created a paper-folding problem whose solution eventually produced the A-series of paper sizes, which enables designers to readily scale up or down. Brooks is terrific at digging out such lesser-known players. Others include Ingrid Daubechies, whose streamlined data-handling method makes medical and other imaging analyses more efficient and John Snyder, whose work on geometrical projections made satellite maps of Earth possible. Brooks understandably skates over the more famous mathematicians, blithely assuming most of them were brilliant but unpleasant. He does like the playful, eccentric IT pioneer Claude Shannon, and gives an interesting overview of the development of information theory – and of much else. With its array of interesting characters, real-world applications, and tantalising mathematics, Brooks’s book is an engaging contribution to our maths-shy but maths-dependent culture. g Robyn Arianrhod’s latest book is Thomas Harriot (OUP, 2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Poetry

No time limits

Three new poetry collections Anders Villani

ood poetry uncovers the secret in the manifest, and the manifest in the secret. Three new collections throw this paradox into vibrant, unsettling relief. Each book deserves a broad readership. Each beats back the lethargic thinking that has invaded society under the cover of the pandemic. Two poems in Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning How to Make a Basket (University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 136 pp) crystallise the poet’s mission, and challenge. ‘If I write a poem’ begins: ‘if I write a poem / it’s for the pen / banned from my grandmother’s hands’. More than a book, How to Make a Basket is a reclamation. Numerous poems trace an arc from pre-colonial idyll to ‘sickness’, and on to resilience, growth. Yet for an Indigenous person ‘raised off Country’, the culture to be reclaimed proves innate and distant, ‘a song that boils in my chest / in my soul / that no one has taught me the words to / yet’. Occasionally, that song grows audible: ‘when i break through the confines of english / i’m free / all the best things i write / are straining at the edges / of the coloniser’s language’ (‘ngargan’). Like too many, Money must pass through the tainted language she knows to reach the ideal language of which she knows only fragments. In a tragic way, this resembles the double bind of the poet. The Wiradjuri language jewels How to Make a Basket. ‘Gadi’ is the collection’s best poem in part for its braiding of English and an Indigenous refrain, the word for home: ‘ngurambang ngurambang ngurambang’. If this is the sound of ‘the stars singing down’, the sonic richness and strangeness of Wiradjuri words function on the page like starlight, blazing us to attention. The mythic ‘bila, a river cycle,’ shortlisted for the 2021 Porter Prize, follows a river in human form as, ‘redirected rerouted and dispelled’, it enters the sea to ‘rejoin the lands of all rivers / of all stars’. Another resonant formal strategy is Money’s coupling of the passive and active voices: ‘hear the way / the old voices are / held here / hold here’ (‘gully song’); ‘we were returning and being returned / to the land’ (‘redbellyblacksnake’). In the final poem, Money writes that ‘everything worth holding in two hands / has a perfect basket to respond’. A metaphor of unassuming beauty, and an ethic for troubled times. Perhaps this is why reclamation is also forfeiture: it requires ‘unlearning’ (‘keep in touch’). As with most débuts, the book attempts too much. Its length reflects this over-ambition. The short love poems, though important for their celebration of queer intimacy, are uneven; a winnowed suite might have tightened the focus on Money’s 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

core subjects. By comparison, crucial biographical details, such as the speaker’s relationship with her Indigenous father in ‘prayer is electric’, receive scant attention. But this audacity is also a strength, seeding future works as ‘the old words return’ (‘sweet smoke’).

‘N

ational Spelling Bee’, in Ann Vickery’s Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Carepack (Vagabond, $25 pb, 80 pp), poses another question to language: ‘Prospiscience is imperalism’s goal, the reserved trophy / to trove. To be insouciant and ask: Can you use it / in a sentence? What is the word’s current milieu?’ Prospiscience, Merriam-Webster tells us, means ‘the act of looking forward: foresight’. Fancifying concepts such as linear progress in flash words, Vickery suggests, obscures their lived ramifications. Poetry, however, inverts this rule; obscurity makes visible, rather than invisible. The collection opens with a collage text featuring a deft conceit for imperial conquest. Newspaper clippings, diary entries, and ‘scrapbook gleanings’ chart the establishment in Australia of European honeybee colonies, and their ascendancy over native varieties. J.C. White’s 1869 article documents how introduced bees would, given the chance, ‘kill … all the native bees, and decamp … with the honey’; an 1846 Inquirer piece lauds the first ‘swarm’ in the colony, given that ‘there is no patriotism more true than that which seeks to introduce into new countries the foundations of future blessings’. Articles encouraging women to take up beekeeping at home implicate them in the takeover, rearing new generations. Important, disturbing reading, the piece recalls W.G. Sebald’s depiction of the murder of silkworms to evoke the Holocaust. Vickery’s is a protean, satirical poetics, a hive of virtuosic wordplay. ‘These borders move when I look again’, from ‘Bad Hat’, captures the reading experience. What to do with lines such as ‘[m]ost fidget spinner universes animate sui generis / against the backdrop of westward ho’ (‘Squad Assembly’), or ‘[n]om de plume reifies my hat, O jaunty Alouette’ (‘Alouette, or a Trip Through Ghostland’), but relish the musicality and the banishment of the ordinary? There are ekphrastic poems, repurposed nursery rhymes, letters to American poets, and ‘Listed Land Uses of Moonee Ponds Creek’. Narrative poems recount the deaths of noblewomen in the Venetian Republic, the capital of glassmaking, a process by which, like the bee’s eye for colour, ‘[t]he flame’s intensity throws frailty into finer form’ (‘Propagation). ‘Festina Lente’ parodies the decadence of the ‘tropical shirt swarm’ of summer holidaymakers, ‘going at it hammer and thong’ ‘to survey another funeral reef ’. This is a book of jagged angles, for readers ‘[f ]eeling vaguely Byronic or, at least, Bryan Brownish’ (‘Destination True Detective’).

he penultimate section of Lucy Van’s début, The Open (Cordite Books, $20 pb, 82 pp), finds the author and her son at Melbourne Park. ‘Tennis,’ Van observes, ‘has no time limit. The question, “When does the match end?” makes no sense. Tennis just goes on. Like other things that are real, there is no limit.’ But there are limits: spatial parameters, ‘general laws’, surface playability. If the court is a ‘discursive space’, closed and open, so is the poem, the state, the subject. Fittingly, this book defies classification. Its autobiographical voice evokes zuihitsu, a Japanese genre wherein essayistic fragments cohere around place: the Hotel Grand Saigon, to which Van returns as the

daughter of a Vietnamese emigrant, ‘smuggled’ to a ‘rich country’ and into the role of the waited-upon, rather than the waiter; ‘The Esplanade’, an empty swath of land from the poet’s youth that is a physical space and memory itself; the Australian Open. Subtle connections – the Hopman Cup, tying Van to Perth and her mother, plays in the hotel bar where Van contemplates her father and his homeland – expose these places as single field of enquiry with the speaker at its centre. Van blurs the chronology of events and the chronology of remembering. She accomplishes this in part by showing how language presupposes this blurring. ‘Some memories are clearer than others. Some,’ like irretrievable photographic negatives, ‘come back clear’. Can memories be clear in both senses – defined, blank – at once? Perhaps they always are. Similarly, Van writes that ‘[i]t was afternoon and then dusk then and it was dusk when we looked at the bedsit’; what a vital pun, that this word denotes past and future. The poet’s imagery transports: she and her friend stare ‘at the white frills’ of Wangi Falls; ‘the metallic mesh’ of

screen doors ‘smells of dust and rain’. A tonal levity (watching male tennis players, Van and her mother are ‘determined to know these beings’; in the following paragraph, ‘Thoreau said he was determined to know beans’) makes room for insight: Van raises her hand, realising that ‘you can never raise it, you can only be it’. Non-dualist-meditation teachers would approve. The Open begins and ends with self-presence: ‘I have gone back and now I am here’; ‘or is it that I’m here’. Heidegger argued that we know ourselves, and others, via ‘a clearing’ where things become ‘unconcealed’; poetry, as the ‘setting-into-work-of truth’, founds this ‘Open’ – opens it. Mid-book, Van offers an etymology lesson: ‘The term ‘apocalypse’ has its original meaning in the Greek apo (off, turn away from) + calypso (cover, or conceal): literally, the term means to uncover, or to unconceal’. Van has opened a clearing – intimate, immediate, breathtaking. g Anders Villani is a PhD student at Monash University and a 2021 ABR Rising Star.

Poetry

Levelling the uncanny Two moody books of allusion Joan Fleming

Capacity

by LK Holt Vagabond $25.99 pb, 78 pp

Theory of Colours

by Bella Li Vagabond Press $35 pb, 156 pp

hese days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets. Capacity by LK Holt collects referential poems that respond to myths, works of art, and a sequence of sonnets by French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. A pair of block-shaped ekphrastic poems, named after paintings by Mark Rothko, hangs in the book like a verso–recto diptych. ‘Light Red Over Black’ reclaims Rothko’s morbid blocks of black paint, as the speaker takes the colour back into her live body against a pulsing of red progesterone.

The poem performs – even collaborates with – the painting’s bodily affect, its disturbance. Holt’s ekphrastic response to an Ainu (East Asian) epic song is similarly dynamic: ‘Woman of the House (Spider Goddess)’ gleefully narrates the Goddess’s violent spurning of the advances of Big Demon. In tone and plot, the poem is a faithful version of the source text. However, Holt’s writewithism then gives rise to the perverse spinoff poem ‘Woman of the House (Millennial)’ where the Goddess’s superpower is nothing more than the choice not to look away from a bukkake scene glimpsed between the backs of aeroplane seats. The pornstarlet on the laptop screen is also imbued with a divine scrap of agency, in the equanimity with which she takes the treatment. It’s a wry, weird indictment of the contradictions of feminist power, and a fine example of the way that Holt uses mockery to weaponise perversion.

Two new releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing The great accomplishment of Capacity is the ‘Modern Women Sonnets’, which respond to the poems of Louise Labé, a sixteenth-century daughter of ropemakers. Labé had the luck of exceptional education and literary exposure and her sonnets stage an argument with the self about love’s vicissitudes. Tonally, they alternate between modes of elation and degradation, a trick that Holt does well: ‘I live, I die: I burn & I drown, I’m having issues …’ While faithful to Labé’s oscillation between rapture and ironic distance, Holt’s versions often overturn Petrarchan cliché (‘like a flayed moon’) and upend the logic of the original’s argument. Where Labé begs the beloved not to quench her longing, without which she would die, Holt flatly tells the nurse holding love’s ‘black needle’ that she will have to die for desire to disappear. Holt’s sonnets are darker and more despairing of AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

love’s exhausting violence. Frankly, they are suffused with disdain: ‘So I’ve cried my days down the days-drain.’ The heart is meat, love is twisted, and it’s not always the lover’s fault. As readers, we can trust the self-excoriation of these poems, and the brilliance at work behind them, even if we’re not always invited in.

These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets Holt is a tart and tartly serious poet in the mould of the most demanding of the Anglo-Modernists (Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore). She has an erudite sensibility that is loath to give anything away too easily, and reviews of her work contain a thread of anxiety about ‘feeling comfortable’ with the poems, or ‘being able to deal with’ her work confidently. Her wit and referentiality draw on an idiosyncratic personal library of artworks, writing, and ideas, and the legend provided by the book’s notes is a mere gesture towards decipherment, partial at best. Some of her poems read like private, coded jokes. There is a density to LK Holt’s poetry that will keep a reader at arm’s length.

ella Li’s new book of poetry and collage is, by contrast, a series of opening doors. With Theory of Colours, Li has levelled up the uncanny. Unnerving collages with gothic overtones give way to prose poems that are a tissue of references. The empty spaces of abandoned hotels and national parks, devoid of human life, create a sense of dislocation, and haunting. While nearly two years of lockdowns may or may not have shaped the artistic choices here, it is impossible not to associate these collages with the eerie, blank streets of our empty cities. The difficulty of the experience of reading this book is one of its strengths. The collages in Li’s award-winning Argosy (2017) were transparent in their influences. Max Ernst’s surrealist cut-outs provided the blueprint. In Theory of Colours, however, reproductions of black-and-white architectural and geological photographs are undermined by subtle interventions. Everything is just a bit off, like the cursed manor in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (one of Li’s textual sources). Hill House is a culmination of tiny architectural aberrations that add up to a profound distortion. As Dr Montague tells his guests, ‘every angle is slightly wrong’. The effect of Li’s surrealist détournements is a subtle discomfiture, and the images are masterfully set into conversation with the perturbing linguistic performances of the texts. One visual sequence references Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (a different pandemic) with a progression of coloured open doors. This sense of an endless corridor is bookended by writing that slams the door suddenly shut, through sentences forced prematurely to fragment: ‘In the west wing, veined with precious lodes of chrysoprase, onyx and opaline, the visitor will find.’ Li is preoccupied with the holes in language, the holes in perception. The poems are not lyrical or personal in any traditional sense. They are tonally complex about history, culture, perspective, colour, absence, and language itself. Occasionally, gleeful gothic pronouncements (‘the garden, as I have said, was blessed with a 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

plentiful supply of sharp objects’) and a mode of soft menace are part of the verbal spectrum, which is dominated by an unnerving formality. Scientific language is used sparingly, in a subtle critique of imperialism’s trust in the systems of Western knowledge. And while some of the sequences in Theory of Colours are narratives, there is never the relief of a resolution. Each piece of text ‘[floats] not into clearness, but into a darker obscure’. Theory of Colours and Capacity are both densely referential books. But rather than LK Holt’s cool, acid distance, encoding meanings that a reader might not be shrewd enough to decipher, Bella Li offers the reader a fully open text. g Joan Fleming’s verse novel Song of Less is forthcoming with Cordite Books. Poetry

Lyric provocations

Two politically charged poetry volumes Prithvi Varatharajan

Dropbear

by Evelyn Araluen University of Queensland Press $24.99 pb, 104 pp

TAKE CARE

by Eunice Andrada Giramondo $24 pb, 72 pp

here is a moment of reflexivity in Evelyn Araluen’s diary poem ‘Breath’, in which the poet, thousands of kilometres away, follows news reports of bushfires ravaging Australia, including the Dharug Country where she grew up. ‘I’ve started a book which seeks to tease the icons of Australiana that have been so volatile to this country. They, too, are burning,’ she writes. Several reviewers have focused on this dimension of Araluen’s début. Dropbear contains many poems that excoriate the tropes of colonial literary kitsch. This genre takes native vegetation and wildlife, and Aboriginal people, and transforms them into the cute, the twee, or the fearsome. Dropbear responds to May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill and Nutsy, D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, and Banjo Paterson’s poems and diaries, among other texts and films. In a scholarly essay (2019) that addresses the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Araluen has argued that we still underestimate ‘literature’s power to operate as a force of imperialism’. For the Bundjalung poet and academic, the personal in poetry is inseparable from the political – as well as from the historical and the literaryhistorical. Reviewers are right to focus on the collection’s Australiana theme, which is central and gives it its coherence and discursive force – not to mention its title. But to do so exclusively overlooks its fullness as literature. The writing alternates between lyric

poems, diary poems, prose poems, and short essays, as well as pieces that veer between these forms. Some adopt an epistolary mode to address someone dear but unnamed (the intimate other ‘J’ appears infrequently as a subject or addressee). Readers may be surprised to find lyric mellifluence infusing poems that critically address colonial history, as in ‘The Last Endeavour’: ‘And it was from each to each that ghosts grew boats: tree / spectre stacked sliced for belief and buoyancy to break / waves against the encroachable unknown.’ Take, as well, these devastating lines from ‘THE INLAND SEA’: They’re dragging black bodies through the halls, shooting black bodies on the street, blood on the concrete the wattle the sheets.

There are formally unconventional poems, such as ‘PYRO’ and ‘With Hidden Noise’, made up wholly or mostly of upper-case lettering; their typography seems to spur the poet to break from her introspective and measured tone: to be blunter and faster in getting to her point. There are also thematic surprises. I was startled, for instance, by the naked eroticism of the poem ‘Bread’. Dropbear has a compelling flow that is maintained by shifts in forms and by a consistently intimate storytelling voice. Occasionally, I was unconvinced by a poem’s placement, especially those quieter in mood and softer in tone. ‘Hold’, ‘Boab’, and ‘See You Tonight’, while engaging in themselves, are placed between others that are incendiary, or formally disparate, and seem to fade as a consequence. ‘Playing in the Pastoral’, a hybrid poem-essay, includes crossed-out words to object to their exploitative use in the pastoral genre, or else to show – in the deconstructive mode – that they are insufficient yet indispensable. It also underscores suppressed terms that the poet considers necessary: ‘since invasion, haunted / structured hallowed settler responses to, and representations / restraints of Aboriginal land home and its custodians’. In ‘To the Poets’, Araluen states: ‘You cannot / redeem the pastoral … You cannot put back into the earth / what you’ve taken from it. You’ve disturbed the ancestors. The words are wounds and that’s done now.’ I suspect that this attitude to literary representation, especially as found in Australiana, will be foreign to many, even those in politically progressive circles. But this is Dropbear’s provocation. It is a remarkable collection: rich in artistry, knowledge, and insight.

unice Andrada’s second poetry collection, TAKE CARE, is also invested in the political: specifically in how colonialism and imperialism inform (diasporic) Filipinos’ experiences of trauma. The collection’s themes – sexual assault, rape, labour, social oppression under patriarchy, activism, and self-preservation – all relate to this overarching context. This historical–political preoccupation is continuous with Andrada’s début, Flood Damages (2018). TAKE CARE weaves its thematic threads tighter, however, with few loose ends. Andrada is of Ilonggo ancestry, from the Philippines, but her work’s raw lyricism may be placed in the confessional genre,

which has included such poets as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. The genre explores taboo subjects for poetry, allowing female poets to speak candidly of desire, or of sexual trauma. Andrada situates such traumas in imperial histories, and looks unwaveringly at their perpetrators. For instance, in an untitled poem, she addresses atrocities committed by American soldiers in the Philippines: ‘Under the Visiting Forces Agreement, / the condition of legal immunity / to commit rape is agreed upon.’ The preceding twenty-two-line poem mentions the word ‘rape’ or derivations of it sixteen times: A rapist decides what I do with my body after rape. A rapist on trial doesn’t believe he’s a rapist. A rapist doesn’t like being called a rapist. A rapist raping doesn’t believe in rape, its perversion of simpler ideas …

A standout lyric, which alludes to rape and abduction, is ‘I Write the Poem’. Filmic in imagery, the poem describes a car trip with a man; it closes with the speaking ‘I’ sprinting from the car, and the lines: ‘I write the poem to bury / the endings.’ This is not to overstate the presence of such subjects in TAKE CARE, which takes its title from acts of care. Such acts are infused with tenderness for friends, family, and activist communities. The poet also situates these acts in forms of employment that Filipinas are expected to take up: nursing and cleaning, for instance. In the eponymous poem, set in Jerusalem, the phrase is both an injunction between Filipinos, as they disperse into the night after a party, and a reminder of labours of ‘care’ that seem to define them. The concrete poem ‘Pipeline Polyptych’, laid out in the shape of four cylindrical pipes, describes cheap Filipino labour ‘piped’ to Israel and the USA: ‘supply / chains ensure / America will never / be forsaken’. Andrada’s calligrams – concrete poems whose form relates to theme – are often her most compelling. This was also the case in Flood Damages: one of its most affecting poems, ‘Prescription’, is composed of one line, ‘believe him when he hurts you’, repeated twenty-five times in a vertical block. TAKE CARE’s two most striking poems respond to patch-worked news articles about the removal of ‘statues dedicated to “comfort women”’ in the Philippines. In the first, a block of news text has lines erased from its middle, in the shape of an erect penis. In the second, Andrada’s words form the shape of this penis; it features the lines: ‘the reminder / of a woman raped: in- / tolerable, too real too real …’ (below this, ‘too real’ is repeated fifty-five times, making up the shaft and root of the penis). Given the symbolic force of such poems, I hope the poet will work with calligrams more often. TAKE CARE features a handful; the majority of the collection is in free-verse lyric. My sense is that a higher proportion of calligrams would increase the dynamism of such a collection, with its insistent probing of entwined subjects. That said, TAKE CARE is undeniably a coherent and artful collection – one that is unafraid to shine light in the darkest of places. g Prithvi Varatharajan’s début collection of poems and prose, Entries, was published in 2020 by Cordite Books. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Interview

Publisher of the Month with Ivor Indyk

Ivor Indyk is director of Giramondo Publishing, and Whitlam Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He was the founding editor of HEAT, and co-founder of the Sydney Review of Books. He has written on many aspects of Australian literature, art, architecture, and literary publishing, including a monograph on David Malouf published by Oxford University Press.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I was a lecturer in Australian literature, and some of the writers I wanted to lecture on couldn’t find publishers for their work. Also I found I preferred to converse with writers who were living rather than with the dead. And then there was the Demidenko affair, which made me angry enough to start HEAT in 1996.

How many titles do you publish each year?

This year we are on track to publish eighteen titles; poetry and prose, Australian and international.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

This is like asking you to choose between your children. I’m proud of all the books we have published.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Yes, though editing is a collaborative process and involves our whole team, as well as the author, of course.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Voice. Intelligence. A devotion to language. A curious way of looking at things.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

Those that have stood the test of time, and those I think will do so.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

The greatest pleasure is when, in editing, you suggest something

From the Archive 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

that the author knew to be the case. The greatest challenge is to align yourself with the author’s thinking.

Do you write yourself ? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?

I write critical essays. As a publisher, I practise what I think of as criticism, but before and during publication, rather than after the fact, as it must be for a critic. However, the mindset is the same. You’re looking for something that will last.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire (from any era)?

A.G. Stephens, Frank Thompson, Brian Johns, Hilary McPhee and Di Gribble, Katharine Brisbane.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties? Yes, but because the market is conservative, not because it is competitive – it thinks in categories, and in terms of what has already been successful.

On publication, what is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales? Immediately – the feel of the book. And then later, maybe a long time later, the moment when the value of the book is realised.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

Terrible at the moment, and for as long as it relies upon the recognition of the market. g

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Category

A R T S AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Theatre

Animalism

While I don’t have a script to check, it seems as though slabs of text have been directly transcribed, a testament to the acuity of Badham’s adaptation. However, Badham’s use of digital techVan Badham’s adaptation of George Orwell’s novel nologies – breaking news segments, tweets, videoed selfies, and Francesca Sasnaitis the filming of major incidents, such as the farmers’ incursion he birds are twittering and tweeting (all puns intended) into Animal Farm and the destruction of the wind farm – blurs on Manor Farm. Industrial scaffolding leads up to a plat- the boundaries between theatre and cinema, and catapults her form that cuts the minimalist set in two. The same metal homage to Orwell into a present to which we can all relate. Most impressive are the three actors who take on a mammoth barriers that are used to corral the crowds waiting for Covid-19 cast of barnyard characters, farmers, and media personalities, vaccinations criss-cross the floor of the stage. ‘Breaking News’ flashes across the cinema-sized screen that looms over what will transforming themselves with the aid of wigs, masks, and perfect mimicry. Designer Fiona Bruce must be commended for the soon be renamed ‘Animal Farm’. Videographer Michael Carmody does a splendid job of splic- simple but effective costumes that allow the actors their lightning ing together YouTube footage circulating on Facebook – animals changes, and director Emily McLean for keeping this complex gambolling, rearing, yawning, bleating, baying, being slaughtered production under control. Ebullient best describes the performances of Gibbs as, among – to introduce Animalism. In the spotlight, the granddaddy of the revolution, Old Major (Andrea Gibbs sporting khaki overalls others, the pigs Old Major (Karl Marx) and Snowball (Leon and a pig snout), begins his incendiary speech with ‘Comrades, Trotsky), and Clover the horse; Megan Wilding as the pig SquealI had a dream’. The nod to Martin Luther King Jr’s famous line er (Vyacheslav Molotov), Moses the tame raven, Benjamin the is enough to rouse a laugh of recognition from the audience. donkey, and others; Alison van Reeken as a drunken Farmer Jones, Mollie the horse, the despotic pig Napoleon ( Joseph Stalin), and more. Wilding’s porcine turn as Squealer the propagandist, in particular, is a tour de force of rapid-fire Valleyspeak and teen-girl mincing. The utopia-spouting Moses and the dour Benjamin play lesser roles in Banham’s version, but still manage to provide Wilding with plenty of opportunity to ham it up, so to speak, with ‘you know’ and a ‘bad vibe’ peppering her monologues. Van Reeken’s Mollie, in a dramatic departure from Orwell’s somewhat sexist take, is transformed from a Paris Hilton-ish bimbo into a horse with uncanny insight into what is really going on. With despised human ribbons in her long blonde mane and a taste for forbidden sugar cubes, she neighs, snorts, and Alison van Reeken, Andrea Gibbs, and Megan Wilding in Animal Farm cavorts about the stage in a (photograph by Daniel J Grant) convincing approximation of equine behaviour. Gibbs as the Old Major denounces the human enemy and goes on to exhort his motherly Clover, a hard-working carthorse whose costume makes animal cohorts to throw off the shackles of slavery. The lyrics of her look like a much put-upon charlady, is suitably ponderous the revolutionary anthem ‘Beasts of Our Land’ (originally ‘Beasts by comparison. The exuberance of the mise-en-scène fades towards the of England’) appear on the screen behind his back. Many will be familiar with George Orwell’s classic 1945 end of the play. Poignant moments, such as the departure of political satire from their high-school English curriculum. When farm stalwart, Boxer the carthorse (who never appears), for the I reread the book in preparation for the performance, I wondered knackery, and the transformation of the pigs into beer-swilling how playwright Van Badham could possibly adapt Orwell’s post- near-humans, are less fully realised. Napoleon’s guard of snarling war critique of Stalin’s Soviet Union to contemporary times. So hounds is less threatening than it might have been. According to the program notes, Animal Farm was slated for I was surprised by how closely the play follows Orwell’s novella.

64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

performance just before the 2020 US elections. In lines that are clearly meant to imitate Donald Trump’s bumptious egotism, Badham has Napoleon declare that he is responsible for all good things, including the calamitous building and rebuilding of the wind farm. Seated in front of a backdrop that looks like an image of the White House, he says something like, ‘It was my idea, a great idea, it was mine.’ Covid-19 delayed the production, but, as Badham points out in an interview, ‘the relevance of this play is even greater in 2021’, when the pigs and cows (I would add sheep) who stormed the Capitol Building in January 2021 brought the United States closer to fascism than anyone could have imagined. Animal Farm, book and play, is essentially about the difference between propaganda and reality, and the risk of acquiescing, with-

out proper investigation, in the lies we are told. The moral of the story – tell big enough lies and the animals will believe – holds as true in our era of fake news and political double-speak as it did in postwar Europe. I might have anticipated a more overt engagement with issues such as the #MeToo movement or Black Lives Matter, for example, but that does not detract from the fact that Badham’s abridged version of a literary classic is impressive and makes for a thoroughly enjoyable evening of theatre. g Animal Farm (Black Swan State Theatre) was performed at the Heath Ledger Theatre in October 2021. Francesca Sasnaitis has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia.

Documentary

Prison island

An essential documentary on deaths in custody Travis Akbar

ean Gibson, a Guugu Yimithirr man, is the writer and director of Incarceration Nation (SBS On Demand). It’s worth noting this because Incarceration Nation, for those who believe this country was ‘settled’ and is equal for all, is essential viewing. Gibson says that ‘Australia was founded by the English with one clear purpose: to create a prison island. More than two hundred years later, not much has changed.’ It’s a strong statement. I would take it one step further and say that Australia was founded to create not a prison, but an economy. With prisons come populations, which build communities. Communities need housing, trades, and retail, as well as services such as health and education. This all requires an economy to operate. But Gibson is right that not much has changed. The economy is all our governments worry about, as they did when colonisation began. The problem is that none of it was meant for the Indigenous population that existed here before colonisation, and it still isn’t. People who have knowledge of what really happened during colonisation, from reading racist government policies to the confessions of unpunished ruthless farmers in court, will know a lot of what Incarceration Nation has to present. But what is different here is that all of these different snippets of history, these past and present statistics, as well as a few personal stories, are presented as a cohesive narrative that leads you on a path from action to consequence, from trauma to response. The results are nothing short of ground-breaking. Gibson’s vision is a roadmap to understanding the state of Indigenous affairs today.

Joshua Creamer, a Waanyi and Kalkadoon man, is a lawyer. A key part of Gibson’s presentation, Creamer is able to speak accurately and poetically on the policies of past colonial governments, as well as on the actions of farmers desperate to make their violent mark in the search of land ownership, and the opportunity of wealth. He tracks the changes whereby any step forward only comes after two steps backwards. Also speaking on past policies, but able to give intricate details into current injustices, is Gangulu Elder Mick Gooda. Formerly, Gooda has served as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2009 to 2016 and Co-Commissioner of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory from 2016 to 2017. In addition to this, he was appointed the chair of the Queensland Government Stolen Wages Reparations Taskforce. Gooda discusses ignored royal commission recommendations and broken

Keenan Mundine in Incarceration Nation (NITV) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Television policies, and their consequences for the prosperity of Indigenous people in Australia today. There to offer statistics on and insight into child removal and housing issues are Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman and lawyer Teela Reid and proud Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman Dr Chelsea Watego, along with academics and experts such as Federal Circuit Court Judge Matthew Myers, Professor Don Weatherburn, and author Amy McGuire.

Gibson’s vision is a roadmap to understanding the state of Indigenous affairs today If the atlas of Aboriginal oppression presented above is not enough to change minds, then look to the personal stories that are also included. David Dungay Jr was a Dunghutti man from Kempsey who died in Sydney’s Long Bay jail on 29 December 2015 after guards rushed his cell to stop him eating biscuits. They proceeded to drag him to another cell, then held him face down and had him injected with a sedative. Before he died, he said twelve times that he could not breathe. David Dungay Jr’s mother, Leetona Dungay, tells the heartbreaking story of her search for justice as part of this compelling documentary, which features the released CCTV footage of the events leading up to her son’s death. The footage is tough to watch, especially given the countless other clips of police brutality, including Dylan Voller’s treatment at Don Dale, weaved throughout. While many will question Dungay’s death, and even respond with comments such as ‘commit the crime, do the time’, please consider: is eating biscuits a serious enough crime to end up dead? Or take the other examples given in Incarceration Nation and ask the same question: is a stolen bottle of water worth twenty-eight days in jail? Should stealing stationery be a death sentence? It all seems so senseless until Incarceration Nation covers prisons for profit. The story of Keenan Mundine – a young man growing up in Redfern who as a child is caught in a rising tide of crime and at age sixteen is thrown among the adults in prison – is also quite personal. A place that is described by Keenan as the place where he learnt what real crime was. His description of how the prison system strips away your personality is truly harrowing, and his story is not unique. While Incarceration Nation conveys its message perfectly and I hope it receives a far wider audience than the typical SBS/NITV viewership, I found it frustrating to watch, as will many other Indigenous people and those whose lives centre around social justice and equality. For Indigenous people, this information and these feelings have long been known and felt; their truth has been told so many times, and so often fallen on deaf ears. Sitting through an hour and a half of more Indigenous pain and trauma is hard. For those who have dedicated their lives to social justice, protesting and more, it will also be frustrating to watch knowing that you have tried to prevent the very thing Incarceration Nation depicts. g Travis Akbar is a Wongutha man who grew up on the west coast of South Australia. He is a screenwriter and freelance writer. 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

An exasperating game of Cluedo The new dramatisation of Liane Moriarty Jordan Prosser

icture this: a taut, ninety-minute thriller featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest names, based on a bestseller from a literary celebrity. A slow-burn mystery about a group of wealthy strangers, each with their own dark secrets and buried traumas, arriving at a boutique wellness spa for a ten-day retreat. Nicole Kidman starring as the enigmatic, ethereal Russian wellness guru Masha Dmitrichenko, who has specifically chosen these guests to carry out a series of risky experiments involving cutting-edge psychotherapy and mind-altering drugs. An hour and a half of rich character drama and suspense that builds to an intriguing philosophical twist. Now imagine that same story, stretched well beyond the longevity of its initial premise to a bloated eight-hour runtime, robbing it of coherent structure and narrative tension. An unwieldy hydra of tone and storytelling style. An exasperating parade of superficial soul-baring and perfunctory plot table-setting, leaving its exceptional cast treading water week in, week out. There you have Nine Perfect Strangers (Hulu), a show that epitomises the era of Peak TV while simultaneously embodying a compelling argument against it. With the streaming wars in full effect, companies like Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, Disney+ et al. seem to be gravitating back towards weekly release schedules for their premium content, perhaps to prevent shrewd viewers from bingeing an entire series in the space of a thirty-day trial. Or perhaps this is optimistically intended to foster the sort of positive water-cooler word of mouth that made shows like Game of Thrones and, more recently, Mare of Easttown such incomparable hits. But surely, if the first three episodes of your expensive new premium series are borderline unwatchable, won’t this release strategy have the opposite effect? Nine Perfect Strangers’ middle stretch of episodes does manage to summon some genuine intrigue and deploy some of its talented cast to mildly better effect – but four weeks in, was anyone still watching? Kidman seems intent on lending her considerable star power to a run of always interesting if hit-and-miss premium TV projects. Big Little Lies was an incisive and scandalously fun update to the Desperate Housewives formula, while The Undoing proved a Faustian chore, a comically bad whodunit that culminated in Hugh Grant’s speeding toward the Canadian border, shouting about steamed clams. Reuniting Kidman with Big Little Lies’ source material author, Liane Moriarty, and TV writer–producer– impresario David E. Kelley, Nine Perfect Strangers sits somewhere in the middle: a show heavy on ingredients but frustratingly short on ingenuity. Consider those ingredients: there’s Kidman herself, indulging all her most admirably offbeat performance proclivities, plus Melissa McCarthy, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Shannon, Regina Hall, Asher Keddie, Luke Evans, Samara Weaving, and Manny Jacinto – none of them ever uninteresting. There’s the eye-popping beauty of Byron Bay, where the series was filmed, to stand in for California. There’s the novel itself, another New York Times bestseller from the queen of airport paperbacks. There’s director

Jonathan Levine, whose previous films 50/50, Warm Bodies, and Masha sitting in her high-tech, fluoro-green bunker, spying on Long Shot displayed quiet mastery of their respective genres. Then her guests through a network of hidden cameras – or when she we have music by Marco Beltrami and Miles Hankins (A Quiet receives a slew of threatening text messages reading: ‘CongratuPlace), cinematography by Yves Bélanger (Brooklyn, Arrival), lations! It’s your LAST WEEK ON EARTH.’ and additional writing from John-Henry Butterworth (Edge of Nine Perfect Strangers belongs to a subculture that deals in Tomorrow, Ford v Ferrari), Jessica Sharzer (A Simple Favour), and closure as commodity: will this help me get closure? – or worse, Samantha Strauss (The Dry). But the overall result is a mystery as a competition: how can I get the most closure? It can be inthriller that fails to either mystify or thrill, capturing lavish land- furiating for anyone who has had experience with real-world scapes and handsome faces in a manner aesthetically pleasing psychotherapy to watch others fawn over a show that trades but thematically disengaged – a tourism ad for New South Wales meaningful resolution for wish fulfilment. Watching Nine with a half-decent mystery buried in there somewhere. Perfect Strangers, I was reminded of Lost – the people-pleasing The show’s best moments are ultimately its two-handers; network thriller directly responsible for the overabundance of shared scenes between any combination of the impeccable cast. trauma-revealing flashbacks in modern television. Other times, Shannon makes for a compellingly tragic father figure, while I thought of Wakefield, a far superior series (also shot in regional McCarthy continues to bring uncanny warmth and sincerity to her run of wryly comic characters. Cannavale effortlessly turns a one-note brute into a sympathetic addict, and Weaving manages to find humour and humanity in a role written as a thinly veiled swipe at Millennials and influencer culture. But while the whole ensemble is in fine form, they seem exhausted at times, wringing significance from screenplays full of hollow portent, base platitudes, and cheap cliffhangers, and sorely lacking in internal logic. Characters change tack, contradict themselves, monologue endlessly, and become suicide risks whenever the meandering plot requires; others, like Masha’s offsider Delilah (Tiffany Boone), are forced to play the same note of righteous worry for the entire runtime. Nicole Kidman as Masha Dmitrichenko in Nine Perfect Strangers (Hulu) It would be impossible to discuss Nine Perfect Strangers without reflecting on HBO’s hit The White Lotus, which finished its ex- New South Wales) whose creative flourishes never distract from ceptional six-episode run mere weeks before Strangers premièred. its characters’ struggles. Mostly, though, I was reminded of the Both series are set at high-class holiday resorts – refuges for the board game Cluedo, in which a group of wealthy caricatures are privileged. Both hint at something unsanitary lurking beneath the summoned to a beautiful location to take part in a slowly unravthin veneers of wealth and propriety. Both have a lot to say about elling whodunit; pieces move tediously around a well-designed ‘wellness’, the fractious nature of modern life, and the commodifi- board and hours pass until the initial hook of the game buckles cation of our physical and mental health. But The White Lotus was beneath the two-dimensional experience of playing it. As with a satire of the highest order; laden with pithy political and soci- so many entries in the canon of Peak TV, Nine Perfect Strangers etal observation. It embedded us with characters festering from is a passable but forgettable distraction. Even with its bevy of their own privilege, wound them up and set them off, allowing talent and big ideas, it remains the televisual equivalent of a juice them to dig their own moral graves. Sitting in the unfortunately cleanse: overhyped and under-nourishing. g long shadow of The White Lotus, Nine Perfect Strangers comes up painfully short. Its class commentary runs about as deep as ‘rich Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and perpeople have problems too’, and its episodes cascade and blend into former, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. one another like so many protein smoothies, another unfortunate His short films have screened at dozens of international festivals, side effect of Peak TV. Meanwhile, its thriller elements are so and he has appeared on stages across Australia, New Zealand, sporadic that they are often met with laughter, as when we find the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2021

Fiction

From the Archive

Delia Falconer is widely regarded as one of Australia’s foremost readers of nature and writers of place. The line between her fiction and non-fiction is especially porous. In the recently published Signs and Wonders (reviewed in this issue), nature itself is the archive being plumbed as Falconer tallies the casualties of the Anthropocene. To mark the occasion, we return to her highly acclaimed fiction début, The Service of Clouds (1997), an atmospheric romance set in the Blue Mountains. As Terri-ann White observes in ABR’s September 1997 issue, the setting affords ‘a potential of that fresh air and living so close to the face of God, the salvation of what it carries’. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

his novel, Delia Falconer’s first, takes the form of a love lament: all about breath in bodies; textures and surfaces; clouds; mountains; photography; colour; gardens; illness. Much more, too, of course, and it is a work that certainly does not warrant such a glib cataloguing of elements and attributes. It is ambitious, and successful. The clouds stand in for much: they are there, so close, our reading heads surrounded by them, lodged there in that pillowy space. We are high up, in the midst of mountains. Cumulus. Cirrus. Stratus. The clouds in service, attending to the forms of desire; providing more, too, a more physical effect, like this: ‘We marvelled at the beneficence of clouds. They would encourage us to eat and sleep ... soak into the pores of our skin, improving its texture and the quality of our blood.’ From the Blue Mountains setting, the village of Katoomba, Eureka Jones offers, for a whole range of listeners, retrospective tellings of the fate of love and the establishment and changes in a community. The period of her reminiscence is 1907 to 1926: starting with the closure of the hydropathic institute in the Hydro Majestic Hotel and ending with a ship’s journey. But it is to diminish the novel to try and pin down any chronology, any trajectory of action or development. It is more accurate to speak of its movement forward as holding and capturing recoveries – recuperations from consumption, from physical ailments and broken hearts. The heart and lungs are intimately connected. Falconer’s prose is dense and dreamy; it is a beautiful book, an exquisitely made thing. The writing is often lushly romantic about learning to see colour and landscape, how to look through the filter of photography, about looking, and looking through other people’s apertures. The punctum, in Roland Barthes’s elaboration, resonating in these descriptions of what is caught in photographs: those prickings that occur beyond an image; the addition, the detail that can fill the whole way that the picture is read. The photographer, Harry Kitchings, carries his legacy of family investment in image-making, and is swept away into the madness of photography. The image is everything; the process of photography has made imprints, impressions, on him in the womb, or so his mother believes: if an image could attach itself to glass or metal, she wondered, could it move through the thinner surface of the skin and leave its residue upon the heart? Had these things made their way into the blood of her strange, observant child? The mother’s own hands, out of enforced photographic work, are imprinted with portraits of families. One of Harry’s hands, 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2021

crushed in a printing press, bears biblical text, indecipherable, in Gothic type. Everywhere, images of one sort or another are imprinted onto bodies. And people are possessed inside, too, and vulnerable to ghosts. This Blue Mountains setting holds an abundance, a potential of that fresh air and living so close to the face of God, the salvation of what it carries. There is a local Fresh Air League, operating in a rescue-welfare role to give lucky Sydney children a respite from the dismal nature of city poverty. And in the midst of all this restoration of health there is the site of the agony of the disease of consumption. Eureka shifts from working in a pharmacy to the sanatorium for consumptives at Wentworth Falls, just as Matron Coan moves sideways from being a corsetiere to a nurse, simply another means of disciplining breath. Then the vivid descriptions of consumption, that it was among our clouds that consumptives learned to chew mist instead of words. The florid detail of the wetness of chests, the waterfalls you could hear if you listened to the chest of a consumptive, the jacaranda flowers delivered out of mouths, bright bloody gifts. Falconer presents a dazzling, eerie scene of sickness and death and intensity, moving through mist at a time when in other parts of the Mountains there is a diminution of cloud and mist, a thinning out of all of that atmosphere. This thinning corresponds with a leaching of colour in the landscape, described by Harry Kitchings as an overuse. And there is the historical return of men at the end of the Great War, with different needs now; a concentration on containment, on indoor furniture. The writing itself is visceral, with images of unfurling lungs and broken, busted-up hearts, dreams that pre-empt the disasters. Les Curtain, gardener, dreams of Nellie Melba singing in the grounds of the Hydro Majestic, so close that he could see ‘her great jaw work around each note ... sinews moved and expanded in her throat beneath the powder’ the night before the beginning of his end in the men’s ward. The Service of Clouds is a delight to read, but I feel that it will become an even richer work as I sit with it, and absorb its layers, and its grace. The investigations of the genealogies of family, love, mountains. ‘In this first decade of the new century faith was essential in dealings with clouds. They had to be propitiated. My mother, being possessed of a practical temperament, did not use metaphors lightly: she expected them to do a full day’s work.’ In the hands of Eureka Jones and, most particularly, Delia Falconer, we are presented with a fulsome account, full of sadness and sleekness, of fugitive mysteries of clouds and love. g