Australian Book Review - October 2016, no. 385

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Bragging rights

Advances was delighted to see that Ashley Hay’s ABR Dahl Trust Fellowship essay ‘The forest at the edge of time’, published in our October 2015 Environment issue, has been shortlisted for the 2016 Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing. The Bragg Prize is for short non-fiction pieces of science writing aimed at a general audience. Also on this year’s shortlist are pieces by James Bradley, Susan Double, Nicole Gill, Alice Gorman, and Fiona McMillan. The winner of the $7,000 prize will be announced on 10 November (along with two runners up who will each receive $1500). All the shortlisted pieces will feature in The Best Australian Science Writing 2016 edited by Jo Chandler which NewSouth will publish in November. Ashley Hay’s essay can be read in ABR Online and she also recently recorded it for the ABR Podcast.

Vale inga Clendinnen

Advances was saddened to hear of the death of internationally acclaimed writer and historian Inga Clendinnen AO on 8 September at the age of eighty-two. An acclaimed scholar of Aztec and Mayan culture and society, Clendinnen also published on other major historical and personal subjects. Among her best-known works are Reading the Holocaust (1998), Dancing with Strangers (2003), and the powerful memoir Tiger’s Eye (2000).

Clendinnen also wrote for ABR Her first appearance was a one-page ‘microstory’ titled ‘Lace’, which was published in May 1994, and her last was in April 2008 as part of a special feature marking ABR’s 300th issue. In her contribution she reflected on how she wrote her first books ‘as offerings to the Mesoamerican Academy across the Water, which I imagined as very like Nine Mayan Lords of Death: nameless, aloof, implacable and almost

certainly fatal’ and her subsequent meeting (through a review published in ABR) with former ABR Editor Helen Daniel who introduced her to the ‘Republic of Letters, Australian Branch’.

Clendinnen received a liver transplant in 1994 and, as Text Publishing director Michael Heyward wrote in an obituary published in the Australian (13 September 2016),

Three years later Inga dedicated Agamemnon’s Kiss, a thrilling book of essays, to her unknown donor. It was her coda to everything life had revealed to her about writing and thinking. ‘Now I know how I want death to come for me,’ she wrote, ‘strolling in the slanting rain of light through eucalyptus leaves, a strip of bark in my fingers, the gurgle of hidden magpies all around. I will say to Death, “A moment, friend.” And then: “I’m ready now.”’

arts issue – 10 novemBer ABR will celebrate the launch of its annual Arts issue with a special event at the Monash University Museum of Art (Caulfield) at 6pm on 10 November. This event will also see the introduction of our new Laureate and the announcement of the Laureate’s Fellow. Please see our website for more information. This is a free event but bookings are requested to rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au

Vale riChard neville

Advances was also saddened to hear of the death of Australian writer, editor, and social commentator Richard Neville on September 4 at the age of seventy-four. Neville was best known as a co-editor of the satirical counterculture magazine Oz, which was launched on April Fool’s Day in 1963, and which was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial in the United Kingdom following the publication in 1970 of

an issue edited by teenagers. As one of the young guest editors, Charles Shaar Murray, later reflected in an article published in the Guardian in 2001, ‘This was a cultural war disguised as an obscenity trial … The fact that, between verdict and sentencing, the Oz three were subjected to forcible haircuts was a valuable clue towards figuring out what their real crimes were.’ Richard Neville appeared in ABR in September 2002 as part of a symposium published to accompany Morag Fraser’s La Trobe University essay on the aftermath of September 11.

douBle take

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Australian Book Review

October 2016, no. 385

Since 1961

First series 1961–74

Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

ISSN 0155-2864

Registered by Australia Post

Printed by Doran Printing

Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Victoria 3006

Editor Peter Rose Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu Assistant Editor Dilan Gunawardana Business Manager Grace Chang Development Consultant Christopher Menz

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Cover

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This month, thanks to Transmission Films, we have ten double passes to Pedro Almodóvar’s Julieta, adapted from stories by Alice Munro (in cinemas from 13 October). Thanks to Cinema Nova, we also have five double passes to Joe Cinque’s Consolation, based on the book by Helen Garner (at Cinema Nova from 13 October) for new or renewing subscribers.

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October 2016 Contents

Kate Burridge

Dennis Altman

David Smith

David Rolph

Miriam Cosic

Catherine Noske

Sue Kossew

Cate Kennedy

Letters

Kym Houghton, Dennis Altman, Sandy Thorne, Catherine Noske, Laurie Hergenhan

Politics

Jane Mayer: Dark Money James McNamara

Memoir

Friedrich Gerstäcker: Australia Christopher Menz

Frank Vajda: Saved to Remember Agnes Nieuwenhuizen

Poems

Sarah Holland-Batt

Jill Jones

Stuart Cooke

Law

Philippe Sands: East West Street Neil Kaplan

History

Philipp Blom: Fracture Peter Morgan

Biography

Mark Baker: Phillip Schuler Kevin Foster

Literary Studies

DBC Pierre: Release the Bats

Charlotte Wood: The Writer’s Room Jen Webb

Fiction

Hannah Kent: The Good People Amy Baillieu

Ann Patchett: Commonwealth Francesca Sasnaitis

Jock Serong: The Rules of Backyard Cricket

Craig Billingham

Rajith Savanadasa: Ruins Claudia Hyles

Michelle Wright: Fine Alice Bishop

The new Australian National Dictionary

A biography of Jack Mundey

Donald Trump’s disasters and audacity

The debate over 18C

A welcome addition to Hitler studies

Two new books from Maxine Beneba Clarke

J.M. Coetzee’s new novel

A new short story

Commentary ‘Bobbin Up by Dorothy Hewett’ Nicholas Jose

Arts Update

Sunset Song Brian McFarlane

The Kettering Incident Jake Wilson

Missa Solemnis Morag Fraser

Shakespeare

Brian Vickers: The One King Lear David McInnis

Music

Jeremy Rose: Iron in the Blood Geoff Page

Jon Savage: 1966

Jon Savage: England’s Dreaming Anwen Crawford

Cultural Studies

Terry Eagleton: Culture Andrew Fuhrmann

Philosophy

James A. Harris: Hume Janna Thompson

Jessica Pierce: Run, Spot, Run Simon Coghlan

Poet of the Month

Sarah Holland-Batt

Poetry

Louise Nicholas: The List of Last Remaining

Andrew Sant: How to Proceed

Susan Varga: Rupture Philip Harvey

Charles Bernstein: Pitch of Poetry John Hawke

Science

Thomas Rid: Rise of the Machines Gary N. Lines

Critic of the Month

James McNamara

THANKING OUR PARTNERS

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts SA.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, and our new partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Sydney Ideas

Feeble times

Dear Editor,

Alan Atkinson’s study of national conscience and how it has functioned in Australia is timely (‘How Do We Live With Ourselves?’ September 2016). Returning to the eighteenth century, he argues that such a thing as a national conscience might exist but that it is ‘especially feeble’ at present. Naturally, this feebleness is seen and expressed in Australia’s policies on offshore detention. Australia’s policies on offshore detention didn’t exist until recently. For most of the twentieth century, Australia maintained bipartisan policies on migration. Aside from the postwar migration of displaced persons, the acme of national policy was the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees from a united Vietnam from 1975 onwards. We can regain that bipartisanship, I believe. All that is needed is a refusal to use the issue for political advantage.

While Atkinson goes into considerable detail in his account, he doesn’t mention the way this bipartisanship was lost. John Howard and Tony Abbott are the people who are culpable here. National conscience has been readily vulnerable to desperate political unscrupulousness.

Kym Houghton, Carisbrook, Vic.

Pragmatic arguments

Dear Editor,

I understand Alan Atkinson’s intent in claiming that ‘foreign aid is an index of a nation’s moral self-confidence’, but this overlooks the very real pragmatic arguments in favour of international development assistance which, unfortunately perhaps, are likely to have more purchase in the current political environment than are claims for moral conscience. As many of us have argued, foreign aid is an extremely important pragmatic step towards increasing Australian and global security. I develop this argument in a recent article: http://rightnow.org.au/essay/ human-rights-essay/.

And while I agree that our current treatment of asylum seekers is a graphic indictment of Australian

Letters

morality, the damage done to Australia’s international reputation by our regimes of brutality on Manus and Nauru is more likely to have some impact on our major parties than positioning this as a moral challenge. After all, our current prime minister seems to reserve moral challenges for economic management, while denying any responsibility for the regime of terror conducted in Australia’s name in offshore detention centres.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Trumped

Dear Editor,

I was shocked and disgusted to read Beejay Silcox’s description of Donald Trump’s followers as ‘rednecks, idiots and xenophobic lunatics’ (‘Letter from America’ September 2016). When President Trump restores America to prosperity and its past greatness, I hope she sends him an apology.

Sandy Thorne (online comment)

Long live magazines!

Dear Editor,

Many thanks for your mention of the current issue of Westerly Magazine (61.1) in ‘Advances’ (September 2016). The time I spent with you and your team in Melbourne was of enormous benefit to me. The state of arts funding nationally makes this collegiality between magazines all the more valuable. In working with you, and in improving Westerly’s networks with other east-coast publications, I have had the chance to represent Westerly to new audiences, creating exposure for the Western Australian voices within, and illustrating Westerly’s interest in writers from across the nation. The opportunity to learn from your processes and production will support my efforts as editor of Westerly, particularly in the development of initiatives like issue 61.1 and its celebration of Indigenous writing and culture.

We have been excited to follow the release of the issue with another announcement: the commencement of Dr Elfie Shiosaki (Curtin University) as Westerly’s first Editor for Indigenous Writing. Dr Shiosaki will be working to

commission and edit Indigenous work for publication in every issue of Westerly forthcoming, starting with our November issue this year (61.2). This is part of our desire to make a space for Indigenous voices within Westerly’s general remit, and to celebrate the continuous living cultures of Australia’s First Nation peoples.

Thanks again for your kind support, and long live Australian literary magazines!

Catherine Noske, Editor, Westerly

A piece of the main

Dear Editor,

In reviewing Sylvia Martin’s Ink in her Veins, a life of Aileen Palmer, Dr Susan Lever questions whether it is an appropriate subject for a biography (June–July 2016). I suggest that it is.

As an expatriate, Palmer worked as translator with the British Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil war, meeting a number of writers and recording graphic experiences in her letters. When she returned home to Melbourne, her life was plagued by a series of breakdowns. Martin depicts Palmer’s experience in detail, showing how she and her parents (Vance and Nettie Palmer) and friends (including Flora Eldershaw, David Martin, K.S. Prichard, Stephen MurraySmith) tried to cope.

Martin, who had ambitions as a writer, continued to produce mostly unpublished fragments. It is true, as Lever points out, that Martin has not retrieved ‘a significant writer or public figure’, but this was not intended. Palmer’s unpublished writings show her potential. She had the poetic spark, writing in the tradition of social protest verse. Her writing shows her continued struggle to resist the isolation associated with her condition by making her life ‘a piece of the main’.

One of Martin’s biography’s attractions is the literary tact with which she engages readers’ empathy without special pleading. Importantly, Martin wears her scholarship lightly: the immense labour of sifting through the Aileen Palmer papers, now part of the great Palmer archive.

Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, Qld

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Bogans, reg grundies, and trackie daks

A

selfieless new edition of the national dictionary Kate Burridge

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL DICTIONARY, SECOND EDITION edited by Bruce Moore

Oxford University Press, $175 hb, 2 vols, 9780195550269

The appearance of a new dictionary is always exciting, and the publication of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary is certainly cause for celebration. It is an impressive collection of some 16,000 Australian English expressions contained within two beautifully bound volumes of scholarly lexicography. It should certainly allay any fears about the continued place of ‘tree-dictionaries’ in this all-digitalall-the-time age of e-publications.

This dictionary is modelled on the Oxford English Dictionary and shares its historical orientation. Both works track the life story of expressions. Buttressed by quotations that shed light on these stories, each entry captures the history of meanings from the first appearance of the word. As an aside, consider what a whopping undertaking this would have been for the original makers of the Oxford English Dictionary in the 1800s. Just imagine having to document the life cycle of a word from the very beginning (perhaps even as far back as tenth-century Old English). Not surprisingly, this project took way longer than anticipated – five years into the venture and they had progressed no further than the entry for ‘ant’. (You can read details about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary here: http:// public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/)

Even today, it is no small feat to track something as slippery as words and their meanings, and in this case the whole enterprise was made all the more complex because this dictionary team (based at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, of which chief editor Bruce Moore was director for many years) was searching out words and expressions unique to Australia. So it is not surprising that twenty-eight years have passed since the first AND was released.

As Bruce Moore writes in the introduction to the new edition, the classification ‘Australianism’ casts the net rather wide. The admission requirements were originally outlined by W.S (Bill) Ramson in the first edition:

‘words and meanings that have originated in Australia, that have a greater currency here than elsewhere, or that have a special significance in Australian history’. This points to a second feature of this dictionary: its descriptive and democratic approach.

The call remains the same as in the 1800s – to provide an inventory of language, and to give equal treatment to all kinds of words (good ones, bad ones, new ones, old ones, perhaps ones that have long shuffled off the lexical coil). Of course, just how objective dictionaries can ever be is an interesting question. There are always societal values lurking in the background – think of what guides whether or not an item is included, the definitions that are given, and the usage labels that might be applied such as ‘coarse’, ‘colloquial’, ‘derogatory’, or ‘slang’ (and dictionary users themselves often interpret such descriptive usage labels as normative).

In this regard, the AND has always been more impartially descriptive than most. From the beginning, the intention was not to label words. As outlined in the introduction to the first edition, this kind of sensitive handling was judged unnecessary for Australian English, a variety that has always allowed ‘easy movement between formal and informal usage’. Whereas other dictionaries employ a type of good-etiquette gauge that determines, say, the offensiveness of an expression without reference to context, the AND has always relied on citations to guide users in matters of appropriate usage – to quote Ramson, it’s these that indicate ‘if a word belongs mainly in colloquial use or to the slang of a particular group, and equally clear if it is for some reason taboo in some contexts’.

The current editorial team has continued this tradition and has not tagged entries with labels like colloq. or slang. However, they have on occasion branded words deemed derogatory, and this is understandable. Different eras have seen different pressures put on lexicographers to alter definitions or to even omit entries entirely. Early

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dictionary makers included religious and racial swear words (the obscenities of more modern times), but were reluctant to admit the sexually obscene words. In contrast, the twentieth century saw mounting pressure on editors to change, or omit, the racial and political definition of words. As Moore describes at the start of this second edition, ‘[i]ncreased sensitivity about the presence of offensive terms in dictionaries, especially racist terms, has been addressed by the use of the label Offens. in this edition. Derogatory terms are sometimes self-evident from their definitions, but if we have felt that further guidance about register for such terms would be useful, we have added the label Derog.’

It is no small feat to track something as slippery as words and their meanings

Among the expanded inventory of words are two areas in particular. One draws expressions from Aboriginal language and culture, both important influences on Australian English. Many new entries come from Indigenous languages (among them bunji ‘mate’, minga ‘tourist’, tjukurpa ‘the Dreaming’, yidaki ‘didgeridoo’) and from Aboriginal English (including deadly, Invasion Day, secret women’s business, songline, welcome to country).

The colloquial aspect has also been increased substantially. Alongside sedate terms-of-art from the world of economics and politics (aspirational voter, economic rationalism, negative gearing, scrutineer) you will find many quirky slangy expressions (bogan, ranga, reg grundies, rurosexual, seppo, trackie daks, tradie, even not happy Jan). Some entries appear so scruffy you might wonder at the wisdom of the editors to include them at all. But rest assured these expressions have been scrutinised within an inch of their lives – they wouldn’t be there unless they ‘had legs’ (to quote John Simpson, former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary).

‘Slanguage’ is entering all dictionaries much faster today, and it is understandable that this dictionary places particular emphasis on the colloquial element. Right from the time English was first transplanted into this part of the world, an informal culture and colloquial style of discourse emerged as ‘the mark of the Antipodean’ (a description first used of the Australian and New Zealand accent). And as the standard language grows ever more global in nature, so our colloquialisms, nicknames, diminutives, swearing, and insults become even more important indicators of identity.

In this regard, one surprising omission from the dictionary is selfie, especially given that it was the Oxford Dictionaries ‘Word of the Year’ for 2013 (apparently the frequency of the word had increased by a whopping 17,000 per cent since the previous year). Social media sites are clearly what have given selfie its global profile, and its success has been astonishing – in

the same year it was even crowned Dutch Word of the Year (no squeamishness about English loanwords in the Netherlands). Perhaps for this dictionary, selfie is not Australian enough to qualify, even though its Australian origin seems undisputed. Selfie has been traced back to a 2002 ABC Online forum posting (http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/11/word-of-the-year-2013-winner/). It certainly has all the earmarks of our dialect –a shorthand form of self-portrait photograph with that distinctive -ie ending.

I was drawn to the expression selfie because it nicely illustrates just how the business of lexicography has changed. When Ramson and his team sourced the entries for the first edition of AND, they employed a squad of trained readers (and thus relied on written language). In the lead-up to the word-processed version of the work, editing was done entirely on file cards and everything was handwritten. The big difference for this new edition is the wealth of electronic material – evidence for both new and old entries now comes from the Web (digitised and searchable printed books, journals and newspapers). It is a great resource for lexicographers, but it comes with challenges. Certainly, it is easier now to track words and to test their currency, but the ephemeral nature of the Web means that citation evidence doesn’t always survive. Another challenge comes because the internet is such a hothouse for new words and, just like other internet ‘memes’, within a matter of hours newly minted expressions can have worldwide visibility. The internet gives even the scruffiest of them a cachet, a new respectability. So when are they released into the dictionary?

I am often struck by people’s fascination with vocabulary. There are books and websites devoted entirely to the ‘most irritating words’, ‘favourite words’, ‘dead words’, ‘new words’, ‘peculiar words’, ‘unusual etymologies’, ‘clichés’. Then there is the flurry of media attention that comes when dictionaries announce their word of the year – articles on the meaning of the winner, its origin, and even whether or not it’s worthy of the award. But then, it is not really surprising: more than any other aspect of language, words are tied to people’s identity, and dictionaries will always open nice windows onto culture, values, attitudes, and artefacts. Of course, for expressions to gain entry to this particular collection they must be Australian, and this makes these words, and all their twists and turns, all the more fascinating for us. I continue to be delighted by the entries I encounter here, among them two curiosities that have special significance for me –up to dolly’s wax ‘replete’ (think of dolls with heads made of wax) and Mrs Kafoops (the female counterpart of Joe Blow).

The Australian National Dictionary really is a treasure trove of Australianisms. You are sure to come across some personal gems here. g

Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University.

The anchor

Dennis Altman

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT: JACK MUNDEY, GREEN

BANS HERO

by James Colman NewSouth

$49.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781742235011

The term ‘green ban’, first used in 1973, is so much part of our political vocabulary that we forget it has a specific and Australian genesis, which had considerable influence on the Greens movement internationally. In 1970 the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), under Jack Mundey’s leadership, refused to take part in a proposed redevelopment of an area of bushland, known as Kelly’s Bush on the foreshores of the Parramatta River. Over the following couple of years, the BLF played a crucial role in blocking ‘developments’ which would have destroyed large areas of nineteenth-century Sydney. Mundey became a national figure as part of a rapidly growing recognition of the importance of urban heritage. In Sydney, the BLF played a major role in safeguarding the character of the Rocks, Woolloomooloo, and Centennial Park. The last campaign brought writer Patrick White into an alliance with Mundey that is commemorated in White’s play Big Toys (1977).

Sometimes the campaigns to save heritage became major political issues, as in the battle for Victoria Street, the surprisingly quiet street running from Woolloomooloo to Kings Cross. For a few days in 1974 a number of residents engaged in ‘the siege of Victoria Street’, which became a major media story the following year when one of their more prominent supporters, journalist Juanita Nielsen, disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Colman devotes one paragraph to the Nielsen affair, and passes quickly over the dramatic politics of Victoria Street and Mundey’s connection with members of the ‘Sydney Push’. By then Mundey had voluntarily stood down from his position in the union, and in 1974 the BLF was deregistered, follow-

ing a concerted campaign by the Master Builders Association. Having been forced from the industry by internal battles for union control, Mundey moved on to a number of key positions in environmental groups, notably the Australian Conservation Foundation. Green bans quietly became less important in blocking developments, although some of the passion of that time lives on in protests such as the current moves against WestConnex in Sydney.

That unions might act to further larger social causes has a long and distinguished history in Australia, as in the refusal of the Waterside Workers to load Dutch ships involved in the fight against Indonesian independence after World War II. In many cases, union activism was closely linked to control by the Communist Party. Jack Mundey was a member of that party from the mid-1950s, though by 1984 he was elected as an independent to the Sydney City Council. I mention this not to ‘red-bait’ but because the positive role of the Communist Party in developing a whole set of progressive policies in Australia needs to be acknowledged. Colman’s book barely discusses Mundey’s role in the party, but it is relevant to understanding the way in which Mundey came to link the immediate aims of the union for better pay and conditions, to an analysis of the importance of preservation of both the natural and the built environment.

The green bans movement was part of a much larger story, and the strength of Colman’s book is in placing it within the context of a new awareness of conservation spreading across the Western world from the end of the 1960s. As an architect and town planner, he is at home with the development of new approaches to planning. The House that Jack Built often moves beyond the house into the surrounding environment in which a plethora of forces were seeking to limit uncontrolled urban development.

Here one wishes Colman’s editor had wielded a tougher blue pencil; parts of the book read like a series of encyclopedic entries which draw us away from any sense of Mundey or the immediate movement he created. At times Colman seems not to see the wood for the trees,

indeed not to see the tree for the twigs. Too often the book becomes a resource to be consulted for specific information rather than a story that justifies the claim for Mundey’s role as ‘the anchor’ of Australia’s heritage movement. Thus Mundey barely emerges as other than the subject of hagiography; there are barely any references to his personal life, although much of this has been the subject of public discussion. There is no account of Mundey’s political movement from the Communist to the Greens Party, or any analysis of the ruling by the NSW Industrial Court when it deregistered the BLF that ‘the union had resorted to intimidation of employers and employees on a wholescale basis’.

For a detailed account of the politics of the BLF in this period we need rely, as does Colman, on Meredith and Verity Burgman’s book Green Bans, Red Union (1998). Given that the current government is now proposing legislation to correct what they allege are similar practices in today’s building unions, it is disappointing that the subject is so lightly covered. Too often one feels the author felt Mundey looking over his shoulder and silencing any critical examination of the internal politics of the union at the time. Jack Mundey, who in the 1970s was excoriated by the media and conservative politicians for his role in green bans, has now become a certified ‘national treasure’, with honorary degrees from several universities and honorary life memberships of several mainstream conservation societies. Colman is assiduous in recounting his achievements, but his picture of Mundey is disappointingly one-dimensional. g

Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University.

Rabbit hole

How the Koch brothers subverted American political debate

James McNamara

DARK MONEY: THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE BILLIONAIRES BEHIND THE RISE OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

by Jane Mayer

Scribe, $35 pb, 464 pp, 9781925321715

When I arrived in America, green card in hand, I soon got down to my favourite pastime: discussing politics over grainbased liquor. I was surprised to find that President Barack Obama was widely reviled. I had spent the previous decade in England and Australia where, in my experience, Obama was considered a decent president or, at least, a decent man. Not, it would seem, in the United States.

That opinions could so differ between Western nations was partly attributable to the radicalisation of American politics in the Obama era. From their first leadership meeting after Obama’s election, Republicans mounted an unprecedented ‘guerilla war’ against his presidency. Denying any Democratic victory was more important than governing. This extremist shift, Jane Mayer argues in Dark Money, reflects a sophisticated, multi-decade effort by a small group of billionaires to inject radical right-wing views into the political mainstream. This might sound a bit Bond villain, but Mayer, a veteran New Yorker journalist, proves her case through masterful investigative reporting.

By endowing tax-beneficial private foundations, then disseminating funds through a complex web of charitable entities, ‘a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families’ weaponised philanthropy, ‘pour[ing] money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted’. While dressed up as charity, the absolutist free-market, anti-government positions advanced by this ‘dark money’ benefited donors’ ‘bottom lines first and foremost’.

Mayer identifies the most sophis-

ticated players as Charles and David Koch, multi-billionaire industrialists whose fortune was reportedly built on their father’s refinery deals with Stalin and the Third Reich. Steeped in fringe libertarian theory, the Kochs considered politicians ‘merely actors’ and were determined to supply the ‘themes and words for the scripts’. From the 1980s the Kochs built the political equivalent of a venture capital fund. They began with intellectuals, funding university centres, chairs, and grants that masked their true intent behind benign-sounding program names. By 2015, ‘the Charles Koch Foundation was subsidising pro-business, antiregulatory, and anti-tax programs in 307 different institutions of higher education’ sometimes requiring students’ ‘ideological improvement’ to be tested. Research projects financed included ‘why bank deregulation is good for the poor’ and that ‘mine safety and clean water regulations only hurt workers’.

To influence policy and national discourse, the network funded think tanks, augmenting this with bought media. Millions were spent for conservative radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh to push specific anti-government, pro-business ideas. Lawyers and lobbyists were funded to press cases in courts and Congress.

To give the illusion that these policies reflected the concerns of ordinary citizens, the Koch network deployed ‘Astroturfs’, ‘synthetic grassroots groups’. At times these were wholly concocted – fake constituents’ letters, agitators planted at town halls. But with the Tea Party, Mayer argues, an existing groundswell was co-opted. While the left’s Occupy movement dissipated, the right’s populist anger was ‘funded, stirred,

and organized by experienced political elites’, then used to advance the policies of the ultra-rich.

Dark money came to the fore with Obama’s election in 2008 – seen as an existential threat to billionaires’ interests. Within forty-eight hours of his taking office, Obama’s (centrist, bipartisan) legislation to address the unfolding financial crisis was attacked: ‘Think tanks funded by the Kochs and their allied network of donors, such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution … began cranking out research papers, press releases, and op-ed columns opposing Obama’s stimulus plan … The paid advocates formed a national echo chamber’ on Fox News and Limbaugh.

The Kochs built the political equivalent of a venture capital fund

Cap and trade, a ‘market-based solution’ to address climate change ‘originally backed by Republicans’, threatened the Koch donors’ major industry: fossil fuels. Notwithstanding that ‘as late as 2003, seventy-five per cent of Republicans supported strict environmental regulations’, Mayer shows how a ‘private network waged a permanent campaign to undermine Americans’ faith in climate science’, spending ‘over half a billion dollars’ on misinformation and attacks on non-partisan scientists.

Nevertheless, the dark money was so well disguised that as late as 2010 Obama’s team barely knew it existed. But after Citizens United removed restrictions on corporate spending in elections, dark money boomed. The 2010 congressional elections saw outside spending increase from two per cent in 2006 to forty per cent. By 2012, the Koch network’s expenditure was $407 million, more than the total donations of 5,667,658 American voters. Targeted spending in 2010 congressional races destroyed unprepared moderate candidates (one described it as like being hit by a house) and elected extremists. With the Kochs’ network now so well-funded and sophisticated that it began ‘to supplant the Republican party’, new GOP

representatives were beholden more to their funders’ narrow, anti-government interests.

Congress moved as hard and fast to the right as it has in recorded history. Narrow ideological interests repeatedly trumped the nation’s. Mayer shows how this resulted in the ousting of thenSpeaker John Boehner for being insufficiently conservative, and examines the extremist tactics used in two disastrous budget fights. One courted the US Treasury’s first-ever default, and sacrificed

By 2012, the Koch network’s expenditure was $407 million, more than the total donations of 5,667,658 American voters

the nation’s AAA rating, to preserve tax loopholes. The other shut down the government to try and defund Obamacare – a law passed by both houses, upheld by the Supreme Court, and given a mandate by Obama’s 2012 re-election.

The net result of this decades-long campaign has been to coarsen American political discourse, inflaming hyperpartisan opposition where there was previously bipartisan support, and rendering equal participation in democracy a quaint anachronism. Mayer’s exceptional book reveals the money trail behind this pervasive threat to democracy. It remains to be seen in November just how far down the rabbit hole America will fall. g

The great degrader

Donald Trump’s unerring genius for roaring disasters

David Smith

THE MAKING OF DONALD TRUMP by David

Cay Johnston

Hardie Grant, $29.99 pb, 280 pp, 9781743792995

This is an angry book. David Cay Johnston has been doing investigative reporting on Donald Trump’s business practices for nearly three decades, and this book is a compilation of his findings. Most of the information in the book has come out before, but Johnston sees an urgent need to put it all in one place for the world to see. How has the United States come so close to electing this con artist as president? The answer that comes out of these pages is clear: Trump has a lifelong talent for degrading every institution he touches, often to the point of implosion. For decades, the Republican Party has pushed the idea that government is ‘the problem, not the solution’, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. Trump has spent those same decades touting his extraordinary success in business, and this year Republicans embraced the profane billionaire as a vacation from political and social norms. Every presidential candidate claims to be an ‘outsider’, but Trump was the real deal. With every insult and slur,Trump showed he was unbound by political decorum, and ready to do the job that generations of useless politicians had failed to do.

Trump’s supporters admire the way he ‘tells it like it is’, but this book shows that his purported success in business is based on doing exactly the opposite.

In 2005 the author of another book, TrumpNation, alleged Trump was only worth $150 million, rather than the $6 billion he claimed (sometimes he has claimed as high as $12 billion). Trump sued for libel, but failed to provide an account of his real net worth in terms of assets and liabilities. Instead, he testified that his net worth fluctuates ‘with markets and with attitudes and with

feelings, even my own feelings’. When pressed by an incredulous lawyer about exactly what he based his statements of his net worth on, Trump replied, ‘I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies.’

Court documents are an important source of information for Johnston, because lawsuits are central to Trump’s business model. He routinely underpays labourers and suppliers, or doesn’t pay them at all. This often lands him in court, where his strategy involves dragging out proceedings for as long as possible to exhaust plaintiffs who don’t have the money or will to fight on. He protects his reputation by threatening to sue anyone who writes something about him that he doesn’t like. Today, Trump boasts of his mastery of debt and bankruptcy, intimating that he knows how to get away with paying far less than he owes, and could get a much better deal on America’s trillions in debt. But in the early 1990s he only escaped total ruin thanks to the favouritism of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, which let him short-change his creditors by $1.5 billion while keeping his casino license. Local political connections have saved Trump more than once. When Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi announced she was considering investigating Trump University as a possible fraud in 2013, her election campaign organisation immediately received a $25,000 cheque from the Donald J. Trump Foundation. Less than a week later, she announced her office would not take any action against Trump.

Trump has made his legal battles part of his mystique. He claims he never settles lawsuits, because that would make

James McNamara is Critic of the Month (page 64).

him a target for more lawsuits. In fact, as Johnston shows, quietly settling lawsuits is a way of life for him. The phrase ‘the court sealed the terms of the settlement’ appears regularly throughout the book. This allows Trump to deny he has ever lost anything or failed in any way. Most successful business people like to talk about how they learned from their setbacks, which made them what they are today. For Trump, every disaster is in retrospect a roaring success, evidence of his unerring genius at every stage of his life. He cannot describe himself, or allow himself to be described, in anything less than superlatives. He promised Trump University would ‘teach you better than the best business schools would teach you, and I went to the best business school’. He planted a quote from Marla Maples in the New York Post holding him responsible for the ‘Best Sex I Ever Had’. He even claims he ‘reads the Bible more than anyone else’.

How has the United States come so close to electing this con artist as president?

There are too many unconscionable details in this book to summarise. There is Trump’s standard practice of talking up the value of his properties to obscene levels, then telling tax assessors they are worth hardly anything. There are his connections to mob figures and drug traffickers. There are his announcements about lavish charitable donations that rarely materialise. There are the many hospitality awards he has received from an organisation whose trustees consist of Trump, his family members, and an art thief known as ‘Joey No Socks’. From the start-up football league he bankrupted, to the buyers of apartments that were never built, to the unfortunate students of Trump University, there are countless dreams that were destroyed because people made the mistake of trusting him.

The problem with this book is the problem with Trump himself, and the great danger he presents: the outrages overwhelm to the point of anaesthesia. A credibly researched book like this one would sink the aspirations of a normal

presidential candidate. A single chapter of this book would endanger a normal career of any kind. But it won’t matter for Donald Trump, who exhausted the world’s reserves of pique long ago. The book may be intended as an indictment of Trump’s offences against decency, but by the end it seems like a terrifying account of the new normal.

Trump’s most accurate claim about himself is that he is tireless. Ordinary politicians lie for marginal gain, but can’t fully commit themselves to lives of deceit and obfuscation. Maintaining lies in the face of mounting counterevidence takes a terrible toll on a normal person. Not so Trump, who evidently doesn’t believe in the concept of objective truth.

His method of estimating his net worth – whatever he feels like at the time – is the same as his method of determining the number of illegal immigrants in the country, or his standing in the polls, or the role of Ted Cruz’s father in the assassination of President Kennedy. His response to any counterevidence, no matter how strong, is to insist that no one really knows, so you may as well believe him and move on.

In country with extremely low trust in politicians and political institutions, and partisanship that manifests as rabid tribalism, plenty of people are prepared to accept Trump’s view of truth and reality. In Johnston’s words: ‘To disagree with Trump is to be wrong. To portray Trump in a way that does not fit with his image of himself is to be a loser.’ Trump has long prized loyalty as the only value that matters, and now he promises to fight for America in the same way he has fought for his family, with no scruples whatsoever. This is a political vision that appeals to plenty of people, maybe enough to get him elected to the most powerful office on earth.

David Cay Johnston has done all he can to prevent that, but it may not be enough. The truth is not enough anymore. g

David Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. ❖

AUSTRALIA: A GERMAN TRAVELLER IN THE AGE OF GOLD

by Friedrich Gerstäcker

Wakefield Press

$34.95 pb, 317 pp, 9781743054192

Formerly only known to historians and specialists, either in the original German or the author’s abridged translation, Friedrich Gerstäcker’s Australian travelogue (1854), based on his 1851 journey, is now available in a modern and complete translation, edited by Peter Monteath. It is well worth reading, both for its account of colonial Australia and for the author’s engaging style.

Gerstäcker, born in Hamburg, was an intrepid nineteenth-century traveller. He journeyed from his native Germany to the Americas, Australia, and Polynesia, and became a successful travel writer. In his Australian volume, he makes many interesting comparisons with the United States, which he knew well and had just left.

Gerstäcker’s Australian journey begins and ends in Sydney. His account of that city forms a valuable record on how the gold rushes transformed it in a matter of months. However, it is his journey down the Murray River to South Australia, where he wanted to visit the newly settled German communities near Adelaide, which is the most fascinating part. His travel by coach from Sydney to Albury was most uncomfortable and makes hilarious reading (‘I had jammed my right knee between my beautiful and ugly neighbours’). Part of his epic journey along the Murray was by canoe; when that failed he went on foot, much of it alone. He had many encounters with Riverland Aborigines, and his descriptions here tell us much about the patronising and fearful European attitudes of the time.

Gerstäcker has many wry and several caustic observations about Australia; he notes that the Murray ‘empties into Encounter Bay via a large lagoon which is called Lake Alexandrina or Lake Victoria (because the English name practically any puddle in Australia after their queen)’. He describes the port at Adelaide: ‘one can hardly imagine a dirtier and more insignificant dump than this Port Adelaide’. The Sydney of 1851 fares slightly better: it ‘measures perfectly well to a third rate city in England’. Christopher Menz

The debate over 18C David Rolph

It is not often that a legislative provision leaves the pages of the statute books and enters everyday conversation.

Statutory interpretation rarely enters public consciousness. Yet this has been achieved by section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth). It is easily the most famous statutory provision in Australia.

The debate about 18C shows no signs of going away. Controversial at its enactment in 1995, it was, for the next fifteen years, largely uncontroversial. The sustained controversy surrounding 18C followed the Federal Court’s decision in Eatock v Bolt. In September 2011, Justice Bromberg found that columns by Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt contravened 18C, by being public acts that were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate people on the grounds of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, and that Bolt had not established an exemption under 18D – the complementary but often overlooked provision creating defences to 18C.

The cause for reform was taken up by the Coalition, first in opposition, then in government, before being abandoned by Tony Abbott in August 2014. Despite the Coalition Government’s official policy, under Abbott and now under Malcolm Turnbull, being no change to 18C, the debate has been kept alive. This year alone, the media coverage of Cindy Prior’s claim in the Federal Circuit Court against Queensland University of Technology, some employees and three students; the controversy surrounding Bill Leak’s provocative cartoon in The Australian in response to Four Corners’ revelations about abuse at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre and the Turnbull government’s establishment of a royal commission; and the signature of a petition by twenty Coalition and crossbench senators in support of amending 18C on the first sitting day of the new parliament have ensured that the issue has not gone away.

Many proponents of the reform or repeal of 18C have elevated this issue to the position of the most urgent threat to free speech in Australia. The sheer volume of commentary devoted to 18C over the last five years indicates this. No other challenge to free speech has received such sustained public attention. Indeed, there has been a seeming conflation – sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly – of 18C and freedom of speech: that if 18C is reformed or repealed, then speech in Australia will again be free.

The 18C debate shows how narrow public discourse

about fundamental rights and freedoms is in Australia. The intense focus on 18C, to the exclusion of other encroachments on freedom of speech, is misplaced. There are many other equally or more important challenges to freedom of speech under Australian law. One of those challenges is defamation law, which applies to all speech, whereas 18C applies only to speech about race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. The intense focus on 18C has also been counterproductive. By overstating the importance of 18C, the most vocal proponents of repeal or reform have alienated people who might be sympathetic to principled reform.

As a matter of principle, the removal of the words ‘offend’ and ‘insult’ from 18C would be a modest reform in the interests of freedom of speech. It is true that 18C has been interpreted so as not to apply to ‘mere slights’. There is then a de minimis standard applied when 18C is considered in practice. Nevertheless, no other area of law imposes civil liability for mere offence or insult. In defamation law, for example, mere insult or affront to dignity has never been sufficient; to be liable for defamation, there must be damage to reputation. In practice, removing ‘offend’ and ‘insult’ may not have a substantial impact on those who have been found liable for contravening 18C. For instance, Andrew Bolt’s conduct was found by Justice Bromberg not only to be reasonably likely to offend and insult but also to humiliate and intimidate people on the grounds of their race.

Reforming 18C in isolation is probably insufficient if one is concerned about freedom of speech. Just as in defamation law, the public interest in freedom of speech is embodied and protected in the defences, which are contained in 18D. The comparative neglect of 18D in public debate is concerning, given its important role in protecting free speech. This section is not without its problems. Not the least of these is that 18D incorporates defences from defamation law, such as fair comment. In principle, the defence of fair comment protects the exercise of free speech on matters of public interest; in practice, the defence of fair comment is highly technical and does not work effectively in protecting expressions of opinion. If a defence does not work in defamation law, where it originates from, it cannot be expected to work in 18D. The task of real reform in the interests of free speech may need to extend beyond 18C, to include 18D and defamation law more generally.

A significant objection to 18C is not that it is routinely

An eye for trouble. A love of words. A life of writing.

enforced or directly applied but that its existence in the statute books inhibits free speech; that it leads people to self-censor. It is sometimes framed in terms of ‘political correctness’. Particularly since the reporting of Prior’s claim against QUT, a related criticism has been that 18C can expose private individuals to costly, protracted, stressful litigation arising out of low-level, everyday speech. The risk of litigation can only be avoided if people avoid speaking in the first place. Essentially, these criticisms of 18C recognise that this legislation has a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech. However, the ‘chilling effect’ of 18C is not unique. Other areas of law also ‘chill’ speech. The ‘chilling effect’ of defamation law is well-known. The threat of defamation litigation can lead people to self-censor. Defamation litigation can also be costly, protracted, and stressful. Cases can stretch over years, sometimes over a decade. Defamation law does not only apply to media outlets. It applies equally to private individuals. Private individuals can be, and are, sued for defamation.

To the extent that defamation law has been considered by proponents of reform or repeal of 18C, it has been largely to dismiss it as a challenge to free speech. It is regarded

as a long-standing, accepted encroachment on freedom of speech. This presents a problem for advocates who have focused too intently on 18C. The principal objection to 18C is that, as a matter of principle, it encroaches too much on free speech. It is no answer to say that defamation law is well-established if defamation too has, for a long time, as a matter of principle, encroached too much on free speech. If the principle of free speech matters, it should matter consistently and the sanction of history should not be relied upon to avoid the need for reform.

The debate about 18C is likely to continue for some time. Even if this statutory provision is amended to delete the words, ‘offend’ and ‘insult’, that will not alone enlarge significantly freedom of speech in Australia. In the absence of a bill of rights in the constitution or under statute, human rights in Australia are subject to political contest. Freedom of speech then will need to be contested and there are many other arenas for disputes beyond 18C, of which defamation law reform is the most obvious one. g

David Rolph is a professor at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law.

Two poems by Sarah Holland-Batt

The Changing Room

We tread the wood in J. Crew, pluck grey seersucker and navy cashmere and talk about dressing for the seasons as though we will see each other through the rhythm of a year’s fabrics: Memorial Day white, spring gingham, fall merino, patchwork madras on the lake. When the sales assistant mistakes me for your wife I smile, briefly imagine that other life. In the change room I watch you dress –salt-washed twill, checkered linen, and a slate oxford whose pearlescent buttons at the neck are like oyster shells, stubborn things that cling to impassive rock. And as you do them up so confidently, your hands knowing your body, your fingers anticipating each distance, I think of your wife, the way she will watch you do this for years and years, how her fingers will reverse all of it, the wreckage, the ruin of covering up then setting everything undone.

The Worst of It

As I combed it, he sat cross-legged in front of me bent over like a penitent, his head heavy as intimacy. An easy gesture, like wind riffling blue dunegrass in tidal weather. Salt and pepper at the temples, or more accurately silver, perilous and stellar. A wave in it, long from lack of cutting. How can I go back to knowing nothing, knowing this?

Sarah Holland-Batt is author of The Hazards (2015) and editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016. She is Poet of the Month (page 58).

The role of lawyers

Horrendous crimes and human rights

Neil Kaplan

EAST WEST STREET: ON THE ORIGINS OF GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

by Philippe Sands

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.99 pb, 494 pp, 9781474603553

Philippe Sands, a barrister and Professor of International Law at University College London, brings together in this multi-faceted book the perpetrators of the worst crime yet devised by man and pits them against two lawyers who were instrumental in providing the legal underpinning for their conviction. This is no dry legal tome: the story Sands tells is intensely moving and a personal family memoir about his maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz, and his wife, Rita.

The story centres around Lviv, a city which changed hands eight times between 1914 and 1945. When it was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was known as Lemberg. After 1918 it became part of Poland and was renamed LwÓw. Later, when conquered by the Soviets, it was known as Lvov. During World War II Germans occupied the city. Finally, after 1945 it became part of Ukraine and reverted to Lviv.

Lviv was where some of the Sandses were taken and never heard of again. Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin also studied law there. Lauterpacht moved to Vienna to further his studies, and then to England. At Cambridge he became a distinguished international lawyer; later a judge of the International Court of Justice. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Lauterpacht effectively wrote modern international law. Lauterpacht’s son, Sir Eli, who is also a distinguished international lawyer, taught Sands at Cambridge.

Lemkin, after developing a successful legal career in Poland, joined the Polish army and defended Warsaw during the German siege of that city. He

managed to escape Poland and to make his way to the United States, where he continued his legal career.

Importantly, both Lauterpacht and Lemkin were directly involved in the Nuremberg trials. Lauterpacht assisted Sir Hartley Shawcross, the UK Attorney General, and David Maxwell Fyfe, the Solicitor General, in the preparation of the charges for the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Lemkin, to a lesser extent, assisted the American prosecution team.

As described by Sands, both men contributed tremendously to the basic notion that the State, under the guise of sovereignty, is not free to run roughshod over its population. It was Lauterpacht’s idea to insert the term ‘crimes against humanity’ into the Nuremberg statute –a phrase that criminalises the mass killing of civilians, such as the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis. Lemkin coined the word genocide (genos, Greek for race, and cide, Latin for killing) and advocated fiercely that the Nazi leaders should face the charge of genocide. Subsequently, Lemkin introduced a draft of what later became the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ (1948).

In this readable and exciting account, Sands highlights the distinction between the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. While genocide is focused on the protection of groups, crimes against humanity is based on the protection of the individual. Lauterpacht favoured the use of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trials due to its focus on the individual and because genocide was not sufficiently rooted in

customary international law and contained various doctrinal problems. Perhaps due to those doctrinal problems, the Nuremberg judgment did not include any reference to the crime of genocide (although it had been argued and supported by three of the four prosecuting powers). Lemkin was terribly disappointed by this omission and by the fact that the judgment did not cover the crimes committed before the war. Lemkin said that the verdict was ‘the blackest day’ of his life.

Both men contributed tremendously to the basic notion that the State is not free to run roughshod over its population

Nevertheless, the idea that leaders cannot commit crimes against their own population and hide behind the shield of sovereignty became a reality at Nuremberg and has continued to develop ever since. For example, in 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu for the crime of genocide. In 1999 Slobodan Milošević was indicted for crimes against humanity and, after he left office, genocide. Milošević was the first sitting head of state to be indicted for international crimes.

A crucial character in the story is Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and Governor of Poland, who was responsible for the death of most Polish Jews. From a lawyer’s standpoint, Frank was the more despicable because he attempted to provide a legal basis for the Nazi regime.

MONASH ARTS RESEARCHERS ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE

DR KATE FITZ-GIBBON

Monash research leads to murder law reform

Monash Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Dr Kate Fitz-Gibbon, researches family violence, legal responses to lethal violence, and the effects of homicide law and sentencing reform in Australian and international jurisdictions. She studied Arts (Honours) and completed her Doctor of Philosophy at Monash University.

Her 2014 book ‘Homicide Law Reform, Gender and the Provocation Defence: A Comparative Perspective’, published by Palgrave Macmillan, examines the partial defence of provocation in different jurisdictions around the world.

Dr Fitz-Gibbon found that, by using provocation as a partial defence to murder, men who killed their female partners were able to avoid a murder conviction. A man could claim he was provoked by jealousy or infidelity into killing his partner; then face a lesser sentence for his crime. Her research has been cited by the High Court of Australia and gone a long way towards ensuring just outcomes in domestic homicide cases.

Dr Fitz-Gibbon’s research led to law reform around the provocation defence, meaning it’s now much more difficult for men who kill their partners to avoid full responsibility for their lethal actions.

If you would like to know more about doing a research degree with Monash Arts go to: artsonline.monash.edu.au/graduate-research-programs

PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH DEGREES

Creative writing

Journalism

Music composition

Music performance

Theatre performance

Translation studies

OTHER RESEARCH DEGREE AREAS

Film, Media and Communications

Historical Studies

Linguistics and Applied Linguistics

Literary and Cultural Studies

Philosophy

Social and Political Sciences

Theatre, Performance and Music

Much of his thinking was set out in his diaries, which were a useful tool for the prosecution. Although Sands lost members of his family because of Frank, he met his son and they discussed what is was like to be the child of what history terms a monster. Remarkably, the two men developed a friendship as a result of the meetings that are described vividly in the book.

Sands’s fascination with the role of lawyers in facilitating international crimes is not new. In his excellent book Torture Team: Deception, cruelty and the compromise of law (2008), Sands examined the involvement of lawyers in the

The idea that leaders cannot commit crimes against their own population and hide behind the shield of sovereignty became a reality at Nuremberg

treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. In East West Street, Sands’s focus on Frank provides us with another example of how the law can be used not only to commit and justify horrendous crimes, but also to provide justice and protect human rights.

Finally, Sands writes about members of his family who did escape from Poland. He recalls his grandfather, who lived in Paris and was always reluctant to explain how he and the author’s mother escaped the Nazis. Sands assumes the role of sleuth in establishing how his mother arrived in England.

Sands’s skills as a barrister and arbitrator, and his keen eye for detail and fact, make East West Street an absorbing book. Extremely well researched, at times it reads like a detective story. Sands pieces together a fascinating story which combines family memoir, a history of the birth of modern international criminal law and human rights law, and a biography of two of the most important lawyers of the twentieth century and one of the most notorious lawyers. g

Neil Kaplan CBE QC is an international arbitrator practising law in Hong Kong, Australia, and New York.

Storms and vertigo

A vividly coloured history of the interwar years

Peter Morgan

FRACTURE: LIFE AND CULTURE IN THE WEST 1918–1938 by Philipp Blom Atlantic Books, $29.99 pb, 494 pp, 9780857892201

In 1915 a young Englishman was repatriated from the Western front to Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Scotland. Traumatised and disillusioned, he would write the best-known anthem of his doomed generation. Wilfred Owen’s horror was replicated across the war zones of the twentieth century. Shell shock, epitomising the catastrophic new relationship between man and machine, is Philipp Blom’s unifying metaphor in Fracture: Life and culture in the West 1918–1938, a popular history of the interwar years (1918–38).

Fracture begins with an episode linking US events to the wider Western world, signalling that this is the story of the West, not just Europe. In 1920 Mamie Smith created history as the first black artist to make a blues recording. For Blom, this event was not just about race. Smith sang of unadorned emotion, bringing popular culture into the mainstream. Jazz was the iconic release from the confines of the pre-war world, and just one of transnational imports that ushered in the era of American supremacy. The following year links the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors, brutally suppressed by Lenin, with the labour strife splitting the United States and fatally weakening the American workers unions. Edwin Hubble’s identification in 1923 of a cepheid variable star in the galaxy of Andromeda provided data that would galvanise German physicist Werner Heisenberg to formulate quantum mechanics.

While Blom situates ideas succinctly into context, he segues sometimes too smoothly from one event to the next. He is certainly right to point to the re-emergence of irrationalism as a response to the war, but one wonders just how

useful this is as the key to both Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. By 1935, apocalyptic dust storms had devastated the American mid-western cornbelt, creating streams of internal refugees (‘Oakies’) and poisoning social relations even further in a country racked by racial strife and economic depression. But I am not sure what is gained by using the metaphor of the storm to move to Hitler’s Germany, where ‘another gigantic choking cloud had risen up from what once was good fertile soil’. The German storms were of a very different order. For the past half century, historians have asked just how contaminated the German ‘soil’ was, with its deeper layers of Prussian militarism, Protestant Innerlichkeit (inwardness), and the uncontested remnants of a feudal-absolutist state modernised and controlled from above by industrial and aristocratic cliques. Few historians today would claim that the Nazi ‘storm’ blew over a natural or healthy political landscape.

In 1930 Marlene Dietrich got her first big break as the prostitute with legs to die for in the film The Blue Angel, based on Heinrich Mann’s book Professor Unrat (1905). The professor’s fall from martinet schoolmaster to abject slave to his demanding mistress satirised the brutal discipline and rigid pedagogy of Wilhelminian schooling. But the film stressed something else: the decadence of Weimar culture. At its height by 1930, and about to fall, Weimar appeared to mean anything and everything. For Christopher Isherwood, ‘Berlin meant boys’. There is certainly much truth in this. But at the same time, things were not quite as Blom portrays.

The openness was of a particularly dangerous kind. You could be gay, transvestite, a sexual fetishist of any sort –but it was still kept behind closed doors. For all his laconic distance, even Christopher Isherwood was very careful with his published statements. Paragraph 184 of the German legal code continued to censor, and Paragraph 175 to criminalise homosexuality. By 1930, too, the heyday of Weimar permissiveness was over and Nazi gangs were routinely bashing gay men in the streets. In the rush to link sometimes only superficially similar events across Europe and America, Blom falls into the trap of oversimplifying. Several pages later, he lays blame on the Weimar Republic for having failed to win the battle of images. But that would only have been possible if Weimar was not what it was, namely a mosaic of fragmented and mutually suspicious and antagonistic splinter groups. The Nazis would supply the clean new unified image promising a future to a country reeling from the effects of the Versailles Treaty. Weimar Germany didn’t.

The occasional misattribution or misusage brings out the worst of the pedant in me. Many might consider the philosophy of Heidegger abstruse, but few even of his fiercest critics would consider the German magus ‘obtuse’. The Italian and British Blackshirts, and the German Schutzstaffel (SS), wore black uniforms; Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA) famously were called ‘Brownshirts’. They did not wear black. Socialist realism had been around as an idea and potential basis for the new art of the Soviet Union for some time since the early 1920s, but in 1931 it was not yet state policy. It was only adopted as official Soviet literary and artistic policy in April 1932 by the Party Central Committee and the literary doctrine laid out in detail only after the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934.

Blom’s surprised account of German war hero and writer Ernst Jünger’s diagnosis of modern technology’s ‘celebration of its bloody triumph’ betrays a certain lack of understanding of the nature of the reactionary modernism that often made figures on the right look like those of the left. No lesser thinker

than Walter Benjamin recognised in Jünger’s Storms of Steel (1920) a modernistic celebration of the mechanised body. Klaus Theweleit put this figure of the man-machine at the centre of his controversial study of fascist psychology, and left-wing/anarchist writer William Burroughs wrote a fascinating short story on the same theme. It has become a staple of popular culture at least since The Terminator (1984).

Nevertheless, Blom writes well and has a wonderful eye for vivid quotes, telling anecdotes, and succinct summations of the players in his history: the outrageous performances of black American dancer Josephine Baker; the image of ageing Italian womaniser, flying ace, and poet-turned politician Gabriele D’Annunzio; the anarchy of Barcelona’s civil war.

In his previous bestseller, The Vertigo Years: Change and culture in the West 1900 – 1914 (2008) Blom asked his readers to look back at that time ‘without the long shadows of the future darkening their historical present’. Vertigo is the unifying theme of modernity in these early years of the twentieth century, as accelerated change brought a sense of uncertainty and crisis to Europeans. However this sort of intellectual history has its dangers: one might well contend that these years were stable. Empires were still strong, admittedly some more than others, and there were signs of increasing wealth and prosperity even in late tsarist Russia. Germany and Italy were newly unified after centuries of fragmentation.

And yet Blom has a point. An awareness of impending crisis, of increased competition for declining resources among European powers, and of tension between the forces of social stability and social change seemed to dominate the first decade of the new century. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), perhaps the greatest literary index of the state of the European soul at this point begins with a sense of crisis and foreboding that explodes into dreams of rampant bestiality during the course of Gustav von Aschenbach’s flight from a life of repression. By 1914 the discontents of civilisation were preoccupying intellectuals and artists alike.

Meanwhile, revolution was brewing in Russia, the Morocco affair presaged an increasingly bellicose Germany, and Ottoman power had waned to the point where south-east Europe was aflame.

Blom’s model of moving chronologically through the years and taking significant events as his guiding theme in each chapter worked marvellously in The Vertigo Years. Perhaps that period supported such a potentially fragmented approach. In Fracture he repeats the formula, but, for me at least, with less success. The passing years certainly marked important events: revolutions in Germany and Russia in 1918; the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919; the influenza epidemic of 1921; the burning of the Justice Palace in Vienna in 1927; the slaughter of the Kulaks from 1928; the 1936 Olympic Games. But the historical narrative of this period needs to explain how that which seemed so disconnected earlier was now linked by major dynamic forces – economic political, social, and cultural – that had revealed themselves in the intervening war.

The final paragraphs draw parallels with the present, but beyond a sense of impending crisis, there is little substance to Blom’s warnings. Together, Vertigo and Fracture present the scenarios of the years 1900 to 1938 in vivid colours, but like the abstract art that this era bore, there is not much depth of field. g

Peter Morgan is Director of European Studies at the University of Sydney. ❖

The emptiest of vessels

A welcome addition to Hitler studies

Miriam Cosic

HITLER: A BIOGRAPHY, VOLUME I: ASCENT, 1889–1939 by Volker Ullrich, translated by Jefferson Chase

Bodley Head, $59.99 pb, 998 pp, 9781847922861

There is a point of view that says we shouldn’t humanise a tyrant such as Adolf Hitler since that reduces the symbolism, the power of his name as a synonym for pure evil, and can lead to excuses and to relativism. Another argument holds that we must understand the psychology and sociology of the individual’s rise to power if we are to recognise, and prevent, such developments in the future. The former position is a quasi-religious juxtaposition of good and evil, often held, understandably, by historians of the Holocaust. The latter is the more disinterestedly scholarly and pragmatic approach to political history.

Despite the millions of words written about him since his death by suicide on 30 April 1945, and the ubiquity of imagery spread by everyone from historians to neo-Nazis to pop culture, few comprehensive biographies have been written about Hitler. Read Ian Kershaw’s magisterial work (1991) and Joachim Fest’s more psychological take (1974) for a thorough overview of the man and his times. Experts add Konrad Heiden and Alan Bullock. These authors’ works offer not only multiple perspectives but points of view from the 1930s onwards. Given that Hitler died seventy-one years ago, is there any need to revisit his life?

Well, yes, it turns out. Volker Ullrich’s massive tome – 1,000 pages and it is only part one of two – is a welcome addition to the bookshelves. Hitler: A biography, volume I: ascent, 1889–1939 provides little that is startlingly new, though the opening up of East Germany’s archives after 1989 has provided additional material unavailable to Western postwar scholars.

What Ullrich has managed to do, however, is re-craft the history compellingly for our own era. His scholarly rigour, very readable prose (thank you, too, translator Jefferson Chase), and clear argument are leavened by a fascinating amount of personal detail, from Hitler’s unremarkable childhood through the loneliness and, presumably, deep depression of his late adolescence, to his galvanising experience during World War I and his relentless rise to prominence on the German right. Most frightening are the parallels one can draw to the backlash against multiculturalism and rise of populism across the West today.

Hitler liked to claim that he grew up in poverty, but his father was a senior public servant and earned a middleclass salary. He had a happy enough younger childhood in southern Bavaria, where his father had been transferred from Austria and where he picked up his accent, doing well in school and reading westerns in his spare time. (He was a fan of Karl May, and would even refer back admiringly to his characters during the war.) His father was authoritarian; his mother quiet and protective. Ullrich points out that historians’ assumption that his father’s violence towards him was formative overlooks the fact that corporal punishment was normal in families at the time and no one else turned out quite like little Adolf. ‘If Hitler had a problem,’ he writes, ‘it was an overabundance rather than a paucity of motherly love. That may have contributed to his exaggerated self-confidence, his tendency towards being a know-it-all and his disinclination to exert himself in areas he found unpleasant. These characteristics were

already evident during Hitler’s school days.’

The transition to high school in well-to-do Linz, back in Austria when his father retired, was not so congenial. Hitler was tormented by his classmates for being a country yokel. A teacher remembered him as talented but lazy. ‘As he entered puberty,’ Ullrich writes, ‘the lively, curious young boy became an introverted, moody adolescent who positioned himself as an outsider.’ His father died suddenly in 1903, his mother four years later, aged forty-seven. Hitler, who was eighteen, tended to her assiduously at the end. Not long before her death he sat the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and was astonished when he failed, something he kept secret from everyone.

Most frightening are the parallels one can draw to the backlash against multiculturalism and rise of populism across the West today

In early 1908 he left for the sophistication of ethnically diverse Vienna. He seemed to learn little there. His art was certainly not influenced by Viennese modernism, something that played out horribly in the burning of ‘degenerate’ art when he came to power. Unable to find a foothold in the city, he ended up in a shelter for homeless men, selling painted postcards on the street. Ullrich maintains that Hitler had not been antiSemitic when he arrived in Vienna; indeed, he continued to revere his mother’s Jewish doctor. But he would have been exposed to organised right-wing groups there. A small inheritance allowed him to move to Munich, where he eventually found his milieu.

The turning point was World War I. Although many people across Europe looked forward to the ‘cleansing’ advent of war in the decadent and unstable early years of the twentieth century, most were quickly disillusioned by the horrors of mechanised fighting. His participation made Hitler, however. Having first been turned down by the

army on health grounds, he eventually enlisted and had a solid career as a communications runner, earning the Iron Cross. He also experienced the warmth of membership for the first time – previously, Ullrich points out, ‘[his] lack of social contact was the external symptom of a deep inner uncertainty’ – and was still ensconced in the military, and used it as a launch pad, when he began to expand the National Socialist Workers Party. It was, of course, neither socialist nor a worker’s party, though Hitler grew adept at playing on both these tropes as he developed his one real talent: for rabble-rousing speechifying.

Kershaw described Hitler as an ‘empty vessel outside his political life’, incapable of the intimacy of sexual love or friendship. As Neal Ascherson wrote in his review of Ullrich in the London Review of Books , ‘ He [Kershaw] considered that Hitler had no “private life”, but instead “privatised” the public sphere: his entire career was devoted to acting the Führer.’ Ullrich cautions against overplaying this point. Hitler may or may not have had a sexual relationship with Eva Braun, but they certainly had a domestic one. He suffered terribly when his niece, Geli Raubal, committed suicide while living with him, and continued to visit her grave even when in power. He loved Wagner’s operas and was a regular, and fêted, guest at Bayreuth. Older women doted on him, as a leader and as a single man in need of cosseting, and he rewarded them with exaggerated Viennese chivalry.

Ullrich shows that he was never at ease in the higher echelons of society, however, nor with his intellectual superiors. ‘As is typical for many autodidacts, Hitler believed he knew better than specialists … and treated them with an arrogance that was but the reverse of his own limited horizons,’ he writes. ‘As a parvenu, Hitler lived in constant fear of not being taken seriously or, even worse, making himself look ridiculous.’ He was decidedly quirky in so many ways: a vegetarian non-smoker, he doted on dogs, couldn’t dance, drive, or ski, and had no interest in acquiring those skills.

Hitler was entirely at home in polit-

ics, however. Under his leadership the party expanded quickly. Within a year, meetings had expanded from a couple of dozen to 2,000-strong cheering fellow travellers. Hitler had only two defining policies: removal of the Jewish influence he believed was ruining the entire Western world, and extension of Lebensraum – space for the German people to live – into eastern Europe. All the rest was tactics. Hitler alternated between calm persuasion and dramatic threats, first in his inner circle, then with German and Austrian politicians, eventually with world leaders. Although apparently

tortured by decision-making, he took careful and unerring steps towards legal implementation of his plans, gauging exactly how far he could push each one without causing a backlash.

At the end of this volume, these steps culminate in the Anschluss, the move on Czechoslovakia, and the absurdly lavish public celebrations of Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. Despite the enormous amount of detail, Volker Ullrich traces them with pace and vigour. g

Miriam Cosic is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.

Myth eats man

Phillip Schuler as catalyst

Kevin Foster

PHILLIP SCHULER: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST WAR CORRESPONDENTS by Mark Baker Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781760111656

Who was Phillip Schuler? A war correspondent for The Age, his six-week visit to Gallipoli in July and August 1915 produced, inter alia, a few of the rare eyewitness accounts of the battle and resulted in the first extended treatment of the Gallipoli campaign: Australia in Arms (1916). Schuler also compiled a unique photographic record of some of the battlefields and the living conditions in the trenches. Later enlisting as a soldier, he served in Flanders where, in April 1917, aged twentyseven, he was fatally wounded by a stray shell.

The works he bequeathed, the events that spawned them, and the legend that has grown up around them have long overshadowed Schuler’s short life. Mark Baker sets out to rescue him, not from the condescension of history, but from the wheels of the mythic juggernaut that he helped put together and propel. It’s a noble aim, but the book doesn’t quite get there. Mesmerised by the myth-

making, and chary of too trenchant a reappraisal of its key components, Baker struggles to sustain his concentration, and his focus on Schuler flickers and fades. In the end, Schuler emerges from the book as more a catalyst than a fullyfledged figure, the vehicle rather than the destination.

This is, for better and worse, a journalist’s book. In Melbourne, Baker’s nose for a lead turns up an illegitimate son –whom Schuler never knew about – from a wartime fling with a family friend. Further research reveals an unlikely Melbourne connection with Schuler’s long-lost Egyptian lover – twin threads entwining two women from opposite sides of the world, differently burdened by Schuler’s death. Yet as the focus of the narrative shifts from the private to the public, its protagonists shrink into archetype rather than emerging as individuals. The narrative is suddenly thick with character types: the ruthless arriviste who will stop at nothing to advance

his career; the ‘poet–warrior’ innocent of the low skulduggery of politics; the upper-class cad, devious and dyspeptic; and the rakish foreign correspondent, breaking hearts, busting expense accounts, and bearing witness to the making of history. In concert with this retreat into formula, the prose, larded with redundant intensifiers, regularly collapses into a wooden journalese: the newspapers Baker describes are invariably ‘crusading’, their columnists ‘zealous’ in their advocacy, and their editors ‘stern’ to a man. On occasions the whole thing tips over into bathos. When the action moves to the Middle East, this storehouse of familiars serves up a world of orientalist cardboard cut-outs. ‘Cosmopolitan Cairo’ is a Downton Abbey in the desert. While Peter Lorre-types smoke, sip cocktails, and cut deals, Egypt’s ‘vivacious’ beauties do battle, with ‘charm and style’ the weapons of choice.

As Baker’s account follows Schuler into the world of generals and statesmen, his conventional restaging of Gallipoli as a gladiatorial combat between the military and the media brings him back to the perennial obsessions of the professional war reporter – access to the battlefield, censorship, and professional rivalry. In this context, Schuler’s value resides less in anything he says or does than in the entrée he provides to the storied events of Gallipoli. The book is far more interested in walking the reader back over the well-trodden landscape of Australian military myth than it is in re-mapping it or reassessing Schuler’s influence over its cartography. With Baker fixated on the major players

who command the stage, Schuler is confined to the role of ‘attendant lord’, there to ‘swell a progress, start a scene or two’, but he’s definitely no ‘Prince Hamlet’.

Ironically, the book’s failure to reanimate Schuler is also its principal strength and the basis of its main contribution to a now voluminous literature on those who reported on the Australians in the Great War. While Baker protests Schuler’s excision from, marginalisation, or misrepresentation in Australian accounts of what happened at Gallipoli, his treatment of him compounds his obscurity and emblematises its causes. In the wake of the Great War, Schuler’s former colleagues C.E.W. Bean and Keith Murdoch went on to attain public profiles buoyed but never overwhelmed by their experiences at Gallipoli – one as the founder and guiding spirit of the Australian War Memorial, the other as a press magnate tirelessly dedicated to the promotion of the nation’s – and his own – mythic self-construction. By contrast, Schuler’s pointless and inglorious death, mortally injured by shellfire while demonstrating the operations of a camp oven near Messines, all but guaranteed his comparative obscurity – his life snuffed out so soon after the brief access of fame that Australia in Arms brought him. Schuler was swallowed whole by the myth he did so much to define, popularise, and disseminate.

If Schuler does have a ready means to significance, it resides in his photographs from Gallipoli, almost two thousand of which are in the collections

of the Australian War Memorial. Baker makes passing mention of two of the most famous examples but ignores hundreds more, thus passing up the opportunity to consider Schuler’s unique contribution to the Gallipoli myth, reappraise his legacy, and advance his claim to fame. Seduced by the power of the legend and the glamour of its protagonists, Baker leads the reader back through the case of Murdoch versus Hamilton, rattling off the well-known claims and counter-claims like a knowledgeable but wearisome tour guide who informs his audience but fails to inspire them. A book explicitly purposed to return Schuler to the limelight demonstrates why he remains in the shadow of the myth he helped bring into being. g

Kevin Foster teaches in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Don’t Mention the War: The Australian Defence Force, the media and the Afghan conflict (2013).

‘Trauma on my skin’

Racism as a force, writing as a response

Catherine Noske

THE HATE RACE: A MEMOIR

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette, $32.99 pb, 271 pp, 9780733632280

CARRYING THE WORLD by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Hachette, $26.99 pb, 183 pp, 9780733636400

Across two new titles, Maxine Beneba Clarke offers an unflinching portrayal of the impact of racism, and transcends form in turning a lens on Australian society. Together, these two works witness the myriad ways in which racism shapes the daily life of its victims, the ongoing impact and the toll on body and mind. We see this damage play out in each work, both in psychological terms and, as she describes in her memoir, physically. ‘For most of my school life,’ she writes, ‘trauma manifested itself on my skin.’ Her writing is blunt, uncompromising. Both works utilise repetition to enormous effect, layering instances of prejudice and returning again and again to specific moments of trauma. While the approach in writing differs radically across the two texts, they share stories to create something much larger between them.

The memoir feels in many ways like a shift from Beneba Clarke’s poetic approach. It lacks the sharp edge I had expected. Carrying the World offers the same dangerous beauty of her previous poetry collection, nothing here needs fixing (2013) – and indeed incorporates some of the same work. But The Hate Race lacks some of the intricacy of her poetry. The voice is simple and open. Sympathetic to the child’s perspective, it predominantly focuses on her school years. And it depends on the appeal of this voice – the familiarity of childhood, the associations of innocence – to carry the emotional power of each moment.

This voice is balanced with narratorial interjections. Beneba Clarke repeat-

edly interposes on the child perspective with a series of self-reflexive considerations of the writing as an act. These interjections become almost a mantra, shifting slightly in wording but turning on the same two ideas: racism as a force and writing as a response, singing to be read, ‘or else what’s a story for’. In this, the adult perspective directly addresses us as readers, forcing us to bear witness. The structure interrupts participation with the narrative and reminds us that we as readers represent the society perpetrating the violence portrayed. Ultimately, this separation between the two versions of the self presented, one victim and one survivor, shapes the emotional development of the work.

This adult perspective is taken up in Carrying the World, and here, through the skilful use of both parataxis and imagery, all the force of that survivorstatus is felt. It is also problematised, as we are left in no doubt that racial violence is continuing. We are inclined to use the phrase ‘casual racism’ when recognising social inequality in Australia, and in doing so we downplay the violence that any act of racism represents. Beneba Clarke refuses us this luxury and throughout the collection lays bare the effect this ‘casual’ racism has on victims. There is a more overt anger to be felt in the poetry, and seemingly more freedom of expression. The writing opens into a more intimate experience.

Relatively early in the piece, for example, the suite ‘Demerara Sugar’ moves over twelve parts to recount Beneba Clarke’s work in tracing her family his-

tory – work that was supported by the Hazel Rowley Fellowship for Biography. The poem reprises some of the family relationships and memories included in her memoir, taking them forward into more complex ground. The motif of sugar opens a generational interplay which reaches back into a history of slavery, from the ‘sweet splintered ground / uneven with granule spill’ of the sugar warehouse of West India Quay to fallen apples returning home, ‘black and heavy / black and heavy like // molasses’. Sugar and its trauma come to be internalised, embodied, in family illness and high blood sugar:

demerara sugar bet you anything it took uncle buddy’s ma

four hundred years on demerara is still trying to kill us all

The only uncomfortable moment in reading the collected poetic work (Carrying the World is arranged in alphabetic order, very much giving the sense of a collected oeuvre) was the manner in which Beneba Clarke expands her experience out towards other cultures. The poem ‘Marngrook’, for instance, connects to indigenous Australia. But at the same time, Beneba Clarke is reaching towards portraying racism as a phenomenon. The closing emphasis is on a unilateral engagement with the problem: ‘it is our / responsibility / to point’. In producing these two new titles

within the same year, across very different forms, Beneba Clarke invites the reader to participate in an exploration of the manner in which writing can function as an art-form to face the ongoing social crisis of racism. Both works constantly question how writing works and its capacity to carry a voice. In her poetry, this is through the use of accent. Her memoir, alternately, insists on voice through the refrain of singing, repeated again and again: ‘There are a myriad ways of singing it, but this is the melody I hum. That West Indian way, of crooning a tale. Or else what’s the music for?’ The shift implied, from how it is sung to why, is crucial.

Carrying the World seems to be a personal endeavour. Language appears to function as a site of reclamation, opening the poet’s experiences and offering the possibility of both healing and resistance. But in her memoir, Beneba Clarke turns the lens back onto our society. It inverts the normal act of witnessing to focus directly on the perpetrators rather than the victims. This is signalled in the title, The Hate Race, reversing the normative phrasing of racial hatred to concentrate instead on the perpetrating race. The deliberate nature of this manoeuvre characterises the precision with which Beneba Clarke takes up writing as a weapon.

The Hate Race and Carrying the World demonstrate Maxine Beneba Clarke’s capacity to engage with Australian society while also opening an intimate relationship with her reader. They are both compelling and emotional works. g

Catherine Noske is editor of Westerly Magazine at the University of Western Australia, where she also teaches in Literature and Creative Writing. ❖

‘The best plans never work, do they?’

Fourteen authors on the business of writing

Jen Webb

RELEASE THE BATS: WRITING YOUR WAY OUT OF IT by DBC Pierre Allen & Unwin, $27.99 pb, 297 pp, 9780571283187

THE WRITER’S ROOM: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT WRITING by Charlotte Wood Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 446 pp, 9781760293345

Writers have, it seems, an insatiable appetite for reading about writing; and such advice comes in various forms. There are books that promise to teach their readers how to write in any form or genre imaginable. There are books on grammar and punctuation, on contracts, on making a living, on managing your profile. Whatever you want, it seems, you’ll be able to find; though the quality is not always certain. This year the publishers have provided two more books in this idiom, each of which enriches the genre. Charlotte Wood, herself an accomplished author, talks with equally accomplished writers about their experience of the business – the life – of writing. (This prodigious effort is made more impressive by the fact that, at the same time, she was writing her Stella Prize-winning novel The Natural Way of Things [2016].) DBC Pierre, enfant terrible of the early 2000s and author of the Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little (2003), offers what the blurb calls an ‘irreverent guide to writing fiction’, one that skips through principles and technical aspects, and weaves it together with anecdotes from his larger-than-life life.

The conversations featured in Wood’s collection are drawn from her bimonthly The Writer’s Room Interviews, a kind of local Paris Review. The results demonstrate the value of free-ranging conversation between peers: it is a model for extracting and communicating nuanced information, and achieving clarity

within complexity. Wood has selected a wonderfully diverse group of Australian and New Zealand writers. Between them they have published literary fiction, novels for children and young adults, short stories, criticism, essays, memoir, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, corporate writing, journalism, scripts for production, and ghostwriting. The magic of conversation leads to thoughtful, nakedly honest, and often illuminating commentary from them, and from Wood herself.

Don’t read this book if you just want a set of instructions on ‘how to be a great writer’. In fact, don’t read any book if that’s all you want, because there is no twelve-step solution, no template for writing. As Amanda Lohrey says in her conversation with Wood: ‘The best plans never work, do they?’ But do read this book if you want to understand how established authors manage their work. It contains a wealth of practical information, and a lot of ‘aha’ moments, in twelve generous, lucid, and surprisingly revealing conversations. It is difficult not to derive valuable approaches to writing from these 437 pages of commentary about the lives and processes of these very different writers: the stratagems they apply, the rules they make and break, and their individual truisms about the art, the craft, the profession, the vocation of writing. For me, it is summed up as the willingness and the capacity to attend to the long slow process of writing, reading, writing,

reflecting, writing, critiquing, writing, reviewing, writing. ‘Just write’ (James Bradley). Write as ‘a conversation with life’ (Tegan Bennett Daylight). ‘Surprise yourself’ (Lloyd Jones). ‘Get lost in the makingness of things’ (Kim Scott).

Each of these thirteen authors, in their varying accents and from their various backgrounds, talk about strategies for wrangling the complexities of life. How to manage your time, your relationships, your disappointments. How to deal with depression. How to manage envy and its cousin, shame. How to cope with being confronted by failure, by one’s own inadequacies, by lack of funding. But as well as the ‘disillusionment, pessimism, dystopia’ (Wayne Macauley), there is also humour and pleasure and the chance to ‘make sense of the divine or the nightmarish or the dangerous’ (Christos Tsiolkas).

If I were compelled to find a hole in this collection, I would probably say that I would have liked to see more probing of an issue pretty well all the authors discussed: how to ‘get it right’; how to know when to push on, when to stop, when to discard. But this is small beer in the light of a book that is transfixingly clear about the impulse to write, what galvanises one’s writing, and the magic that is at work in this creative practice.

The first third of DBC Pierre’s Release the Bats treads very similar terrain, conveyed in his idiosyncratic voice. He confronts his own – and by extension, his readers’ –desires, aspirations, and anxieties in a voice that can be touchingly irresolute, touchingly lacking in hubris. Despite the bravado of tone found elsewhere in the book, and the sometimes glib scenarios offered as prompts for stories, when he writes about his own way of approaching the world of writing, the life of a writer, I found him convincing. His characterisation of the ‘two worlds’ in which we live – ‘one where shit happens and one where we decide what it was’ – makes sense as a catalyst for writing: he genuinely seems to understand existential uncertainty.

Unfortunately, at least in my reading of the middle passage of the book, this isn’t sustained. Here I found the

writing unconvincing: full of anecdotes about hyperbolic male characters; stories about pregnant servants in his Mexican childhood home; and about being stoned; about women who fall in love too easily; about bullfighting, for heaven’s sake. I found myself thinking, with a sinking heart, that I had inadvertently got myself trapped in a bar by yet another plain-pack version of an Ernest Hemingway or a Hunter S. Thompson – writers who did it earlier, better, more persuasively. Pierre’s determinedly repeated lines about the value of being ‘a maniac’, the stories of personal chaos, of giving oneself over to recreational drugs or drink, of succumbing to despair or to fatigue: it all started to sound a little like the employee who has on their desk a sign announcing ‘You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.’

While the middle section seems under-digested, over-heated, and marred by the deployment of the comma splice, and while the end sections might have been phoned in, there is genuine honesty in the opening section. Here, with ringing clarity, Pierre reminds would-be writers that it is hard to write, that there are no shortcuts, that there is no right way to write or to live as a writer, that you have to look into the abyss, and risk it looking back into you. His rollicking, fast-moving diction can work exceptionally well to propel readers, to keep them captivated, and sometimes to find the perfect description. For instance, ‘Symbols: the gloves we use to pat spiders’. That, I love. But it’s a pity that Release the Bats was published in book form: it could have been a great essay.

In her conversation with Wood, Emily Perkins offers a small cri de coeur: ‘It’s hard. It’s hard, isn’t it? Why is it hard?’ This is a lovely summation of what seems to lie behind the experience of the fourteen writers presented in these two books: writing is hard; we hate it being so hard; and yet we keep writing. g

Jen Webb is the author of eight collections of poetry, short fiction, and photographs, and sixteen scholarly books. She is Distinguished Professor of creative practice and director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra.

The escapologist

Possible equivalences in a cat-and-mouse game

Sue Kossew

THE SCHOOLDAYS OF JESUS

by J.M. Coetzee

Text Publishing, $34.99 hb, 288 pp, 9781925355789

In order to grasp the complexity of allusions in J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, you need to have your wits about you. On the other hand, as with its prequel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the novel may also be read fairly simply, as a fable. As a sequel to the first ‘Jesus’ novel, it progresses the story of Simón, Inés, and David, the ‘holy family,’ as they continue their journey, with their dog Bolívar, from the town named Novilla to a new town, Estrella, meaning ‘star’ in Spanish, in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country.

As in the earlier novel, there is no character called Jesus; only teasing biblical references that provide an allegorical substratum to the fable-like surface story and that, along with the novel’s title, tempt the reader into equating David with Jesus. So Simón is not his real father, but has taken him under his wing as a kind of ‘god-father’; Inés is not his real mother, but has been chosen by Simón to act as David’s mother. In The Schooldays of Jesus, when David is asked whose son he is, he replies: ‘Nobody’s.’ Later he declares, ‘I wanted to be a lifesaver but they wouldn’t let me.’ Simón can’t tell David for sure if he was born ‘out of Inés’s tummy’, as memories and past experiences have been wiped clean in the process of starting

their new lives. ‘Unable to remember, all you can do, all she can do, all any of us can do is to make up stories,’ is Simón’s response to David’s question about his birth.

It is hard to resist the temptation to draw parallels, particularly when the text invites such a reading albeit without ever confirming it. There is, for example, a wonderfully redolent scene at the beginning of the novel where David tries to save a duck that has been hit by a stone thrown (‘cast’) by one of the ‘tribe’ of boys with whom he has been playing. This leads to a ‘lesson’ about repentance, conscience, and resurrection, culminating in the discovery of the duck’s almost empty grave the next day, emphasising the incident’s parable-like significance. These possible equivalences – which may or may not be significant – permeate the text in a kind of cat-and-mouse game between writer and reader.

Counting and numbers are integral to the narrative. Now that he is six, the precocious and wilful boy, who has been named David but who continues to insist that this is not his ‘true’ name, has to be educated. Having escaped, in The Childhood of Jesus, from the special school for delinquents and wards of state to which the authorities in Novilla had sent him, the question of how and where to school David arises again in Estrella.

The story is concerned with different models of learning and knowledge David encounters: mathematics, as taught by his first tutor, señor Robles, who believes that ‘every object in the world is subject to arithmetic’, is set against the mysterious numerology taught through dance and music at the Academy of Dance, where señora Arroyo ‘calls down’ mystical numbers from the stars for the children to dance. It is clearly no coincidence that the names of the Arroyos, the husband and wife who run the Academy, are Ana Magdalena and Juan Sebastian, Spanish equivalents for J.S. Bach and his second wife.

The novel includes discussion of different approaches to educating children that is reminiscent of Dickens’s Hard Times: in particular, the age-old battle between reason (Gradgrind’s ‘Facts’) and the imagination. In Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus, the new ‘metric science’ attributed to a mathematician called Metros is pitted against an older mode of human and animal understanding, arising from the ancient body-mind nexus represented by ‘music-dance’. David’s own dancing, in his performance at the end of the novel, has him ‘become pure light’ that is ‘neither body nor spirit’. Simón himself (or ‘he, Simón’ as he is

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referred to throughout), who characterises himself as ‘the danceless one’ and is unable to fully grasp the mysteries of the dance, potentially has his own moment of enlightenment, though this remains unresolved.

The clash between the imagination and the real, as it is thematised in Cervantes’Don Quixote, was central to David’s idiosyncratic way of learning

Possible

equivalences –which may or may not be significant – permeate the text in a kind of catand-mouse game between writer

and reader

to read in The Childhood of Jesus. In this follow-up novel, both David and Simón still use Cervantes’ text as a touchstone. Indeed, the epigraph to The Schooldays of Jesus is taken from Book II of Don Quixote and given in Spanish: ‘Algunos dicen: Nunca segundas partes fueron buenas’. It translates as: ‘Some say: sequels are never as good.’ In Cervantes’ text, this is a self-parody (it occurs in a discussion about the author’s motivation for the writing of Book II as profit rather than praise). Used here, it is a doubly self-referential joke, humorously anticipating a critical response to the novel as sequel whilst also acknowledging the enduring influence of Cervantes’ complex narratology and metafictional humour.

Of equal interest to Coetzee is the notion of a moral education that deals with issues of crime and punishment. It is no surprise, then, to find intertextual allusions to that other great novelist, Dostoevsky, whose works, like Cervantes’ and Defoe’s, permeate Coetzee’s oeuvre. In The Schooldays of Jesus, the unsettling character of Dmitri and that of the young man, Alyosha, bear the marks of Dostoevskyan protagonists (both names are from The Brothers Karamazov), as does its startling climax. Dostoevskyan themes of passion, guilt, confession, retribution, and forgiveness are threaded through the story.

Intrinsic to the narrative is the crucial connection between arts and sciences,

music and mathematics, passion and reason. The novel itself provides a compelling model for rethinking the dualism that led to the separation of these disciplines and the perceived neglect of the ‘training of the soul’.

The Schooldays of Jesus is both a moving story of a young boy’s formal and worldly education and a complex narrative that engages with big philosophical ideas. It confirms Coetzee’s status as one of the world’s great living writers, one whose work poses important questions without imposing simple answers. Already deservedly long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker prize, The Schooldays of Jesus is, like his other novels, clever,

intriguing, and witty whilst also being thought-provoking, literary, and elusive. Simón’s wry comment to David, after shielding him from being counted in the census – ‘Congratulations, David. You have escaped again’ – could well apply to any attempt to pin down meaning in the novel. The possibilities for interpreting its many layers are seemingly endless. Some readers may find the inconclusiveness frustrating, but, for devotees of Coetzee’s work, this novel provides another rich and rewarding reading experience. g

Sue Kossew is Chair of English and Literary Studies at Monash University. ❖

Alarms

Miracles are not like tempests. Furlongs are not like hedgerows though they come close.

Refrigerators are not like alarms although propositions are tempting.

I am not above challenges although grey kittens can be notorious when hackers are around.

Tempests are not like refrigerators though they come close.

When food moves, you move with it. When it stops, you die alone. Your fur moves onto another inventory.

It’s tempting to alarm hedgerows they’re full of hackers eating hackers. The kittens fall about.

Perhaps fur is a price though it doesn’t come close.

Jill Jones’s most recent poetry collection is Breaking the Days (2015).

Jill Jones

Cold places

Amy Baillieu

THE GOOD PEOPLE by Hannah Kent Picador

$32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781743534908

After reading her début novel about Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland, no one is likely to pick up a book by Hannah Kent expecting a frothy comedy set in a sun-drenched contemporary location, but even for the author of Burial Rites (2013) this compelling new historical novel ventures into grim and shadowy territory.

The Good People was inspired by an article about an unusual Irish trial that Kent came across while doing research for Burial Rites. As the London Morning Advertiser reported in 1826, the main witness claimed that the actions undertaken by the accused were not done with intent to harm the child ‘but to cure it – to put the fairy out of it’

As Kent acknowledges in an author letter included in advance copies, she writes books ‘about dark happenings in cold places’. However, where Burial Rites gradually moves towards understanding, acceptance, and redemption, The Good People is far bleaker, with few characters left unscathed. Setting the tone for the novel by prefacing it with the lyrics of an Irish murder ballad from 1600, Kent dives deep into the murky waters of human nature, finding there is nothing so potentially lethal as the combination of desperation, false hope, and blind faith when added to grief, superstition, and ignorance.

The novel opens as the unfortunate Nóra Leahy is confronted at her cabin in a remote Irish valley by two local men carrying the body of her beloved husband, Martin, who has ‘collapse[d] at the crossroads where they buried suicides’. Now she must look after their grandson, Micheál, alone. Foreshadowing later developments, Nóra’s first thought is that the body ‘could not be her husband’s’ but must be ‘a changeling’; her second is to move Micheál

from the cabin so that when the new priest and the ‘quiet, close folk’ of the valley arrive for the wake they won’t be ‘gawping and gossiping over him’.

Micheál is a difficult, ‘ill-thriven’ child. Delivered into Nóra and Martin’s care by his poverty-stricken and recently widowed father, the previously ‘normal, healthy’ four-year-old has become ‘dreadful thin’ and can no longer speak or walk. At first, Nóra believes he has simply ‘mouldered’ from the cold and hunger he suffered as a toddler, but, after Martin’s death, a series of events, combined with her own grief, leads Nóra to believe that Micheál is not her grandson but rather a fairy substitute.

The inevitably tragic story is told chronologically from the perspectives of the three main characters: the widowed Nóra, submerged in grief and increasingly relying on the alcoholic comforts of the poitín bottle; Nance Roche, an old woman who lives alone in the forest by the river Flesk and who is said to have ‘the knowledge’ from the Good People themselves; and Mary Clifford, a fourteen-year-old hired by Nóra after Martin’s death to help with Micheál. These three women are all, in their own ways, outsiders in the valley.

Kent brings the bitterly cold winter landscapes to life with flair and precision. As in Burial Rites, she does not shy away from the less-than-bucolic realities of nineteenth-century rural life: mud, cow shit, and even the practical housing adjustments necessary when sharing a small, enclosed space with a goat. Her characters are nuanced and sympathetically handled (with only one perpetrator of domestic violence appearing as a one-dimensional villain). She evokes the terrors of hunger, loneliness, cold, and isolation.

Her descriptions can be startling (rosary beads ‘bauble’ Nóra’s skin into welts, and she feels later that ‘her soul was grinding itself into powder under the weight of her own unhappiness’), but also melodramatic (such as when lightning flashes light up Nance’s face as she greets Nóra); sometimes they veer towards the indulgently lyrical and alliterative. The images of rising waters and drowning that ripple through the text can be heavy-handed; and even

scenes of children playing and picking berries are given a macabre twist. Kent evidently relishes the inventiveness of Irish idiom; her descriptions of Micheál are particularly creative and affecting as she emphasises his difference and extreme vulnerability.

The world Kent depicts is richly and convincingly layered with superstition, ritual, and religious belief. Few of the valley dwellers question the idea that Micheál has been replaced by a changeling. Kent touches on the wider societal and political context of the story, but aside from a brief section towards the end the narrative is confined to the ‘fertile crucible’ of the valley. Knowing that The Good People is based on real events makes for an uncomfortable reading experience and it is difficult to suspend modern awareness and sympathies in order to accept the world as it is seen by Nóra, Nance, Mary, and their neighbours – a world in which fairies are a fact of life and where threatening a changeling might be your best chance to have your own child returned, unharmed and healthy. A few instances where it seems as though magic might actually be taking place contrast awkwardly with the realism of the rest of the narrative.

In the end, the reader is necessarily another kind of outsider, bearing witness to the muddy realities of the world that Kent has conjured, but unable to fully enter into them. g

Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of Australian Book Review

What if?

Francesca Sasnaitis

COMMONWEALTH

by Ann Patchett HarperCollins

$29.99 pb, 322 pp, 9781408880395

Life, one of Commonwealth’s minor characters remarks, is a series of losses. Teresa Cousins acknowledges that life is also other, better things, but that it is the losses that define us – ‘as solid and dependable as the earth itself’. This is at the crux of Ann Patchett’s seventh novel, but Commonwealth is not a maudlin, grief-stricken ramble through divorce and disaster. To the contrary, it is a deft rendering of complex interfamilial relationships, filled as much with misunderstandings and drama as with reconciliations and humour. Patchett applies the same rules of engagement to this suburban milieu as she did to Bel Canto’s far more extreme hostage crisis situation. After Bel Canto (2001) won the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Patchett admitted with unwonted modesty that she had previously tried writing in the omniscient third person but had always failed. Her utilisation of multiple voices and viewpoints now appears effortless. Commonwealth begins with a christening party and a figure framed in a doorway. Fix Keating, father of baby Franny, struggles to place the fellow standing on his porch. With his recognition of attorney Bert Cousins, the angle widens to include the baby’s mother, Beverly, and ‘neighbours and friends and

people from church and Beverly’s sister and all his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops’. Patchett establishes characters through the timbre of their interior monologues and their attitudes to others. The cast continues to drift in and out of frame as the author pans through the living room, the kitchen, the backyard, providing a glimpse into the mores of 1960s Irish Catholic Los Angelenos. Personalities begin to emerge from the scrum of guests, and it becomes obvious that a couple of marriages are not working. The fatal moment comes with the glimpse of a beautiful face in the crowd.

Fast-forward fifty years and baby Franny is a grown woman taking her father to the UCLA Medical Centre for chemotherapy. What is left is the imperative to hear, to collect, and to remember the stories of a particular life before those stories die with the man. Franny comes to regret ‘the things [she] didn’t listen to, won’t remember, never got right, wasn’t around for’. Forgetting is the tragedy, she realises.

Between the fateful christening party, during which Bert and Beverly discovered their mutual, though not abiding, passion, and the noughties of extended families and elderly parents, Patchett plays the game of slow revelation, demonstrating an astute manipulation of the minutiae of daily life, and insight into psychological development and the see-saw of attraction-aversion, action-reaction.

The primary consequence of Bert and Beverly’s attraction is the destruction of their first marriages and the effect this has on the two Keating girls and the four Cousins. Franny and her responsible sister Caroline live permanently with Bert and Beverly in Virginia and see their father for only two weeks in summer. Angry Cal, amenable Holly, silent Jeanette and Albie live with their mother Teresa in California but join the newlyweds and their step-sisters for the entire vacation. The blended family summers are not a success. The children do not particularly like each other but are united in hatred of their parents. Beverly retreats from the chaos of six children. Bert is the classic absent father, interested in his children only in

the abstract. The children exploit their neglect. They find a handgun in the glovebox; they polish off the gin; they get rid of annoying Albie by feeding him Benadryl that sends the youngest child into a deep sleep. What they get up to would horrify any adult, but in the halcyon days of the 1970s there is no one around to notice.

‘Commonwealth’ has obvious connotations: an independent state; a union of countries; a self-governing community; the general good. But Commonwealth is also the title of a novel within the novel. The young Franny, a law school dropout, meets a famous writer, an older man whose work she much admires, in the bar where she works as a cocktail waitress. Leon Posen has the reputation of a Philip Roth or John Updike, but he has been relying on past glory too long and is close to becoming an alcoholic. Leon is smitten and Franny is flattered that an Anton Chekov might be interested in her life.

Posen can be accused of salvaging his career by stealing the story of Franny’s family, but isn’t everything fair game to the writer? Reality should not be confused with, but informed by, fiction. That real people recognise themselves in the characters is of little consequence. The pertinent question should be whether the fictional world is true to itself. The Keating–Cousins’ reactions to Posen’s Commonwealth vary from denial to mild amusement to shock, but when the inevitable film comes out, it is predictably wrong, a horror to their memories.

In the end, Franny may speculate on what might have happened if one stupid childhood act had not lead to a tragedy or if two people had not fallen in love or if they had not acted on that attraction or if, or if – a million ifs proliferate. She comes to the conclusion that ‘to map out all the ways the future would unravel without the mooring of the past’ is impossible. The temptation of one possible gain hardly outweighs the myriad of unforeseen losses. Therein lies the pathos of Commonwealth. g

Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

A frolic in the slips

Craig Billingham

THE RULES OF BACKYARD CRICKET

by Jock Serong

Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925355215

Rain delays at sporting events are not reserved exclusively for reading Australian literature, which I think is a great shame. For example, in July 2016, Alex James, a cricket fan from Brisbane, decided during a washed out session of the First Test between Sri Lanka and Australia to frolic naked on the slickened ground covers, an act for which he was jailed for a week and fined 3,000 rupees (approximately $28). I know this because I overheard two men discussing it merrily on my regular train trip between the Blue Mountains and Sydney. Normally I would have been mildly annoyed – we were in the quiet carriage – but, since I was in the process of reading Jock Serong’s second novel, The Rules of Backyard Cricket, their intervention seemed timely.

‘Timely’ is how Malcolm Knox, on the front cover, describes The Rules of Backyard Cricket, and it’s clear he means no coincidence with Sydney Trains or with my reading habits; he means the scandals that dog professional sport, from performance-enhancing drugs to match-fixing, via the occasionally appalling off-field behaviour of young men and women (though mostly men) caught up in the heady mix of being an élite athlete, a celebrity, and a role model. How this behaviour may in some instances shade from larrikinism to selfsabotage, or even cause lasting harm to other people, is the driving concern of Serong’s new novel.

In The Rules of Backyard Cricket, the larrikin in question is Darren Keefe, the novel’s first-person narrator. Darren is a prodigiously talented Victorian batsman, ‘a force of nature: a talented freak with no mooring’. Success comes

early, but, just as clouds have silver linings, Darren’s balloon is peppered with targets; throughout, it seems he can’t get out of his own way. Alcohol, recreational drugs, and a wayward friend called Craig: these are ominous signs indeed. For the most part, Darren’s scrapes do not test our credulity, possibly an indictment of contemporary sport. It is giving little away to say the novel starts with Darren in the boot of a car, gagged, cable-tied, and bleeding. That we have to wait until the end to learn how he got there, and whether he will manage to extricate himself, adds the thriller tag to an otherwise literary novel.

The sense of Darren teetering on the brink is contrasted with the smooth sailing of his older brother, Wally, also a professional cricketer, who is described as ‘responsible, grave: a leader’. The intimacy and the antagonism are pronounced; Darren and Wally regularly knock chunks out of each other and then proceed to pick at the scabs, as brothers will, but there are also quieter moments of empathy and communication. The relationship of one brother to another – how they respond to events, how they move together and apart, and the rewards each is fated to enjoy – gives the novel its buoyancy.

But of Darren’s potential ‘moorings’ it is his mother, who for the most part brought up two children as a single parent, and also Hannah, his niece, to whom he seems most emotionally connected. The relationships are well drawn, culminating in real tenderness in the final third of the novel, when so much else is unravelling. If Darren could have steadied himself, we feel, it would have been for the benefit of one of these two women.

Reminiscent of Malcolm Knox’s A Private Man (2004), which also featured a professional cricketer, the subject under investigation in The Rules of Backyard Cricket is a recognisable variant of the Australian male: white, laconic, barrel-chested, hands shaped by long exposure to bats and balls and beer bottles. The female characters largely symbolise innocence and sacrifice, and their involvement is ultimately in the service of Darren or Wally’s story. As a microcosm of mainstream Australia from the 1970s onwards, The Rules of

Backyard Cricket is both satire and lament; it does little for national pride, sporting or otherwise.

Alongside his freakish talent as a batsman, Darren Keefe also has a gift for lyricism. Attending the funeral of a dementia sufferer, he says: ‘I know the casket’s over-generous, because in the end there was so little of her, as though the departing memories took the flesh off her bones as they went.’ Later he reflects: ‘We rationalise the inexplicable because we don’t like it occupying that infirm ground in our hearts.’ He watches a man in a café as he ‘sheafs through the papers with the air of a bored factotum’.

In the examples cited, and there are others, there is a misalignment between the sophistication of the prose and the character of the narrator; it is Jock Serong we hear, not Darren Keefe. This was not a problem in Serong’s first novel, Quota (2014), which employed thirdperson narration to good effect. In Quota, Serong could range more broadly, from Melbourne barristers to small-town fishermen, finding the appropriate register as he went; for Darren Keefe, the intrusion of the novelist’s ‘voice’ on occasion obscures the consciousness Serong is attempting to portray.

On the whole, I enjoyed The Rules of Backyard Cricket, and I will look out for Serong’s next book. In preparation for the inevitable rain delay, Alex James might do the same. g

Craig Billingham is a Doctor of Arts candidate at the University of Sydney.

Moonstone

Claudia Hyles

RUINS

by Rajith Savanadasa Hachette

$27.99 pb, 343 pp, 9780733635052

Ruins is the impressive début novel of Rajith Savanadasa, born in Sri Lanka and now living in Melbourne. He is founder and primary contributor to Open City Stories, a website documenting the lives of a group of asylum seekers in Melbourne, lives that may have been in similar ruins to those described in the book.

Five voices tell the story set in the anxious period at the end of the twentysix-year-long Sri Lankan Civil War. Since 1983 an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had torn the country apart. The Tigers’ dream of an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka’s north and east finally ended on 18 May 2009 when government troops defeated the remaining Tigers.

Mano is the Sinhalese editor of a failing English-language newspaper. Office standards have slipped, as have sales, and Mano has sunk into despondency, reduced to toeing the line and printing safe things ‘fed to us by the ministries’. He sanitises stories to avoid the wrath of the powerful. Although Mano sees little fault in himself, ‘peacetime editorial’ leaves him ‘unsettled’ and ‘disori-

ented’, and his workplace gloom invades his home life as a new and hopeful Sri Lanka begins to emerge.

Home life is a microcosmic combat zone. Lakshmi, Mano’s Tamil wife, radiates ill-temper and distraction bordering on mania. She appreciates the sacrifices Mano has made in their mixed marriage, but the war has overwhelmed her domestic world. A Tamil in Australia contacts her by email and asks her to find a beggar boy from her home town. His father, a poor fisherman, has found asylum in Australia and wants to be reunited with his son. Lakshmi becomes obsessed with finding the boy, conflating him with another lost child, her son Niranjan, whom she finds hard to understand when he returns from Sydney with a degree from UTS and a taste for a different kind of life.

Lakshmi’s nagging drives Niranjan from the house to a smart flat. His teenage sister Anoushka believes his departure is her fault. Anoushka feels misunderstood by all and is treated like a baby. This is of course not an unusual situation, and her parents would definitely have tried most daughters, but she is particularly unpleasant and rude. Against the odds, her O-Levels results are brilliant. But, pressured beyond all limits, she reacts violently.

While rather wallowing in their own ruinous unhappiness, the four family members exhibit great selfishness. The fifth voice is different. Latha, the household’s servant who, with benign tolerance, considers her family to be ‘good people’. Abandoned by her own parents, she is grateful to have accumulated enough pinn, or merit, to have earned such surrogates. Whilst not physically abusive, the behaviour of the family towards Latha is contemptible. They criticise her cooking and cleaning, begrudge her the tiniest boon of a telephone call, and generally treat her as a half-witted and expendable slave.

Subterfuge pervades the book and one insidious consequence of the war is that people lose basic trust. Colleagues might be informers, anonymous phone calls could mean the phone is tapped, recognition by a soldier at a checkpoint could result in being put ‘in a white van’ and disappearing. Mano hides his arrack

from the family and becomes a voyeur, stalking an old office friend; Anoushka manufactures alibis, covering her tracks in a quest for punk rock music and a cool image, Lakshmi makes clandestine visits to an astrologer. Phrases and short conversations in untranslated Sinhala add to the veil of secrecy.

Latha receives news that her nephew Kumara, a soldier, has died on the battlefield. ‘Bad karma’ thinks Latha: first Niranjan has an accident, then a goldfish dies (not as absurd as it sounds), then Kumara. Grudgingly, Mano grants her leave for the funeral. ‘We will have to buy lunch and dinner for a week,’ he notes before deciding that the family will take a holiday and drive Latha to her village. On the way they stop to inspect some thirteenth-century ruins, palaces and military strongholds built against foreign invaders. At the base of a staircase, Mano finds a sandakada pahana or moonstone, a semi-circular carved stone representing the Buddhist wheel of life. Desire, he says, is the cause of pain in this never-ending cycle.

Latha, overcome by grief and confusion, leaves the funeral and experiences a kind of transfiguration. She finds ‘the story of the moonstone is everywhere and nowhere’. She recognises the futility of her search for something tangible which presents a kind of truth reinforcing the Buddhist view that the primary purpose of life is to end the cycle of suffering.

There is much to consider in Ruins and many issues have contemporary relevance. There are no devastating images, as in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012) or Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000), but in depicting what seems like an ordinary family, Savanadasa suggests unbearable tensions and imaginings. An Author’s Note states that the novel’s structure is loosely based on the symbolism of the moonstone, and drawings of it mark the start and end of the text. He says the moonstone is no longer a simple analogy mapping ‘myth, experience or history but a space to project one’s own meaning’. g

Claudia Hyles is a Canberra-based writer and reviewer with a great interest in South Asia.

PETER PORTER POETRY PRIZE

Australian Book Review seeks entries for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of $7,500. English-language poets from all countries are eligible. Online entry is available via our website.

First Prize: $5,000 and Arthur Boyd’s The lady and the unicorn, 1975, an etching and aquatint from the publication of the same name which Arthur Boyd produced with Peter Porter. This print is donated by Ivan Durrant in honour of Georges Mora.

Shortlisted Poems: $500

Judges: Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, and Felicity Plunkett

Closing date: 1 December 2016

Special offer

Subscribe to ABR Online (RRP AU$50) and enter one poem for just $55, a saving of $15. Additional entries cost only $15.

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

Bobbin Up by Dorothy Hewett

by Nicholas Jose

‘

Bobbin Up was written in 1958 during eight weeks of the coldest Sydney winter on record’, recalled Dorothy Hewett in her introduction to the Virago Modern Classics reprint of her first novel in 1985. Encouraged by Frank Hardy, Hewett wrote it for the Mary Gilmore Award for fiction, to a tight deadline. After being rescued from a cupboard by one of the judges, it won second prize. Published by the leftist Australasian Book Society in 1959, the first edition was a success and the 3,000 copies sold out quickly. But it was not available again until Seven Seas in East Berlin published an English export edition along with its German translation, Die Mädchen von Sydney, in 1965, with a print run of 10,000 copies, from which other Eastern bloc translations followed.

This fascinating information comes from Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain, edited by Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel and just published (Anthem Press, 2016). The inclusion of Bobbin Up in Virago’s influential list in 1985 then introduced the book to new audiences in a context of rediscovered international Anglophone women’s writing. In 1999, a fortieth-anniversary edition appeared, edited by Ian Syson and published by the Vulgar Press in Melbourne. I reviewed Bobbin Up for The Age Monthly Review when the Virago edition came out, concluding enthusiastically: ‘May it never again go out print!’ Alas, in vain. It’s hard to find now, even second-hand. ‘And yet … and yet …’, so the author mulls over her early work.

I wrote it on the end of the laminex kitchen table, working into the early hours of the morning after the

children were in bed, warming my hands over the electric stove, because we had run out of money and coal … I found myself for the first time for years facing a typewriter with time to spare in between putting a catalogue to bed … I started writing again.

Nine years earlier, Dorothy Hewett had arrived in Sydney from Western Australia and found work at the Alexandria Spinning Mills, experience she turns to. Like her, Beth in chapters two and three has come from Perth with her lover. Like her, Nell in chapters eleven and twelve, given the fullest portrait in a vividly individuated cast, is an author – of another ‘Bobbin Up’, this one the roneo’ed ‘Communist Party leaflet, written for and about the Jumbuck Mills for the Jumbuck workers’, which brings the women out on strike. With its punchy opening, ‘There’s a name for a man who lives off women’, that ‘Bobbin Up’ was ‘definitely a best seller, outselling even True Romance’.

Bobbin Up can be read as a social realist or naturalist novel, as Stephen Knight shows in a fine essay called ‘Bobbin Up and the Working-class Novel’. But it’s other things too, and never simply any one of them: autobiographical, feminist, modernist, experimental; steeped in popular culture and a sense of the city; lyrical and dramatic. Nick Enright made a musical of it for NIDA students in 1993. Knight recognises the work’s formal innovation: ‘the characters coexist, like threads of a larger pattern, not being organised in tiers of importance as is usual in the novel’. Susan Sheridan notices how Hewett describes ‘proletarian life with a verve and sensuality far removed from the sober worker heroism that was the preferred mode of socialist realism … the prose has the

rhythmic and imagistic power of poetry’. Moving freely across genres, borrowing, reinventing, Hewett’s radical artistry splices shifting tones and textures together. The author was apologetic in 1985: ‘Sometimes sentimental, sometimes didactic, sometimes clumsy and overwritten Bobbin Up was the work of a still young writer struggling to find her own style and voice.’ Here I prefer to trust the tale rather than the teller. At thirty-six, Hewett knows what she is doing as a writer, and this mix is her discovery. ‘Clumsy and overwritten’? No, the style is responsive to a new, emerging vision.

Sheridan quotes Hewett’s letter to Meanjin editor Clem Christesen in May 1958: ‘Last year I started seriously writing again … So now I am making my second run …’ That was Bobbin Up, and a run that would carry her through successive new starts in plays, poems, memoirs, and more fiction in a career without parallel in Australian literature. Her kaleidoscopic autobiography Wild Card (1990) charts a trajectory from 1923 to 1958 that ends with Bobbin Up, where the two works converge at an angle. Hewett associates the commission to write Wild Card with meeting Carmen Callil in London when Virago was reprinting Bobbin Up. ‘Tell us about yourself,’ urged Callil, the expatriate Australian publisher. With its antipodean input, Virago Modern Classics reprinted many key Australian and New Zealand works, including Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and Sylvia Ashton-Warner in the first fifty titles.

The cover of Virago’s Bobbin Up shows a beautiful watercolour by the New Zealand artist Rita Angus of her sister-in-law Timmy, painted in 1952. The book was in good company.

Bobbin Up can be read as a social realist or naturalist novel

Hewett apparently told her daughter Kate Lilley not to read Bobbin Up because it was ‘no good’. But Kate enjoyed it, in the Virago edition, and in time the author herself became less critical. Hewett’s relationship with her own novel is inseparable from its politics, which, in Nell, the closest to an authorial stand-in, can look naïve. There is an interesting authorial distance that relates to Hewett’s own changing relationship with radical and working-class politics. ‘I lived and worked and gave birth and wrote amongst them [the people of South Sydney]’, Hewett explained in 1999: ‘Bobbin Up is the lasting memorial of that encounter.’

She sounds elegiac, but there is more to Hewett’s language when she contemplates her creation: ‘I find it returning like a doppelganger … does it still tap some nerve of recognition … have they risen up with some odd, compulsive life of their own, that silent majority I worked beside thirty-five years ago?’ Her language responds to the irrepressible vitality that a reader feels on every page. The women stick their bobbins up the

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ruthless male bosses, and Bobbin Up just keeps bobbing up. ‘That sense of surfacing, of emergence, a marginal positive [where women have the numbers],’ Knight calls it, ‘wrily suggested in the title itself.’ Or, in Hewett’s words, ‘I … gave birth and wrote’, and what she gave birth to with this enduring book includes herself as a writer

‘Shirl was nineteen years old, four months gone and just starting to show, bumping through Newtown on the back of a second-hand Norton.’ The theme of emergence is there from the opening sentence. A sequence of loosely linked chapters takes us into the lives of the women from Jumbuck Mills as they move between home and work, the family, the past, the pressing present, and a future of dream or despair. They are seen coupled – with a man, a mother, a child, a sister – and standing alone. Shirl’s emergence, her bump, is also an emergency. She needs to get Jack to the registry office, concealing an earlier relationship with another man who was smashed up on his bike and left her pregnant, with a baby born terminally deformed. Shirl’s mother sees the scheming in her daughter’s seeming spontaneity: ‘You’re hard … Hard as nails.’ The clock is ticking. For Shirl, whom ‘no one had ever wanted to protect before’, as she feels Jack might, the only option is to press forward. ‘Don’t ever look back. If you look back you might turn into a pillar of salt.’

Feelings of nurture conflict with other exigencies

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throughout the book, from the beach, where conception takes place, to the women’s hospital. Beth is rapturously pregnant, showering with her man in ‘rainbowing’ spray and ‘the great white globe of her belly’. She has a ‘blue crepe-de-chine maternity frock’. But pregnancy is what Dawnie fears and Gwennie curses. The sexuality of Hewett’s characters – their physicality, desire, and self -image – is a shaping force.

In a powerful pair of contrasting chapter-portraits at the heart of the book, sixteen-year-old Patty dreams excitedly of being a singer while twenty-eight-year-old Maisie is near-destroyed by a dream of social betterment. After singing in a local club, Patty resists the temptation to ride home with a passing ‘bodgie’ and goes home to sleep ‘as lonesome as the white, scarred face of the moon’, her isolation part of the cost of what she longs for. Her older sister Jeanie, protective of Patty, remembers the deprivation and humiliation of their childhood as ‘Commo kids’. Her husband Alec works overtime and they’re saving hard for a new house. But Jeanie still has to rely on her mother Peggy to mind the kids, and Peggy, for all her loyalty to her activist past, hopes that her daughter will achieve her bourgeois dream, as maternal feelings well up with the tears from the onions she is slicing.

The action of Bobbin Up takes place as the Soviet satellite Sputnik passes over Sydney in the small hours of the morning in October 1957, a ‘man-made star, a pathfinder’, watched with wonder by all the world, at once cheesy and memorable as a time marker. As Tom and Peggy McGuire watch from their backyard by the railway line, Peggy reveals that she is pregnant again, with ‘a change of life baby’, sixteen years after she had Patty. ‘Can’t keep a good militant down,’ jokes Tom, ‘We’ll call him Sputnik.’ A new world of technological advancement, mass communications, Cold War, and consumerism – a continuing emergency – is at hand. This prompts reflection from Tom as he drifts off to sleep beside his wife. In fact he never joined the Party, though he and others had ‘seen the need to change the world, and, in doing so, had begun the long, painful, bitter process of changing themselves’. The success of Sputnik, in which Tom feels a part, shows him that ‘all men only existed in relationship to other men’. And all women in relationship to other women, we might want to add.

The buoyancy of this chapter is remarkable, not least because of its insistence on time’s passage, across the night, from youth to age, from expectation to loss, as Hewett’s camera pans. That opening sentence recurs, like a knell. ‘Four months gone and just starting to show, Shirl roared up King Street on the back of a secondhand Norton.’ The recursion tips the weight onto time that is now a pressure as much as a space of becoming: ‘four months gone’. Hewett is never better than in her kinaesthetic evocation of mutability, an eternal double of celebration and lament. She cannot write illumination

without its shadow, joy without sorrow, nor disappointment without a glimpse of renewal:

Generations merged into each other and time lost its meaning. The struggle to live out your days blurred your dreams. Powerless, you watched them sliding away like the sunlight on the roofs of trains, never to come back again, lost forever … lost … lost … only to be born again in the hearts of the little girls leaning over the railway fence chucking orange peel onto the rails.

This concertina of time, from the moment of writing back to the days in the mills nearly a decade earlier, spirals further back into Australia’s violent past, as people’s stories rise up like ghosts. ‘’E’s still got the marks of the “cat” on ’is back’ is said of one Woollahra old-timer, in a reminder that convict floggings continued in Australia well into the twentieth century.

Patty’s hope is balanced by Maisie’s despair, beaten by her husband, rejecting of her children. Maisie’s mother sees her grown daughter as ‘the Frankenstein she’d created, this monster that strode the earth like dung, staring at her out of the vicious wreckage of her own life’. The spectre is evoked with ‘terrible compassion’ and understood as the fatal expression of a brutalising, exploitative social system. Yet there is hope. Maisie’s children are ‘beautiful’, ‘healthy’, ‘guileless as angels’.

The focus on Nell and her husband Stan offers the most sustained analysis of the struggle to reconcile individualism, commitment, and collective action. Even as

Nell succeeds in getting ‘Bobbin Up’ through the branch, Stan is heroic in not wanting to damage the union on account of a personal defeat. The sequence ends with a collage of Stan’s life as he sings his pain with Whitmanesque grandeur for all of them, alone on the back step with his ukulele as Sputnik sails on.

Nicole Moore illuminates Hewett’s work with a quotation from Julia Kristeva on the relationship between desire and meaning, where body and word join to assure a kind of life ‘which is only because it imagines’. Through language a transforming fantasy remakes the individual body, connecting it to the world’s flesh. In Bobbin Up, what Moore calls ‘a collective, yet corporeal, affect … a particularly gendered, feminine model’ makes a strong debut, showing the generative body in a world where it is connected vitally to, immersed in, the collective.

For Australian literature, Dorothy Hewett’s work is generative and liberating, like the magically renewing pudding that Nell introduces to her children at bedtime. If the job for life that workers want is also a sentence, ‘for the term of your natural life’ as Dawnie’s boyfriend thinks, Dawnie herself, with ‘the pale, wispy Australian sky fragile as hope above her head’ (my italics) suggests something different – bigger-hearted, freer, more open, better. That is the possibility that Hewett’s art yearns after and embodies. It is exciting to experience an author discovering herself. I’m reminded of the exhilaration George Herbert expresses in his poem ‘The Flower’ (published in 1633), when he feels himself writing again: ‘I live

Dorothy Hewett in Gingin, Western Australia, 1940 (image courtesy of the Estate of Dorothy Hewett and UWA Publishing)

and write; / I once more smell the dew and rain, / And relish versing … ’ It is exciting to see the novel reinvent itself too, as it always must, always new, always novel, especially in an Australian context, where coming into being, experimentally, is a continuous necessity. In that respect, Bobbin Up sits with Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) Hewett’s first play, This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (eventually performed in Sydney in 1968), emerges from the same milieu and period as Bobbin Up. In a production I saw in Adelaide at the Bakehouse Theatre in 2013, the tension between live progressive politics and a fondly recreated lost world made for an intriguing theatrical experience. Bobbin Up, with its chorus of rich vernacular voices, its songs and dances, its interior monologues, rhetorical apostrophes, and staged confrontations, is a rehearsal for the dramatic potential that would burst forth in Hewett’s later theatrical triumphs, in The Chapel Perilous (1972), for example, or The Man from Mukinupin (1979). I remember the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Man from Mukinupin in 1981, directed by Rodney Fisher, with Noni Hazlehurst, Colin Friels, John Gaden, and Ruth Cracknell in the cast, and in 1983 Fields of Heaven, on which Hewett again worked with Fisher, starring Heather Mitchell.

(1980) was praised for its frankness about the multiple burdens women were asked to bear in keeping up their half of the sky. I wrote that Bobbin Up allows us ‘to conceive what it might have been like to believe in’ a communist revolution. No doubt I was thinking of Chinese friends and colleagues who were reviewing their own ideological positions in the aftermath of Mao. I knew that Dorothy had been to China from the Soviet Union, clandestinely, in 1952, as she would later record in Wild Card. She stayed at the Peking Hotel.

‘China is good for us,’ she writes, meaning personally. ‘Hope revives.’ Again, the sense of emergence catches her imagination, of possibility, revolutionary or otherwise, ‘where the ancient and the new converge for one extraordinary moment in human history’.

I met Dorothy and Merv Lilley around that time and we had some great talks. That was one reason I was happy to discover Bobbin Up when Virago reprinted it and I was asked to review it. I was in China at the time, and that is part of the context. The mid-1980s was a time when Chinese writers were at last able to move away from writing about factory workers and when Shen Rong’s best-selling novel At Middle Age

I reviewed Bobbin Up alongside collections of stories by John Morrison and Helen Garner, This Freedom and Postcards from Surfers (both 1985). Not a bad line-up: there are connections between all three writers. Yet the perfect spareness of Garner’s great story ‘The Life of Art’, which appears in Postcards, could not be more of a contrast with the rich, raw amplitude of Hewett’s ‘art of life’ in Bobbin Up. To adapt the words of the song that runs as a refrain through the novel and that was a hit at the time of writing, whether sung by thirteen-year-old Laurie London at Abbey Road or Nina Simone in Atlantic City, or Dorothy Hewett in her kitchen in Sydney, ‘She’s got the whole world in her hands.’ g

Nicholas Jose’s most recent work of fiction is Bapo (2014). He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide.

This essay was first given as a talk in the Reading Australian Literature series, in the Sydney Ideas program at the University of Sydney.

The Virago Modern Classics edition, 1985

The Vulgar Press edition, 1999

Sunset Song

by Brian McFarlane

It is possible that the remainder of 2016 may produce a more memorable film than Sunset Song, but I doubt it. None so far has moved and enthralled me as Terence Davies’ latest has. How I wish he didn’t keep us waiting so long between films. It was the semi-autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) that established him as a major figure, and in the new century there was the brilliant, painful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2001), the eloquent documentary of growing up in Liverpool, Of Time and the City (2008), and a moving version of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (2011). In my view, there is more sense of piercing emotional truth in Davies’ films than in those of almost any other working director.

His latest, Sunset Song, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel of the same name, is no exception. It tells the story of a Scottish girl called Chris Guthrie, who, as a teenager in Aberdeenshire, shows serious academic interest and promise. The film opens on a sumptuously shot field of waving corn from which Chris emerges – she’s been lying there – and then cuts to her in a Latin class where she is asked to say something in French because she is said to have an immaculate accent. Two crucial matters are thus established: her aspirations and the land whose enduringness will outlast everything that follows, including family griefs and the havoc and brutalisation of World War I.

The film cuts from Chris and her schoolfriend running happily along a forest road to the interior warmth – and what seems domestic harmony – of the Guthrie family: father (Peter Mullan) and mother (Daniela Nardini), and an older brother Will (Jack Greenlees). Suddenly, with shocking arbitrariness, the puritanical Guthrie beats Will for ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’. We are made aware that we are in a patriarchal household that momentarily shatters the luminously beautiful images the film has so far dealt in – and which inevitably reminds us of Pete Postlethwaite’s brutal father in Distant Voices. Even more painful are

the cries of the mother as she is giving birth to twins upstairs. There is nothing gratuitous about the film’s moments of violence; they are presented as the almost inevitable outcome of a repressive community in which women do what they are told. Chris, for instance, will never get to realise her idea of becoming a teacher, and the mother, played with moving grace by Nardini (of This Life fame), will find that she can no longer bear the crudity of enforced sex and repeated pregnancy.

It is strange to be talking about the film as if it were full of incident. Actually, it is poetic, reflective, interested in tracing how individual lives respond to the challenges of the seasons, to the rigours of climate, and to the bursts of emotional savagery on either individual or national levels. The incidents that happen are generally those that account for a daily working life. When something more obviously dramatic occurs, it brings with it the sort of shock that everyday life, rather than the movies, has accustomed us to. Between such moments, there is, for instance, the touching sense of a bond between Chris and Will, which reminds us how rarely the affection between brothers and sisters receives serious cinematic mileage. One of their memorable scenes is that of the harvesting when the father propels the horse-drawn machine along and the siblings’ task is to gather the hay into stooks.

Such scenes reminded me of Brueghel’s unforgettable paintings of rural life. Another echo came during the sequence of the marriage of Chris and Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), a friend of her brother’s, when the whole sequence has a similar painterly beauty, a rendering of real joy that recalls such community occasions in Brueghel. More to the point, Michael McDonough’s cinematography, whether focused on the splendours of the natural world, the realities of everyday life, or the later grimness of war, is stunningly eloquent from first to last. I mentioned the wedding sequence, which creates a sense of real joy (complete with the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’). The last third of the film enacts the wonderful sense of the love and the heartbreak it will involve.

Perhaps this last third, dramatising the trauma of war, needed more detailed treatment, but the performances of all concerned, particularly that of Agyness Deyn as Chris, more than carried me through effortlessly to its poignant last moments, in which Chris’s voiceover as an older woman acknowledges what she has always believed: that ‘Nothing endures but the land’. You may be moved, but you will not be depressed. g

Sunset Song, directed by Terence Davies and based on the novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is being distributed by Madman Entertainment, and is in cinemas now. Arts Update is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.

Brian McFarlane is an Adjunct Professor, Institute of Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology. His latest book is Twenty British Films: A guided tour.

Paper wars

David McInnis

THE ONE KING LEAR

by Brian Vickers

Harvard University Press (Footprint) $84 hb, 408 pp, 9780674504844

Shakespeare’s King Lear exists in two significantly different versions, the quarto (Q) published in 1608 and the folio (F) of 1623. Scholars typically believe that the play was altered for performances after its first printing. Possibly this took place around 1610, when the King’s Men were interested enough in the legendary history of Britain to perform Cymbeline. The folio text was the seeming product of these revisions.

Distinctive features of Q include a more elaborate mock trial; the pathos of servants helping the blinded Gloucester; and a more substantial denunciation of Goneril by Albany. By contrast, Albany is systematically demonised in F (including having his final speech reassigned to Edgar); F has the Fool’s famous prophecy; and F consistently politicises the action in a way not found in Q. The Folio text justifies Lear’s decision to divide the kingdom between the dukes (‘while we / Unburthen’d crawle toward death’) somewhat more than Q, and it amplifies the uncomfortable exchange of ‘nothings’ between Lear and Cordelia. Perhaps most interestingly, Lear dies differently in Q and F. He has a moment of delusion in F (‘Do you see this? Looke on her? Looke her lips, / Looke there, looke there ...’) before dying, causing Kent so much pain that he wishes his own heart would break. In the quarto, Lear wills his own heart

to break, and then expires.

Editors of Lear responded to these differences by conflating the two texts into an imagined ‘perfect’ text. In The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s two versions of King Lear (1983), Gary Taylor and Michael Warren proposed that Q and F ‘preserve two separate and successive stages in the creation of King Lear’. In their view, ‘far from recovering the true Shakespearian perfection in form and content’, the conflated text tradition was nothing but an ‘unauthoritative creation of eighteenthcentury editors’ and their successors. The Oxford complete works of Shakespeare, which Taylor co-edited with Stanley Wells, subsequently printed the quarto and folio texts as separate plays.

Troubled by this anti-conflation argument (which ‘begs the question by assuming what it intended to prove’) and irate at how ‘proponents of the Two Versions thesis did not wait for a scholarly consensus to emerge, but in effect created one of their own’, Brian Vickers now hopes (without a hint of irony) that his new book ‘may bring about a new consensus’ and ‘restore King Lear to its original unity’. Despite the numerous bibliographical examples he offers, the circularity of Vickers’ argument (assuming the unified Lear he intends to prove) is unlikely to convince any Two Versions scholars.

Vickers’ premise is that the stationer Nicholas Okes underestimated the amount of paper (an expensive item) needed to print Lear in 1608, and consequently resorted to extreme space-saving measures. These techniques included both typographical and textual adjustments. The cumulative effect was the ‘various deformations’ present in Q. Vickers derides Okes for being a cheapskate, lacking in ‘good workmen’, and being inexperienced. Some of this scorn may be merited, but it becomes problematic when it is used to gloss over inconvenient obstacles to Vickers’ argument. Noting that Okes ‘gave the equivalent of six lines [of space] to his FINIS ’ at the end of the quarto, Vickers offers no explanation for why a printer so desperate to save space would squander six lines, but snidely remarks: ‘Modern readers might wish that he had given the

text greater priority.’

Chapter two provides a lengthy discussion of other ‘instance[s] of awkward space saving’, illustrating that Okes was extreme in the extent of his measures. Chapter three advances the major claim that Okes’s compositors (typesetters) are to blame, ‘omitting more than a hundred of Shakespeare’s lines’. The circularity of relying on his conclusion as premise is boldly stated when he claims that ‘[w]ithout the Folio as an independent witness we should never have known about the omissions Okes made’. By the end of chapter three, Vickers confidently declares that ‘we can dispense with the range of theories’ about the relationship between the two Lears, because they are really one, and Okes ‘simply had too little paper’.

The Folio text thus becomes a ‘fuller text’ rather than a different text in chapter four, where Vickers offers abridgement as a putatively simpler explanation for the Q/F differences (assuming, as it does, a common ancestor for both – which has inconveniently not survived, leaving Vickers without hard evidence). Vickers asserts that the additional text in F – such as the opening scene’s justification for dividing the kingdom – are not additions, but were present in 1608 and cut by ‘an abridger unfamiliar with the theater’. In chapter six, Vickers accuses the King’s Men of having ‘mutilated a perfectly sound copy of the play’ through performance cuts, making F a theatrically distorted (though importantly, not ‘revised’) text.

The dubious logic and polemical tone of Vickers’ book hurts its argument. Furthermore, interspersed with the bibliographical details are a series of bizarre claims about ‘Shakespeare’s intentions’, and the assertion that ‘[w]e know much more about the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays than his fellow actors did’. Throughout, the reader is bombarded with questionable textual examples but ultimately not the ‘material evidence’ that Vickers, in a perplexing and scathing final chapter, accuses revisionists of lacking. g

David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne. ❖

The Kettering Incident

by Jake Wilson

The citizens of Kettering, Tasmania might well feel ambivalent about Foxtel’s new drama The Kettering Incident, which was shot on location. A small coastal town just south of Hobart, Kettering looks like an attractive spot for a weekend getaway, but the same cannot be said of the fictionalised setting of the show, imagined by head writer Victoria Madden and her team as an insular community full of secrets.

Taking its cue from recurrent accounts of UFO sighting in the Kettering area, the show has an uncanny mood from the outset. Ari Wegner’s cinematography evokes a world where perceptions are not always reliable, where the sombre landscape looms inescapably while close-up details slide in and out of focus. The dominant colours are grey, green, and blue – dolomite cliffs, forested hills, cloudy skies. Against this backdrop touches of brightness leap out at the viewer, such as the hooded red jacket worn by Gillian Baxter (Miranda Bennett), one of two teenage girls seen at the start of the first episode riding their bikes into the woods.

Gillian never returns from the expedition; the remaining girl, Anna Macy (Maddison Brown), comes under a cloud of suspicion and is sent off to be educated in the United Kingdom. Fifteen years later and now a doctor in London (played by Elizabeth Debecki), Anna is plagued by migraines and blackouts and with no memory of the events surrounding her friend’s disappearance. When she returns to Kettering to confront her past, history seems to repeat itself; her arrival coincides with the disappearance of another girl (Sianoa Smit-McPhee), whose father (Damian Garvey) owns the local sawmill. Soon she finds herself probing not one mystery but many, as cops, businesspeople, loggers, and greenies all prove to have something to hide.

Muted yet stylish, slow-paced but intricately plotted, The Kettering Incident is one of several recent Australian efforts to emulate American-style ‘prestige television’, a genre that might be said to begin with David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks (1990–91) a reference point for

every subsequent offbeat small-town mystery with hints of the supernatural. But there is no equivalent here to Lynch’s characteristic absurd humour. The sober tone is closer to Atom Egoyan’s films about grief in a cold climate, such as The Sweet Hereafter (1997), or the understated treatment of fantasy and the gothic in the Australian work of Peter Weir.

Madden’s background is mostly in crime drama, and The Kettering Incident retains the form of a traditional whodunit, with a gallery of suspects and a solution you may or may not see coming. At the same time there are larger issues at stake: intimations of apocalypse are everywhere, whether the threat stems from nature, human technology, extra-terrestrial intervention, or a mix of all three. Oysters go bad, dogs turn on their owners; the camera dwells ominously on owls and swarms of moths. Moss climbs up walls and onto bodies, as if the land were an organism and civilisation the disease it sought to expel.

Our anchor in the midst of all this weirdness is Debicki, one of the few cast members to emerge unscathed from Baz Luhrmann’s disastrous film The Great Gatsby (2011). Her impact there was mostly visual, her black-bobbed profile resembling a vintage illustration in Harper’s Bazaar Here she is an equally striking, aloof presence: an investigator whose curiosity matches our own, but also a mystery in herself. Anna’s British accent immediately sets her apart from the locals, and her clipped, offhand delivery is always faintly out of sync with whatever happens around her.

Unable to read her thoughts, we have to make what we can of her alternately imperious and recessive gestures – toying with a snow dome, resting her arms on a shop counter, or folding up her body as if apologising for her height (Debicki is over six feet tall). Her flapping blue coat, often paired with an old Saints T-shirt (the band, not the AFL team), gives her the look of an eccentric superhero towering over the other characters and peering at them anxiously down her long bony nose.

The Kettering Incident is not the kind of television drama that offers a clear political or social statement: each revelation poses a fresh riddle, allowing meaning to be constantly deferred. But this makes the subtext all the richer, especially when it comes to the question as to what it means to belong to a community or a land. One feature of the show’s enclosed world is the overwhelming whiteness of its inhabitants – a whiteness taken for granted within the narrative yet hard to ignore, given that in reality Oyster Cove, just north of Kettering, was the site of the last Aboriginal settlement in Tasmania. Whether or not future seasons touch more explicitly on this, one advantage of amnesia as a plot device is the space it allows us to ponder what has been forgotten. g

The Kettering Incident, directed by Rowan Woods and Tony Krawitz, was produced by Porchlight Films in association with Sweet Potato Films for Foxtel Showcase.

Jake Wilson is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne and reviews films regularly for The Age

IRON IN THE BLOOD: A MUSICAL ADAPTATION OF ROBERT HUGHES’S

THE FATAL SHORE

composed by Jeremy Rose

ABC Classics (Universal Music)

$24.99 CD, 69:51 minutes, 479 6387

Iron in the Blood is jazz musician Jeremy Rose’s ambitious and heartfelt tribute to Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore (1986). Although some academic historians may demur, The Fatal Shore remains a crucial book for understanding the brutality of Australia’s colonial origins.

To create his eleven-part tribute, Rose has assembled The Earshift Orchestra, an ensemble of seventeen musicians, nearly all of whom are youthful, like the composer. Two accomplished actors, Philip Quast and William Zappa, perform short excerpts from Hughes’s book (which are sometimes excerpts from original documents themselves). These are cleverly and movingly integrated into the work as a whole.

Rose’s composition and orchestration here is reminiscent not only of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Gil Evans, but, at times, of Igor Stravinsky and Peter Sculthorpe. It is a powerful mélange to which Rose has added much. Listeners tend to think of jazz as primarily improvisation, but a great deal here is written down then stirringly performed in the idiom. There are also several improvised solos, including a couple of memorable ones by the composer and others by trumpeter Nick Garbett and saxophonist Matt Keegan. The rhythm section of Joseph O’Connor (piano),Thomas Botting (bass), and Danny Fischer (drums) also plays an indispensable role – even when playing rubato.The sources of Iron in the Blood are not only to be found in the work of the composers and arrangers mentioned above, but also in British folk song. The optimism in these parts is a useful counter to, and relief from, the harsher textures portraying the (stillastonishing) savagery of the ‘System’.

This project was supported by the Australia Council with cooperation from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. It is hard to imagine money being better spent.

Geoff Page

Noise and tumult

Two Savage studies of pop and punk’s formative years

Anwen Crawford

1966: THE YEAR THE DECADE EXPLODED by Jon Savage

Faber, $49.99 hb, 653 pp, 9780571277629

ENGLAND’S DREAMING: SEX PISTOLS AND PUNK ROCK

by Jon Savage

Faber, $12.99 pb, 653 pp, 9780571326280

In March of 1966, Los Angeles rock group The Byrds released their sixth single, a song called ‘Eight Miles High’. It was, writes Jon Savage, a song that combined ‘two staples of sixties minority taste: free jazz and Indian classical music’. The arrangement was spacious, but the mood was uneasy: a twelve-string guitar part evoked the sour, droning tone of a sitar. The lyrics, chiefly written by band member Gene Clark, alluded to an LSD trip without naming it as such. Though LSD was still legal in 1966, its widening use had prompted an increase in policing: in February of that year, the first arrest was made in Britain for possession of the drug.

‘Eight Miles High’ laid the foundation for psychedelic rock, a style – and a lifestyle – that would come to dominate the late 1960s counterculture. In his new book 1966: The year the decade exploded, Savage argues that the year marked a turning point, particularly in Britain and the United States. Youthful rebellion, familiar from the rock’n’roll 1950s, was turning into a confirmed opposition to the Vietnam War, organised religion, consumerism, and conservative morality. It was, Savage writes, ‘a year of noise and tumult’, and he navigates it by way of popular music.

Savage is a respected music critic and historian. English-born, he began his career in the 1970s as a journalist for the British weekly music paper Sounds. He has demonstrated a sustained interest in youth culture (his previous book, Teenage, published in 2007, was a his-

tory of adolescence during the first half of the twentieth century), and he is able to tease out the social and political ramifications of that culture. 1966 proceeds month by month through the year, in twelve chapters, with each chapter framed by discussion of a 45RPM single. Some songs released that year, like The Four Tops’s ‘(Reach Out) I’ll Be There’, remain in the public consciousness to this day. Others, like ‘A Quiet Explosion’, by Birmingham rock group The Ugly’s, swiftly disappeared. In all of them Savage hears a fervency that spoke to the times.

Popular music in 1966 was characterised by the tension between mass popularity and a burgeoning underground. Some artists, like The Beatles, were caught between these territories. John Lennon caused controversy when comments he made to the Evening Standard about The Beatles being ‘more popular than Jesus’ hit American newsstands in late July. Soon afterwards, the band’s seventh studio album, Revolver, was released: the closing track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, was another early landmark of psychedelia. Savage describes it as ‘a mass market avant-garde artefact’, one that combined advanced studio techniques, such as tape loops, with the counter-cultural imperative to ‘be here now’. But this commitment to living in the present – also expressed throughout the year in an increasing number of ‘happenings’ and immersive art environments – was edged by nihilism. The working title for ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was ‘The Void’, and

who knew what might happen if you looked into it.

Most extreme were The Velvet Underground, who, in 1966, became the house band at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Their songs dealt with topics – heroin addiction, sadomasochism – that were challenging even by the standards of the time, and their type of New York decadence was received with hostility when they toured the West Coast as part of Warhol’s multimedia performance nights, which were known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. ‘They will replace nothing, except maybe suicide,’ said Cher. John Cale, one of The Velvet Underground’s members, summarised the group’s attitude: ‘We hated everybody and everything.’

The Velvet Underground would go on to have an enormous, and enduring, influence on rock music, but their spirit of confrontation – and the bleak, harsh sound of their early records – had an especial impact on punk. That outbreak of musical and social upheaval is the subject of Savage’s book England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk

Rock, first published in 1991, and reissued this year as a Faber Modern Classic.

England’s Dreaming has been acclaimed, in the decades since its initial publication, as the definitive book on punk – certainly on British punk – and for good reason. It is an exhaustive treatment, based on interviews that Savage conducted with many of punk’s main figures, and given momentum by a detailed narrative of the Sex Pistols, whose short and turbulent existence would permanently alter the possibilities of popular culture. The Sex Pistols brought into being a genuine opposition to mainstream consensus in Britain, their songs and performances shaped by virulent rage; but they were also a kind of prank, staged for maximum controversy by their manager, Malcolm McLaren. England’s Dreaming is, among other things, the story of how McLaren and John Lydon – who was known as Johnny Rotten during his time as the Sex Pistols’ vocalist – began by mirroring each other’s ambitions but came to despise one another, riven by the irresolvable contradictions of their joint project.

‘One definition of nihilism,’ writes Savage, ‘is that it is not the negative or cynical rejection of belief but the positive courage to live without it.’ For a brief time, the Sex Pistols and their followers – many of whom would form groups of their own, when the barrier of even basic musical competence was demolished – would attempt to live outside of existing social conventions. Their rebellion was of a different tenor to the bohemians who had proceeded them. ‘No future for you,’ warned John Lydon in 1977, which was not quite the same as John Lennon singing ‘Turn off your mind’ in 1966. A sense of desperate and terminal violence hung in the air; in Germany that year, members of

the Red Army Faction murdered judges and kidnapped politicians. If this was the legacy of 1960s utopianism, it was a poisoned one. Short extracts from Savage’s contemporaneous diaries, written when he was a young journalist, capture the mood, and also the violence directed against punks themselves: ‘the result is a claustrophobia so tight that you can barely speak’.

England’s Dreaming ranges over a wider span of time than 1966, but it is the more focused of the two books, and the more original. Though 1966 sets out to cover one year in detail, it soon becomes a more general history of the decade and its music. England’s Dreaming digs deeper into the cultural and political impulses that would form punk, and which the movement, in turn, gave expression to. In absenting themselves from moral norms, punks could voice desires that still sound both unsettling and prescient. ‘Give me World War Three, we can live again,’ sang Lydon. He didn’t mean it – or did he? g

YOUNG MINDS

Anwen Crawford is the music critic for The Monthly and the author of Live Through This (2014).

Missa Solemnis

by Morag Fraser

How fortunate was Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainer, archduke of Austria. In his short life (he died at forty-three), he enjoyed the privileges of empire and the high positions that accrued to his noble state. Yet we would hardly remember Rudolph had he not been also the chosen pupil of Beethoven, and patron and dedicatee of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, the Emperor Concerto, and the Missa Solemnis

It is easy to love both the Trio and Concerto. Their melodies beguile and haunt; they ask for virtuosity, not a miracle, from the musicians who perform them. But the great solemn Mass in D major, Beethoven’s second setting of the liturgy (after the more conventional Mass in C major), is another creature entirely. Little wonder conductor Andrew Davis has waited until his eighth decade to assemble its huge vocal and instrumental resources and bring it to an audience. But how triumphantly he has done so. The recent performance with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and four splendid soloists was a revelation, paying full homage to the soaring drama of Beethoven’s exploration of belief, transcendence, divinity, and the place of humankind in the scheme of things.

It was also testament to the power of live performance. All around me in the stalls people held their breath during the sombre pauses of the Credo’s ‘passus et sepultus est’ (he suffered and was buried) and then reeled at the choral lightning bolt of ‘Et resurrexit tertia die’ (and rose again on the third day). The Mass is a work of such scope and stretch in its orchestral and vocal scoring, and such a departure from expected decorums of liturgical setting, that it is hard to fathom and almost impossible to appreciate fully from recordings. So to see it live (the last MSO performance was in 1971) and to observe the way soprano and mezzo leaned toward one another as they navigated the interlaced passages of the Agnus Dei was to experience exaltation of a very particular kind. Beethoven takes one to the brink of a precipice.

He is exhilarating and daunting. I had some sympathy with the comment made by Ronald Vermeulen, the MSO’s Director of Artistic Planning, during his pre-concert talk: ‘This is some of the most incomprehensible music ever written.’ But Vermeulen, deftly ironic, was issuing an invitation, not a warning. And his succeeding remarks were an extrapolation from Beethoven’s inscription on the copy of the Missa presented to Archduke Rudolph: ‘Von Herzen – Möge es wieder – Zu Herzen gehen’ (From the heart may it return to the heart’), suggesting a profound sincerity, if not a simplicity, in Beethoven’s intent.

The Missa Solemnis has puzzled, challenged, and exhausted its performers and critics ever since it was first performed (in St Petersburg) in 1824. Beethoven, already afflicted with the deafness that would torment him, experienced a truncated version – the Kyrie, Credo, and Agnus Dei – in Vienna later in 1824. Austrian Catholic Church authorities forbade the use of the Latin for the secular performance, so the Mass parts were translated into German. The performance is variously reported as triumphant and a complete botch. But translation into German tells us about more than clerical strictures.

Beethoven, while composing the Missa, had the Latin (and the Greek Kyrie) texts translated into German for himself, the better to align his orchestral and vocal resources to his understanding (and emphasis) of the texts. In the MSO performance, those emphases give us some inkling of what Beethoven believed and which words of the liturgy resonated most for him. Listening to the sublime Benedictus, I kept wondering about the way those words might be interpreted today. ‘Blessed is he who come in the name of the Lord.’ The music suggests a benign, guiding presence, amplified in the glorious serenity of the violin solo (beautifully executed by MSO concertmaster Dale Barltrop). But I don’t want to speculate about Beethoven’s theology (too many have – and chastised him for it, or the lack of it). In music he was profoundly unorthodox, but at the same time drew on all that had gone before him. His setting of the liturgy of Mass is extraordinary, soaking up plainchant, Palestrina, Haydn, and Mozart, but it is also unorthodox – seeming to instantiate the glory of a divinity and the necessity of belief (the pounding fugal ‘Credo, credo’), while skittering over the tenets of belief in a choral rush. And for all the high Hosannas and the worlds without end of the alliterative ‘Vitam venturi saeculi’ fugue, there is an overwhelmingly earthed, incarnated sense of human yearning – for mercy and for peace, but also for something more – in the Missa. I don’t have words for the something more. But Beethoven gives it to us in the untranslatable language of his music.

Certainly, anyone who has sung or played the work knows how trying it is, how it tests the limits of the human body. So the MSO performance was all the

more admirable for seeming so beautifully achieved. I won’t say effortless. It couldn’t be, given what Beethoven (never a performer’s friend) demands. Effort is the warp of its fabric.

For a work and a performance so markedly orchestral (with great Beethovian pastoral sweeps), Davis’s Missa, from the opening bars of the Kyrie, nonetheless proved a perfect vehicle for the four soloists as well as for the massed choral and instrumental forces. Again, live performance, with the visual and the kinetic in play as well as the aural, was crucial here. The ensemble of the four – soprano Emily Birsan, mezzo Michèle Losier, tenor Andrew Staples, and bass-baritone Christian Van Horn – was exemplary, and their solo passages eloquent and audible. I shall never forget the poignancy of Losier’s penetrating solo passages in the Agnus Dei, or the limber power and sensitivity of Emily Birsan’s soprano as it lofted over the walls of sound from chorus and orchestra. The four soloists’ performances were astonishingly sustained – equal to the accelerating rigours as the Missa moves into the intensity of the B minor adagio of the Agnus Dei and on to compete with the instrumental incursions of sounds of war. We might

wonder whether the sudden drums and trumpets that invade this song for mercy and rest are Beethoven’s way of conjuring his own conflict-ravaged world: when Vienna was bombarded by Napoleon’s forces in 1809, Beethoven sought refuge in his brother’s basement, shielding his already vulnerable hearing by clamping a pillow over his ears. But whatever Beethoven’s immediate reason for introducing the martial riffs, we hear them now as part of our own experience. Timeless and dreadful. So the Missa does not end in the cadences of peace, and nor do we ask that it should.

Beethoven himself never heard his great Missa, except in his unfathomable head. We are the blessed beneficiaries of his tumultuous musical invention. But once every forty-five years is not often enough for such a profound experience. g

Missa Solemnis, composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, was presented by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Andrew Davis in Hamer Hall, Melbourne Arts Centre. Performance attended: 27 August 2016.

Morag Fraser is a Melbourne writer and critic. A longer version of her review appears in Arts Update.

Francis Bacon Created Australian Literature

His feet were stubborn on the frozen path. He put it into His hand, then they walked along a bit. The mud splashed; it was all coming back, that big cow with a bullet-head bending over his bed in a dream. His jaw was swollen with a bull’s eye, his shadow bunched on the wall.

There was plenty of Him that flowed into his hand, like standing under a tree and having apples hanging to your mouth.

It was a different matter near the equator; he was going home; they were going away.

His mind was large with the possibilities and all the unreal frustration that lies hidden in the banal phrasing of a waltz;

it strayed outside where the darkness obstinately refused to produce a moon.

He could feel his coat jutting into the half-reality of a dream world; he had waited for this, as time stretched out blank, waiting for his impression.

The other shapes were not imagined.

It was a stiff winter falling into his hand like a pear not yet ripe; trees moved in a flux of moving things, like experience, fused. This was his part now, to withstand the ebb and flow of seasons, the sullen hostility of rock, all those passions that sweep down, lapsed into distance and the moving rain.

Stuart Cooke

Stuart Cooke’s latest book is George Dyuŋgayan’s Bulu Line: A West Kimberley Songcycle (2014). All the text is from Happy Valley by Patrick White (1939).

Australian Book Review presents

Arts Update

‘Australian Book Review is essential reading for anyone here who is seriously interested in any of the arts.’

David Malouf

Contributors include

Tim Byrne

Lee Christofis

Alison Croggon

Ian Dickson

Morag Fraser

Andrew Fuhrmann

Andrea Goldsmith

Grazia Gunn

Michael Halliwell

Philippa Hawker

Brian McFarlane

Peter Rose

Michael Shmith

Jake Wilson

Canute’s bone

Andrew Fuhrmann

CULTURE

by Terry Eagleton

Yale University Press (Footprint)

$38.95 hb, 192 pp, 9780300218794

No one should be surprised that Terry Eagleton has written yet another book about the excesses of academic postmodernism. Railing against the pretensions and deceptions and phony jargon of postmodernism has been a favourite sport of his for more than twenty years. In this latest book, Culture, his specific target is that sinister creeping project, cultural studies, a conceptual field which currently dominates the humanities and social sciences and which Eagleton claims is a crucial obstacle to the ultimate overthrow of capitalism.

Like King Canute, Eagleton sets up his armchair on a shingle beach (Morecambe Beach if we’re within spitting distance of his professorial home at Lancaster University) and orders back the tide. Culture, he says, needs to be put back in its place: not everything is cultural, and culture should not be a site for analysing all the world’s problems. Instead, he proposes a return to a more modest concept of culture. For Terry Eagleton, it is much handier if culture is understood as a combination of shared habits of mind, patterns of behaviour, and emotional disposition. Culture is what gives life meaning, although it is not to be equated with life. Eagleton imagines culture as a kind of social unconscious or communality of the psyche. His central idea is that we can only completely understand political and economic systems – and ultimately revolutionise them –if we first cotton-on to the shared psychology that underlies them and gives them significance.

This consciously old-fashioned but eminently reasonable position is developed by Eagleton in a lengthy chapter on Edmund Burke. ‘No thinker,’ writes Eagleton, ‘has articulated the idea of culture as the social unconscious more magnificently than the eighteenth-

century writer and politician Edmund Burke.’ It is a clear highlight of the book, full of germane insights about the complex relationship between traditions, habits of life, and political power. The advantage of combining Burke’s ideas with a residually psychoanalytical metaphor is not always apparent, but it does produce some lurid and spectacular results, particularly when Eagleton comes to discuss Burke’s critique of the French Revolution:

In their metaphysical frenzy [the Jacobins] have inquired too deeply into things, stripping off the decorous vestments of culture, laying bare the shameful sources of social existence and turning their impious gaze on the father’s phallus. Yet nobody can look upon this sublime authority without being struck blind; and in the case of the French revolutionaries, this blindness is the bedazzlement which comes from an excess of light.

And an excess of light, Eagleton reminds us, is a kind of madness against which culture and the deeper (sometimes unreasoned) impulses of the heart are a partial bulwark.

The bone Eagleton has to pick with contemporary Jacobins – the French postmodern theorists who dominate the cultural studies barnhouse – is not an excess of light or reason, but a lack of it. In particular, Eagleton is mightily pissed off about the sky-obscuring fog of identity politics, and the way this undermines any chance there might be for class solidarity, tra-la-la:

[S]ome sectors of the cultural left … in their zeal for a discourse of difference, diversity, identity and marginality ceased to use the word ‘capitalism’, let alone ‘exploitation’ or ‘revolution’, some decades ago. Neo-liberal capitalism has no difficulty with terms like ‘diversity’ or ‘inclusiveness’, [whereas] it does with the language of class struggle.

Yes, all right, he has made this argument often enough, but can we be honest for just one illuminating moment? While it’s true that neo-liberal capitalism has no difficulty with diversity and

notions of the hybrid, it also has little difficulty with the diction of class strivings, at least not the affable roundabout formulations of which Terry Eagleton is master. Eagleton has written upwards of fifty books, all of them brimming with denunciations of neo-liberalism and globalisation and corporatisation. They sell very well, but not one of them has brought us an inch closer to the revolution. And not one of them was meant to.

His specific target is that sinister creeping project cultural studies

Culture has a laidback, free and easy, somewhat improvised quality, like the first draft of a more radical vision the author can scarcely contemplate with a level gaze. Meandering through a brief history of how culture and our framing of it have evolved, there are entertaining and informative sections on Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, the German philosopher Johann Herder, and Jonathan Swift, and Burke is a constant and reassuring presence. But it all seems to come back to the scourge of postmodernism and to the same predictable litany of complaints that he detailed in The Illusions of Postmodernism in 1996. And it does seem that Eagleton prefers to remain ignorant of the way things are headed intellectually. He broods about whether the time has come to question the idea that all discourse is a form of inner speech. Really? Surely Terry Eagleton – who is, after all, first and last a professor of English – is aware that cultural theory nerds have been banging on about this for at least a decade.

Poor Canute didn’t get very far whipping the waves; but, still, they must have eventually gone back. It’s in their nature to do so. Rambling and genial, Terry Eagleton doesn’t really have any expectation or appetite for change. And yet, the so-called cultural turn will eventually correct. Professor Eagleton will no doubt have his satisfactions as the conflation of culture and society is gradually unwound. g

Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic and a past ABR Fellow.

Window

by Cate Kennedy

Alex is watching his wife as she stands at the pale stone bench and raises her canister of Chinese herbal tonic to her shoulder to give it a quick shake. She gives him a game, faintly ironic smile, like someone pretending to be a cocktail waitress.

What’s in there tastes nothing like a cocktail, Alex knows, because she made him try it the first day. More like lint from the vacuum cleaner, he thought at the time as he struggled to keep it down, blended with something indescribably bitter infused out of the boiled-up leaves and twigs and bits of bark in there. The day of their appointment he’d watched the Chinese herbalist grab small handfuls of this and that out of a wall full of drawers, seemingly at random, the whole place – the clinic, if you could call it that – smelling like anise and liquorice, mushrooms and exotic wood shavings.

He’d struggled to contain his scepticism as the guy had wrapped it all up neatly in white paper and handed it over to Mel, calmly naming a figure at the cash register that Alex thought at first he must have misheard. But Mel had removed her credit card, and handed it over willingly – eagerly, almost, like she was on the right track now and this was the price to be paid. Back at home she’d simmered the mixture exactly as directed in the special pre-purchased ceramic crock and made Alex take a sip.

‘There,’ she’d said, virtuous and pious, as he tried not to gag. Aware of that constant, static undercurrent of accusation in her voice, so faint that only the paranoid could hear it, as she added: ‘There, Alex –that’s what I’ll be drinking four times a day, and all

I’m asking you to do is give up coffee.’

Oh god, the theories. This was a new one she’d got off the Net, as she sat up surfing it in the middle of the night, some webpage claiming that caffeine was responsible for plunging fertility rates and low sperm motility.

‘Come to bed,’ he’d say to her gently, swaying bleary-eyed in the door. Willing her to turn around from the screen and face him.

‘In a sec,’ she’d answer without moving, eyes moving rapidly across text and blue light bathing her face. ‘I’m just studying something.’

Now she lowers the canister with the same wary smile and unscrews the lid, pouring out what looks exactly like silty river water. If only it was a vodka martini, Alex thinks fleetingly. That’s what he could use, something just to give him a bump, wake him up. He feels saliva flood his mouth, like pressing a trigger.

Mel takes a breath, holds her nose and drinks, then grimaces.

‘Oh,’ she gasps, her mouth twisting. ‘That’s revolting, it really is. I’m really going to have to buy some mints. Right now. They’ll have mints down at reception, right?’

Alex feels in his pocket for change. ‘I’ll go,’ he says quickly. ‘Or how about a juice out of the bar fridge?’

‘It’s like I have to steel myself not to throw up every time I drink it.’

‘How long did he say you had to take it for?’

She looks at him, her eyebrows raised.‘Till it works,’ she says. And brings the canister down on the coun-

ter with a rap, like a gavel.

Alex’s smile feels held in place with wires.

This is the big weekend. Four weeks into the Chinese herbs and they’re at this resort because Mel has written on the desk diary ‘Conditions are Perfect!’ with a big fluorescent circle around the date, and booked them in for an optimal two-day stay. A green light. A window.

‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ she says, gesturing around the room.

‘Beautiful.’

‘And we’re right on the beach, just like they said.’

They both look out through the screen doors, down the sandy path. Alex can see the ocean out there, but can’t hear it. There’s a pile of striped canvas deckchairs, stacked under a tree. The resort must own the whole strip of beach.

‘Alex?’ she says. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

He listens for waves again, but there’s nothing. The sea through the trees lies flat and unreflective, like brushed metal.

‘Are you kidding? I’m great,’ he answers. ‘Just a bit tired.’

‘Not too tired, I hope,’ she says, kissing him on the back of the neck, on his ear. He can smell the earthy bitterness of the herbs on her breath, an ancient smell. Mandrake, he thinks, the word falling into his head out of nowhere. He doesn’t even know what mandrake is, but he’ll think of anything rather than the feel of her narrow body against his back and buttocks, the hard twin bumps of her pelvic bones, her wrapping arms, the birdlike lightness of her. She’d go to bed now if she could. She’d convince him with this gentle insistent pressure, teeth on his earlobe, and yeah he knows plenty of his friends would name him the luckiest bastard in the world for that alone, but there’s still this grim businesslike undercurrent, the upbeat jauntiness he can’t get used to. How, he wonders, can she just turn this on and off like a tap, how can she set herself so assiduously, so zealously, to the task? He thinks of the tidy folder of webpages she’s carefully printed and filed, the way she steels herself before downing that brew, the way, after sex, she lies with her legs tucked against her chest, silently counting, he knows. Optimising the post-coital angle, or some crap.

He reaches for her hands, holds them.

‘Let’s get down to the beach,’ he says. ‘Let those herbs do their work.’

He sees a muscle work in her face, a quick comical pout of disappointment. Mock disappointment, to go with the desire.

‘A swim and a read,’ he says gently, smoothing her hair. When his hand caresses her shoulder he feels not an ounce of excess flesh on her; feels instead a taut wing of cartilage which shifts a little beneath

his fingers like something underwater, flexing itself against the tide. The beautiful scoop of her collarbone, so familiar under his thumb, fills him with unaccountable sorrow.

He can’t focus, that’s the problem. His thoughts track uselessly down disconnected paths, like a clueless dog floundering along looking for a scent in the undergrowth. Are you listening? Mel will say to him impatiently, and he’ll tell her of course I am, groping for a foggy handhold in the conversation, trying to dredge up words to respond. When they’d gone to the gynaecologist he’d sat distracted when Mel asked the guy how he felt about alternative medicines. ‘It’s entirely up to you,’ he’d said evenly. ‘A lot of couples take that road, especially before IVF.’

‘Does it seem to work?’ Mel had said, and Alex had felt a stab of wincing pity at the hesitancy in her voice when she’d added: ‘Sometimes? I mean, is it complementary?’

The gynaecologist had given a non-committal shrug, weighing his words with that professional neutrality they all perfected. ‘Sometimes, yes, it seems to get results,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to say. Everything takes time.’

And Alex had sat mute and useless, mesmerised by the gynaecologist’s clean, tapered hands spreading in a placatory gesture, thinking: he knows the secret. He had to. He must have had those hands covered in blood and afterbirth, must have lifted newborns by the ankles, must have felt inside women’s bodies – the incredible, labouring intimacy of those barriers broken! – and touched, with those fingers, the pulsing shift of unborn flesh, feeling it turn hotly under his palm. Yes, he was privy to all of that, he had to be, but he was keeping it to himself.

The hands were scrubbed now, bland and palely disinfected, but Alex couldn’t drag his eyes from them even so. Was that gesture meant to say just calm down now or were those hands raised to dispassionately bar their way, sitting there shamed by failure?

He was invited to ask questions, but had found himself with nothing to add. All he could think of was how time had bracketed them now, he and Mel; ruled up their lives into dutiful individual cells like the days on the calendar that lived next to their bed beside the clock. It all sat there like monitoring apparatus: Mel’s system of green and red markers, her thermometer, her ovulation chart. It was like she was going to stalk this thing, set a snare for it, bring it to ground.

They were the ones ensnared by it, though. Now it was as if each day was only there as something to be endured, marked off with a cross.

He’d see her brushing her hair in front of the mirror before bed, looking for the matches on the

chest of drawers to light the candle, and feel it all tighten around him. He hated the scent of the candle, now. He’d close his eyes so he didn’t have to see the determination in her face, or the open calendar on her bedside table, dates grimly circled in green like traffic lights, uninfringeable.

The first thing he saw in the morning. A window you looked through, but couldn’t open. A fixed pane.

No wonder the resort costs 300 bucks a night; because here comes a waiter, right onto the beach, and Alex wants a cold beer so badly he has to work to keep the casualness in his voice as he orders.

‘What did you order me a beer for?’ says Mel as she comes out of the water, stooping to pick up her towel. ‘You know I’m absolutely sworn off alcohol. That’s the worst thing.’

‘I didn’t. The mineral water’s for you. The extra beer’s for me. In case he doesn’t come back down to the beach again.’

He can feel her giving him a long, assessing look.

‘Alex,’ she says.

‘There is absolutely nothing to be paranoid about,’ he answers.

‘Both of us should be avoiding alcohol,’ she says. ‘Both of us.’

He takes a sip of beer. Just a controlled, orderly sip. ‘I think that’s going a bit far,’ he answers, and waits for the plaintive barb of annoyance in her voice.

‘I know you do. I just ... well, don’t you? Want to give it the absolute best chance?’

‘Mel, you’re doing everything right. You’re so conscientious, you’ve checked out everything. But part of it’s relaxing, isn’t it? That’s what those websites say, isn’t it – that you’ve got to stop stressing?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says emphatically, ‘God, yes. I’m not stressing. Just this weekend is our ideal fertility window. And the herbs are helping. I’m sure they are.’

He leans back in his deckchair. ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Perfect.’

‘The water’s beautiful,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t look like it, I know, but it’s really warm. You should have a swim.’

‘I will. In a little while.’ Another swallow. Next time she goes in, he’ll catch the waiter’s eye and ask him to take away the two empties and bring another one, be drinking it when she gets out; she’ll never know the difference.

‘In fact, I’m feeling absolutely ripe,’ she says, stretching luxuriously.

‘You look it.’ After a moment he reaches over and strokes her damp hip. Nothing.

‘I’ve just got to think: baby, baby, baby.’

‘Yep.’

One year is a reasonable time to keep trying, the gynaecologist had told them, before we go that further

step and start to check for reasons. That night in bed she’d turned to him, lifting up her arms, and as he moved into her embrace she’d murmured in his ear: we’ll show them. Eleven months ago. All that ebbing time. She doesn’t go back in, not soon enough for him. From the corner of his eye he sees the waiter approaching, and he holds up his empty with a careless wave, signalling one more. Quick, so that if she glanced at him in her peripheral vision she might just see him waving a fly out of his face. But she’s not looking his way. She’s gazing blankly out over the horizon, over all that expensive water view.

‘It’s low sperm count,’ she says eventually. ‘It’s the new epidemic. People think it’s a female problem, but nine times out of ten, they’re wrong.’

Here we go, he thinks. Next month, each of those intervening cellblock days crossed off the calendar, if there’s no double blue line on the pregnancy test, they will have to trek back to the gynaecologist to start the Assisted Conception program. Mel will buy two tests, because something in her just won’t believe the evidence of the first one, and she’ll come out of the bathroom after twenty terrible minutes, go straight to bed, then take the next day off work. When Alex gets home at the end of the day, his heart spiralling down like a lead sinker, she’ll be back surfing the Net. He’ll watch TV in the other room, where people who want out of their relationships whisper sorrowfully ‘I can’t do this anymore’, as if that’s all it takes.

‘Your beer,’ says the waiter, and Mel shoots him a look of pure reproach as he takes the bottle unhesitatingly and puts it to his lips, shaking, wanting the ashy taste out of his throat.

He’s the one gazing pointedly out to sea now, pretending to be transfixed by the aluminium flatness of it, like foil in your mouth, on your fillings.

‘Let’s go back,’ says Mel. ‘Let’s not just sit here.’ She pauses. ‘With you drinking.’

‘In a sec,’ he answers. After a minute she stands and walks back up the path, and Alex tips his head back and lets more beer slide down, chilled and reliable. He feels marginally looser now, less like he’s going to fly apart. He stands up, puts on his shoes and picks up his dry towel. He can always swim later. Right now he needs to find the spot, here at this pricey resort, where he can sit on some cushioned cane chair under a fan, out of this salty metallic glare. And sure enough, there it is, up the stony path in the distance, tricked out like a tiki bar with Hawaiian umbrellas and a bright aqua pool.

‘The Crusoe Lounge’. Excellent. The waiter who’s already brought his beers to the beach is here doubling as barman, filling in time behind the bar doing whatever staff do when there’s no one to serve. Alex remembers his room number and tells it to him, then lets himself scan the drinks list. He takes his

time studying what’s on offer, because truth is he’s not looking forward to going back to that room any time soon, because even if she’s furious with him, even if she’s barely speaking to him, she will still need him to have sex with, because this weekend is their golden opportunity, their window. He will be required.

‘So there’s a South Pacific theme going on,’ he says genially to the barman, feeling the possibility of respite.

‘Yes, indeed,’ says the barman, just as genial. ‘Can I get you something else?’

‘Why not?’ he says. ‘It’s not as if I’m driving.’ He reads through the list of drinks again, considering. ‘Just another beer, I think. Not too early in the day for another beer, is it? Since I’m here?’

‘Not at all.’ They’re paid to agree with you, Alex thinks. Trained to be amiable.

‘I’m meant to be on the wagon, actually,’ he says confidingly. He wants the guy to say one more can’t hurt or hey, you’re on holidays, but what he actually says is ‘Why’s that? Are you doing that February fast thing – quit alcohol, give up sugar?’

‘Kind of,’ says Alex.

‘You should try the special, then. The kava.’

‘The what?’

The barman indicates the blackboard menu behind him. ‘Oh, it’s a Pacific Islander speciality. We import it. I’ve mixed some up today ready for Hawaiian Happy Hour.’

‘Is that right? What’s the alcohol content?’

‘That’s the thing,’ says the guy. ‘It’s not even alcohol. It’s a narcotic.’

Alex sits back in his stool. ‘Perfect.’

The barman ducks beneath the counter and stirs something with a ladle. When he sets a drink on the bar – poured into a replica coconut shell cup like something out of Gilligan’s Island – Alex grins and takes a sniff.

‘You might actually need a beer chaser,’ says the barman. ‘It’s … a bit of an acquired taste. But it’s got its die-hard fans, alright. It gets manufactured as a tablet, too. As medicinal herbal medicine.’

‘So, what ... I sip it?’

‘No, you knock it back in one.’

Alex sniffs the cup again, dubious. ‘I’ve never even heard of the stuff.’

‘Well, give it a try,’ says the guy easily, replacing the ladle. ‘I mean – since you’re here.’

‘Cheers, then,’ says Alex, swigging it down. It’s distinctly unpleasant. Kind of like cucumber juice, with a harsh bitterness which reminds him instantly of the Chinese herb brew. The plastic coconut shell hits the bar counter with a hollow weak little thump.

‘Well,’ says Alex, suppressing a small shudder. ‘It was cold and wet, I’ll give it that.’

The barman pushes a bowl of peanuts towards

him. ‘We mix ours up from a powder,’ he says, ‘but people tell me, in the South Pacific, they grind it fresh and it’s way more powerful.’

‘So drinking this is more a ceremonial thing?’ Even if he had a peanut allergy, Alex thinks fleetingly, he’d still be reaching for this bowlful right now, just to get the taste out of his mouth.

‘That’s right. It’s like a cultural ritual, especially for men. The boss here drinks a couple of shells every evening. Says it makes him relax and sleep better.’

‘No kidding? Well, hell, line me up another quick one, then.’ He doesn’t know what makes him say this – the thought of relaxing and sleeping, maybe, or the desire to spin out the conversation. He nerves himself for the second round to hit the back of his throat, but it’s not as bad this time. Dirt and roots, definitely botanical. He eats a couple more peanuts as the barman heads off to stack something into the fridge and settles back to look out to sea, wondering if he feels sedated. Hmmm. Lips tingling, maybe, not much more. Possibly his tongue feeling a little thick. Nothing worth writing home about. She’ll be soaking in the spa bath now, steadfastly and determinedly relaxing. Or else updating her bloody status on Facebook. Absolutely ripe. My God.

Alex slowly finishes the bowl of peanuts, one by one. Every one of them tastes perfectly salty and delicious.

‘Not feeling a thing,’ he says eventually, resettling himself on the stool. ‘You’d better get me a beer after all. Or a very strong vodka cruiser, or whatever. Because I’ve got a feeling that stuff is just dirty water.’

The barman gives him a quick look. He’s been and gone a few times, and now he’s back – he’s got a small pile of foliage and a bunch of little glass vases lined up on the bar, and is poking artificial hibiscus flowers into each vase with a little spray of leaves.

‘I can show you the packet of powder, if you like,’ he replies. ‘It’s some kind of pepper root. Tonight we’re having a kava ceremony to welcome new guests.’

‘Right,’ said Alex. His eyes swivel to the Hawaiian Happy Hour menu again: Come along: you’re guaranteed to get lei’d! it says. Alex squints at the text, conscious of how hot and heavy the air feels on his skin. Should have had a swim. Well, he could walk down now. Except can’t work up the enthusiasm.

‘She’s hoping it’s me,’ he hears himself saying, apropos of nothing. ‘But it’s not me. That’ll be a bitter pill to swallow, when she finds out.’

What? He blinks and tries again. ‘See, once we do the Assisted Conception program, it will …’ – he gestures slackly, coming up short – ‘come to light.’

He stops, seeing his wife’s white ambushed face, armed with her counterfeit theories and bags of

magic herbs, clutching her folder of webpages. How infinitely preferable, he thinks, to leave the breaking of bad news to the scrubbed secretive gynaecologist. He’ll have all the right words.

‘See, you have to fill out these questionnaires, I’m pretty sure,’ he says, leaning forward on the stool now, ‘where they ask about previous pregnancies or conceptions, but I think it’s just simpler if I just tick ‘no’, don’t you? Clean slate. I mean, what difference would it make now, what box I tick?’

The barman evens up the artificial flowers. ‘None,’ he agrees pleasantly.

One hibiscus bloom in each vase, one vase per table. It seems a pretty sterile, token sort of celebration, if that’s what it is.

‘What do you call it,’ Alex says after a while, ‘the thing you’re having?’

‘Sorry?’ says the barman.

God, the effort of summoning an explanation for what he means! It’s like struggling out of sluggish sleep, the same weird, disoriented annoyance. He runs a hand through his hair.

‘This Hawaiian party, happy hour thing. Tonight.’

‘Oh. A luau,’ answers the barman. Alex nods sagely, like it’s a word that’s been evading him for a long time. And what about you, what’s your story, he feels like saying, ironing a Hawaiian shirt to go to work at 11 am in the morning in a place like this? But the sentence feels beyond him; way too demanding, faintly belligerent.

‘This was at uni,’ is what he hears himself say instead, ‘so I was dumb as a box of rocks, all that, twenty-three years old and a complete arsehole. But I’m not excusing myself.’

He can’t believe what’s coming out of his own mouth.

But the barman is nodding. He gets it. Alex releases a breath and lets it keep trickling from him like smoke, a long lethargic exhalation. It’s good to have the guy turn his back to him now and start stacking glasses on a shelf. Alex waits resignedly, almost mournfully, to hear what he might say next.

‘Found out at a party later she’d terminated it anyway, and gone overseas, and good luck to her.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Stupefied, Alex looks down at his legs. Got to send a message to them, very soon, to stand up and walk him back down to his room. He marshals the enormous concentration required to make everything work together to do it. He puts his hands flat on the bar and slides from the stool, planting his feet firmly on the wooden floor. He’s fine.

‘Just put that on the tab,’ he says at last, ponderously.

‘No problem,’ says the barman lightly without looking up. ‘Take care. And don’t worry - it affects different people in different ways. It evens out into

a mild buzz.’

‘Right.’

‘Like a joint.’

‘Okay.’

Just keep agreeing, and work out later what the hell he’s on about. Guy looks to be about twentythree himself, so what would he know about things evening out?

Things to do now. Alex picks up his towel and weaves his way through the tables out of the bar. At the beach corner, out of the barman’s sightline, he pauses and leans against one of the rustic upright posts. He’s puzzled. He knows he’s stopped for something but he can’t think what it is until he leans forward suddenly and throws up a thin stream of beer and kava onto the sand.

He remembers the girl at uni – Sarah – when she’d told him, her seeing, before he could hide it, his fumbling, stuttering dismay. The crass selfishness clear as day there on his stupid face. No doubt she’d predicted, too, the bolt of traitorous relief he felt when he found out about the abortion after they broke up. She’d had his measure, clearly. Could see in him instantly the thing it was taking Mel a suspiciously long time to notice. This caving, contemptible weakness.

Mel. Gaunt in the blue of the computer screen, swigging down her mandrake mix, printing out and fastening those pages with paperclips like they were official and real. Her lips moving soundlessly as she reads. And it’s all still waiting for them anyway, he thinks with a wave of rolling, submerged despair – whatever box he ticks, it will still be the same antiseptic white rooms, rounds of injections, taking out more loans trying to make something take root. He sees it all murkily, as if through a porthole. The same glazed, seasick certainty.

Well, he needs a minute. He doesn’t want to stumble back to their room and have to meet her eye just yet. He’s not up to keeping his end of the script until he gets a few more breaths of fresh air into him.

He just wants to stand here a little longer, holding this post; head blotted empty as cloud, feeling the dim, wilful suspension of time – the luxury of it, its perfectly oiled spin – before he goes and finds her. She’ll be waiting. This is their window, and conditions are perfect.

There will be no need to talk, which is just as well. When he lowers his numbed mouth to hers, he will taste, faintly, the terrible, bitter-root medicine on her breath, and wonder if she can taste his. g

Cate Kennedy won a Queensland Literary Award for her short story collection Like a House on Fire (2012). She was shortlisted in the 2010 and 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. ‘Window’ was commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize.

Humean nature

Janna Thompson

HUME:

AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

by James A. Harris

Cambridge University Press

$79.95 pb, 633 pp, 9780521837255

David Hume earned his place in the philosophical pantheon mostly because of the uncompromising empiricism of his early work

A Treatise of Human Nature (1738). He looked into his mind and found no such thing as the will or an agent that directs it. He found nothing in the world to explain causal connection and concluded that predicting the future depends on an inclination of mind. Sympathy and utility, he argued, are the ground of morality, and reason is the slave of passion. Generations of philosophers have contended with Humean scepticism about knowledge and agency.

In this intellectual biography, James A. Harris aims to present a different Hume from the one known by philosophers. He pays equal attention to Hume’s political, economic, and historical writings and gives an account of his intentions that challenges the prevailing interpretation of his intellectual trajectory.

Hume was born in 1711, the second son of a lowland Scottish family that was well off but not so rich as to relieve him of the need to find a profession. However, the need was not so pressing as to force him into an uncongenial occupation, and he spent much of his early adulthood in his family home immersed in books. Later, he became the secretary of an ambassador. He travelled in Europe and lived in Paris and London. But he was content to settle down in Edinburgh in the company of his friends. He was proud of being a Scot.

One of Harris’s tasks as a biographer is to explain how an isolated young man of twenty-three managed to conceive of a project like the Treatise. Hume provides little help. He did not keep a journal and few of his letters survive. Harris has to speculate on what Hume might have read. He makes much of a

letter written to an unnamed physician that describes a mental crisis Hume suffered because of his failed effort to put stoic philosophy into practice. Harris thinks that this crisis, along with reading Mandeville and others who stressed the egoistic basis of human action, gave Hume the ambition of creating a science of human nature as it actually is.

Hume later described the Treatise as ‘falling dead-born from the press’. He discontinued his original scientific project and turned to writing essays on popular topics. Eventually, he presented some of his philosophical ideas in a more accessible form, but he never acknowledged his early work. It was published anonymously and not included in the volumes of his writings that he later compiled for publication.

Another task for a biographer is to explain this change of direction. Harris does not agree with those who think that Hume was driven by a desire for fame or that his philosophical thought had reached a dead-end. He argues that Hume was from first to last a man of letters whose interests were not confined to what we now call philosophy and whose main ambition was to communicate ideas about important subjects to men and women of culture. In this he was successful. When he died in 1776, Hume was one of the most well-known and respected intellectuals of his day. The problem with the Treatise, in his view, was that it did not adequately communicate his ideas.

Hume wrote on economic and political issues, but nothing he produced on these topics was in the same league as Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) or his friend Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776). The projects that he took most trouble over, and which were largely responsible for his reputation, were his British histories. His aim was to be both impartial and stylish, and Harris explains how Hume maneuvered his way around the controversies about history that divided the political parties of his time.

As Harris presents him, Hume is a philosopher of the middle ground. His histories neither celebrated the regime change of 1688 nor questioned the legitimacy of the Hanoverian rulers.

Politics, he believed, requires a balance between authority and liberty. Later in his life he leaned in the direction of a preference for authority. He disliked the pretensions of clerics but was not comfortable with the radicalism of the French philosophes. He rejected the stoic life of virtue but also the egoism of Mandeville. He supported social conventions as reasonable ways of ordering social life but denied attempts to found them on religious or philosophical principles.

This portrait of Hume as philosopher of moderation who found unorthodox ways of defending conservative positions is put into question by the two works for which he is now most celebrated. His disregard for the Treatise was not a repudiation of his radical philosophical ideas. He attempted to make these ideas more accessible, but he did not change them to suit his audience. Hume was also notorious in his time for his scepticism about religion. He never declared himself to be an unbeliever, but his posthumously published Dialogues of Natural Religion (1779) leaves us in no doubt about his negative opinion of attempts to establish the existence of God.

Harris succeeds in his primary aim of presenting Hume as an intellectual of his times who regarded philosophy not as a doctrine but as a style of thought that can be applied to any subject. Nevertheless, he gives us no reason to disagree with the common view that Hume’s thought transcended his times because of the radical ideas in his early writings. g

Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University.

DISCOVER NEW TITLES

GREAT STORIES. UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES.

Billy Bounce

The jumping champ from Uluru who causes such a hullabaloo

Jackie Carstairs

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-4990-0871-5 Paperback

978-1-4990-0876-0 E-book

Jackie Carstairs was inspired to write a story about kangaroos after watching them lying beneath gum trees in her garden and leaping easily over fences into the paddocks. This illustrated story, in bouncing rhyme, is about a young, conceited kangaroo called Billy—a champion jumper who lives near Uluru in outback Australia. One day, he accepts a dare and, wanting to show o , lands in trouble.

A Unique Mind, Strong Music Unsigned

Taner Remzi

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-5144-4207-4 Hardback

978-1-5144-4206-7 Paperback

978-1-5144-4205-0 E-book

Taner Remzi writes a record of family memories, with nostalgic insights into times long gone in his compelling book, A Unique Mind, Strong Music Unsigned . Taner started writing based on unique observations and explanations of song themes. Now, he is able to share the product of his enjoyment in writing, expressing his thoughts in an articulate and entertaining way. Revel in his unique insights!

Cities at Sea

Martin Simons

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-5144-4445-0 Paperback

978-1-5144-4444-3 E-book

Land-based civilization collapsed long ago. The great cities moved onto huge self-su cient rafts on the oceans. Strict, closely supervised discipline prevails.

Young Sal is a restless young woman who wants a free and more intimate connection with the sea and its creatures. This leads her to extraordinary adventures, fundamental alterations to herself and others and in the long run to the stranded city where she now lives.

A Window to the Soul

William Dickie

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-5035-0931-3 Hardback

978-1-5035-0930-6 Paperback

978-1-5035-0929-0 E-book

In this collection of original poems, William Dickie celebrates one of the most profound human experiences: love. Immerse yourself in a world of love and human emotions as you take a peek into A Window to the Soul…

Improving Your Digital Photography

Mazen Kasamani

www.xlibris.com.au

978-1-5035-0968-9 Hardback

978-1-5035-0971-9 Paperback

978-1-5144-4275-3 E-book

Improving Your Digital Photography ’s objective is to bring out the photographer in you as amateur “snapshooter” and allow you to take memorable, professionally-looking photographs. From basic settings to art essentials, it builds the photographic eye of the enthusiast amateur.

Behind walls

Simon Coghlan

RUN, SPOT, RUN: THE ETHICS OF KEEPING PETS

by Jessica Pierce

University of Chicago Press (Footprint)

$52.95 hb, 256 pp, 9780226209890

Asea change has occurred in the way we regard pets. In recent decades the West has fervently embraced pet keeping. Australia has one of the world’s highest levels of pet ownership. Moreover, pets are described as ‘members of the family’. Pets sleep on our beds, join us on holidays, and receive human-grade medical treatment. Furthermore, our moral concern for animals has generally risen. Witness the public concern with Australian live animal export and the greyhound racing industry.

American bioethicist Jessica Pierce explores some consequences of this social shift in Run, Spot, Run: The ethics of keeping pets. The title, borrowed from the blandly happy 1930s Dick and Jane school readers, is double-edged. Spot the frolicking dog is, like Dick and Jane, having fun. But Spot is also running from us. Pet keeping is a story of brutality as well as love. Pierce both celebrates pet–human relations and reveals their darker side. As the book proceeds, the darkness gathers.

Run, Spot, Run unflinchingly exposes what has made contemporary pet–person relations troubling and hence ‘ethically rich’. Of course, some unsettling elements were never really hidden. The ‘single biggest moral problem’, the author rightly says, is the many ‘relinquished animals languishing in … shelters, pounds, and humane societies’.

We are blinded by the normalisation of animal disposal. Pointedly, Pierce contrasts our sanitised system with an earlier, more brutally honest, method from the late 1800s. Crammed by city authorities into large crates, the New York Times reported, forty-eight unlicensed dogs at a time were lowered in plain view into the East River:

The dogs seemed to know their fate, and most of them sullenly submitted to it;

but many crouched down desperately in their corners and made a most ferocious and dangerous resistance … There was one female dog with eight puppies that was especially hard to handle … she actually forced the other dogs within to crowd upon top of one another and give her little family plenty of room.

Now we kill them behind walls.

In short, accessible chapters, Pierce dissects numerous other pet-related moral issues. She questions blanket desexing, on the basis of unclear evidence that neutering is uniformly beneficial to pets, and perhaps also because it deprives them of a natural function. (Scandinavian countries don’t routinely neuter pets.) Meanwhile, female dogs on puppy production lines have litter after litter, producing offspring with painful congenital abnormalities. Many animals, not least exotic species, are neglected, bored, or suffer from untreated anxiety.

Pierce discusses the link between anti-social criminality and animal cruelty. Similarly, domestic violence is associated with animal abuse; hurting pets is an effective means of exerting control over women. Animals are surprisingly often the victims of sexual abuse. Alarmingly, there is a subculture in the United States of individuals – called ‘zoos’ – who have sex with animals. There are even animal brothels, and so-called crush films – the animal equivalent of snuff movies. This all makes for difficult, strange reading.

Other problems are built into the fabric of the pet-keeping system. Highly profitable industry bodies have successfully spun a ‘narrative of pets as a happy and necessary part of every healthy family’, while opposing limits on easy pet availability that reduce unwanted animals. (Interestingly, Victoria has recently moved to restrict the unfettered sale of puppies from pet shops.) The commodification of animals reaches a nadir in the US phenomenon of rent-a-pet: when you have had enough, simply return the not-so-shiny animal to the store.

The language we use can foster these practices by deprecating pets’ moral value. Thus, ‘owner’, unlike (say) ‘guardian’, presents pets as fundamentally property.

‘It’ objectifies; ‘he’ or ‘she’ does not. The very term ‘pet’ arguably trivialises animals. Pierce is right, but her writing sometimes undermines those points. For example: she calls herself an ‘animal lover’ and ‘addict’; her celebration of animal companions is sometimes too cute; and her judgement is at points dubious. Here she speculates about whether her dog Bella, asleep on the couch, could conceivably have telepathic powers:

I set my intention and thought of the words flying through the air from me into Bella’s head, ‘Do you want to play Frisbee?’ To my delight, Bella immediately lifted her head and grabbed the orange Chuck-it Flying Squirrel lying next to her. She jumped off the couch and looked at me with that special ohmy-god-it-is-time-to-play twinkle in her eye. I’m not convinced, but neither am I unconvinced.

The book is far from bland, but it is not philosophically rich. Still, Run, Spot, Run introduces very effectively to a wider audience serious questions about pet keeping’s ‘dark undercurrents’. Can keeping pets be justified? Well, if we let open the cages and doors, Pierce asks, who would stay with us? Not, perhaps, birds, reptiles, insects, rodents, and various exotic animals. Dogs would stay, and probably cats too. But many ethical problems would remain. One might question Pierce’s comparison of pet keeping with the plight of animals ‘caught in the wheels of agribusiness’. Yet many of her objections hit home.

In 2016 the New South Wales government accepted that the greyhound racing industry treated animals so badly that no reforms would likely render it morally satisfactory. Jessica Pierce comes close to a comparable view. But she finally judges that, with sufficient awareness, we might transform the way we livewith animal companions. Her book is a call to us to help make that happen. g

Simon Coghlan is a moral philosopher and veterinarian. He lectures in philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. ❖

whiCh poets have most inFluenCed you?

My first poetic influences were all American, due to the fact that I spent my critical early reading years in the United States. My poetic imagination is steeped in the disjecta membra of poets like Bishop, Stevens, Bogan, Dickinson, Ammons, Lowell, Moore, Hughes, Rich, and Eliot; I couldn’t erase their presence if I tried. Bishop, in particular, is a poet I never tire of –her forensic eye and tremendous command of the line are extraordinary. Beyond those earliest influences, there are too many poets to begin naming names, for fear of never stopping. Recently, I’ve been blown over by the exquisite, savage poems of Pascale Petit, particularly those in Fauverie are poems ‘inspired’ or mainly the work oF CraF t?

Both. I can’t work on a poem if I don’t feel any impetus, and I have abandoned many poems where I feel an impetus but can’t find a successful entry point into my subject matter.

what prompts a new poem?

A sort of niggling, perhaps best compared to the sort of irritation that builds up layers of nacre from a grain of sand inside an oyster. Sometimes the process produces a pearl; at other times, a misshapen mess (or mass).

what is the diFFerenCe Between poetry and prose?

The simple answer is line breaks. The longer answer has to do with the poet’s sense of spatiality, which to me is akin to a painter’s or sculptor’s. Form, composition, and space are present in poetry in a way that distinguishes it from other modes of writing.

what CirCumstanCes are ideal For writing poetry?

In my case, travel, movement, and change. As Mark Strand once wrote, ‘I move / to keep things whole.’

whiCh poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

Dorothy Parker, over a Whiskey Sour or three, for all the obvious reasons.

what do poets need most: solitude or a Coterie?

I like a mixture of solitude and company, but coteries don’t appeal to me. I’d take company over a coterie any day.

what have you learned From reviews oF your work?

That my sex seems to be vastly more important to reviewers’ understanding of my work in this country than it is to my own. The modifier ‘female’ seems to be permanently affixed to the noun ‘poet’ in my case. It does grate a bit.

iF plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry ColleCtion in his repuBliC, what would it Be?

Something by Elizabeth Bishop, probably – let’s say ‘One Art’.

do you have a Favourite line oF poetry? ‘Let be be finale of seem’ – Wallace Stevens

is poetry generally appreCiated By the reading puBliC?

Yes. Perhaps not so widely in Australia as it is elsewhere, but I find the obsession with the supposed impending death of poetry to be hyperbolic. Poetry will always have readers – perhaps not multitudinous readers, but devoted, intelligent, and ardent ones, which, on the balance of things, is better.

sarah holland-Batt’s most recent book of poems is The Hazards (2015, UQP), which has been shortlisted in the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, the NSW Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the AFAL John Bray Memorial Poetry Prize, and the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award. She is the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 (Black Inc.), and works as a Senior Lecturer at QUT and the poetry editor of Island

Crossing sixty

Poetry and essays from three distinctive voices

Philip Harvey

Poetry as the solidifying of memory, poetry as a survivor’s sanguine amusement, takes a lifetime. Louise Nicholas relates autobiography through strongly considered moments in time in The List of Last Remaining (Five Islands Press, $25.95 pb, 85 pp, 9780734051998). Her childhood is tracked by the small fears, confusions, and elations that only later feel like turning points:

in the same year but not the day that President Kennedy was shot in Texas, I sit on the sidelines at my first high school social wondering what to make of a new betrayal: the flowered bodice of my favourite party frock straining to contain an embarrassment of breasts where once there was little more than the rise and fall of my breath.

(‘Aged Thirteen’)

Nicholas displays an accomplished skill with voice and line, has an unhurried delivery, and a hint of mischief. Travel to places like Israel, the death of parents, the intrusion into private life of world events: these and other transformative experiences are addressed in turn with a pleasurable mixture of measured tone and telling detail. Nicholas is most comfortable with the personal encounter, whether with a person, an object, or another poem. For example, she expects the following ‘On Becoming My Mother’:

Soon I’ll take to pinning my greying hair in forties curls to grace the top of my head then, lacking my mother’s years of practised flair, wake to the pain of a bobby-pinned bed.

Nicholas knows what to say and

when to stop. She begins ‘Window’, a poem shaped like the object it addresses, ‘Here’s looking at you, window, you square-eyed go-between.’ Common sense toys with absurdity. ‘You capture the clouds and waylay the wind. You frame the moon and apprehend the sun,’ she lauds, before getting more worldly, ‘Peeping Tom is your raison d’être, defenestration is your guilty secret.’

Nicholas’s ripostes to poems express the same delight in personal engagement. ‘My Last Duke’ lets Robert Browning’s Duchess have the last word from the grave. The satire ‘Sharon Olds Is Smiling’ gives that poet’s obsessive eroticism (‘who sees sex / in a grain of sand’) a serve, and even manages to do something new, arresting, and humane with Robert Frost’s most famous poem in ‘Two Roads Untravelled’.

Poetry as risk-taking, poetry as outcomes of self-knowledge, combine in intensity. Andrew Sant, a philosophical poet, takes a break from such immediacy of expression through essay writing in How to Proceed: Essays (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 132 pp, 9781922186805). Sometimes a poem refuses to be made from the load of thoughts, the time is not right, thoughts are too divergent or abstract for the present of poetry. We know Sant is a poet here by his selection of words, but more significantly by the pacing of his thoughts.

‘On Consuming Durables’ relates the ordinary delight of op-shopping. One ‘opportunity’ was new furniture for his Melbourne residence, ‘But I kept the place TV free: more reality without one.’ More reality without one could be a guiding principle for Sant, who shows every effort to go in contrary directions to convention, with a sense that the mystery will never find complete explanation.

FINE by Michelle Wright Allen & Unwin

$29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760292454

All thirty-three short stories in Michelle Wright’s Fine echo the powdery residue and hairline fractures printed on the cover. Silt and grit and cinders: Wright writes of people navigating worlds often on the brink of crumbling. From the blurry aftermath of the Sri Lankan tsunami to the static shock following a hurried phone call revealing betrayal, Wright’s characters stay quietly strong as certainties dissolve around them.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Fine offers the untold back-stories to the opaque phrases we use as everyday armour: ‘I’m Fine’, ‘Good thanks’, ‘Can’t complain’. Wright uses each story to build detailed insight into the network of complex states and situations that exist behind her characters’ learned veneer of small talk and half smiles. In ‘[Wǝrdz]’, the linguist protagonist is shrouded by the unexpected ordinariness surrounding her father’s death: ‘I want to confront it with a word that sounds as hard as it needs to be –dead – bookended by a pair of [d] – a final sound.’

The collection’s geographical breadth –from the backstreets of suburban Australia to a No Fire Zone near the Nandikadal Lagoon in Sri Lanka – is admirable, if occasionally exhausting. Some readers may long for an anchor or stronger thread for the large collection. However, this sensation of being adrift feels intentional; for many of Wright’s characters, the world is unpredictable and uncontained.

Wright explores both everyday setbacks and unexpected disasters. Her unusually stoic characters inhabit swift plotlines and varied styles. Most stories linger. Others aren’t as affecting. Overall, though, Fine flexes strong among the most accomplished short story collections. The act of reading Wright’s emerging body of work can be neatly summarised by a character’s observation in ‘Summertime’, a story that appears towards the end of the collection: ‘What just happened is real and that its beauty and its sadness are what makes [it] worthwhile.’

Alice Bishop

‘On Curiosity’ extols the ‘chain of connections’ that might lead to ‘a lifetime interest’, while warning against ‘its dubious relative, obsessive interest’. Sant here is a great observer. Geared up with five hypersensitive senses, his mind filled with the minutiae of perpetual selfeducation, he observes the world with precision and delight. In the title essay, Sant opens with the view that it is best to trust your own instincts rather than what you are told, to give ‘himself permission to think freely for himself, to go it alone’, only then to conclude with that most amusing and confusing long day’s journey into night, asking for directions in rural Ireland.

How to proceed is a quandary understood by poets. The creative act is not like baggage handling at Essendon Airport (Sant has done this). It goes in fits and starts, usually a start followed by a fit, or nothing at all. Not surprisingly perhaps, he goes on literary pilgrimages; his charmingly haphazard accounts of finding the holy sites in the lives of heroes like D.H. Lawrence and Elizabeth Bishop is another reward of this poet’s self-analysis.

Sant comes across as sane and solitary. He escapes total solipsism, being always too much in the world. He is a novice phenomenologist. He knows how to be the observer observed. As with Louise Nicholas, this collection slowly reveals secrets in his life that enlarge our appreciation. His mother’s suicide, his restless search for a sense of place, his philosophical reflection on a broken marriage, come as illuminating surprises, altering how we hear him and understand both his predicaments, and our own.

Poetry as therapy, poetry as a daybook of recovery, has uses. Susan Varga suffered a stroke, which is where her collection Rupture: Poems 2012–2015, (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 95 pp, 9781742589091) starts, in the ward. (‘Sounds, words, sentences / disappear like tumbleweed.’) Reconstructing memory is shared by poets and stroke victims; she pieces together those parts of the past she knows into verses of varying effect. Like most writers arriving late at poetry, there are hits and misses.

Varga is good with small details, summing up people and situations, settling in with the diagnosis. Her freeverse thought patterns, when they work, give the reader enhanced insight into the daily individuality of existence. Like Nicholas and Sant, Varga has crossed sixty, able to speak more forgivingly of others and of herself. She may track a difficult emotion, as in ‘Enemy’ (‘Embedded in folds of skin / sunk deep in red tissue / imprinted in bones/ my enemy lies’) or renew affirmations (‘Like a dog dozing / waiting for night to / swallow the hours. / Survival.’)

‘First Poem’, dated December 30, 2011, outside the time frame of the collection, explains the compulsion: ‘An old garden seat, / a new bed of plants / flowering into the New Year./ Old fears,new fears. // Small shoots of thought / sustain me.

Reading Varga raised for this listener the dilemma of how we hear the voice in poetry. Poets with a tale to tell want transferred the effect of their individual voice, something the page can flatten out. With Sant and Nicholas, it is the chosen forms that aid in hearing their voice. With Varga, the shifts in her attention, the exclamation marks, the small ironies that might be sincerities, rely for their impact on knowing her own speech. Some of the poems are obviously best done in performance, but how to learn her timing was sometimes a difficult ask. There is time yet for her to notice more ‘small shoots of thought’, perhaps by trying new forms. g

Philip Harvey is the Poetry Editor of Eureka Street

Making strange

An instructive introduction to Bernstein’s energetic advocacy

John Hawke

PITCH OF POETRY

by Charles Bernstein

University of Chicago Press (Footprint), $49.95 pb, 352 pp, 9780226332086

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay ‘Art as Technique’, asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of ‘making strange’ the reader’s customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implications of this approach directly influenced Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, and in turn underwrite Roland Barthes’s structuralist unmasking of societal ‘mythologies’.

The Russian Formalist critics – and their counterparts in practice, the avantgarde Futurist poets – are frequently cited as precursors by the American poet and

critic Charles Bernstein, along with Wittgenstein’s similar explorations of the manner in which our perception of the world is shaped by language. (Bernstein’s undergraduate dissertation, later published as Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature [1972], linked Wittgenstein’s ‘linguistic turn’ to the textual experiments of Gertrude Stein.) Yet the political claims made for their often wilfully ‘difficult’ poems by Bernstein and his associates in the burgeoning international field of ‘Language’ practitioners have often been contested: as a somewhat perplexed Chinese interviewer puts the question to Bernstein here, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is generally regarded as a renegade brand, but in what way is it rebellious?’ Or, as the poet Jackson Mac Low once / Help me, words – / you always have.’

asked: ‘What could be more of a fetish or more alienated than slices of language stripped of reference?’

These issues are consistently addressed across the essays and interviews collected in Pitch of Poetry, a summational critical work that also serves as an instructive introduction to Bernstein’s energetic advocacy of experimental poetries over several decades. Unlike Stein, who, as Bernstein puts it, ‘refused to explain the inventiveness of unconventional art in conventional prose’, Bernstein’s critical approach – honed through years of pedagogy – is a model of compositional clarity. An informative survey essay, ‘The Expanded Field of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’, describes the ‘constellation of activity’ that Bernstein and Bruce Andrews initiated through their establishment of editorial and organisational poetry networks from the late 1970s. A group of poets, roughly corresponding in age to Australia’s ‘Generation of ‘68’ – including Bernstein, Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Palmer, and Lyn Hejinian – were joined by younger figures such as Andrews, Ron Silliman, and Steve McCaffery; the movement incorporated important overlooked experimentalists from the postwar period like Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, and Jackson Mac Low, and established connections with such innovative British poets as Maggie O’Sullivan and J.H. Prynne. These associations have since become more fully internationalised – in part because of their dissemination through such vital online resources as Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center and PennSound (both initiated by Bernstein), and through the significant role played by John Tranter’s Jacket magazine; their often controversial effect on Australian poetry has been in particular evidence over the past decade.

From the outset, the movement was intended as a critical as well as poetic enterprise, and this included the reconsideration of neglected precursor figures, such as the Russian Futurists. Pitch of Poetry acknowledges many of these in a section of valedictory tributes (some of which appear to be obituaries) to Bernstein’s chief luminaries. The primary figure in first-wave modernism is

Stein, for her cubistic emphasis on the materiality of language (‘for itself, in itself, and as itself’): poetry is necessarily, in Shklovsky’s terms, ‘a difficult, roughened, impeded language’, and Bernstein several times approvingly quotes Robert Creeley as stating that ‘content is always an extension of form’. Bernstein also champions a second-wave of American modernists who emerged in the 1930s, especially the ‘Objectivist’ poet, Louis Zukofsky, whose extreme emphasis on ‘sound sense’ led him to homophonic translations which challenge referential comprehension. The postwar poets of Donald M. Allen’s New American Poetry 1945 – 1960 (1960) are re-evaluated, mainly for the degree to which they break from Poundian compositional principles based on ‘montage’ (which Pound called the ‘ideogramic method’). Bernstein instead favours ‘a more openended collage’, which is first identified in Charles Olson’s ‘The Kingfishers’, and in the ‘non-linear’ compositions of New York School poets such as John Ashbery and Barbara Guest.

Bernstein is equally adamant in defining the ‘official verse culture’ to which he opposes these figures, especially the ‘reification of lyric poetry’ evident in ‘the personally expressive poem’. His remarks on Ashbery’s evocation of ‘the temporal sensation of meandering thought’ are particularly interesting in this regard: Ashbery, he argues, creates ‘a “third way” between the hypotaxis of conventional lyric and the parataxis of Pound and Olson’, one which ‘averts both exposition and disjunction’. Barbara Guest is similarly viewed in terms of a ‘lyric negation’, ‘at all times close to, yet out of sync with, the rites of lyric voicing’. Bernstein expands on this idea to present what is perhaps his ideal for poetic representation: ‘No ideas only surfaces, no surfaces only words, no words only textures, no textures only contingent connections …’

This rather cryptically Mallarméan phrasing seems to place Bernstein at some remove from the realm of political action. Yet Pitch of Poetry opens with material devoted to the Occupy Movement, in which Bernstein was an eager participant, and for which he at times acted as a somewhat unlikely

spokesperson. Answering a 2011 interviewer’s question regarding Rogelio López Cuenca’s slogan ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, Bernstein argues that: ‘There is a direct relation between OWS and a poetics that sees the representation of reality as always at stake when we use poetry’. But where and how exactly can this relation be located? Bernstein’s essay on the foundation of ‘Language’ poetries describes how many of these poets emerged from the political movements of the 1960s (Abbie Hoffmann and the Yippies are cited in the Occupy interview), with ‘a strong desire to connect oppositional political and cultural views with linguistically inventive writing’, based on the belief that ‘language is never neutral but rather always betrays an ideological interest and unstated messages’. Shklovsky’s claim that poetry can ‘lay bare the device’ is therefore pertinent to this goal. As Bernstein sums up the implications of the Russian Formalist’s argument: ‘poems can make the metaphoricity of our perception in and through language more palpable’. g

Bernstein’s critical approach – honed through years of pedagogy – is a model of compositional clarity

John Hawke is a Senior Lecturer, specialising in poetry, in the Department of English at Monash University. ❖

A fervent quest

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen

SAVED TO REMEMBER: RAOUL WALLENBERG, BUDAPEST 1944 AND AFTER by Frank Vajda

Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 158 pp, 9781925377088

‘Is the Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg’s Death Finally Solved?’ asked a headline in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, on 6 August 2016. The New York Times published a similar story, reporting on the publication of Notes from a Suitcase: Secret diaries of the first KGB chairman, found over 25 years after his death (2016). Suitcases of journals were discovered hidden in the wall of a house inherited by the granddaughter of the first KGB chairman, Ivan Serov. The diaries state for the first time that the saviour of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews was liquidated on Stalin’s orders in a Soviet prison in 1947. Since Wallenberg’s arrest by the Soviets, many explanations of his likely fate have circulated, with reported sightings into the 1980s. Determining Wallenberg’s fate has been a fervent, worldwide quest. This latest find still needs verification.

Frank Vajda, author of Saved to Remember, published here in June 2016, must be both overcome by this news and disappointed that it did not arrive in time for his book, an account of his own life and his career in medicine, but also a homage to Wallenberg. Like other Hungarians in Australia, Vajda was saved by Wallenberg, an architect and banker turned special envoy sent to Hungary following the Occupation in March 1944. The Nazis, with the complicity of the ruthless Hungarian militia, the Arrow Cross, were determined to rid Hungary of Jews. Vajda’s father died of starvation in the Mauthausen camp in 1945 and some sixty members of his extended family also perished.

An only child, Vajda was nine in 1944 and sheltering with his mother in one of Wallenberg’s ‘safe houses’. He testifies:

Wallenberg removed people from deportation trains, rescued children out of convoys and returned groups of people … before they could be transferred to Eichmann’s hands … He rushed to execution sites … saving hundreds of people in the face of the power crazy murderers by using his assumed power, his charisma and bribes to induce the release of ‘Swedish protégés’.

Vajda ‘survived by a series of near misses and coincidences’, of which he details eight. He does not allow himself much emotional expression except when talking about his beloved mother who died in his youth and to whom, in her years of illness, Vajda feels he did not devote enough attention. He writes: ‘I seriously contemplated suicide and felt absolutely devastated when the end came.’ Not an observant Jew himself, Vajda notes: ‘There are many different attitudes among Jews’, and he has some sharp words about some of the more hard-line views. He has made a considerable contribution to Jewish life and been widely honoured for this. Short sections document key personal and public aspects and events: ‘Historical Anti-Semitism in Hungary’, ‘The Horthy Regime 1941–1944’, ‘My Maternal Keve Family’, ‘Two Family Houses’, ‘My Maternal Grandmother’, ‘The German Takeover’, ‘The Deportation of Provincial Jews’. Vajda observes: ‘The final reprieve for the remains of Hungarian Jewry was not due to any Axis generosity, but to requests and warnings from the Allies, the Pope and the Swedish King.’ Vajda was instrumental in having the first ever honorary Australian citizenship bestowed in 2013 on Wallenberg following the United States, Britain, Budapest (though not Hungary), and Israel. He has dedicated a memorial sculpture to Wallenberg near his Melbourne home. He has also worked closely with others, often at high levels, as well as with Swedish connections, particularly Wallenberg’s sister, to establish what befell this exceptional man. For this work, Vajda was awarded the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star.

Vajda’s secondary education at his cherished Melbourne High School,

his training as a doctor, his later specialisations and many achievements and accolades are summarised. There is little about family or an interior or social life. ‘My wife Michelle has given unstinting support in these endeavours and my son has brought unparalleled joy to my life.’ His son was named after Vajda’s three heroes; Simon (Wiesenthal), Raoul, and Leslie (Laszlo) – ‘my martyred father’.

In his introduction Vajda writes: ‘This story is not about the Holocaust in its entirety, but rather about responses to events that happened to me.’ He presents his early life in compressed detail including contact with various relatives, his schooling or lack thereof; his escape with his mother to Austria by paying a people smuggler; their wait in difficult circumstances before being accepted as immigrants by Australia.

Frank Vajda became a distinguished neurologist, specialising in drugs for pregnant women suffering from epilepsy. He founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre of Clinical Neuropharmacology at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, thus bringing together his two consuming endeavours. Saved to Remember is a timely and significant work. It could garner a wider readership with a more arresting cover, better presentation, a less dense typeface, and some judicious pruning in sections on individuals important to Vajda but perhaps not of equal interest to readers. With its four stand-alone chapters on Wallenberg, appendices and testimonials, the book veers between memoir, autobiography, and historical account. The tone is detached except for flashes of anger and sadness at what was perpetrated and lost. Of undeniable power and relevance is this question that still remains to be answered: ‘How could the world, and in particular German civilians, claim to have been ignorant of mass murder in Nazi occupied territories, when in July 1944, I, although a child, knew from stories being circulated by word of mouth, about lime pits, gas chambers and showers, into which people were crammed to suffocate them?’ g

Agnes Nieuwenhuizen reviews adult fiction, memoirs, and works on ageing.

Thinking machines Gary N. Lines

RISE OF THE MACHINES: THE LOST HISTORY OF CYBERNETICS

by Thomas Rid Scribe

$35 pb, 316 pp, 9781925321425

What is the definition of the postmodern concept known as cybernetics? Englishman and mathematician Thomas Rid, a professor in the War Studies department at King’s College, London, comprehensively documents the history of cybernetics in his book Rise of the Machines. First, though, he discusses the problem of defining cybernetics. It seems like a logical place to start. Logical it may be, but easy it isn’t.

Cybernetics is a postmodern concept; it resists attempts to be pigeon–holed with one universally accepted definition. It employs the usual suspects, such as self-awareness, great promise, paradox, parody, and a god complex. Stafford Beer, a UK theorist, specialising in management cybernetics, relates a joke which sums up the dilemma of defining cybernetics.

It concerns three men about to be executed. They are all granted one last wish. The first admits to sins during his life and asks for a priest. The second explains he is a professor of cybernetics. His last wish is to deliver a final and definitive answer to the question: what is cybernetics? And the third man? He is a doctoral student of the professor and his last wish is to be executed second.

The term ‘cybernetics’ has a futuristic other-world taint to it, but the neologism was coined in the 1940s by the nerdishly named Norbert Wiener, an eccentric American MIT mathematician and philosopher, portrayed by Rid as brilliant but a bumbling egoist. Rid explains how Wiener was declared

a ‘prophet of the second industrial revolution’ by Time magazine when Wiener published his book Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine (1948). Rid, interpreting Wiener’s insights, writes: ‘In the first revolution, engines and production machines had replaced human muscle: now in the second revolution, control mechanisms would replace human brains.’

Rid argues that ‘cybernetics was a general theory of machines, a curious postwar scientific discipline that sought to master the swift rise of computerised progress’. He then traces the evolution of cybernetics from its beginnings when it emerged as a direct response to the German war machine during the London Blitz. Rid identifies the benchmark leaps of the blurred anastomosis of machine and human control and how this is managed via the agency of negative feedback. Rid identifies the practitioners who expanded cybernetics across their various disciplines. There was Elmer A. Sperry who invented products specifically designed to give machines better control; Julian Bigelow who, with Wiener, attempted to predict pilot behaviour; W. Ross Ashby, the English psychiatrist who, in the early 1950s, invented the ‘Homeostat’, a ‘thinking’ machine, ‘the closest thing to a synthetic human brain so far designed by man’; and Alice May Hilton, a brilliant mathematician who in 1963 articulated the idea of ‘cyberculture’.

Then came Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a prescient film about technological progress and machines acquiring human characteristics; Clarke was heavily influenced by Wiener. Donna Haraway frightened everyone with her notion that anyone with a pacemaker was in fact a ‘cyborg’. Cybernetics generated more and more portmanteau names as its field of influence expanded.

Rid also assures us in his earlier dissertation Cyber War Will Not Take Place (2012) that there is nothing to fear from cybernetics. Rid confirms that ‘cyber war has never happened in the past, that cyber war does not take place in the present, and that it is un-

likely that cyber war will occur in the future’.

Rid’s subtitle, The lost history of cybernetics suggests that if the history is ‘lost’ then this text by logical extension offers to find it for us; this is a tacit promise kept. Rid delivers with a text accessible to the layman in the same way that Richard Dawkins weaves his compelling style into his rainbow theories of delusion and Stephen Hawking did in A Brief History of Time (1988).

In the last chapter, which bears the title ‘Fall of the Machines’, Rid opens with an obvious, if trite and overworked, religious metaphor: ‘First came the promise, then the rise, and finally the fall of the machines.’ This indulgence aside, it is the chronological revelations and the players that reveal a working understanding of cybernetics. It takes a book like Rid’s to comprehend that just as postmodernism ranges over many disciplines, so to does cybernetics.

In prosecuting his case, Rid evokes the prescient fictional work of William Gibson, who coined the term ‘cyberspace’, and Verner Vinge, whose novella True Names (1981) deals with gaming and encryption, and privacy incursions. Rid underpins his work with references to the literary theory of Roland Barthes, the cultural anthropological genius of Margaret Mead, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), and Ayn Rand’s sociological and philosophical fiction. Even L. Ron Hubbard created a religion out of cybernetics. This is not Rid’s exhaustive list of influencers on the subject, but it serves the view that cybernetics is, as a master narrative with an inbuilt automatic feedback loop, relevant and influential across many spheres, including the humanities and pop culture.

In the main, the book is well written. It is not, nor was it meant to be, a scientific dissertation per se. Rid can be a garrulous writer, but in spite of his occasional prose affectations, as a key to understanding the ‘rise of the machines’ and history of cybernetics Rid’s text is seminal. g

Gary N. Lines is an Adelaide reviewer and the author of the novel Doing Life in Paradise (2016). ❖

when did you First write For aBR?

I came to ABR as an unpublished writer in 2011 after an invitation to write on Ernest Hemingway. I promptly read all of Hemingway. The resulting publication (February 2012) was my first review.

whiCh CritiCs most impress you?

Clive James: the master. Erudite yet accessible; terrifyingly well-read; and pioneering, in treating television as a medium deserving of serious critical attention. Caitlin Moran: her feminist critique of gender politics is accessible and vital; her pop-culture criticism perfectly blends the eye-roll with toe-wriggling enjoyment. Giles Coren: he turned the restaurant review into a roaring, funny, joyous literary art. I have no interest in British restaurants, but if I can’t read Giles on a Saturday, I’m annoyed. That’s the sign of a great critic. Camilla Long: nobody wields a more deft scalpel on film. Christopher Hitchens: his voice is so strident, so vibrant. He’d be at Trump like a wolf to steak.

what makes a Fine CritiC?

Fairness, close textual engagement, and excellent prose are basic requirements. I admire critics with a strong, individual voice who write engagingly in the first person. As a magazine or newspaper critic, you have limited space to make an argument. Given that, it’s important to establish a relationship with readers to enable them to trust – or run a mile from – the critic’s opinions. I also think there’s a place for humour in reviewing. [Bravo! Ed.]

do you aCCept most Books on oFFer, or are you seleCtive?

I pitch for most of my work, so I mainly write on books I’ve chosen.

do reviewers reCeive enough FeedBaCk From editors and/or readers?

Peter Rose gives excellent feedback – I value that, it’s rare. I also got an early and important ‘constructive bollocking’ from Stephen Romei at The Australian, which was vital. Otherwise, critics get very little volunteered feedback. Young writers need this to develop, so I sought it out from senior writers I admire. I’ve been luckier than I deserve to receive generous constructive criticism in response. I’d welcome more feedback from readers. Just don’t fling fruit at me.

what do you think oF negative reviews?

Tricky. I agree with Geordie Williamson’s 2011 Pascall Prize remarks, where he endorsed ‘open-handed criticism’ and being an enthusiast. I hope to be the print version of the person who rushes up to you at a dinner party before you drop your coat, shoves a drink in one hand, a book in the other, and bellows: ‘Lovely to see you, YOU MUST READ THIS.’ Having said that, we are a bit too nice to each other in Australian letters. We’re a small pond, but sometimes we drift towards being an extension of a publisher’s marketing team.

When a negative review has to be written, I think critics should take a proportionate approach. If a prizewinning author has written a well-received turkey, by all means give it a drubbing. They can take it, their career will survive, and they don’t deserve a platform just because they’re a name. But I can’t stand established critics kicking début novelists in the throat – it’s counterproductive, career-damaging, and stops people writing. Similarly, young critics trying to make a reputation by being bastards is just dreary.

I also think a negative review should be scrupulously fair – critics must weigh the bad with the good, and judge a book on what it aims to be (i.e., not sneering at commercial fiction for being insufficiently literary). Above all, it’s important to remember that a person wrote the book. They lived with it, their family lived with it. It’s their soul on a page. Be careful how you stomp on it.

how do you Feel aBout reviewing people you know?

It shouldn’t be done, where possible. You risk giving the book a puff, which is wrong, or hurting a friend by telling them their book is crap. That’s best done awkwardly, with faint praise, over the fourth drink.

what’s a CritiC’s primary responsiBility? Don’t be boring, don’t be cruel.

James mCnamara holds degrees in English and Law from the University of Western Australia, a doctorate in English from Oxford, and graduated in screenwriting from AFTRS. He is the recipient of ABR’s third Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship for his essay ‘The Golden Age of Television?’. He works in television.

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India & the Jaipur Literature Festival with Claire

Scobie

INDIA | 13 Days | Delhi – Agra – Jaipur – Udaipur – Mumbai

Ever since Claire Scobie first set foot on the sub-continent nearly 20 years ago, she has been drawn back to this land of contrasts and contradictions, palaces, princes and colour. In January 2017 you have the opportunity to join her on an extraordinary literary journey through India. From beginning to end, India comes alive through its literature and at Asia’s preeminent writers’ fair, the Jaipur Literature Festival, you’ll join audiences at Diggi Palace Hotel to be entertained by a galaxy of international and Indian authors. Meet local writers and follow in the footsteps of famous novelists. From the memoirs of a Rajasthani princess to the trials of a middle class Delhi family, from Salman Rushdie to Shantaram, India’s unforgettable characters and vast historical canvas will surprise, enchant and intrigue.

JOURNEY HIGHLIGHTS

• An intimate group size of no more than 18 guests

• Specially tailored author days by Dr Claire Scobie

• Two days privileged entry to the Jaipur Literature Festival

• Exclusive literary lunches and talks from authors in Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai

• Chic city hotels and historic palaces

• Walking tours through Old and New Delhi

• Sunset visit of the Taj Mahal

• Touring of Udaipur

• A day in Mumbai visiting important sites from local and foreign literary works

DATES & PRICING

14 - 26 January 2017

Twin Share Per Person: $12,695

Single Supplement: $5,820

For more information please call A&K on 1300

Dr. Claire Scobie is the award-winning author of ‘Last Seen in Lhasa’ and ‘The Pagoda Tree’, chosen by Good Reading magazine as one of their Best Fiction Reads 2013. She has lived and worked as a journalist in the UK, India and now Sydney. The Sydney Morning Herald described ‘The Pagoda Tree’ as ‘a richly textured tale full of the sights, sounds and smells of India … a novel to be savoured.’ Through her consultancy, Wordstruck, Claire advises businesses on harnessing the power of storytelling as a strategic tool. She also hosts writing workshops across Australia and at London’s Faber Academy. She has appeared on ABC TV’s First Tuesday Book Club and her Tibet memoir won the 2007 Dolman Best Travel Book Award.

Dr. Claire Scobie