This issue went to press not long before the Jolley Prize ceremony at the Melbourne Writers Festival on 27 August. Even then the judges – Amy Baillieu, Maxine Beneba Clarke, and David Whish-Wilson – were staying mum about the winner. Of the three shortlisted authors, two were due to attend the ceremony (Jonathan Tel lives in England) before the formal announcement of the overall winner.
We look forward to interviewing this year’s Jolley Prize winner on our podcast. Meanwhile, Cate Kennedy’s story ‘Window’ – one of three commended by the judges – will appear in our October issue.
ABR in the USA
Our first cultural tour of the United States begins on 15 September, led by Peter Rose and Christopher Menz. One highlight is the opening-night celebration of Australian literature at the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC, where Peter Rose will be joined by Geraldine Brooks and Anna Funder. Over the course of sixteen days the party will then visit Boston, New Haven, and New York, taking in writers’ homes, libraries, museums, and live performances. Everyone is looking forward to attending a separate event at the McNally Jackson bookshop in Manhattan, when Helen Garner – fresh from receiving her Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction in New Haven – will be in
conversation with Ben Lerner (Tuesday, 27 September). Garner’s biographer, Bernadette Brennan, a tour guest, will be in the audience. She has just completed the critical biography, which Text will publish in 2017.
This is a turning point for the magazine – the first time ABR has gone on the road – and there will be much to report in our pages and in Arts Update on our return.
WesteRly eAStwArd
In late July our colleague Catherine Noske, Editor of Westerly, spent a week with ABR as part of her Professional Development grant from the Australia Council. Catherine, who became Editor of the biannual journal in early 2015, was keen to observe the completion, and subsequent digitisation, of our magazine (both of which occur in-house). She attended staff meetings
WRITTEN WORD
and had separate conversations about all aspects of the business, including publishing, production, marketing, podcasting, and cultural philanthropy. It was great to have Catherine with us, and we enjoyed hearing about her plans for Westerly, one of Australia’s oldest literary journals.
Westerly 61.1 is now available. At almost 300 pages, it is one of the longest issues ever published. This one is devoted to indigenous themes and writing. Stephen Kinnane, the guest editor, has commissioned work from writers such as Kevin Brophy, Alison Whittaker, Kim Scott, and Graham Akhurst. Beautifully illustrated, this is a rich and engaging issue. To subscribe or purchase a copy go to Westerly’s website: https://westerlymag.com.au/
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Australian Book Review
September 2016, no. 384
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September 2016 Contents
Glyn Davis
Robin Gerster
Simon Caterson
Beejay Silcox
Bernadette Brennan
Joy Damousi
Alan Atkinson
Fiona Wright
Letters
Salvatore Babones, Peter Christoff, Leo Schofield, Michael Halliwell
Biography
Anne Boyd Rioux: Constance Fenimore Woolson
Brenda Niall
Leigh Straw: The Worst Woman in Sydney Rachel Fuller
Memoir
Kim Mahood: Position Doubtful Michael Winkler
Tim Elliott: Farewell to the Father Kári Gíslason
Olivia Laing: Lonely City Alexandra Mathew
France
Peter McPhee: Liberty or Death Robert Aldrich Poems
Bill Manhire Tracy Ryan
Economics
William N. Goetzmann: Money Changes Everything
Peter Acton
Business
Bob Kealing: Life of the Party
Rachel Fuller
Russia
Simon Sebag Montefiore: The Romanovs Mark Edele
Fiction
Tara June Winch: After the Carnage Kerryn Goldsworthy
Howard Jacobson: Shylock Is My Name Andrea Goldsmith
Nike Sulway: Dying in the First Person Shannon Burns
Nick Earls: The Wisdom Tree
Anthony Lynch
Anna Spargo-Ryan: The Paper House Thuy On
Sarah Drummond: The Sound Piri Eddy
Kate Tempest: The Bricks that Built the Houses
Barnaby Smith
Britain after Brexit
The elusive Alan Moorehead
A clear-eyed account of Brett Whiteley
Letter from America
A companion to Kim Scott
History with currency
How do we live with ourselves?
Steven Amsterdam’s new novel
Arts Update
Love and Friendship Anwen Crawford
Twelfth Night Ian Dickson
Making the Australian Quilt 1800–1950
Margaret Robson Kett
The Mill on the Floss Andrew Fuhrmann
Film
Jonas Mekas: Movie Journal Philippa Hawker
Green Room
Brett Dean: Michael Shmith
Art
David H. Solkin: Art in Britain 1660–1815
Patrick McCaughey
Australian History
John Stanley James: The Vagabond Papers John Arnold
Essays
Melanie Joosten: A Long Time Coming Patrick Allington
Annie Dillard: The Abundance Kevin Rabalais
Goenawan Mohamad: In Other Words Satendra Nandan
Poetry
Tony Page: Dawn the Proof
Anthony Lawrence: Headwaters
Geoff Page: Gods and Uncles
Dennis Haskell
Poet of the Month
Geoff Page
Graphic Novel
Tim Molloy: Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares
Max Sipowicz
Open Page
Fiona Wright
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
Our island home
Dear Editor,
Melbourne geographer Peter Christoff may be right that Australia should shake off its island mentality, but he is wrong to suggest that Australia has become much less of an island economy in the half century since the publication of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. In his review of The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia by Ian Lowe (ABR, August 2016), Christoff misquotes some statistics and misrepresents others. Christoff writes that Australia’s exports amount to forty-two per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP); the correct figure is twenty per cent. Christoff writes that half of Australia’s exports go to China and Japan; the correct figure is forty-two per cent. And Christoff claims that Australia’s economy is now ‘integrally Asian’, yet nearly all of Australia’s exports to Asia are minimally processed minerals and foodstuffs.
Compare Australia to a real Asian country like South Korea and the difference between trade and integration becomes clear. South Korea’s top exports to China are integrated circuits and liquid crystal displays, key components in tight-knit global production networks. South Korea is fully integrated into the Asian economy. Australia is merely a supplier of raw materials to Asia, and if in the future global economic growth shifts to new regions, Australia’s raw materials will simply be redirected to where they are wanted. There are no integrated production networks involved in the sale of iron ore.
Christoff may be right to criticise Lowe’s nostalgia for ‘a more self-contained society and insular economy’, but since the publication of The Lucky Country, the preponderance of exports in Australia’s economy has only risen from fifteen to twenty per cent of GDP. For the world as a whole, the rise over the same period was from twelve per cent in 1964 to twenty-
Letters
nine per cent in 2015. Over the last half century, Australia has become more dependent on export markets, but qualitatively with very little integration and quantitatively much less than the world average. Australia may have become an extraordinarily cosmopolitan country in recent years, but in economic terms it is still our island home.
Salvatore Babones, Elizabeth Bay, NSW
Peter Christoff replies:
Salvatore Babones is right to correct my error. I mis-wrote ‘exports’ where I meant trade. Australia’s total trade (not just exports, as I wrote) amounted to 42.3 per cent of its GDP in 2013–14. And it was Australia’s trade (not just exports) as a percentage of GDP that rose from twenty-nine per cent in 1964 to forty-two per cent in 2013–14.
However, on other crucial points he is wrong. At the risk of generating a nerd-fest, some details. Of course markets shift over time. That was the point of my historical comparison with Australia’s previous relationship to American and European markets.
DFAT’s report on Fifty Years of Australian Trade notes that ‘by 201314, Asia accounted for 83 per cent of Australia’s merchandise exports, up from just 32.8 per cent in 1963–64’. For imports, the figures are 21.8 per cent in 1963–64, and 56.8 per cent in 2013–14. As I wrote colloquially, half our exports now go to two Asian countries: China and Japan (here, Babones is wrong: the precise figure, from DFAT data, in 2013–14 was 54.7 per cent … not forty-two per cent). They also are its largest national sources of merchandise imports. My line about Australia’s economy now being ‘integrally Asian’ stands.
Unfortunately, Babones fails to engage with my core argument. While the growth in Australia’s trade exposure is not exceptional, it nevertheless shows we are much more strongly
globalised than when Donald Horne wrote. We are less economically self-sufficient now than before, and our increased level of complex global integration is harder to unstitch – economically, politically, and ecologically – than would have been the case decades earlier. Moreover, one has to think carefully as to whether such a path is wise. If we are to make our economy more ecologically sustainable by becoming more autarchic, which of our global connections should go and how could this be achieved? Babones, like Lowe, fails to address this challenge.
Peter Christoff, Parkville, Vic.
The missing conductor
Dear Editor,
In his exhaustive review of two stagings of Così fan Tutte (Arts Update, July 2016), Michael Halliwell notes the conductor of the Vienna performance but fails to do so for the splendid Sydney production by David McVicar. That he and all other reviewers were impressed with the performance surely had something to do with the conductor.
Jonathan Darlington has an international reputation and has collaborated with McVicar: before, both overseas and here in Don Giovanni, and now with Così. In his 2,000-word piece, Mr Halliwell might surely have found a few extra words of praise for the conductor whose contribution to this fine new production, one of the best things Opera Australia has done in years, is at least as worthy of praise as that of the set and lighting designers.
Leo Schofield (online comment)
Michael Halliwell replies:
Mr Schofield is absolutely correct. It was remiss of me to omit mention of the excellent conductor, Jonathan Darlington. The great success of the performance was due in no small part to his excellent choice of tempi and rapport with both the orchestra and the singers.
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well? Europe as an important ally and potential sinkhole Glyn Davis
BRITAIN’S EUROPE: A THOUSAND YEARS OF CONFLICT AND COOPERATION
by Brendan Simms
Allen Lane, $49.99 hb, 338 pp, 9780241275962
For elections in Britain, the polling stations stay open until late, with counting through to dawn. So it was a sleepless night for many on Thursday, 23 June 2016 watching the Brexit referendum results on BBC1, its impressive graphics showing a divided country with cities supporting Europe, the countryside firmly against. As a new working day began, the count topped the 16.8 million votes required for Britain to leave the European Union. Within hours, Prime Minister David Cameron had announced his resignation and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was under challenge for a perceived failure to campaign effectively to ‘remain’. With Scotland and Northern Ireland voting for Europe, commentators predicted the dissolution of the British union. After forty-three years in Europe, Britain had slipped its moorings, with no new destination in sight.
In Britain’s Europe: A thousand years of conflict and cooperation , Cambridge historian Brendan Simms argues that the relationship between island and continent is central to British identity. British diplomacy, in turn, has focused on maintaining security amid shifts in the balance of power. As the scriptwriters of Yes Minister observed in a 1980 episode:
and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans
As his title promises, Simms traces these changing alliances with skill. His Britain begins in Cnut’s North Sea empire of the early eleventh century, and remains European in focus through to the pan-European economic and security treaties of modern times. The stance is avowedly contrarian: Simms does not accept the conventional narrative of a sceptred isle, unique and separate, but sees Britain’s destiny as ‘mainly determined by relations with the rest of Europe’. For Simms, Britain emerged from shared European values and institutions in Christendom, and for centuries was tied by conquest and empire to the continent. Although Britain developed an independent set of institutions, key moments such as the Act of Union in 1707 were responses to developments in Europe. Tumult such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic expansion required Britain to articulate a foreign policy vision and invest vast resources to re-establish a balance of power. The age of empire and the cataclysmic wars of the twentieth century continued this pattern, with British interests tied closely to continental developments. ‘Europe needs Britain to be part of it,’ said Prime Minister Tony Blair in a 1997 speech. ‘For four centuries our destiny has been to help shape Europe.’
Yet as the Brexit vote suggests, the idea of Europe presses hard against aspirations for local autonomy. Europe is hinterland and threat, important ally and potential sinkhole. In a period of Soviet threat, close
military links helped underpin economic union, though never a surrender of the pound to the Euro. Now the interests of unity give way to older concerns about identity and sovereignty.
Simms published Britain’s Europe before the Brexit vote, but his final chapter anticipates the issues. He opens with Winston Churchill in 1946 calling for a United States of Europe, and moves quickly to contemporary crises: threats from Putin’s Russia; austerity amid economic stagnation; a return to authoritarian regimes; and secessionist campaigns against the logic of nation states. ‘All of these challenges,’ argues Simms, ‘pose a mortal threat to the European Union and some of its member states.’
For Simms, however, the threat to Britain is domestic rather than existential. The Scottish referendum made stark the fragility of unity. The subsequent leave campaign could play on dissatisfaction with the cost of European membership and the burden of regulation. It was fuelled by the growth of ‘Britain first’ political movements and the (ultimately career-fatal) decision by David Cameron to quell Conservative critics by agreeing to a referendum.
Ahead of the vote, Simms offered a different way forward: a ‘more British Europe’. The European project struggles. It is a currency without a state, a political alliance lacking shared military force, a continent without a common mission. Europe cannot control its borders despite collective commitments, nor deal effectively with Russian territorial ambitions. Europe remains a collection of parliaments rather than a united political entity. So it is time, suggests Simms, to think again about the meaning of ‘union.’
His proposal is full European federation – a continental set of governing institutions called into being by a ‘single collective act of will’. Local legislatures should be replaced by a two-chamber European Parliament (a
House of Citizens and a Senate) with a directly elected president. There would be one army, one foreign policy, a single currency and – remarkably – ‘the language of government would be English’.
One country is conspicuously absent from this arrangement. Simms reconstructs Europe to look like (and speak like) an Anglo-American state, but leaves Britain outside this new European Union. The British people, he acknowledges, would never vote to join such a Europe.
It is a provocative, if improbable, polemic, timely when published but already overtaken by events. Brexit saw Britain forfeit influence on European affairs. The United Kingdom will now be preoccupied by the domestic consequences for the British state, and by the ugly politics that may follow.
Britain’s Europe: A thousand years of conflict and cooperation offers engaged scholarship, an invitation to think differently about familiar history. It is well crafted, lively, and enjoyably argumentative. The text anticipates objections and answers them. There are fulsome notes, but alas no bibliography or index to encourage further reading.
The day after the referendum, a stunned silence settled on much of Britain. The university towns all voted to remain by very large margins, and now contemplated what would follow. They were suddenly in the minority, isolated electorally and in sentiment from the surrounding countryside.
Others celebrated. A small and apparently drunk group of young Englishmen staggered down Trumpington Street in Cambridge in the warm summer twilight, mocking the academics and students who voted to stay. ‘How do you feel?’ jeered the men. ‘We’re in charge now.’
With such taunts, Britain’ s complex thousand-year relationship with Europe comes close to home. g
Glyn Davis is Professor of Political Science, and ViceChancellor, at the University of Melbourne
New from MONASH UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING
Who was The Vagabond?
The Vagabond Papers (expanded edn)
By John Stanley James
Edited & introduced by
Michael Cannon
Published in association with the State Library of Victoria
September 2016 $34.95
ISBN 978-1-9222235-98-5 (pb)
From little things…
A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle, After the Walk-off By
Charlie Ward
‘A narrative rich in ironies, well structured, much like a campfire tale ... unfurling, exploring side channels, circling round’. — Nicolas Rothwell
August 2016 $29.95
ISBN 978-1-925377-16-3 (pb)
Diptych
Brenda Niall
CONSTANCE
FENIMORE WOOLSON: PORTRAIT OF A LADY NOVELIST
by Anne Boyd Rioux
W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (Wiley)
$46.95 hb, 416 pp, 9780393245097
If Constance Fenimore Woolson is remembered today, it is likely to be as a friend of Henry James, and a minor character in his much-chronicled life. Anne Boyd Rioux’s biography is a reminder that Woolson was a serious and talented professional writer, with ambitions and achievements that have nothing to do with James.
The subtitle, Portrait of a lady novelist, invokes James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881). Rioux sees Woolson as a version of Isabel Archer, as ardent and independent as Isabel was, but gifted with a creativity that Isabel did not possess. Woolson was ‘a woman as beguiling as any of James’s heroines’. That’s quite a stretch from James’s own words. Woolson, he said, was ‘old-maidish, deaf & intense but a good little woman & a perfect lady’. She was also intelligent, witty, and undemanding. James came to rely on her friendship during sojourns in Florence and Venice.
The expatriates first met in Florence in 1880, when she was forty years old and James was thirty-seven. After the death of her father, an Ohio businessman, Constance had earned a moderate living as a newspaper columnist, novelist, and short story writer. Her biographer gives a well-researched account of her family and career. Woolson was a great-
niece of James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Her immediate family background was one of loss, marked by the early deaths of five of her six sisters, and by her father’s financial failures. Born in New Hampshire, she grew up in Ohio and went to finishing school in New York. Her move to Italy, where she could live more cheaply than in the United States, was a way to enrich her fiction, pay the bills, and satisfy her love of art.
The subtitle also recalls George Eliot’s 1856 demolition piece, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in which Eliot gave exasperated attention to the ‘frothy, prosy, pious and pedantic’ writers who were enjoying good sales. Woolson, as Anne Boyd Rioux shows, was better than that. Yet, unlike the work of her contemporaries and fellow Americans, Kate Chopin and Sarah Orne Jewett, Woolson’s novels and stories have never had a revival.
I am sceptical about the suggestion that Woolson’s obscurity is Henry James’s fault. ‘Her life story has never been fully or adequately told in large part because it has been eclipsed by James’s’, the biographer believes. It is more plausible that the extraordinary attention accorded to James’s life and work has created Woolson; she can be made to fill an emotional gap in his narrative.
For a time, Edith Wharton was best known as a friend of the Master, and for some critics her work was simply lightweight James. Yet, as soon as her novels came back into print in the 1960s, her distinctive talent was recognised. To be a friend of James wasn’t necessarily fatal for an aspiring woman writer. Wharton was never James’s victim, nor was she overly-impressed by his late fiction. ‘I broke a tooth on The Golden Bowl,’ she remarked.
The contrasting fortunes of James and Woolson illuminate late-nineteenth-century literary taste; for a time her work sold far better than his. She has been seen as the original of May Bartram, the devoted woman who watches over the self-absorbed John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. Rioux spells it out, claiming that Woolson’s death taught James that ‘to love deeply was the great thing, the only thing perhaps’. Her
death in 1894, a presumed suicide, by jumping or falling from a high window in her Venetian apartment, prompted James to blame himself for having been a neglectful friend. More than a friend, Rioux believes; there was ‘a bond of mind and heart’. This seems an idealised reading: neither James nor Woolson left records to show such a bond.
Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) has some splendidly eerie imagined scenes in which James destroys evidence of his friendship with Woolson. After her death, he burns letters and other papers in her apartment; he then loads a gondola with bundles of clothing which he attempts to submerge in the canal. Her bulky dresses refuse to drown, as does her troubling memory.
Rioux doesn’t make much of this story. She does, however, find a secret intimacy in the six weeks they spent, in separate apartments, in the same building in Florence. This is represented as a daring breach of convention. But, given that Constance received a ‘constant stream of visitors’, it doesn’t seem that she was unduly worried about her reputation.
Outside his family, Rioux believes, Constance came first in Henry’s affections. Given his self-protective discretion and the presumed destruction of letters between them, it can’t be known that the two of them were as close as Rioux suggests. Her summary suggests a mutual decision: ‘they would not marry; they would not live in the same apartment; they would not have a physical relationship.’
But were they so close? James appears not to have known her financial difficulties, nor that she suffered from depression. He was patronising about her novels; she criticised him for his inability to develop a plot and for never showing his characters in love. As a story of a warm but at times abrasive friendship, and as a study of a professional woman writer whose work never quite satisfied her ambition, Constance Fenimore Woolson has much to offer. But despite its author’s best intentions, it is dominated by Henry James. g
Brenda Niall is a biographer, literary critic, and journalist.
The elusive Moorehead
Channelling the spirit of the biographical quarry
Robin Gerster
OUR MAN ELSEWHERE: IN SEARCH OF ALAN
by Thornton McCamish
Black Inc., $39.99 hb, 324 pp, 9781863958271
MOOREHEAD
You have to admire the professional writer who describes the chore of churning out the daily ration of words as ‘like straining shit through a sock’, though this may not have been the quotation for which Alan Moorehead would have chosen to be remembered. At the time he was Australia’s most internationally celebrated writer, known for both his apparently effortless prose and the range of his subject matter, from the battlefields of World War II to the great age of European exploration in Africa. He was a cosmopolitan travel addict, the trailblazer of what was to become a golden generation of Australian expatriates (the sock simile was told to a young Robert Hughes at Moorehead’s villa at the Tuscan seaside town Porto Ercole). The man of the ‘great elsewhere’ in Thornton McCamish’s bold new biography, Moorehead had rejected the stultifying mediocrity of ‘nowhere’ (Melbourne) for ‘somewhere’ (Europe), along the way affecting an English accent that hid his origins. But it seems that he couldn’t escape Australia and its idioms after all.
Moorehead left his reporter’s job at the Melbourne Herald in 1936 and headed for London, a familiar antipodean rite de passage, where he found work with Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. He was soon appointed to the paper’s Paris bureau and was running its Rome office when Germany invaded Poland. As an accredited war correspondent in North Africa and Europe, he saw and covered more of the conflict than just about anyone, and produced the quartet of books – the African Trilogy (1945) and Eclipse (1946) – that made his fame. Before the war, he witnessed France’s last public
execution by guillotine, and in early 1938 he met and drank whisky with his hero Ernest Hemingway in Spain. After the war, he courted and befriended the rich and famous. He had his photograph taken with Winston Churchill. Clearly, he had made the right career move.
But do people still read Alan Moorehead? A few of his books are occasionally reissued, but his reputation, as McCamish wryly notes, falls into the category of ‘remaindered Australiana’ (unfair given the vast transnational scope of his work). He is unfashionable, perhaps terminally so. The index to The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009) reveals just one reference, and that is to his war reportage. He was a big name in my youth, in the 1960s. I remember being transfixed by his story of the Burke and Wills misadventure, Cooper’s Creek (1963), with each agonising page pushing the hapless protagonists closer to their doom. I returned to Moorehead recently, reading his travel book of Australia’s north Rum Jungle (1953), which revealed some unappealing if not atypical attitudes. The uranium pioneering of the early 1950s was easily integrated into the master narrative of the conquest of an alien continent, giving meaning to an Aboriginal landscape that was beyond civilisation’s pale. ‘Absolutely nothing’ had happened in the Australian desert, he wrote, ‘except the roamings of the aborigines and the kangaroos and the interminable munchings of the white ants’: an interesting grouping of native fauna.
Yet Moorehead’s account of the damage to the indigenous peoples of the Pacific wrought by colonialism, The Fatal Impact (1966), revealed a sensibility
capable of transcending its time. Robert Hughes borrowed half the title for his masterpiece The Fatal Shore (1986), a work he dedicated to Moorehead and his British wife Lucy. Moorehead’s Gallipoli (1956) is an early and signally important contribution to what has since become the Anzac industry. The worldliness and sinewy prose of his Australian books provide a bracing antidote to the windy portentousness and narrow nationalism of contemporary Australian popular history, as notably practised by Peter FitzSimons. As both a significant individual figure and a writerly exemplar of his time and place, Moorehead warrants the kind of sympathetic investigation that McCamish provides in Our Man Elsewhere.
This is no mere objective biography. McCamish uses ‘the time-machine’ of Moorehead’s prose as a vehicle to re-enter the ‘lost world’ (a trope used frequently in the book) of a generation of writer-travellers made obsolete by the postmodern curse of globalisation. Moorehead’s appeal, as McCamish frankly admits, is driven by nostalgia. While he is at pains to keep some kind of critical distance from his subject, McCamish admits to a ‘fantasy identification’ with Moorehead himself, as one who had fled his own home town to record a world by turns glamorous and tragic.
McCamish is there every vicarious step of the way, both physically and imaginatively visiting the places his subject lived and worked. In Cairo he checks into the Hotel Carlton (the colonial relic where Moorehead stayed as a young war correspondent) in order to ‘tune in to Moorehead frequency across time’, trying to ‘channel the
The Australian National Conscience
An evening with Professor Alan Atkinson, the inaugural ABR RAFT Fellow
‘Never have sentinels between the human and the inhuman been more necessary.’ Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor
As a modern idea, national conscience dates back to the anti-slavery campaign of the late eighteenth century. Its origins were Christian, yet they arose from notions of national character. Alan Atkinson suggests that, in an age of reviving nationalism, when several of the world’s main problems depend on the will of governments, national conscience has a new relevance and a new urgency.
Alan Atkinson is the inaugural Australian Book Review RAFT Fellow. This major public lecture is the culmination of his Fellowship. Funded by RAFT, the Fellowship is intended to produce a substantial article concerning the role and significance of religion in society and culture. The Religious Advancement Foundation Trust (RAFT) was established to promote religion in the broader community, in particular the three Abrahamic faiths, for the benefit of individuals and society.
Professor Alan Atkinson is a graduate of Sydney University, Dublin, and ANU. For twenty-six years he taught at the University of New England, and has lately been Senior Tutor at St Paul’s College, Sydney University. His books have won numerous awards, including the Victorian Prize for Literature for the last volume of his magnum opus, The Europeans in Australia.
Co-presented with Australian Book Review and the Department of History at the University of Sydney.
When Monday, 5 September 2016
This free event will begin promptly at 6 pm, and bookings are essential.
Where
Law School Foyer
Sydney Law School, Eastern Avenue The University of Sydney
www.sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas
spirit’ of his ‘quarry’. He hunts down the writer’s various Italian haunts, travelling to Taomina in Sicily, to Fiesole and to Porto Ercole, where The Blue Nile (1962), Cooper’s Creek, and The Fatal Impact were written. And he rummages through the Moorehead papers in the National Library of Australia. Channelling him from a room in a depressing motel in Queanbeyan on a final research trip to Canberra – ‘maybe not so different from Moorehead’s basic hotel room in Valencia in 1937’ – is perhaps one imaginative leap too many.
It is a dangerous business, placing oneself in a biography. McCamish pulls it off, mostly, though tracking down ‘Casa Moorehead’ at Porto Ercole takes several overwrought pages. There are moments when McCamish’s own travel writing takes off. Breakfasting on ‘a boiled egg and a toothsome croissant the size of a hat’ at the Hotel Carlton, he is served by an ancient waiter in fez and waistcoat, who ‘moved with an exquisite lack of haste, and managed to radiate such a long-suffering contempt for both me and his tasks that his carriage of the tea tray from kitchen to table was a kind of performed critique of the colonial legacy’. Whether the close identification with his subject makes Moorehead ‘reappear’, as McCamish hopes, is doubtful. As the work’s intriguingly oblique conclusion implies, Moorehead remains an elusive, contradictory figure – the ‘man elsewhere’ in every sense of the term. Moorehead lived for another seventeen years after suffering a catastrophic stroke in 1966; he died in London. He survived the car crash that killed his wife, but after the stroke he never wrote again. Instead he took up painting, inspired by Aboriginal rock art. McCamish notes that he would go to the zoo in Regent’s Park, to paint the animals. At the end of his life, the writer once gratefully liberated from the constrictions of provincial Australia took to painting kangaroos at the London Zoo. g
Robin Gerster is Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, and is the author of several books and numerous scholarly articles.
‘Short-arsed
sex pixie’
A clear-eyed account of an artist’s life Simon Caterson
BRETT WHITELEY: ART, LIFE AND THE OTHER THING by Ashleigh Wilson Text Publishing, $49.99 hb, 464 pp, 9781925355239
Notwithstanding the fact that he died alone in a hotel room following a heroin overdose at the age of fifty-three, Brett Whiteley led what for an Australian artist in particular may be characterised as a fortunate life. As Ashleigh Wilson relates in this excellent biography, Whiteley retained the capacity to astonish, despite his misadventures.
A middle-class upbringing and education in Sydney and Bathurst provided him with a solid foundation. Crucially, Whiteley’s natural talent was recognised and nurtured by his primary school art teacher, Miss Waugh. In his early adult years, Whiteley had the benefit of an indulgent employer who hired him as a commercial artist. He received major travelling awards and enjoyed the support of wise and eminent mentors and promoters in the international art world. One influential early admirer was the art critic Robert Hughes.
Encouraged by the likes of Lloyd Rees, Francis Bacon, Sidney Nolan, and Kenneth Clark, Whiteley flourished in London. That halcyon period of cultural expatriatism peaked in the 1960s and lasted until the UK government decided to make it harder for Australian and other Commonwealth passport-holders to stay in Britain. Moving from London to New York on a Harkness Fellowship, Whiteley lived at the Hotel Chelsea, encountering the likes of Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. His presence in the American art scene, however, did not have the same impact as it had in the United Kingdom. Whiteley nevertheless produced the multi-panel, mixed media work entitled The American Dream (1968–69), which served as a major calling card when he
eventually returned to Australia in 1969. Despite the New York disappointment, Whiteley had been provided with as effective an international launching pad as any Australian painter of his era could have wished for. He early achieved a prominence that fortified his reputation against negative criticism as he developed as an artist. Starting in his early twenties, what Brett Whiteley did was news and his technical accomplishments commanded a certain respect. ‘Even critics who disliked Brett’s themes acknowledged his skills as a draughtsman,’ notes Wilson.
Whiteley retained the capacity to astonish, despite his misadventures
In addition to all that talent, precocious luck, and institutional support, the most significant boon in Whiteley’s story was his good fortune in meeting and marrying Wendy Julius. Her remarkable patience and forbearance, as much as the inspiration she provided as long-legged muse, helped advance and sustain his career, and later protect his legacy. Whiteley cheated on Wendy – and she had affairs that caused him torment – but he also appreciated how much he depended on Wendy; he once described her as ‘an inexorable part of my creative process’. Wendy in turn believed in him, and the lasting value of that support cannot be underestimated for all the public swagger he displayed and the affairs he pursued. The two of them certainly used a lot of heroin as a couple, ‘bound together in a shared dependence’, as Wilson puts it. ‘It helped that Brett, when stoned, was less likely
to chase other women.’ Eventually, they divorced when Wendy broke the heroin habit and he could not.
Although Whiteley did important early work in London, New York, and Fiji, he is most closely identified with Sydney, the city that bears the indelible mark of his imagination in those famous bottomless views of the Harbour and the bottom-filled paintings of female bathers on Bondi Beach. Always a fullblooded eroticist, Whiteley captured the humid sensuousness of Sydney as stirringly as any artist before or since.
Whiteley’s studio – a converted T-shirt factory tucked away down a back lane in Surry Hills – is now a public art museum bought by the New South Wales state government with the support of Wendy; it is preserved as if the artist is still working there. Perhaps no other Australian artist – certainly none as closely associated with Sydney – has such a fine permanent public memorial.
Wilson analyses Whiteley’s contradictions with precision. The duality of man – a fashionable concept in the 1960s – is a constant theme in Whiteley’s early work. In his own personality, Brett Whiteley was a mixture of the wild and the disciplined, the extravagant and the self-contained. A painter friend of mine said recently that she thought every artist has a touch of OCD, and Whiteley certainly was obsessive about making art.
often simply courage.’
As a committed artist, Whiteley was pulled along by his senses and an undimmable natural curiosity. He was
Wilson concentrates on marshalling the relevant facts into a smoothly flowing narrative and does the reader the courtesy of allowing us to form our own judgements. Perhaps it is just as well for a biographer not to get caught up in unnecessary exegesis. As Whiteley once remarked contemptuously of those who took a negative view of his work: ‘Critics are the dildoes [sic] of art’.
For those readers who delight in much of Whiteley’s best work, this book is essential reading. It illuminates the awe-inspiring creative force beyond the only-in-Sydney celebrity image of the cheeky Harpo Marx-haired shortarsed sex pixie who wore Mao suits with bucket hats and partied with famous rock stars while carrying around big rolls of cash in his flash convertible. He was doing so well financially in Australia in the last decade or so of his life that he didn’t bother exhibiting overseas.
Whiteley could also perhaps have been diagnosed with ADD. His mind tended to wander while he spoke in interviews, and he kept trying new forms and subject matter. Some of his most striking sculptures are made out of trash: an owl is made from a boot, pingpong balls, and steel hooks. Whiteley was one of those rare and special artists who not only seemed willing to try anything in any genre or medium, but was quite capable of pulling it off.
‘You are only limited by your talent,’ he wrote in a notebook, ‘and talent is
open to all kinds of Western and nonWestern influences, borrowed freely from history and popular culture, travelled extensively, and experimented with different drugs in order to extend his creative reach. He believed that making art was a portal to a higher consciousness, and he lived in an era when this notion was taken seriously by many people. He followed current affairs, though some of his views – concerning, say, the benefits of Chinese communism – seem naïve.
Beyond the fascination of the biographical subject and the extraordinary range of his work, a major pleasure to be discovered in reading Ashleigh Wilson’s book is that the author does not seek to interpose himself between the reader and Brett Whiteley.
Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing is a clear-eyed account of an artist whose output was vast, if uneven, and whose legacy looms large in the history of modern art. Ashleigh Wilson provides an object lesson in writing the life of an artist. g
Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer and the author of Hoax Nation (2010).
Brett and Wendy married at the Chelsea Registry Office, 1962 (courtesy of the Brett Whitely Estate)
COMMENTARY
Letter from America
by Beejay Silcox
Politics is personal in the United States, far more private than it appears from outside. When political allegiance becomes tied to character, revealing one reveals the other. More importantly, if you critique the former, you impugn the latter. As an Australian living in Virginia, one who considers politics a form of sport, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. So I had a breezy line ready for when I was asked why I’d come to see The Donald speak at a rally in Radford, Virginia: ‘When the circus is in town, you want to see the elephant.’ The response was predictable, but slippery: ‘Well, bless your heart.’
‘Bless your heart’ is a delightfully polite phrase that Southerners use to cauterise impolite conversation. The problem is that they deploy it at other times too. Sometimes ‘Bless your heart’ is intended as a compliment; at others, a veiled insult. And it can mean anything in between: boredom, delight, frustration, amusement. It’s fish-slick, dependent on context, intonation, and intimacy. It’s also a fitting analogy for America – a place that is never quite as simple as it seems.
Truth is, I was less interested in seeing Trump than his audience. The Radford rally was held a month into the US presidential primary season, late in February 2016. The Trump campaign was still widely regarded as a national joke, but one that was wearing thin. If Trump was the joke, his supporters were the punchline: rednecks and idiots, xenophobic lunatics who want to ‘Make America Hate Again’. It’s an easy narrative to sell, and easy to buy – unless you happen to live in the middle of it.
Sometimes when Australians ask me what it’s like to live here, on the western edge of Appalachia, I tell
them about the time I went to see Selma (the Martin Luther King Jr biopic). The story of American civil rights played to six people; down the hall American Sniper played on six screens at once, each one of them packed. But my anecdote is a punchline too. There is complexity and rich history here on the underside of the Mason-Dixon: vibrant college towns rub up against post-manufacturing hubs, with empty-eyed factories and boarded-up main streets; there’s old money, but old poverty too. There are confederate flag bumper stickers and Civil War graveyards where people still leave flowers.
The ‘free city’ of Radford is twenty-minutes from Blacksburg, where I’m in grad school. I caught a lift to the rally with a classmate, an earnest Bernie Sanders supporter who was planning to protest by pointedly ignoring Trump – sitting quietly in the audience and reading; eyes down to deny Trump the amphetamine of attention. He had been debating which book to take for days. Which title would send the right scathing message? In order to slink into the rally unnoticed, he had concealed his Feel the Bern T-shirt under a denim shirt.
The rally was slapdash, organised hastily, and late. The city felt unprepared, like someone planning a quiet family barbeque only to find the whole neighbourhood on their doorstep. The parking lots had filled by early morning; every lawn, verge, and side street was jammed with haphazardly parked cars and pick-ups. Hundreds of people made their way on foot down Radford’s slopes to the banks of the New River and the basketball stadium Trump had been forced to rent because Radford University had refused to be partisan.
I had tickets to get inside, but a thousand people were pressing against the doors and security was overwhelmed. The auditorium seated 3,800, but word had it that more than 10,000 people were coming.
A Jumbotron had been set up outside to simulcast Trump’s speech, and the unticketed supporters were massing in the tentative February sunlight, expectant, staring up at the giant screen. Queuing for the spectacle indoors, I realised I was missing something more interesting outside, so I abandoned my friend and joined the festivities.
‘Festivities’ is almost the right word. The campaign’s official rally playlist warbled through loudspeakers, incongruous in its easy-listening glory (‘Uptown Girl’, ‘Tiny Dancer’, ‘Born on the Bayou’). It largely drowned out the anti-Trump protesters, who had been magnanimously allotted a cordoned space to express their First Amendment frustrations, even though – as Trump would later tell his crowd – this was a private event and he didn’t have to be so nice. When protesters climbed onto the roof, they were sedately led back down by state troopers, like chastised children.
There were tables heavy with merchandise: Trump’s trademark red baseball cap (also available in pink for the ladies, or camouflage for hunting enthusiasts), and
a selection of anti-Hillary buttons referencing Benghazi and Goldman Sachs. Once Trump and Hillary clinched their nominations, these items would become more extreme – darkly misogynist in a way that sounds remarkably similar to the rhetoric launched at Julia Gillard as prime minister. But that’s another story.
An Australian accent takes you a long way at a Trump rally. Once I had explained where I was from, several people offered condolences for Steve Irwin. ‘I was sorry to hear about that young man of yours who passed. The one with all the reptiles.’
They asked me why I was there. I ventured my line about the elephant and returned the question. Nobody was remotely embarrassed to be there; I hadn’t caught anyone out. They were polite, open, articulate. Most, though not all of them, were white. I spoke to families and college couples, to seniors and small business owners. I talked to Afghanistan vets and Iraq vets and Vietnam vets. I met a surprisingly large number of people who were convinced that the Federal Reserve had made America ‘a slave to its own currency’. I encountered undecided swing voters and a ‘normal, red-blooded American man’ who was unapologetically reading a 1974 copy of Playboy Magazine (‘the ladies back then were more natural looking’).
Radford, Virginia (photograph by Beejay Silcox)
From the bestselling author of Looking for Alibrandi and The Piper’s Son.
‘A novel of great scope, of past and present, and above all, the Marchetta trademark of a fierce and loving heart.’
MARKUS ZUSAK
With the exception of some loud and beery skinhead teenagers itching for a fight, I didn’t hear Trump supporters talk about Muslims or Mexicans. Instead they fretted about lost jobs and the GFC and the prohibitive price of college. I heard them talk about what they feel ‘Feel’ was the most loaded word I heard all day. The language of feeling resonates where the language of thinking alienates. Thinking privileges expertise; feeling privileges the self. You can’t dismantle a feeling with reason, which is why it seems to be the new watchword of American political discourse. It’s arrogant to tell people they don’t know their own hearts.
dresses. Trump had arrived, ten feet tall and so loud his brash consonants rattled in my ribcage. ‘We’re not going to be the stupid people anymore!’ he boasted. ‘We’re going to be the people who bring in money. We’re going to be the people that create jobs for our country; not for China, and not for Mexico.’ The crowd cheered, fists raised.
Enough words have been wasted on Trump the man. What is seldom described is how catalytic he is, how he incites without personal responsibility. Trump was as reckless with the crowd as he is with truth. He is tethered to nothing, but that includes the people who think he now speaks for them – a Teflon leader who serves no one but himself, surrounded by people who feel they have nothing to lose. When you’re hurting and scared, it’s intoxicating to be told it’s not your fault, and provocative to be given someone to blame. Minutes after I left the rally, a reporter was assaulted.
We’re often told that Trump supporters feel angry. But anger is a symptom, not a cause. What I heard was raw and potent. I heard humiliation – humiliation undercut by fear. The American Dream was never a dream; it was an implicit promise, a compact, an equation – work hard, be rewarded. The people I spoke to had done what was asked of them and felt like fools for trusting ‘the system’ to deliver its side of America’s grand bargain. Trump garners allegiance because he appears to have none. I kept hearing the same line as if on a loop: ‘Nobody owns Trump.’ He operates outside of the ‘rigged’ political process; free from the ‘crooked’ press, from lobbyists, from the ‘liberal cage’ of political correctness, even from the party he purports to represent. ‘Trump is his own man,’ his supporters intoned. I wasn’t sure if I detected envy or pride.
The mood tightened. Trump was coming. I turned to the screen, where the girls seated behind the podium (and they were all girls, glossy blondes) were reapplying their lipstick and smoothing down their Republican-red
My Sanders friend had hoped for a stadium united by quiet protesters and their symbolic books, but he was outnumbered and ignored. Bless his heart. As we turned to leave, I noticed that almost everyone was wearing an orange sticker over their heart, like a neon bulls-eye: Guns Save Lives. I teach at Virginia Tech. Every day I pass a memorial to what was, back in February, America’s largest mass shooting (Orlando would soon set a new benchmark). On my first day of training, I learned how to lock-down a classroom. This dissonance is exacerbating, exhausting, and wholly American.
Understanding Trump’s supporters – empathising with them – is difficult, but deeply necessary. Compassion is not the same as political complicity. Trump’s rhetoric is abhorrent. He terrifies me. But to be frightened of his supporters is to be frightened of my students and my neighbours, and there is already too much fear. g
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and literary critic. She is currently completing her MFA in the United States, and working on her first collection of short stories. ❖
Through country
Bernadette Brennan
A COMPANION TO THE WORKS OF KIM
SCOTT
edited by Belinda Wheeler
Camden House
$163.95 hb, 184 pp, 9781571139498
In 2004 Kim Scott delivered the prestigious Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture to a predominantly academic audience at the University of Sydney. Provocatively, he began by saying that he did not know much about Australian literature; the literature of this country did not reflect his experiences or his sense of identity. It certainly was not the literature of his country. Scott wanted to question and complicate the categories of Australian and indigenous literature. His concern that indigenous literature was considered to be a lesser version, or subset, of our national literature had seemed to be confirmed when he located his novel Benang: From the heart (1999) in a bookshop under ‘Australiana’.
This issue of categorisation is a recurring theme in the eleven essays and one interview that constitute A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott. Scholars from Australia, North America, and India explore Scott’s writing within and across the frames of Australian Aboriginal literature, Australian literature and world literature. Australian-born Belinda Wheeler, now an academic at Claflin University in South Carolina, previously edited A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (2013). In compiling this latest book, she signals the importance of Scott’s writing, teaching and community work.
Opening with Per Henningsgaard’s overview of Scott’s diverse publishing history, it then tracks through each of his major publications, outlines his impressive contribution to Curtin University’s Indigenous Health unit, and concludes with Scott’s own voice. All of Scott’s work is interconnected in deep, enriching ways. The best essays in this collection look beyond their chosen text to illuminate how those connections op-
erate, and why they are so crucial for us to understand. Natalie Quinlivan’s entry on the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project, its importance, how it functions, and where it might be positioned in its regional, national, and global politics and readership, is particularly insightful.
Scott is probably best known to general readers as a novelist. Both Benang and That Deadman Dance (2010) are Miles Franklin Literary Award winners. It is pleasing, therefore, to see two separate chapters dedicated to his short stories. Lydia Saleh Rofail identifies ancestral trauma and spectral landscapes in ‘A Refreshing Sleep’, ‘Capture’, and ‘An Intimate Act’. From a very different perspective, Nathanael Pree demonstrates how Scott employs the mode of ekphrasis in five other stories. Having argued that Scott’s ‘Into the Light’ is an ‘imagist response’ to Hans Heysen’s iconic Droving into the Light, Pree concludes that ‘Scott’s ekphrasis embodies the concept of indigenous storytelling as a mode of tone and rhythm in relation to the landscape’.
For me, the highlight of this Companion is Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s nuanced, close readings of Scott’s poetry. Hughes-d’Aeth is attuned to the subtlety and complexity of Scott’s writing and cultural work, and he writes in accessible, flowing prose. At one point he sets up a conversation between the poem ‘Wangelanginy’ (2002), That Deadman Dance, and the story Mamang (2011), concluding: ‘What Wangelanginy helps readers see is the genesis of the story within the imagination of Scott and its particular role as a generative internalized myth that speaks directly to the actuality of his writing projects.’
As a Noongar man, writer, and scholar, Scott considers his most important readership to be members of his Noongar mob. He also knows that there are few readers of his work among them. In the concluding interview, Wheeler points out that the library database WorldCat records that over sixty per cent of library holdings of That Deadman Dance are in America. She lists figures around the fifty per cent mark for Benang, Kayang and Me (2013), and True Country (1993). Given the differ-
ence in market size, I fail to get excited by such statistics. More productively, Gillian Whitlock and Roger Osborne trace the international reception of Scott’s work through a case study of Benang. They are interested in the transnational turn in literary studies and they acknowledge rightly that there is an everexpanding interest in, and awareness of, the ‘significance and distinctiveness of Australian studies and Australian literary studies in the northern hemisphere’. This Companion feeds into that growing interest and, more broadly, into the field of transnational studies.
Wheeler understandably asserts that the Companion’s essays are ‘the best essays to date on Scott by leading scholars from around the world’. It is a big claim and, in my opinion, not entirely correct, but I welcome this book’s publication. It will be a vital resource for scholars. And it affirms the value of Scott’s work on a regional, national, and international scale. This is a book more geared towards an academic rather than a general readership. A number of contributions have risen out of specific academic conferences and thus have been shaped by current trends in (Australian) literary studies. Price is also a prohibitive factor. This Companion, and recently Anne Brewster’s Giving This Country a Memory (2015), are significant books for advancing (largely non-indigenous) readers’ understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal Australian writing. Both books are produced by American publishers primarily for world libraries. It is imperative that academics around the English-speaking world, at the very least, order these books for their institutional libraries.
In the Foreword to this Companion, Wiradjuri writer and scholar Jeanine Leane writes that she is privileged to be invited to step into Noongar country. With this invitation, she notes, ‘comes the responsibility of being a respectful visitor who takes the time to be introduced to this history and story of place’. A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott goes some way to giving readers just such an introduction. g
Bernadette Brennan is writing a critical biography of Helen Garner.
Pink Martini with your SSO
Eclectic and exotic songs in a jazz-classical style.
Toby Thatcher conductor
Pink Martini
THU 15 SEP 6.30PM
FRI 16 SEP 8PM
SAT 17 SEP 8PM
“Performing live, they can make you feel as if you’ve been invited to one of Holly Golightly’s parties... You never know who you’ll meet next.”
THE TELEGRAPH, UK (2015) ALSO HEAR NELSON FREIRE IN RECITAL
Few pianists are as widely admired as Brazilian Nelson Freire. His long-awaited return to Sydney features a concerto perfectly suited to both the poetry and the virtuosity of his art. Schumann’s rhapsodic Piano Concerto is full of irresistible beauty.
BEETHOVEN Coriolan Overture
SCHUMANN Piano Concerto
RACHMANINOFF Symphony No.2
Marcelo Lehninger conductor
Nelson Freire piano
APT MASTER SERIES WED 21 SEP 8PM FRI 23 SEP 8PM SAT 24 SEP 8PM
Back to the Future
Screen with Live Orchestra
Join Marty McFly and Doc Brown on this fantastic adventure with the screening of Back to the Future with Alan Silvestri’s score live played by the Orchestra.
Nicholas Buc conductor
PRESENTING PARTNER WILSON PARKING FRI 7 OCT 7PM SAT 8 OCT 2PM SAT 8 OCT 7PM
Binocular vision
Michael Winkler
POSITION DOUBTFUL: MAPPING LANDSCAPES AND MEMORIES
by Kim Mahood Scribe
$29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781925321685
At the bottom of one of Kim Mahood’s desert watercolours, she scrawled, ‘In the gap between two ways of seeing, the risk is that you see nothing clearly.’ A risk for some, but not Mahood. Her work as a visual artist and writer attests to an eye that is unfailing and a lifetime of looking. The subtle gradations and veristic detail of Position Doubtful attest to sustained attentive observation.
As a child, Mahood lived on Mongrel Downs station in the Tanami Desert. She returns to the region annually, sketching, painting, and photographing the landscape, camping beside lakes and dry creek beds, and working in small communities including Balgo and Mulan. The binocular vision that comes with her status as both insider and outsider allows for hard-won insights into desert painting and remote community life,‘both vertigo-inducing in their different ways’.
Mahood interleaves what she observes into ongoing musings about geography, community development, and relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. This is terrain – physical and psychic – which she traversed in her award-winning memoir Craft for a Dry Lake (2000). Mahood becomes fascinated by mapping, overlaying Western cartography with Aboriginal stories and art. The book’s (perfect) title is from a locution of her father’s in his 1962 account of exploring the Tanami Stock Route. She ponders ancient waterways beneath the desert sands, and posits that these venerable formations shape the contemporary land, just as the Dreamtime is coevally present and past for people in those communities. Attracted to the practical rather than the theoretical, she enacts this layering of knowledge through several large communal mapping exercises
that are realised as works of art.
By contrast, Mahood’s collaborator, camping companion, friend, and foil Pamela Lofts arrives at her artistic standpoint through the portal of postcolonial and feminist critique. Mahood considers them fashionable but blunt instruments unsuitable for understanding the endlessly varied picture of indigenous Australia. ‘That I was out of step with the intellectual and academic temper of my time troubled me, but I could not submit to the reductionism,’ she writes.
The book is in part an elegy for Lofts. The Alice Springs-based painter and photographer used the word ‘dystopothesia’ to describe ‘what she felt to be a fundamental condition of displacement for both black and white Australians’, but is presented as a more sanguine, sunny character than the author. Lofts’s death is one of many. Mahood etches her grief at the ‘cascading losses’ without extravagance; rather, the precision is powerful: ‘she had the last word so definitively that I am left with a hum of unspoken responses, distracting and incoherent as tinnitus’.
In Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling (2016), Larissa Behrendt decried the falseness of many white representations of indigenous Australians. ‘[A]ny confrontational aspect of the Aboriginal presence is stripped away in portrayal of the passive Indigenous person’, while ‘perceived mystical characteristics or idealised traits’ are invented or emphasised. Mahood, tough as emu jerky, never errs in this regard, because she has the courage not to pander – either to the Aboriginal people she knows, or to the largely non-indigenous readership that will approach her book with predictable preconceptions.
There are two campfires of historical opinion that have burned with more heat than light over recent decades. People beside the first fire believe their adversaries are racist. Those at the second fire sneer that people in the other group wear a black arm-band. Mahood eschews the comfort of either camp. She sees what she sees, and comes to her own conclusions.
In one fascinating chapter she travels with senior community members to
what they claim was the site of a massacre. Mahood tests their stories and points out holes in the narrative, but her conclusion provides no comfort to either side of the political divide. She decides that the story as told cannot be true, but that it has a factual basis. The oral testimony ‘throws a long shadow across the well-lit pioneer myths’, even though it could not withstand forensic examination.
Mahood wears ‘a skin both absorbent of cross-cultural nuance and resistant to manipulation’ and resists the push-pull attempts of those on either side of the racial gulch. Perhaps it is this stubbornmindedness that impels her to use the needlessly provocative term ‘white slave’ (which also appears in at least two other pieces she has written). Her valid point about the contortions some nonindigenous people perform in order to expiate guilt or avoid giving offence is well made without this overreach.
Mahood is simultaneously in the middle and a permanent outsider. So it is that, while she remains fixed on questions of landscape and geography, the reader becomes increasingly intrigued by her. She appears able to slip through the seemingly impermeable membrane between black and white Australia when she chooses to, but pleads that, ‘It is often assumed that I know much more than I do, and understand more.’ Mahood’s ultimate destination is a state where land and story are unified, where ‘The boundaries of people’s knowledge are fluid, morphing and overlapping.’ The palimpsest that is marked and ablated and marked again is country and history, individual and collective, layered and fused.
Thirty-six photographs, paintings, and maps are included, but the grey-scale reproductions are frustratingly small. A book of this quality, drawn from the spectacular realms of desert landscape and visual art, deserves colour plates. g
Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne and works in the Northern Territory. He has worked in all branches of the media – radio, television, print, the internet – as well as corporate communications. He won the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize.
Layers of entrapment
Kári Gíslason
FAREWELL TO THE FATHER
by Tim Elliott Picador
$34.99 pb, 330 pp, 9781743537893
One of the claims that is sometimes made for the memoir form is that it gives the author a degree of release from the past. Getting it down on paper can also be about getting it out – perhaps even out of the way. The title of Tim Elliott’s memoir, Farewell to the Father, suggests that this may have been the goal here; that Elliott, in telling his story, would be able to farewell a man who, we learn, caused much suffering to both himself and his family. A great strength of this book, though, lies with the less satisfying, but I think more realistic, acceptance that definitive goodbyes of this kind are seldom possible. The past, and the layers of entrapment that may lie there, are much more complex than that.
Tim Elliott works as a journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald. The genesis of his memoir was a 2014 article he wrote about his father Max Elliott, a wellknown Sydney doctor and former Australian rugby union player. That article covered much of the material expanded in the first part of the book. Max was much loved and respected, and on the surface enjoyed a comfortable life in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. The large family home looked over Mosman Bay, the children went to private
school, and Elliott’s mother, Rosemary, devoted herself to caring for the home and family. Max could be unpredictable: he liked to shock young women who visited the house by showing up naked, and he encouraged his children to experiment with drugs. But if there was madness there, it seemed to be of the eccentric, charismatic kind.
Underneath, however, lay something much darker. Max Elliott, as the family knew him, was ‘obsessive, masochistic, with a mind like a stoked furnace’. He suffered from what would now be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He was also an alcoholic, and during his worst periods would be violent and
A great strength of this book ... lies with the less satisfying, but I think more realistic, acceptance that definitive goodbyes of this kind are seldom possible
abusive towards his wife and children. Tim, the youngest in the family, was the last of the children to leave. Until a young man, he lived in fear of Max, and also with the real dread that one day his father would deliver on his repeated threats of suicide. Perhaps typical of the times, this disturbing and often heartwrenching situation went largely unnoticed by the prosperous community around them: ‘That was “dirty laundry”, Mum would say, and one shouldn’t go around airing it.’
Elliott’s approach in this book is very different from the one taken by his mother. He has given us an open and direct account, however dirty the laundry might be. But Elliott does not set out to shock the reader. His tone is sometimes angry and occasionally bitter, but his training as a journalist is also present, in the memoir’s steady pacing and in the thematic nature of many of its chapters. While there is a broad chronology to the work, it can equally be read as a series of topic points, a study of family entrapments and their various effects – on his mother, his parents’ marriage, his siblings, his adolescence, his
first loves. Generally, Elliott’s preference is to examine these points of impact in turn, I suspect as a way of quietly insisting that the book has a methodology, and is not merely an outpouring of anger about the events that it covers.
Running through the story is an almost desperate concern with the possibility of escaping a ruinous family situation and its ongoing legacy. As a boy and now as an author, Elliott searches for distance from the father who dominated his life. But at what point is it possible to say goodbye? Death, for one, seems not to offer much in the way of farewell. ‘Once a person dies, you assume they are gone. But in fact they become more present than ever.’ You might even begin to search them out more than you did in the past: ‘If it was windy, I told myself I could hear him. If it was a full moon, I told myself I could see him.’
Rather than fading away, after his death Elliott’s father becomes a persistent and not always unwelcome ghost. In part, this is simply because Elliott still loves him. It is also because of the almost gothic hold that Max retains over his son. Earlier, Elliott writes that the family house ‘was our castle, and Dad was our king’. Even after Elliott has cleared the castle walls and watched over the death of the king, the shadows of childhood remain.
In that sense, Farewell to the Father does not perform the goodbye that is offered by the title, and nor does it need to. As the story moves towards Elliott’s life as it is today, we witness another kind of farewell, and I expect it is the one that matters most. Here, Elliott describes his own struggle with mental illness and its impact on his family life. It is also at this point that Elliott begins to search for a different response to that illness, one that won’t harm his wife and children. In doing so, Elliott makes a powerful and moving farewell – if not to the father, then to a model of fatherhood that he is determined not to repeat. g
Kári Gíslason teaches creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of The Promise of Iceland (2011) and The Ash Burner (2015).
‘Devoid of the sound of bells’
A magisterial study of the French Revolution
Robert Aldrich
LIBERTY OR DEATH: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
by Peter McPhee
Yale University Press (Footprint), $55.95 hb, 487 pp, 9780300189933
The French Revolution never ceases to fascinate. Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre, the storming of the Bastille and the ‘Marseillaise’, the Terror and its guillotine: such is the stuff of historical works, novels, films, and exhibitions. The Revolution remains with us today, and not only in the slogan ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Subjects of the king became citizens of the nation in 1789, the possibility of universal suffrage was broached, and the notion of public opinion became a fundamental part of politics. Our nomenclature of ‘left’ and ‘right’ derives from where members of the revolutionary assembly sat in their chamber. The modern passport and the semaphore telegraph were developed at the time. The metric system is one of the longest-lasting and most omnipresent results of efforts to standardise weights and measures and, in a more general sense, to make the world a more logical place.
The literature on the Revolution is massive. Putting ‘French Revolution’ into Google nets 11.5 million results, and the French national library (a creation of the Revolution) has 38,579 catalogue entries for ‘Révolution Française’. A quarterly journal of French revolutionary history has been published for over a century. It is indeed extraordinary how much has been discovered and calculated. We know that there were 515 new newspapers in Paris during the Revolution, and 701 new songs in 1794 alone. More shockingly, we know that 1,376 people were guillotined in Paris during one six-week period. A scholar writing a general book thus faces a formidable task. Any card-carrying historian must record with admiration Peter McPhee’s remarkable mastery
of the literature, the debates, and the generations of interpretation about the French Revolution. The names of fellow scholars are relegated to McPhee’s notes and bibliography, keeping his narrative moving along at a most engaging pace, but his knowledge is deep and broad. The personal familiarity with and affection for France of McPhee, a long-time professor at the University of Melbourne, is evident at every turn.
McPhee takes readers through the complex series of events that over a decade saw the fall of a regime that had been in place, in an increasingly creaking and ramshackle way, for hundreds of years. Timorous and ill-managed attempts at reforms gave way to more dramatic changes, such as the abolition of aristocratic and clerical privileges, a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, parliamentary government, and constitutional monarchy. Then the Revolution took an even more radical direction with the proclamation of a republic and some of the boldest acts of social and economic legislation ever adopted anywhere. Challenges arose from counter-revolutionary activity, and there was a bitter civil war, with perhaps 200,000 people killed in the Vendée region. France was also at war against an anti-revolutionary coalition of international powers. One response was the Terror, but Robespierre and the cohort that had overseen the Terror ultimately became its victims. Only from the mid-1790s was a kind of stability established, but an ambitious Corsican general was waiting on the sidelines. One of the original aspects of McPhee’s magisterial study is that he looks at the provinces and not just at Paris. Only one in forty French people
lived in the capital, and the Revolution played out in regional centres and tiny villages (and distant colonies). Local lords lost their privileges, estates, and income, new élites emerged, and political sentiments divided families and communities. The effects of the Revolution on the Catholic Church were particularly felt in the parishes around France. Priests had to swear loyalty to the new constitution (and 6,000 mar-
1,376 people were guillotined in Paris during one six-week period
ried), but many fled abroad. Church property was nationalised, and a Cult of the Supreme Being was introduced to replace traditional Christianity. Religious practice had already been declining during the Enlightenment, but these developments created a major sense of disorientation, especially in regions of great piety. The confiscation and melting down of 100,000 church bells transformed the aural landscape: ‘the countryside was a quiet place, devoid of the sound of bells and the call to worship.’
Whether to support or oppose the tectonic changes taking place was a question each French person faced. McPhee’s discussion of the choices, and how people made them, provides one of his most insightful chapters. There were strong ideological positions, but also unpredictability and contingency. No one, the author remarks, in early 1789 knew that he or she was about
to live through a revolution. McPhee repeats a query that many then undoubtedly asked themselves: ‘And who was to decide when the Revolution had achieved its goals?’ He conveys well the hopes, fears, and uncertainties that the revolutionary years engendered. Lifeand-death choices made by individuals, political groups, and communities were neither scripted nor fated.
Maximilien Robespierre was among those who faced alarming choices. The author of a fine and sympathetic biography of Robespierre (2012), McPhee here shows how Robespierre’s profound hopes for the regeneration of France, and his utopian plans for radical democracy, forced him into terrible decisions about the execution of the king, comrades, and friends. He and others had to determine whether sanguinary violence was necessary and justified to preserve their pure ideals.
‘Whose revolution was this?’ McPhee pertinently asks. The events of the revolutionary decade posed that question to contemporaries, and for more than two centuries historians have addressed it as well. Some in France, of course, disowned the Revolution. Others were in part excluded, such as women who were denied the vote despite the pleas of Olympe de Gouges in a ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen’, and the efforts of many other women whose active participation McPhee highlights. The clergy and aristocracy, and peasants in devout western France, suffered from the Revolution, and thousands died in the wars. French people of later years and different political allegiances proclaimed themselves heirs of moderate or radical revolutionaries, partisans of the old regime or Bonapartists. Liberals, Marxists, constitutional monarchists, and republicans, later anti-colonialists, and even protesters in Tiananmen Square have all claimed pieces of the Revolution.
McPhee states: ‘History is replete with examples of regimes that have collapsed because of their own failure or inability to respond to crisis; it is much rarer that such collapses result in a revolutionary shift in who holds power and for what purposes. France in
1789 was one of those rare occasions.’
The Revolution left behind a vision of a new society, a toolbox of strategies for trying to build it, institutions meant to serve as its foundations, and warnings about the obstacles to be encountered and the price to be paid. McPhee’s splendid book – historiographically astute, sensitive to moral as well as political and social positions, beautifully written – provides a guide through the complexities of the Revolution and reflects on its legacy. The book inspires thought about present-day issues of
entitlement and inequality, rights and duties, inclusion and exclusion, power and violence. As historical template, set of reformist ideals, and cautionary tale, McPhee concludes, the Revolution is not yet over. g
Robert Aldrich is Professor of European History at the University of Sydney and author of works on French and colonial history. His Crowns and Colonies: European monarchies and overseas empires, co-edited with Cindy McCreery, will be published in August.
Indexing Emily
The dead gaze back across their special days: cloud above clover, crisis above the crow ... Such new horizons, yet they still approach. They know how eclipse and ecstacy edge along together: whisper and wink of wind, but no real weather.
Between practice and prayer there’s always praise. Mist and mistakes are in the text. And now here’s the night – nobody’s next – and poetry falls from the crucifixion like a crumb, and belief needs bells, needs bereavement. Bothersome.
Now a feather falls towards March somehow recalling the snake above the snow. Everything slows. All those ships anticipating shipwreck: frigate, little boat. Brain almost touching the bride. Sweet anecdote.
Can the simple be simplified? Our riches ride on a riddle: rapture and rainbow and remaining time. And now all the columns of Love appear. No word of reproof, no sign of rage. Love is like Death: it needs to turn the page.
Bill Manhire ❖
Bill Manhire was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate.
$ 12.95 each
Celebrating 100 classic Australian and New Zealand books
The 100 th Text Classic
A masterly portrait of postwar Australia, The Dyehouse vividly brings to life the people of an inner-Sydney textile factory: the bosses, middlemen and underlings; their dramatic struggles and their loves.
First published in 1961, it is an unjustly forgotten gem of our national literature. Like Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower and Kenneth Mackenzie’s The Young Desire It, The Dyehouse now takes its rightful place among the Text Classics.
Introduced by Fiona McFarlane, acclaimed author of The Night Guest
‘Executed with a singular combination of charm, grace and tough-mindedness.’ Meanjin
History with currency
Joy Damousi
ARMENIA, AUSTRALIA AND THE GREAT WAR
by Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 335 pp, 9781742233994
The Armenian Genocide, which claimed an estimated 1.5 million lives, began in 1915. It continues to cause controversy today and is a hotly contested event; several nations, including Australia, do not recognise it as genocide. While the British government has condemned the massacre, it does not consider that it qualifies as genocide under the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide. Although the naming of this event arouses fierce disputation, twenty-nine governments to date, including Germany, Russia, and Italy, have recognised the massacres as genocide. What relevance does this event and its aftermath have for Australia, given its continued reluctance to embrace the term ‘genocide’ to describe the murder of men, women, and children?
As this book eloquently argues, there are many and varied historic connections that significantly add to the fabric of Australian history. It tells an unknown and powerful story with flair, clarity, and engagement, and introduces a fascinating new narrative in Australia’s involvement in World War I, including themes of relief efforts and postwar migration. The 50,000 Armenian-Australians currently living in Australia are very much a part of this history.
The book begins on 24 April 1915, as the Anzacs prepare for battle at Gallipoli. The scene is set for the event that will change the course of Australian history and will construct one of the nation’s most enduring founding myths. On that very day, hours before the landing at Anzac Cove, 230 Armenian intellectuals and political, educational,
and religious leaders were arrested and deported. The Australian defeat at Gallipoli and the attempt to exterminate the Armenian subjects in the Ottoman Empire bring the histories of these two countries together through an experience of violence, destruction, and death. However, the connections between the two countries pre-date the war. The authors trace the links between them from the 1850s and the Ballarat goldfields, when Armenians arrived in Victoria in small numbers. Australia’s first major encounter with Armenia was in 1894 and 1895, when Armenian villages protested against double taxation imposed by Ottoman officials. The massacres that ensued attracted worldwide attention, including much reportage in the Australian press. This not only sparked international relief efforts by Australians and others, but also some migration to Australia. The few Armenians who managed to emigrate encountered the draconian White Australia policy. Defying the odds, several of them were naturalised.World War I heralded brutal violence against the Armenian population. Australians reported the carnage through eyewitness accounts. Australian prisoners of war in Ottoman Turkey wrote of the atrocity of Armenian deportations and massacres. They provided graphic detail of the slaughter and social upheavals. In November 1915, Ottoman soldiers captured Captain Thomas White, of the Australian Flying Corps. He watched Armenians being rounded up and led to their deaths. His eyewitness report remains one of the most compelling accounts of the genocide.
As elsewhere, Australian relief efforts mobilised to raise funds for the surviving Armenians. Australians were actively involved during and after the war, through the Red Cross, Save the Children, and like organisations. During the interwar years, Australian humanitarians undertook Armenian relief with great compassion and commitment. One of the most notable was Reverend James Cresswell, the progressive Presbyterian minister from Adelaide, who campaigned tirelessly for Armenian relief and travelled extensively both nationally and internationally to promote the
cause. Edith Granville’s efforts through the League of Nations reflected many campaigns; women in particular were engaged through the League to support relief for Armenia. Migration to Australia by Armenians after 1945 provides another chapter in the history of the relationship between Australia and Armenia, this time as Australian residents.
As the authors rightly note, this history continues in Australia without controversy. Australia has a long Turkish past and is a haven to both Armenian and Turkish communities. The debates continue on another level – terminology. Both the New South Wales and South Australian state governments have recognised the genocide. In 2014, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop announced that the events of 1915 did not constitute genocide.
The book raises pertinent issues that confront most migrant groups: how are the politics of their homeland negotiated in the new country, by the new country’s inhabitants, and by the state? While the book is largely concerned with World War I and its aftermath, the voices of recent Armenian immigrants might have provided a new perspective. An oral history of the Armenian community is sorely needed, especially in relation to their memories of war.
The other, broader point concerns Australia’s recent role and responsibilities. This book reminds us of the enduring and historical connection of Australia to global movements in providing humanitarian aid, as well as resisting and protesting against xenophobia, populism, fear of refugees, and racial hatred. We have a rich history of such past efforts, demonstrated by the tireless work of humanitarians documented in detail in this account. This history has currency; it invites us to reflect on the extent of Australia’s present role in supporting refugees experiencing violence not too far removed from the very region and situation this book insightfully covers. g
Joy Damousi’s latest book is Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Ernest Scott Prize.
Pollyannaish view of high finance
Peter Acton
MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING: HOW FINANCE MADE CIVILIZATION POSSIBLE
by William N. Goetzmann
Princeton University Press (Footprint), $79 hb, 592 pp, 9780691143781
Given the damage done to the global economy by the finance industry this century, and the apparent determination of its major players to keep on doing it, this would seem a rather ill-chosen time to produce a book singing its praises. Justification lies in the fact that the work is a tour de force of historical scholarship. Goetzmann offers an extraordinarily wideranging and thorough investigation of financial activity from earliest times to the present day, and his enthusiasm for the subject and his lively writing style make the topic much more engaging than one might expect. The immense breadth of his research means that every reader, no matter how expert in history or finance, will learn much. How many ancient historians, for instance, would have known that the Code of Hammurabi set different interest rates for silver and barley, or that the financing of the Ur basket trade prefigured Athenian maritime loans, or that seventy per cent of industrial lead pollution in the northern hemisphere between 366 bce and 36 ce came from the Rio Tinto mines in Iberia, or that China made contracts on bamboo that was then split so that precise matching could not be forged?
The first section explores early civilisations. Goetzmann’s approach to these ancient economies is a refreshing change from Moses I. Finley’s mistaken but influential refusal to believe that the ancients had much of a clue about economic matters. Goetzmann shows how the forces of urbanisation, agricultural risk management, warfare, and trade prompted various forms of financial transaction in Mesopotamia; infers from the complexity of financial arrangements described in lawsuits heard by lay juries of 500
citizens that classical Athenians had a very sophisticated understanding of financial matters; and finds the first example of systemic risk in banking in Rome in 33 ce, along with the first publicly held companies.
The second section deals with early China, where financial tools and institutions developed differently from the rest of the world, reflecting a different conception of the relation between individual and the state, manifested in a vast bureaucracy to manage tax collection and redistribution, and in regular state expropriation of successful enterprises. Goetzmann provocatively suggests this might explain why the Industrial Revolution did not happen in China.
The third and longest section returns to Europe and covers the period from the Dark Ages to around the start of the twentieth century. The wide diversity of political units made for equally diverse financial structures, a fertile laboratory of real-life experimentation that accelerated innovation and development. Corporate structures, trading companies, and bubbles all receive detailed and insightful attention.
The final section concerns the twentieth century and the globalised economy. Goetzmann’s analysis of the inherent conflicts between corporate power structures and nation states is especially interesting, as is his explanation of why index funds should and do outperform most active managers. Despite new analytical tools such as the random walk hypothesis and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, our tendency to repeat the same mistakes is apparent. The ‘skyscraper bonds’ that financed Manhattan’s skyline in the 1920s morphed into the mortgage disaster of 2007. The conflicts of interest and deliberate deception of investors that
2016 Jolley Prize
Australian Book Review congratulates the winner of the 2016 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize
Josephine Rowe
She receives $7,000 for her winning story, ‘Glisk’.
Anthony Lawrence was placed second for his story ‘Ash’, and Jonathan Tel third for his story ‘The Water Calligrapher’s Women’. They receive $2000 and $1000 respectively. All three shortlisted stories are available to be read in our August 2016 issue.
The judges also commended three other stories: ‘Help Me Harden
My Heart’ by Dom Amerena, ‘Window’ by Cate Kennedy, and ‘Slut Trouble’ by Beejay Silcox.
ABR gratefully acknowledges Mr Ian Dickson’s generous support for the Jolley Prize.
For full details, please visit: www.australianbookreview.com.au
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
Dr. Claire Scobie
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.
occurred before the Great Depression and before the global financial crisis are remarkably similar. Should we be surprised that both involved the same ‘giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’?
The book has something for everyone. Serious students will enjoy detailed expositions of the mathematics of probability developed by such brilliant minds as Leibniz, Bernouili, and Condorcet.
Goetzmann offers an extraordinarily wideranging and thorough investigation of financial activity from earliest times to the present day
Marxist theory, Keynesianism, and the peculiar religion of Ayn Rand are all thoughtfully explored, as are alternative models of economic entrepreneurship in China and Russia. Trivia lovers will find many ‘firsts’, including the first evidence of compound interest (Babylon, 2400 bce), the first stockholder corporations (imperial Rome), the first paper money (Sichuan, eleventh century; called ‘alchemy’ by Marco Polo!), the first London bank (founded by the Knights Templar in the thirteenth century), the first market in securitised government debt (the Rialto in Renaissance Venice), and the first business textbook (Fibonacci, thirteenth century).
Given the complexity of the subject, the clear summaries at the beginning and end of each section and chapter are invaluable. Illustrations are plentiful and apposite, and include several photographs drawn from the author’s private collection. There may be a reason why around half of the several dozen pictures are labelled ‘Figure’ and numbered, but it was not clear to this reader. It is disappointing that Princeton University Press has succumbed to the rampant epidemic among publishers of reducing their investment in copy-editing, and an otherwise handsome volume is unnecessarily marred by a number of glaring typographical errors.
A more troubling flaw is the book’s title. One can understand from a mar-
keting point of view a desire to make a dull but worthy subject sound exciting, but the implication that finance is an independent agent in human affairs, rather than the collective name for a set of tools man has developed for particular Darwinian purposes, is misleading to the reader and sometimes, it seems, to the author himself. Major advances in financial technology tend to be accompanied by advances in other areas and, while economic transactions might have prompted various forms of symbolic communication or legislative frameworks, Goetzmann sometimes seems to forget that these developments were the pragmatic response of human beings to specific problems and opportunities, rather than the effects of the autonomous action of an abstract noun. Saying civilisation was made possible by other technologies such as writing or transport would be equally true and equally uninformative.
This view of finance as an autonomous force might explain why Goetzmann ducks some of the more fundamental questions that can be asked of the finance industry today. Though he is not a one-eyed apologist for finance – he calls it ‘a protagonist of uncertain moral value’ – he does not begin to challenge it in the way, for example, Mervyn King does in his new book The End of Alchemy (2016). Nowhere does Goetzmann question whether human well-being is furthered by the industry consuming an estimated twenty per cent of global GDP, or whether the fundamental infrastructure tasks of deposit-taking and lending could and should be done at much lower cost and risk by public servants on modest wages. The disastrous folly of repealing the Glass–Steagall Act does not rate a mention.
Nor does Goetzmann seem aware of the social problems the industry is renowned for, such as endemic corruption, widespread dishonesty, male chauvinism, and generally antisocial behaviour. It is not only civilisation that finance made possible. g
Peter Acton’s book Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. He is president of Humanities 21.
LIFE OF THE PARTY: HOW THE REMARKABLE BROWNIE WISE BUILT AND LOST A TUPPERWARE PARTY EMPIRE by Bob Kealing Affirm Press
$24.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781925344967
The foundation years of the Tupperware empire have all the elements of a great story. Earl Tupper, an introverted inventor determined to become a millionaire by the age of thirty, created the Tupperware range from a plastics waste product that was deemed unusable in postwar America. Sales were elusive until Brownie Wise, a poorly educated single mother, introduced Tupperware to the neighbourhoods, mobilised the masses, and formalised the highly successful, home-based selling technique, the Tupperware party.
Life of the Party by journalist Bob Kealing charts the increasing tension between the publicly invisible president and his media darling. When Tupper had Wise unceremoniously fired in 1958, her story was buried along with any remaining copies of her motivational book, Best Wishes (1957).
As a journalist, Kealing is adept at telling a rollicking tale and at no point – surprisingly since the book is largely a business history – does the story dip or fade. Kealing’s main intention seems to be to write Brownie Wise back into the story of Tupperware. Kealing possesses obvious affection for his subject and specifically inserts himself into the epilogue to describe his visit to Wise’s grave; he laments the absence of a prominent sign proclaiming the final resting place of the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week
Wise is certainly presented as a remarkable woman ahead of her time. While Kealing steers clear of hagiography, Wise’s faults and questionable doings are only hinted at; Kealing often refuses to probe further. Given his access to the archives and surviving players from that time, this suggests that a richer alternative study of Brownie Wise is possible.
The history of (not so) great men and women, their lovers, wars, and marriages is back. After social historians from the 1970s reduced kings and queens to ‘clowns in regal purple’, beholden to impersonal social forces ‘from below’; after cultural historians from the 1980s onwards elevated ‘culture’ and ‘discourse’ instead to movers of history – today the follies, achievements, and crimes of those in power are again capturing the imagination of both writers and readers of history. Following this new interest in the powerful, Simon Sebag Montefiore has provided a collective biography of Russia’s rulers from 1613 to 1918. Montefiore is not unknown to readers of Russian history. After his early study of Potemkin (2001), his colourful work on Stalin (The Court of the Red Tsar [2003], and Young Stalin [2007]) sold well enough to raise professorial eyebrows. ‘The young Stalin had a penis,’ scoffed one academic critical of Montefiore’s obsession with that body part, ‘and he used it.’ So what? The Romanovs, too, had genitalia, it turns out, and they deployed them at least as frequently as the later dictator. (Alexander II to his mistress: ‘How can I forget how I lay on my back and you rode me like a horse.’) When not copulating inside and outside marriage, they were engaged in a never-ending round of wars, internal intrigues, uprisings, palace coups, and the occasional political reform – a winning combination for attracting male undergraduates in particular, as well as a wider public.
Readers might find all the sex alluring or juvenile; the violence will strike some as pornographic, others as realistic; and the sage life advice Montefiore dispenses along the way might amuse or irritate (‘Every wife knows that the best way to save a marriage is to befriend the husband’s mistress’). The vodka flows in abundance, and death from drink-
ing is nearly as frequent as quartering, hanging, or beheading (for the tsars’ enemies) or stabbing, clubbing, shooting, or bombing (for the more unfortunate among the tsars themselves).
As the Romanovs fornicate and fight, drink and dance, murder and torture their way through the pages of this book, the reader sometimes loses track of the countless lovers, conspira-
tors, soldiers, and ministers animating its pages. Mostly, however, a use of the cast of characters at the start of each chapter allows us to follow the rise and fall of ‘the most spectacularly successful empire-builders since the Mongols’. Montefiore develops his historical play in three ‘acts’. ‘Act I: The Rise’ begins with the Time of Troubles, a savage civil war in the early seventeenth century, which ended with the accession to the throne of the first Romanov tsar, Michael (1613–45), and ends with Peter the Great (1682–1725) establishing the growing Russian empire as a European power. Thus begins ‘Act II: The Apogee’, where Russia becomes one of the most powerful of Europe’s polities, eventually taking a leading role in defeating Napoleon under Alexander I (1801–25). ‘Act III: The Decline’ encompasses the reigns of Nicholas I (1825–55), Alexander II (1855–81), Alexander III (1881–94), and the ill-fated Nicholas II (1894–1917).
At the heart of Montefiore’s interpretation of the rise of the Romanovs is their skill in building a warfare state. Near-permanent mobilisation meant that the nobility had to serve the autocrat in army or administration; they had to obey the supreme warlord, and not question his commands; in return they received imperial glory and almost total power over the serfs, the vast majority of the population. It was this compact which held the Russian state together and allowed it to mobilise a vast share of the country’s resources for defence and imperial expansion. After the Na-
Tsar Nicholas II and his wife and son mark the Romanovs’ 300 years in power, May 1913 (via WikimediaCommons)
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
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Subscribe to ABR Online (RRP AU$50) and enter one poem for just $55, a saving of $15. Additional entries cost only $15.
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poleonic wars, this pact ran into trouble. Increasingly, wars were won with modern weaponry in the hands of citizen soldiers. The most successful states in the wars of the nineteenth century were industrialised mass societies, as Russia learned the painful way in the Crimean War (1853–56), ‘the Romanovs’ worst setback since the Time of Troubles’. In order to compete with France or Britain, Russia needed to industrialise and it needed well-educated soldiers in an army based on mass conscription, not illiterate serfs press-ganged into longterm military servitude. Hence, major reforms were necessary, the central one the abolition of serfdom in 1861, followed by judicial and local government reform in 1864, and military reform in 1874.
Alexander II, ‘the best-prepared heir in Romanov history’, understood that such radical reforms were essential, should Russia remain a great power. Yet they undermined the very foundation on which autocracy rested. The abolition of serfdom, in particular, ‘broke asunder the pact between ruler and nobility that had made Russia’, leaving the tsar’s power based on bayonets and bureaucrats alone. To make things worse, the two final Romanov tsars were lacklustre. Alexander III could ‘bend horseshoes with his bare hands’ but was otherwise distinguished by bad spelling and anti-Semitism. He ruled ‘like a curmudgeonly landowner’. Nicholas II, forever in awe of his ‘bearded giant’ of a father, was thin and neurotic, surviving a first revolution in 1905 only to succumb to the next instalment in 1917, and then shot by the Bolsheviks in the following year. Montefiore is much kinder to the last Romanov than most historians, pitying rather than condemning him.
In Montefiore’s narrative, the decline of the dynasty is symbolised by the sex lives of the final two emperors: in sharp contrast to their fornicating predecessors, these were not oversexed empire builders but faithful spouses in happy marriages. Even Rasputin, whose ‘feral sexuality’ could have filled yet more pages with lurid detail, ‘may’ have been ‘impotent’ and ‘not much of a lover at all’.
Montefiore’s interpretation of the impotence of autocracy in the modern
age stands in glaring contradiction to another thesis he advances in the book: a conflation of ‘autocracy’ and modern authoritarianisms. Putin, Stalin, the tsars are all basically the same, as are China’s rulers of today. True, ‘the epochs of the Great Dictators of the 1920s and 1930s’ and today’s resurgence of strong men ‘show that there is nothing incompatible about modernity and authoritarianism’; but if the best way to think about these questions is to declare them all ‘autocracies’ is questionable. Neither Stalinism nor Putinism are based, after all, on a pact between serf-holding élites and a
militarised state led by a monarch with claims to god-given absolute rule. Nevertheless, Montefiore’s book is well worth reading. Fast paced, entertaining, full of colourful detail, frequently disturbing, and often funny, Montefiore’s The Romanovs is narrative history on a grand scale. g
Mark Edele has been teaching history at the University of Western Australia since 2004. He is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), and Stalin’s Defectors (forthcoming 2017).
Smartraveller
Just knowing those colours makes it safer already and how they’ll change anyway by the time you, thirteen now, are old enough for elsewhere:
Red Orange Yellow Green but not about weather except for extremity and those are most finite and fickle, cyclones though murderous rarely durable
as human cruelty. Where are you going? the site prompts but you choose Browse countries then List all countries, then run the current date –
not to miss anything – every day you check them like a thing growing in the mind’s garden that needs tending, a world of worrying
for others under some degree of mastery; keep track of flare-up, pandemic, earthquake, and ask me sidelong, to define civil unrest, safety and security
though these are terms you know, as if rehearsing, as if there could be something more the words don’t indicate, a further shade in my palette till now
held back, but I can only disappoint, being arms’-length, and listen my best as you list the ten tallest mountains while we head for the school bus because last night
and all this week it was Nepal, and pulling your quilt around you to ready for sleep was rugging up for Everest, and before that, another land, one day.
Tracy Ryan won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2009. Her latest collection is Hoard (2015).
Tracy Ryan
EUROPEANS IN AUSTRALIA
The culmination of an extraordinary career in the writing and teaching of Australian history, The Europeans in Australia grapples with the Australian historical experience as a whole from the point of view of the settlers from Europe. Ambitious and unique, it is the first such large, single-author account since Manning Clark’s A History of Australia
“‘Mighty’, a word now rarely used in everyday speech, is one that Alan Atkinson employs often. It is also a word that aptly describes his accomplishment in completing a work of such originality and vision as The Europeans in Australia, one that is epic in conception and execution and one that stands virtually alone in the ever-expanding field of Australian historiography.” – Mark McKenna
How do we live with ourselves?
The Australian national conscience by
Alan Atkinson
‘Never have sentinels between the human and the inhuman been more necessary.’
Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor
When Australian federation was being planned and its implications first worked through, various men and women with agendas of their own set themselves to make something of it. For some, it was all about internal free trade. For some it was about the equal participation of women with men in affairs of state. For some it was about uniformity of race, language, and/or accent. For some it was about the military defence of the continent. For some it was about wage justice. And so on.
For one Fremantle-born clergyman the most pressing matter was the creation of a national conscience for his country. Charles Lefroy believed that this new edifice, this Australia, must be a temple reaching to heaven. Lefroy was exercised by two ideas. The nation had been built, and was being built, on the subjugation of the original inhabitants. Also, for such as Lefroy, if power lost touch with conscience, then Christianity, on which his world rested, had no point. There was at least a hint of unworldliness in Lefroy’s efforts, but as a pioneer in the field he deserves some glory.
Charles Lefroy was the great-grandson of Anne Lefroy, who is remembered by admirers of Jane Aus-
ten as the author’s close friend and neighbour in rural Hampshire. His father, a native of the same place, had come to Western Australia in 1841, fresh from Oxford and a tour of the English Lake District, where he had met William Wordsworth. The older Lefroy became a daring explorer, but as an obituary puts it he was ‘an idealist … obviously unfitted for a settler’s life’. He did not prosper. Charles, his second son, also went to Oxford (Keble College) and was ordained in Rochester cathedral. He too was an idealist.
Charles Lefroy had inherited a pattern of Christian thinking which was inherently gentle. It fed on daily intimacies and the sacredness of place. We woke each day to other people, and it followed for men and women like Lefroy that consciousness and conscience were really the same thing. Wordsworth’s friend, that even greater poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said so explicitly. So, today, does the English philosopher Roger Scruton. Through the ever-present gap between I and not-I, says Scruton, we not only make sense of the world. We also create moral life.
Self exists in a mirror, or in a series of mirrors, because as a human being it is impossible to be self-aware, even in the simplest way, without being aware of others as our own reflection. Each of us is a thing of boundaries and beyond the boundaries reflections, and beyond that more reflections, ad infinitum. All this added up to
one thing. There was a strict logical connection between self-awareness and the main point of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you.’
We not only see, we act in mirrors. It was the same with nations, or so men and women like Lefroy argued. A nation could not know that it was really a nation, that it was fit to be a nation with its own place in the world, without knowing what it owed to human groups beyond its edges. Federated Australia was White Australia, and the Blacks were barely citizens under the new dispensation. But for that very reason the national conscience must define itself at first through them.
Even before federation was accomplished, Charles Lefroy had spoken about its proper purpose. At that point he had also hoped for the union of Englishorigin churches in Australia in what he called ‘the national Church of Australia’. That, he thought, would make all the difference. Such a church, he wrote in the Western Mail of 21 October 1899, ‘would help them to develop the national character more than anything else’, and surely, if they had a national character they must also have a national conscience. After all, Lefroy said, ‘States and nations have responsibilities to God, and hold a mission from Him, as plain and unmistakable as the mission and responsibility of the church.’ In short, in this new land, Church, state, and nation should coincide as to the moral dimension of their joint existence. Together they should work through the years to fulfil it.
Late in 1909, Lefroy was appointed organising secretary of the Australian Board of Missions, which oversaw Anglican missionary effort throughout Australia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. This was his chance. As secretary, he was expected to make the board more efficient than it had been so far, but Lefroy looked forward to doing much more than that. The Church of England could claim to be Australia’s leading church. It was the old government church, inheriting the social prestige and official ties of the Established Church ‘at Home’, and, at least in theory, it had more adherents than any other (about forty per cent of the whole settler population). But it had no settled Australia-wide leadership apart from the Australian Board of Missions. So, in his new post, Lefroy had some claim to be a national advocate for Christian values. He certainly possessed the energy, eloquence, and ease of manner needed to make a mark in the corridors of power.
The new federal constitution had left Aboriginal affairs with the old colonial, now state, governments. During a debate in his Church’s national synod, Lefroy added his voice to a proposal that ‘the physical, moral, and spiritual care of the aborigines is a national responsibility resting both on the individual States and also on the whole people of the Commonwealth’, and he then launched an effort to get the federal government to adopt this approach and to act on it. In January 1911 he read a paper at the biennial conference of
the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science arguing that demoralisation and extermination had reduced the original population of the continent to a ‘remnant’. That remnant must now, he said, become in its entirety ‘a national responsibility under national control’.
The federal government had just taken control of the Northern Territory, hitherto governed from Adelaide. Lefroy wanted a federal minister for Native Affairs, who might set an example to the states among the people of the Territory by applying the highest standards of expertise and integrity. When that happened the state governments might agree to handing over to the minister their own responsibilities in that area. So all would be united. All would be national. Lefroy’s speech before the AAAS was reported across Australia, and it found immediate support. On 24 January a delegation to the prime minister, Andrew Fisher, asked him for this new appointment and also for a commission of inquiry, to draw up ‘a comprehensive scheme for dealing with all the native obligations of the Commonwealth’. Fisher, who was half-sympathetic, arranged that Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne University, the leading authority on Aboriginal matters, should head such an inquiry. Spencer was appointed special commissioner and chief protector in Darwin, and a detailed preliminary report was tabled in federal parliament in September 1913. There was, however, no minister.
By now Charles Lefroy, afflicted by ill health, had moved on. Also by now Lefroy’s ideas about the national conscience, taken up by other enthusiasts, had been hopelessly muddied by practical difficulties and by obfuscating theories of race. And then, World War I intervened.
In getting his message across, Charles Lefroy had relied on several essential points. A great wrong had been done to the Aboriginal peoples since 1788. ‘With regard to the ill-consequences of the European occupation,’ he said, ‘there was reason to think that by cruelty, negligence, and the communication of disease and moral corruption, it had reduced the native population by three-fourths.’ Secondly, Lefroy pressed the idea of shared humanity by highlighting Aboriginal intelligence and virtue. They were good people, he said, in some ways as good as the best of ‘us’. ‘Their tribal and family laws were of considerable moral value.’ Like Jane Austen herself, Lefroy was alert to the way in which a certain etiquette – a delicate thoughtfulness, face to face – might prove moral worth. He recalled travelling by steamer to the mission at Yarrabah, near Cairns, when he talked on deck under the stars with a ‘full-blood aboriginal’. ‘I felt,’ he said, ‘I was conversing with a refined and courteous gentleman.’ He used that experience to confirm that ‘we’ owed much to these people.
Lefroy wanted more than just a one-off solution. Character and conscience were things of eternity. He
argued for structured, lasting leadership which would entrench certain governing methods and, in doing so – as ‘we’ became a distinct nation, with ‘our’ own boundaries and our own character – would at the same time entrench a national sense of right and wrong. The fundamentals of Christian teaching were to be enacted daily in ongoing Christian exchange, as Lefroy understood those things. Whatever national conscience now existed would be coaxed into robust, permanent life, though interaction between people and government, as the latter did its duty. For Lefroy this would be a suitable result of his church’s missionary effort. Its mission was to both Black and White because justice depended on a general allegiance to uplifting Christianity, and that, he said, depended on ‘a very great movement, which would spread steadily throughout the whole of Australia’. ‘In other words they had to organise.’
The ‘very great movement’ had to go beyond the church and church people. It had to be imbued with a Christian spirit and to be guided by churchmen, but in order to be truly national it had to transcend religious order. At a meeting Lefroy convened in Sydney straight after the AAAS conference, the leading speaker, Arthur Vogan, explained that a continent-wide body of opinion was already emerging, in step with federation. ‘[A] “new public”,’ he said, ‘has arisen above the political horizon.’ For that reason alone there was cause to hope for government action in this matter, Vogan said, so that ‘the
remnant of the decimated natives may be accorded some show of justice and mercy’.
National conscience, as Lefroy seems to have defined it, must show itself in many ways. This essay is not about any single cause, even a cause as crucial as race relations and Indigenous rights. Charles Lefroy was right, at least in this. The national conscience was to be understood in terms of national character, which would reveal itself in many ways over time, and would have longterm standards of assessment and some means of action. There had to something like organised, focused, and engaged public opinion, and there had to be administrative machinery through which it could act.
Lefroy and Vogan understood all that. Arthur Vogan was an archaeologist and explorer, but he was also a journalist. He knew about public opinion and he took a long-term view. His book, The Black Police: A story of modern Australia (1890), had been the first detailed account of the murderous operations of the Queensland Native Police, which had been active on the Queensland frontier through most of the second half of the nineteenth century. In that book and since, Vogan had pulled no punches in his effort to shock and persuade. Vogan was a man of action and a man’s man. As the working-man’s paper Truth remarked, he was a writer of ‘virile vehemence’. And really, for Vogan, conscience was a gendered thing. Strong, true judgement existed mainly among men, and men who were intellectually
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Passions of a Mighty Heart
Composer, conductor, critic and firebrand, G.W.L. Marshall-Hall was a leading figure in Melbourne’s cultural life from 1891 to 1915. Edited by Suzanne Robinson, this superb collection of letters, to correspondents including Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, offers a vivid portrait of a man many described as a musical genius.
To purchase your copy online, visit vca-mcm.unimelb.edu.au/lyrebirdpress
Passions of a Mighty Heart: Selected Letters of G.W.L Marshall-Hall. Edited by Suzanne Robinson
and physically strong. Happily, Australia, a country of free men, was gathering strength of all kinds. Having rid ourselves of a selfish governing class, we could feel about us, he said, ‘[t]he fresh, warm blood of rejuvenating democracy’. So, already, ‘our Public Opinion is healthier’ and better able to fight, as men should, for justice. Thus inspired, Vogan joined Lefroy’s campaign. Governments, enlivened by fresh, warm blood, would be the strong right arm of a well-informed public opinion. Lefroy and Vogan were very different characters, but in his scheme for ‘federalising the Aborigines’, Lefroy happily enlisted Vogan’s help. However, the campaign was soon taken over by bigger names. Vogan had hoped to see, or rather to feel, an impulse of moral responsibility, such as every good man feels for the weaker souls depending on him, sweeping the continent from shore to shore. Instead, a lobby group, led by the parliamentarian Bruce Smith and the newspaperman Harry Gullett, assumed effective control, and the concerns of the movement were extended to the welfare of Indigenous peoples beyond national boundaries, into the western Pacific. They became sub-imperial. And so, Vogan said, their appeal to the national conscience, to the moral energies of this new people, was ‘swamped out of existence, as an altruistic affair, by political women; and all the original members left’.
He left, anyway. In fact, the Society for the Protection of the Native Races in Australasia and Polynesia, founded in August 1911 with Lefroy as secretary, was reasonably effective. But it was nothing like the ‘very great movement’, a movement deep among the people, which both Lefroy and Vogan, in their different ways, had both hoped for.
What was lacking for ‘a very great movement’?
Look at attempts made at the same time to interest Australian public opinion in the natural environment, especially native birds. This was not an issue for the national conscience according to any definition I am using here, but it does suggest that Vogan was right about a ‘new public’. The Gould League of Bird Lovers, started in 1909, was modelled on an American effort, the Audubon Society. The founder was John Leach, a schoolmaster and a great publicist, and his great aim was to change the habits and attitudes of Australian children. Members signed a pledge not to hurt birds or raid their nests and, thanks to sympathetic state governments, the message was relayed in detail through nature-study classes in the schools and annual ‘Bird Days’. Gould Leagues multiplied state by state, signing up thousands of members in no time, and they worked with the Wildlife Preservation Society, founded in Sydney in the same year and meant from the start to be a nationwide. Besides children, both organisations targeted women, who were told to stop buying hats with feathers on them. Thus adorned, the ‘fashionable woman’ was told, she wore on her head ‘the blood of
Loyalty, secrets, and lies. When it comes to family, sometimes the things that bind us together can wrench us apart.
slaughtered innocents’.
In this way, the conservation movement made its way directly into the lives of thousands of families. It shaped the enthusiasm of children, and so it affected, at least a little, the thoughts of parents. It was part of family life, taking advantage of everything from principled hatred of bloodshed to childish love for the sweet-voiced and cuddly. It confronted violence and the impact of violence, on a national scale, but in a much less rebarbative way than was apparently possible with Lefroy’s campaign.
If violence was repulsive to many at that point, who can tell how much such logic might have coloured Australian public opinion for the long term if war had not intervened in August 1914? Who can say how violence might have figured in common conversation, in newspaper rhetoric and so on, without that mighty slaughter – 62,000 deaths among Australians alone? Even before the war a great deal had been done to militarise public opinion, but clearly the general attitude to violence was unresolved. The declaration of war and even more the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 turned the tide of national feeling. And yet, as recently as 1911, when war was still far from certain, there had been reason to look forward to a robust national conscience, which could see
a direct link between large-scale violence and large-scale suffering, even within Australia’s borders.
It would have been small comfort to individuals such as Lefroy, but a digital survey of Australian newspapers shows the term ‘national conscience’ turning up twice as often during 1910–19, the decade of World War I, as in the previous ten years, and far more than ever again. ‘National conscience’ was making its way into ordinary language, though with divergent meanings. The role of the national conscience in wartime was highly debatable. For over twenty years there had been a growing feeling that the British Empire was in danger, especially from Germany, but when it came to their own military defence Australians subscribed to a larger nationality. They were British. Also, as this was a matter of life and death, moral judgment, individual or collective, seemed barely relevant.
Fifteen years before the ‘Great War’, the Australian colonies had one by one signed up to support Britain’s quarrel with the Boer republics, in South Africa. In the Western Australian parliament, Frederick Vosper, who shared Arthur Vogan’s manly, egalitarian moral sense, complained that the people knew too little about the justice of the war. ‘We do not want to know’, said the premier, Sir John Forrest. Our existential loyalty, in other words, ended all such questions. In 1914, at the outset of World War I, national public opinion was more clearly focused, but that larger loyalty remained. Individual assessments mattered only as fragments of something vastly bigger, because, said Joseph Cook, former prime minister, ‘[i]n days of war the individual conscience and judgment had to reconcile itself to the national conscience and judgment’.
A massive sacrifice of life was to be expected. So too was an all-consuming daily sacrifice, from household to household, and this clearly depended on a moral consensus from shore to shore. Clergy, whose voices were expected to reach into every family and every individual conscience, devoted their sermons to recruiting and morale, asking that men forget the demands on conscience made by other kinds of human relationship so as to give themselves up to nation and empire. ‘We are set against a foe who incarnates all that faith in God abhors,’ said Archbishop Wright, in Sydney. ‘It is for us to call our men to fight.’
The nations of the earth were in alliance with good or evil, even with the hosts of heaven or hell. From 1916 to 1917 the effort on both sides shifted to total war and national populations and economies were regulated for all-out victory. But clergy had been arguing for totality from the start. In Brisbane in March 1915, a month before Gallipoli, Archbishop Donaldson defined ‘Christian Patriotism’ as the willingness to give all for our country, ‘our money, energies, well-being, our health and even our life itself’. In November 1916, Donaldson told his congregation that he wanted peace delayed until Australia was ready for victory, until ‘[o]ur moral
C.E.C. Lefroy and Archbishop C.O.L. Riley, c.1925 (State Library of Western Australia)
and spiritual condition’ was assured. Patriotism was for national redemption.
At the same time, questions of conscience were complicated by a sharper sense of Australian nationality. During the conscription debates of 1916–17, voters were asked to support the men at the front by agreeing that the government should send after them the many who would not volunteer. The first conscription plebiscite, in October 1916, narrowly failed. In December 1917, a few days before the second, Canada voted a pro-conscription party into government, and in Australia sympathetic papers, copying from the Canadian press, announced ‘a great moral upheaval of the National conscience’ in that country. Faced with a choice between acting and waiting while more died, Canadians, it was said, had put up their hands as patriots should.
In Australia the pro-conscriptionists lost again, and by a larger margin, and yet in the long term they did not lose. Thanks to the war and thanks to this debate, something profound had happened. Moral upheaval in Australia might not have equalled Canada’s, but it took on resounding power. It asserted the worth of manly virtues, but not as Vogan had done, and to much greater effect. From this point the nation was supposed to have been formed, not only by federation but also by a type of foundational agreement, between those who fought abroad and those who worked at home for their support. The obligation was perpetual. The idea of a great, nationmaking contract created a new national consciousness, and a new type of national conscience, for Australia. It defined forever a duty owed to the nation’s fighting men, who left its shores to represent its virtues.
Other forms of national conscience were cast into shadow. Here surely was ‘a very great movement’, deeply shaping the national character, but not at all the sort of movement Charles Lefroy had wanted.
This short story of the varieties and vicissitudes of national conscience during the first twenty years of Australian federation has two conclusions. Obviously, the opinions of the few who tried to set a general standard jostled more or less awkwardly with the rest. And there was always religion. In a post-Enlightenment world, complicated doubts lived on about the way fragments of Christian theology, including the idea of conscience itself, might shape collective opinion. The churches were ever-present. Both questions go a long way back. Jean-Jacques Rousseau invented the idea of the ‘general will’ in his Social Contract (1762), where he argued about the way a national community creates its government. By the general will, Rousseau meant not shared opinion, but something slower and deeper, an unchanging murmur of power rather than anything more vocal – the rumbling of Leviathan, or possibly not a noise at all but only a parcel of settled expectations, the nation’s political DNA. Finer, more instantaneous judgement from day
to day was the business of leadership alone. The idea of the general will quickly entered political conversation. It was understood to be something leaders ignored at their peril. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) used the idea of the ‘general will’ to justify the overthrow of the ancien régime and, in 1793, the execution of the king.
The French Revolution itself deepened the problem. How was this manifestation from the deep to be articulated by government in Paris for practical purposes? Could there be national consensus, and if so how was it to be harnessed for government? The French writer Germaine de Staël sketched these questions in her pioneering essay in 1791. Already, initiatives in Paris
A nation could not know that it was really a nation, that it was fit to be a nation with its own place in the world, without knowing what it owed to human groups beyond its edges
had run a long way ahead of the rest of France. Mme de Staël argued about the need for a single long-term understanding of legitimacy, and in the short term for voting and numerical majorities. Nevertheless, this left an awkward grey area in between.
In Britain the question was more straightforward because public opinion was understood to be the collective opinion of the educated classes, the people who governed. So the ‘public conscience’ was the creation of ‘public men’, the sort of men who normally held high public office. In his famous Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 1774, Edmund Burke argued that a member of parliament had to make up his own mind without reference to the community he represented. He was not its delegate. He was its representative, and whatever his constituents might think he had to preserve intact ‘his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, [and] his enlightened conscience’ – more unbiased than theirs, that is, more mature and certainly more enlightened.
Unlike revolutionary France, Britain was also selfconsciously Christian and the public conscience was associated with the Church of England, the church of Jane Austen, the Lefroys, and the bulk of ‘public men’. In 1797 William Wilberforce, a fervent Christian and a friend and ally of the prime minister, the younger William Pitt, astonished the ‘Higher and Middle Classes’ with a scorching reprimand as to their moral character. Heartfelt Christianity, he said, was in decline. Certainly, there was respect for the duties of family life and a ‘decent conformity to the established faith’, but these things alone, said Wilberforce, were simply ‘decent selfishness’. To be genuinely Christian was to be unselfish in every aspect of our lives, among ourselves and beyond our borders. In short, Britons of suitable rank
must have the moral energy to take their faith – not so much its doctrine as its dynamic altruism – to the world at large.
Wilberforce’s readers knew about the sacred duty of all Christians, set out in the New Testament, to broadcast their faith through the world, ‘pre propaganda fide’. For instance, in August 1786, when the plan to send convicts to New South Wales was announced, some wrote in anger to the newspapers, condemning a scheme which would change convicts into missionaries of English vice through those newly discovered seas, ‘pro propaganda vitiis Anglicanis’. It was ‘an affair’, they said, ‘in which the national honour and character are deeply involved’.
But Wilberforce went further. He took Christianity beyond anything in the gospels and thus invented the modern national conscience. Under this new rubric, national character was to be acted out in ways which were not only moral and devout, but also interventionist and systematic. Guided by conscientious public men, the people were to understand themselves, as a people, by looking beyond themselves. They were to know themselves better for the long term. True patriotism, said Wilberforce, was the enemy of selfishness. He called it ‘public spirit’. It looked actively beyond national limits. Yet in doing so, he said, it ‘attaches us in particular to the country to which we belong’. It was extraordinary suggestion, complicated, challenging, but true.
Wilberforce wrote at just the right time. A vigorous public opinion had grown up in Britain during the eighteenth century, and in the 1790s a few years of war against revolutionary France sharpened the general sense of national pride, throwing up a belief, conceited but creative, that it was up to Britain to restore the moral balance of the world. In his thoughts about national conscience, Wilberforce looked to the teachings of the Church of England, but he bypassed the church, speaking directly to a wartime audience anxious in new ways about national destiny.
Wilberforce is known today as the leader of the British campaign against slavery. More broadly, he wanted a new dimension to nationality, and public opinion responded, from a feeling of national pride but also from a feeling of national guilt. For some the British Empire was all greed and aggression. Increasing power abroad was being used, it was said, ‘not for the protection of freedom, not for the relief of the oppressed, not to do good to men, either with regard to the temporal or eternal interests, – but rather to spread desolation and misery’. The moral cost was cumulative – ‘justice, mercy, national honour, and every principle that we ought to hold sacred, as men, Britons, and Christians’. Wilberforce himself said that in gathering power abroad, ‘in defiance alike of conscience and reputation, we industriously and perseveringly continue to deprave and darken the Creation of God’.
That ‘we’ was both British and Christian, but
Wilberforce pushed beyond boundaries of faith. He built on the moral universalism of the European Enlightenment, but he went back to the story of the Good Samaritan, in the New Testament, where the self-sacrificing hero was not a Jew, not one of ‘us’, and the man whom he finds half-dead on the roadside is.
During the 1780s Edmund Burke offered the same challenge, in a series of speeches about British greed and violence in India. Even more clearly, Burke used an argument from moral equivalence. The people of India, he said, were like ‘us’. The conquered Carnatic, devastated by ‘our’ forces, was about the same size as England. ‘[F]igure to yourself’, said Burke, ‘the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German sea, east and west, emptied and embowelled (May God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation.’ Also, the ancient way of life of the Hindus deserved our respect. ‘Whatever fault they may have, God forbid we should go to pass judgment upon people who formed their Laws and Institutions prior to our insect origins of yesterday.’ The great final point was moral equivalence, and when Burke came to condemn the main culprit, Governor Warren Hastings, it was
Portrait of a Gentleman (Mr Wilberforce) by John Rising, 1790 (Hull Museums via Wikimedia Commons)
equally on behalf of ‘the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured’, and ‘the people of India’, whose country he had ravished.
Of course, such rhetoric appealed directly to national vanity. Towards the victims it was ultimately patronising. But it worked as the great originating definition of national conscience. It was not just rhetoric. It was a new form of moral logic and a new theology, linking an inchoate democracy and national self-awareness with the moral order of the world. Public opinion, simply for its own sake and whatever the cause, has not been the subject of much historical narrative, and the national conscience, for its own sake, even less. That is particularly strange, given its urgency now. Part of the problem is the continuous entanglement of national conscience with Christian understanding.
In Britain the first great surge of anti-slavery speeches and pamphlets had an early impact. During the 1790s, parliament received many hundreds of petitions against the British slave trade and the trade was abolished in 1807. In due course, the final movement to end slavery itself, in 1833, provoked 5,000 petitions, carrying one and a half million signatures, men and women, from a population of 16.5 million. Exact motivation hardly matters. What matters is the main uniting idea. In Australia, at the onset of nationality, Charles Lefroy hoped for ‘a very great movement’, as a foundational expression of national conscience, but he got nothing beyond an address to the prime minister. In the making of modern British nationality a hundred years before, Wilberforce and his colleagues had done much better.
response has national definition. And yet, at least in the Australian experience, the national and the international are mutually defining. It seems impossible to understand one without the other
Besides, a good deal has changed in the near-twenty years since Ignatieff wrote The Warrior’s Honor. Appalled by genocide in the Balkans and Africa, Ignatieff treated feelings of nationality in wholly negative terms. ‘Nationalism,’ he says, ‘is a fiction.’ It has nothing real to do with personal identity. It is born of fear and multiplies fear, and it corrodes that ‘multiple belonging’ which is the only good road for humanity. But, if it was not obvious in the 1990s, it is obvious now that national governments are the only hope in meeting the world’s worst challenges. That includes especially the problems caused by global enterprise. Whatever individuals and international bodies might do, national populations are still the main bodies of public opinion and only national governments can give those bodies moral force.
Ignatieff himself says that the International Committee of the Red Cross, which works from Geneva, is run mainly by Swiss, because ‘[o]nly an executive composed of a single nationality … could be free of the paralysis that often afflicts multinational organizations’. Its moral sensibilities, or at least its attitude to war, he calls ‘very Swiss’. This suggests continuing signs of life in conscience formulated at the national level, where it can be driven by national habits of self-understanding, so as to cross global boundaries and aim for the long term.
Some of these issues have been usefully covered by the North American scholar Michael Ignatieff in his book The Warrior’s Honor (1998), about ‘moral obligation beyond our tribe, beyond our nation, family, intimate network’. But when Ignatieff says ‘our’ he means us as individuals and as international citizens. Addressing readers worldwide, he does not mean ‘us’ as a nation. He writes of the modern conscience as universalist at every point. I and not-I are multiple and similar, like grains of sand. So, in Ignatieff’s book, ‘the sameness of victimhood’ is apparently met by a sameness of emotional response, worldwide. Neither victimhood nor
The anti-slavery campaigners, including Wilberforce, did something else right. At that point, best-selling romantic authors of verse and fiction, and therefore their readers, had begun to explore inner motivation with new authority. Whole stories turned on the moral subjectivity of men and women. In the mid-eighteenth century, writers had pinpointed sexual reputation. Think of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Now everything suddenly broadened out, with fresh attention given to what the Evangelical writer Hannah More called our ‘sudden sense of right’. Best of all, from 1811, were the six novels in which Jane Austen showed female characters wrestling with the
Australian Aborigines Slaughtered by Convicts by Phiz (The Book of Remarkable Trials, 1840; Chronicles of Crime V. II, 1841)
common moral problems of daily life. Writing fiction about women made it easier to focus on conscience alone – private, individual conscience, exercised in deeply personal ways.
The process continued through the nineteenth century. By the time of Anthony Trollope, the 1850s to 1870s, it extended equally to men. The process was easily clichéd, and the Victorian period is notorious for its attention to conscience, but this only shows how familiar the main idea had become.
In due course, women were involved in enormous numbers in all expressions of the British national conscience. During the nineteenth century, there was a massive increase in women’s involvement in philanthropic causes as donors, organisers, and publicists. That included missionary and anti-slavery societies. ‘[C]ompassion and benevolence,’ says historian F.K. Prochaska, ‘were thought to be the preserve of the female sex’, and women’s sympathetic ambitions might go far afield, entering especially into the sufferings of women and children elsewhere in the world. Through women’s involvement such campaigns became part of the heartbeat of family life, affecting everyone, through meetings, periodicals and so on.
In Britain, and as part of the British view abroad, awareness of empire was part of the creation of national conscience, and women were aware of empire in different ways from men. By direct or indirect means, British women now set national moral agendas. In post-federation Australia, Arthur Vogan’s reliance on the manly conscience was a hundred years behind the times. If he and Lefroy had been able to appeal somehow to the consciences of Australian women they might well have made a larger impact.
Like individual conscience – the sense of right felt by ordinary men and women – national conscience seemed to spring from an internal drama of opinion. What was internal to each of ‘us’ became internal to the nation. It was embodied, not just in books, and not just in the new monthlies and quarterlies which were common in Britain and elsewhere from the late eighteenth century, and not just among specialist writers, but also in endless local committees, inexpert speeches, and letters to the papers. It might draw life from pre-existing social and institutional patterns. So, however feebly, however hypocritically, it was built into modern nationalism.
For two centuries or more, the immediate challenge to collective conscience among Australia’s settler population was the fact that they lived by invasion and conquest. In 1911, when Lefroy and Vogan made their big effort, that idea was not new. During the 1820s and 1830s, forty or fifty years after first settlement, a robust public had emerged in each of the colonial capitals, thanks to a sudden accumulation of clergy, lawyers, newspaper editors, and other professional men. Many had families, and women’s philanthropic
organisations multiplied, as in Britain. Also, the sudden inrush of propertied settlers put extreme pressure on the Indigenous peoples, and at the same time weakened government control. We need not worry, said the editor of the Australian: ‘we have not to lay upon our consciences that we can only live by their destruction’. Others were not so sure. ‘How is it,’ said the Sydney lawyer, Richard Windeyer, in a passage which has been made famous by Henry Reynolds, ‘that our minds are not satisfied? … What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?’
By the general will, Rousseau meant not shared opinion, but something slower and deeper, an unchanging murmur of power rather than anything more vocal – the rumbling of Leviathan
Again, women drew attention to common suffering. Many women who wrote against slavery took on the imagined voices of the victims, especially other women. So they asked readers to leap the frontier from I to not-I with a keen effort of feeling. They were to look back at themselves from a strange place. In verse published in 1838, Eliza Hamilton Dunlop wrote about the recent massacre at Myall Creek, near Inverell, of at least twenty-eight men, women, and children, as if she were an Aboriginal mother soothing her child:
Oh, could’st thy little bosom That mother’s torture feel, Or coulds’t thou know thy father lies Struck down by English steel.
‘English steel’ was a term sharpened to touch the national conscience. In a later stanza, Dunlop’s talk of ‘the Christian’s God’, who must hear the ‘murder cry’ of the Blacks, went to its deeper dimensions.
Few questioned the long-term moral propriety of invasion and conquest, but some stumbled in reconciling means to end, and recurring hints of moral equivalence between Black and White weakened conviction. The landowner and magistrate James Macarthur spoke in the Legislative Council about the ‘intolerable tyranny’ every Aboriginal must suffer in being brought under British laws. ‘[I]t was placing him between Scylla and Charybdis, for the savage had laws also,’ Macarthur said, ‘as binding and as stringent on him as our laws were on us, and equally incomprehensible to us as our laws were to him.’ Troubled by ongoing brutalities, Macarthur suggested a special tribunal to hear cases, educing all possible evidence from both sides, which would have been a mere scratch on the moral surface. Edward Smith Hall, of the Sydney Monitor, was less
compromising. Frontier brutality was beyond adjudication. ‘[A] murderous spirit’, he called it, a ‘wicked malignity generally prevalent among our graziers and settlers against the blacks of all tribes, horrible and disgraceful … to a civilized nation’. There could be no fair peace, said the colonial writer Alexander Harris, unless, at some unlikely point, ‘we give up their land and forsake their country’.
It was a long time before any better answer appeared, its complexity unfolding from the 1920s, when massacres were still occurring in central and north-west Australia, and through the twentieth century. Again, the remnants of the anti-slavery movement, still active because slavery still existed in the world, gave room to women as leading voices, and women were now better prepared to talk about violence, including child-theft and systematic rape. So I and not-I became more clearly a physical matter, a matter of mirrored bodies. Beginning in the late 1920s, Mary Montgomerie Bennett, who had ties with the London Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, spent her life arguing for ‘an enlightened national conscience’ with respect to the Aborigines. She lived twenty years among them, in remote Western Australia. Her friend, Olive Pink, in Alice Springs, used the same terminology.
Anthropologists such as Olive Pink and, in Sydney, A.P. Elkin, argued for the continuity of Aboriginal culture, and so they slowly created a wider understanding of the richness of Aboriginal spiritual life. Elkin, the leading figure, was an Anglican clergyman, alert to the power of ritual and the importance of place-bound belonging, and, like Wilberforce, his attachment to a sometime national religion gave him a structured moral view of the way nations might work. As a scientist trained in the new cultural relativism, Jonathan Lane of Sydney University says, Elkin offered ‘a consistent, precise and systematic account of Aborigines’. But he gave this account a ‘moral imperative, inspired by a religious vision’. From that vision came Elkin’s extraordinarily energetic political strategy. Religion happened first, politics second.
Working and often living among Aboriginal people, the anthropologists were publicists for suffering. At the same time, in the 1930s small number of Indigenous leaders also began to speak to nationwide public opinion. On Australia Day 1938, the sesquicentenary of White settlement, Bill Ferguson, William Cooper, and John Patten led a Day of Mourning, as part of a campaign for change in civil rights and living condition among their people. The Day of Mourning has since evolved into NAIDOC Week.
From the 1950s to the 1970s W.H. Stanner, Elkin’s former student, and C.D. Rowley recast the pre-war approach for a new generation, and in turn, before an increasingly wide audience, historians started to dislodge old orthodoxies. In 1981 Henry Reynolds published his first important work, The Other Side of the Frontier,
a title which sums up the guiding image of my own essay. From now on, the frontier was a hinge or pivot on which turned the nation’s ideas about itself, and the leap of imagination attempted by Eliza Hamilton Dunlop was given mighty evidentiary power. There was emphatically another side to the frontier, with its own past and future.
Events moved quickly from that point and the speech made by the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, at Redfern in Sydney in 1992 summed up an apparently robust national conscience. What could be more telling of the conscious of the nation than great moral truths, heavy with intended change, in the mouth of the head of government? It was a speech about ‘we’ and ‘us’. Keating addressed himself to his own people, ‘us non-Aboriginal Australians’, and he linked collective conscience and self-knowledge with ‘our’ old power. So, he said,
[w]ith some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
Keating spoke like the eighteenth-century innovators in taking for granted the authority to act, plus solidarity of feeling and a simple, urgent moral equivalence.
The waters have been shallowing since. Kevin Rudd’s apology in 2008 on behalf of a lesser ‘us’, past Australian parliaments and governments, referred to the ‘profound grief, suffering and loss [inflicted] on … our fellow Australians’. It made a deep impact, but, so long overdue, it seemed less clearly an act of grace. Nor was it accompanied by any compensation, as required by international human rights law.
More lately and more tellingly, great speakers from the other side of the frontier have turned ‘we’ and ‘us’ inside-out. In November 2014 Noel Pearson’s remarkable eulogy at the funeral of Gough Whitlam spoke of the dead statesman, maker of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975, as ‘one of those rare people who never suffered discrimination but understood the importance of protection from its malice’. For Stan Grant, speaking in October 2015, ‘we’ and ‘us’ have distinctive punch, as in ‘when British people looked at us, they saw something sub-human’. Grant lists reasons to hope that we (speaking now from both sides) are ‘better than that’, but there is something larger in his announcement that the ‘Australian Dream’, a congeries sublime with the hopes of ordinary men and women, means nothing useful on his side of the line. For the Indigenous ‘us’, the Australian Dream, he says, is interwoven with conquest, racism, and violence.
A national imaginary jarring with the national conscience spells fragility or futility for both. At the same time, there is a second frontier, at the continent’s edge, which gives the national conscience more urgency than ever.
Michael Ignatieff sees the present age as one of extreme evil, so that, as he says in the quote at the start of this essay, ‘Never have sentinels between the human and the inhuman been more necessary’. Ignatieff looks to international humanitarianism as the obvious sentinel, but given their power and the way they represent and sometimes shape national public opinion, surely much more has to depend on national governments.
There is the national conscience and there are international refugees. Some parts of the refugee question are complicated, just as the rights and wrongs of original British settlement might be said to be complicated, but some parts are simple. One morally simple aspect of British settlement was frontier brutality, and one morally simple aspect of Australian refugee policy is the brutality of refugee detention, especially offshore. They are strictly comparable. They both traumatise conscience, but in the latter case there is a curious disconnect between the conscience of authority and conscience elsewhere. As a result there is no national conscience, at least of the useful sort Wilberforce invented.
This is curious, but clear, and not only with regard to refugees. The neatest quantitative measure of the national conscience is foreign aid. Foreign aid attracts no votes. It brings some diplomatic advantage but the exact quantity of foreign aid is a moral rather than a
practical matter. In other words, foreign aid is an index of a nation’s moral self-confidence. William Wilberforce would have called it an index of ‘public spirit’ and genuine patriotism. In Australia, foreign aid makes up about one per cent of national budget expenditure, but it has made up twenty-five per cent of all cuts made and projected for the period 2013–19. In 2016 Australia’s total foreign aid is 0.22 per cent of GDP, a fraction of the proportion given by some other wealthy countries.
With regard to conditions in refugee camps, the current prime minister says, ‘We cannot be misty-eyed about this ... We must have secure borders and we do and we will.’ And in a letter dated 30 April 2016 to the Melbourne Age, one Peter Lynch replies:
Mr Turnbull tells us we mustn’t get ‘misty-eyed’ – about a man who felt it necessary to immolate himself, a man who unnecessarily died of sepsis from a scratch, a man who was killed when his head was crushed with a rock, or a raped woman who waited weeks for a late abortion.
Lynch goes on, ‘What should we do?’ It was wrong to be misty-eyed. ‘Weeping with pity, shame and anger might be a more appropriate response’.
The apparently total collapse of the national conscience in its usual form, the simple dereliction of moral dignity, has to have some historical explanation. Modern nationality emerged in the nineteenth century with the
mass publication of maps. Before the 1830s maps were expensive to produce and they were not often used for educational purposes. In no country was the bulk of the population familiar with maps. From the 1870s maps became standard issue in schools, they became part of the mental furniture of anyone with any education, and from that point nations were identified in popular imagination, not just by their human membership but also by the lines that closed them in. Governments have since learnt the potency of maps for explaining, and where necessary simplifying, the problems of the world.
Maps enchant, but they also dehumanise. They are figments of learning. They depict blocks of power, including democratic power, and the international refugees are entangled in maps. Australian children at the time of federation were taught to memorise both maps and verse:
For God has made her one: complete she lies Within the unbroken circle of the skies, And round her indivisible the sea Breaks on her single shore.
Australia was a diagram before it was a nation. With cartographic boundaries came a keener sense of geographical destiny, and of positioning in the world.
Australia’s federation fathers made much of maps and also of democracy, that spirit of self-determination and self-help which on the other side of the Pacific was summarised by Abraham Lincoln: ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’. That is, government for ‘us’. In the spirit that founded Australia, maps and democracy went together, and here the cry was, ‘Australia for the Australians’. In these circumstances, whatever Arthur Vogan liked to think, democracy was not an expression of mere humanity. Time has unfolded this truth, and now Stan Grant’s searing lesson seems to have a wider reach. It is not just the Australian Dream but the driving ideas of federation itself, about territory and self-government, which now cut life short. In a newly compact world there can be no self-contained island-continents, uniform and singular from shore to shore. So those ideas have lost traction. They give nil to the future.
It is unlucky that an extreme challenge to Australia’s national conscience, the refugee crisis, comes at a time when the national conscience is especially feeble and when the way forward especially dim. Thus pressured, Australia seems to have come to the end of an old familiar road, and answers which had seemed absolute for generations have failed.
The point of an historical account such as this one is also to look for fundamental ingredients by going back to the beginning. Some of those ingredients, which would have made sense to Wilberforce, are to be found in the effort by the Australian Council of Churches to establish
a network of sanctuaries for refugees, sometimes within their own places of worship. Christianity, like some other religions, is remarkably fluid. Territorial in its own way, it is tangential to democracy – in the end has nothing to do with it – and it forces a rethinking of boundaries. It can stiffen the bigotry of boundaries, but also dissolve it. Its power either way is vast. So all other frontiers can fail in sanctity at the doorways of churches.
It is unlucky that an extreme challenge to Australia’s national conscience, the refugee crisis, comes at a time when the national conscience is especially feeble
This was Wilberforce’s point. From his religious understanding he took lessons about selfishness, from which he took his definition of patriotism. That shaped his understanding of boundaries within and beyond the British Empire. This was also Charles Lefroy’s point. Defining conscience in Christian terms, he thought that the Australian nation could not properly exist without the self-awareness which goes with a national conscience. Finally, it was A.P. Elkin’s point, in rethinking for the twentieth century the relationship in Australia between Black and White. Elkin’s religious vision and his ideas about moral equivalence shaped his political strategy.
It does not need a religious revival to find out the importance of religion for the unfolding of the national conscience, if only because an effective national conscience has to work with the separate and vast incomprehensibility of spiritual life among others, the gap, in Roger Scruton’s terms, between I and not-I. All otherwise is brutality.
So we can return to the eighteenth century, where it all started, and quote from the English novelist Laurence Sterne (as the anti-slavery campaigners did): ‘tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, and then endeavor to make ‘em so’. g
Alan Atkinson is a graduate of three universities (Sydney, Trinity College Dublin, and the ANU). He has taught and been a visiting fellow at several other universities, most notably the University of New England, where he is Emeritus Professor of History. His magnum opus, the three-volume The Europeans in Australia, has won numerous major awards. Professor Alan Atkinson is the inaugural ABR RAFT Fellow.
Australian Book Review warmly thanks the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust, which has funded this $7,500 Fellowship. A footnoted version of this essay appears in ABR Online
FBalances Fiona
Wright
THE EASY WAY OUT
by Steven Amsterdam Hachette
$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9780733636271
or a novel about death – assisted dying, more specifically – The Easy Way Out is incredibly funny. Steven Amsterdam has a wry sense of humour, which is always at work throughout the book, and his sardonic narrator, Evan, is perfectly pitched to offset the darkness of, and the discomfort around, the novel’s subject matter.
The book opens at the bedside of a ‘builder who didn’t believe in sunscreen’ and is now riddled with melanoma. This man has decided to end his life using the newly introduced ‘Measure 961’, which has legalised the use of the euthanasia drug Nembutal for patients with incurable and terminal illnesses. It is Evan’s job to assist this man, and Amsterdam outlines the process, and its bureaucratic checks and balances, in great detail. And yet, after the shock of this procedure – and Evan’s almost farcical bungling – Evan walks outside and observes his surroundings, noting a ‘summer heat’ that ‘wraps both its legs around me and begins to hump’, and healthy women pushing prams who are ‘flushed, not from the weather, but from their own successfully executed hormonal purpose’. These kinds of disjunctions, between Evan’s theatrical and droll descriptions of his world, and his emotional and ethical wrangling with the work that he does in the aptly named Mercy Hospital, are the main energetic forces operating in The Easy Way Out, and also what make it such a striking and unsettling book.
Evan is a new recruit to the assisted dying program at the hospital, but he is no stranger to death or degenerative disease: his depressive father died in a car wreck when Evan was young, and his mother, Viv, has Parkinson’s disease. Evan has moved cities in order to be close to Viv, who currently lives, grudgingly, in the nursing home directly
across the road from the Mercy. An experimental treatment gives Viv a new – if inevitably temporary – lease on life, and her new-found energy and imperiousness wreak havoc on Evan’s tightly controlled, emotionally distant life.
Amsterdam has a deft hand with dialogue, and Viv’s voice in particular – cheeky but mannered, occasionally grandiose – is delightful and charming. This is a skilful move: the reader can’t help but be invested, both in the complex relationship between Evan and Viv, and in Viv herself, who is heading towards a death that will likely be both wretched and protracted. It is with Viv’s imminent death always in the background that Evan begins to encounter the moral and ethical ambiguities of his work.
In a sense, Evan is always aware of these ambiguities. He does not tell his closest friends (and occasional lovers) Lon and Simon the details of his job, saying only that he is working on a research project into suicidality. ‘Even that shocked Simon,’ Evan narrates, ‘who couldn’t imagine regularly talking to the suicidal (and he designs open-plan offices).’ He makes mistakes and is criticised for his ‘heightened empathy’ and ‘need for control’; eventually, he leaves the hospital program to moonlight for a shadowy and dubious organisation, Jasper’s Way, which assists people who are not eligible for Measure 961 to end their lives. The conditions from which these people are suffering, and the reasons they wish to die, are varied and more ambiguous than the cases Evan sees at the hospital; there is also an exchange of money involved. These cases allow Amsterdam to explore a number of different sides to, and a range of implications of, the euthanasia debate, and to do so without moralising, or even offering a clear standpoint or opinion on the matter. This refusal to take sides is evident in the different ways that the patients Evan encounters use the phrase ‘the easy way out’: for some of them, assisted dying is the easier option; for others, waiting for a natural death seems less difficult than choosing to end their lives more quickly. For Evan, who must balance both Viv’s wishes for a dignified death with his
own emotional and practical needs, the distinction is not so clear.
The Easy Way Out is an highly empathetic novel, especially in its descriptions of family relationships, and the unconventional but caring relationship between Evan, Simon, and Lon. Some of Amsterdam’s descriptions of the sick and dying are startling in their intimacy. One woman is described as having tumours like ‘bits of fried bread’ on her torso and limbs; another patient has ‘post-chemo chicken fuzz’ for hair. Amsterdam’s insight here perhaps stems from his work as a palliative care nurse, but this blending of tenderness and arresting or surprising detail is also one of the strengths of his writing as a whole – it is evident in the fraught relationships barely holding together in the post-apocalyptic world of Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), as well as in the interactions between the members of the family – all with superpowers –whose stories make up What the Family Needed (2011).
The Easy Way Out is a finely poised book that deals with a difficult – and also critically important – subject matter with remarkable tenderness, humour, and nuance. It is constantly surprising, and very often confronting; but it is also a story about love and about living properly, notwithstanding Evan’s knowledge, from an age, that ‘death wins. Every single game.’ g
Fiona Wright’s book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the 2016 Kibble Award. She has poems in the NSW States of Poetry anthology and is this month’s Open Page guest on page 72.
An astounding novel of deceit. A narrator unlike any other.
Well-travelled tales
Kerryn Goldsworthy
AFTER THE CARNAGE
by Tara June Winch
University of Queensland Press
$24.95 pb, 200 pp, 9780702254147
Tara June Winch’s first and only other book to date, a series of linked stories called Swallow the Air, was written while she was pregnant with her daughter Lila and published in 2006 when she was not yet twentythree. It was shortlisted in its category for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and for The Age Book of the Year, and it won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, the Dobbie Award for a first book by a woman writer, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in the UTS Award for New Writing category, and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists Award. Since then, Winch has published stories and articles in Vogue and McSweeney’s as well as numerous major Australian publications, and has worked with Wole Soyinka after winning the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award.
Not surprisingly, her second book has been much anticipated, and it does not disappoint. There’s a sureness of touch, a breadth of vision and experience, and an extraordinary combination of technical sophistication with depth of feeling in all of these stories. Those things are rare by any standards, much less in the work of a writer still so young. Most of these stories are told by a firstperson narrator with a limited point of view and a tenuous grip on events. Winch’s control and management of these voices, with all their bewilderment and intensity of feeling, shapes them into richly suggestive stories in which the reader is pointed in various unspoken directions and not a word is wasted.
The short story is traditionally the preserve of private and inner life: its form is suited to the moment of epiphany, the mood of a day, the unravelling of a relationship, or the turning point in a life, moments at once significant and fleeting that form the nucleus of stories
by such masters of the form as Chekhov and Mansfield. Winch’s stories follow this pattern, of emotion intensely felt and moments where lives are changed forever, but behind these tales of individual lives the reader can always sense the politics of race, of class, of gender, and can sense behind those things the massive forces of history, ruthlessly shoving these characters around.
A widely travelled woman of Wiradjuri, Afghan, and English heritage, born in New South Wales and now living in Paris, Winch writes with apparent effortlessness as a citizen of the world. The narrators of these thirteen stories come from all around the globe, many of them willingly or unwillingly transported from somewhere else: a young American in Paris, a Muslim speaker of Arabic who has fled to France, an ambitious young Nigerian man struggling with life in New York, a Chinese-Australian woman trying to sell overpriced Australian university education in Guangzhou. At least half of these stories explore the uncertainties of international displacement and cultural unease.
Another common theme is the unreliability of romantic love and family ties: the pages of this book are littered with unhappy couples, with struggling parents, with drinkers, deadbeats, and deserters. There are couples who are wildly mismatched and others who habitually miss each other’s mental track. But Winch’s clear-eyed observations about intimate relationships are balanced by some positives, notably the supportive and comforting sibling relationships in ‘Easter’ and ‘Failure to Thrive’.
Beginnings and endings are the bane of a short story writer’s – perhaps any writer’s – existence, but Winch excels at both, and her gift for endings in particular is remarkable. The first story in the collection, ‘Wager’, begins with the comically surreal image of a grown son visiting his mother and trying to cope with his little half-brother’s plastic horses in the bathtub. The story moves through its quiet realism with growing unease to end in a place that reminds the reader of Raymond Carver. So does the ending of ‘Baby Island’, in which the ageing and cynical narrator succumbs to
a sudden moment of madness; and that of ‘After the Carnage, More’, in which the hospitalised victim of a bomb blast in Pakistan is left in suspense, desperate for news of his wife.
By contrast, ‘The Last Class’, one of the best and most haunting stories here, subverts its own awful message by ending on an upward swing with an unpredictable and unforgettable image, and the ending of ‘The Proust Running Group of Paris’ is likewise redemptive. Winch’s beginnings can also be arresting in various ways, as in ‘Meat House’, which begins with another unforgettable image: ‘In front of the Hagia Sophia the woman’s skirt billowed, the pleats of houndstooth becoming a momentary jellyfish bell.’ The strange, soft-focus, drifting story ‘A Late Netting’ begins ‘If we had been drawn down a river, at least that knowing river would’ve taken us towards its mouth’. The opening sentence of ‘Mosquito’ is wryly riffing off Bruce Springsteen’s classic ‘The River’, offering a female version: ‘For my nineteenth birthday I got a single-parent pension card and a bassinet.’
‘Mosquito’ is a superb story, a terrifying tale of motherhood, fear, betrayal, and revelation; along with the complex and richly layered ‘The Last Class’, this is the high point of the book. Given the range and scope of this collection along with its technical excellence, it’s hard to imagine where Winch, as a writer, might go next. What’s clear is that she can go pretty much anywhere she wants. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize.
Shylock speaks
Andrea Goldsmith
SHYLOCK IS MY NAME by
Howard Jacobson
Hogarth Shakespeare
$29.99 pb, 277 pp, 9780701188993
Shylock Is My Name is the second novel to appear in Hogarth Press’s Shakespeare Project. In this series, eight well-known novelists have each been commissioned to retell one of Shakespeare’s plays for a modern audience. Jeanette Winterson launched the project with The Gap of Time, her take on The Winter’s Tale; the third in the series, the thoroughly enjoyable Vinegar Girl, a reworking of The Taming of the Shrew by Anne Tyler, was published in July. The brief for the project specifies a modern rendering of the plays, in much the same way that Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch. This is in contrast with drawing on the plays as inspiration, in the manner, for example, of West Side Story. Shakespeare’s plays abound in incredible narrative twists and coincidences, with an abundance of female-tomale cross-dressings (so much more interesting in Shakespeare’s time, when the girls were played by boys dressed up as girls who then dressed up as boys). The Merchant of Venice, the play on which Jacobson’s novel rests, is no exception. The absurdities of the original play demand a deft imagination and a raft of novel-writing skills for a satisfying retelling. Jacobson’s offering succeeds only partially.
It is often forgotten that The Merchant of Venice is considered a comedy (although not by this reviewer). The cultural capital that has adhered to Shylock, together with the play’s themes of revenge (exacting ‘the pound of flesh’) and mercilessness (‘The character of mercy is not strained’), nudge it in popular thought towards tragedy. Jacobson remains true to the comedic under-pinnings, with several laugh-aloud moments in his novel.
The Merchant of Venice is a play that polarises opinion. Is it anti-Semitic? Is
it Portia’s play or Shylock’s? The devoted Shakespearean Harold Bloom regards the play as deeply anti-Semitic and Portia as the central character. Jacobson takes the opposing view on both accounts. Shylock and his contemporary incarnation, the wealthy British Jew and art collector Simon Strulovsky, dominate Jacobson’s tale, while his Portia/Plurabelle is confined to a cardboard cut-out, minor role.
In Jacobson’s retelling, Strulovsky meets Shylock in a Manchester graveyard. (This is akin to a connection with a deeper self occurring outside the therapy room.) Both men have troublesome, ungrateful daughters, and Jacobson has given them beloved wives: Shylock’s Leah, who predeceases him and with whom he talks constantly; and Strulovsky’s Kay, felled by a major stroke two years earlier and now requiring round-the-clock care. Strulovsky invites Shylock to his home, and there Shylock remains for the duration of the novel, engaging Strulovsky in many rather static, talking-head discussions that shed light on the original play but create longueurs in the novel.
The primary difference between the two men is that Shylock has gained in wisdom in four hundred years, patience too. He presents much more sympathetically than Shakespeare’s Shylock, but then there’s nothing like a dose of self-knowledge coupled with love and yearning for a dead spouse to make a character more attractive. Shylock’s asides to his absent wife, his incorporating her into his daily life, are affecting and deeply humanising. The hard-hearted, uncompromising, unchristian Jew of Shakespeare’s play has been banished from Jacobson’s Shylock – to the extent that even Plurabelle is won over by him in a way her progenitor, Portia, never could be.
Shakespeare’s Shylock is as much undone by his daughter, Jessica, as he is by the Venetian Christians. Indeed, for me, Jessica has always been the main villain in the play. In one of the more compelling narrative threads of Jacobson’s novel, the complex relationship between Strulovsky and his daughter, Beatrice, is explored. (Beatrice? This daughter who ostensibly brings so little
joy: clearly a not-insignificant choice of name.) Strulovsky is revealed as a father who loves and protects his daughter a little too much. And so, perhaps, for Shylock and Jessica.
It is Jacobson’s interrogation of the perplexities in Shakespeare’s play wherein the interest of this book lies. For those who have wondered why Shylock does not relent, why he does not find in himself that quality of mercy required to dismiss Antonio’s bond, and why such a toxic relationship has developed between him and his daughter Jessica, Jacobson supplies some possible answers through the Shylock/Strulovsky dialogues. And those shocking words of Shylock, almost the last he utters in the play: ‘I am content,’ he says. But how can he be? Everything has been taken from him. Jacobson’s novel addresses this conundrum cleverly – not through narrative, but again through one of the Shylock–Strulovsky dialogues.
These long discussions between Shylock and Strulovsky, while they illuminate the difficulties of the play and will be of interest to Shakespeare’s fans, do not satisfy novelistically. I cannot imagine why readers unfamiliar with the play would bother. Then there are issues of plot and characterisation. Rather than the pound of flesh of the Shylock–Antonio bond, Jacobson’s version settles for a foreskin, for circumcision. Within the comic aspects of Jacobson’s novel there is a sharp irony here with a satisfying twist at the end, but for those who do not know the play, plot devices such as this simply tip into absurdity. And with the exception of Shylock/Strulovsky, none of the characters are well fleshed out, some like Beatrice’s lover, are nothing more than stereotypes. (The Bard can get away with stereotypes and archetypes and convoluted and absurd plots, but a modern can not.)
The strength of Jacobson’s retelling of The Merchant of Venice is in its seeking to explain this problematic play, not in his having written a gripping novel. g
Andrea Goldsmith is a Melbournebased novelist, essayist, and reviewer. Her novel, The Memory Trap (2013), won the Melbourne Prize in 2015.
Mixed roots
Shannon Burns
DYING IN THE FIRST PERSON
by Nike Sulway
Transit Lounge
$29.95 pb, 304 pp, 9780994395832
During boyhood, Samuel and his twin brother, Morgan, invent and in a sense inhabit a world and language called ‘Nahum’. Years later – after a family tragedy and long separation – Morgan is a celebrated novelist, while Samuel makes a living translating his brother’s fiction from Nahum into English.
The greater part of Dying in the First Person’s force is figured in its language. It begins with Samuel’s effort to imagine the recovery of Morgan’s drowned body from a river in the Netherlands, where he has lived with a woman called Ana for some years. Ana accompanies the body home, and brings a secret or two with her.
The first paragraph offers a taste of things to come: the word ‘body’ appears four times, a reiterative strategy that Sulway employs too often, so that poetic intensity gives way to dullness. There are ‘mooching’ dogs nearby, a sensuous, jaunty description which seems to contradict the mournful mood. The second paragraph aligns Morgan’s death with his father’s, and thereby hints that the novel will explore the consequences of both deaths – as it does. Indeed, Sulway makes use of foreshadowing to gothic proportions, and that genre looms large throughout.
Dying in the First Person is, above all, a novel of metaphors. At times they are deployed reiteratively, as another way of expressing a thought or feeling, to the point of over-explaining; at other times they extend or exaggerate beyond the original meaning, to the point of confusion.
For Nietzsche, language and the concepts we use to understand the world are inherently metaphorical, yet we forget their true function and confuse the metaphor with reality. Sulway’s use of metaphor apes this process, par-
ticularly those metaphors that deal with translation, which she symbolically links with death. For example, when Samuel takes his translation work outdoors, he begins with a metaphor: ‘The sentences rose up between my feet, took on the shape of trees and hills and paths … the curvature of the earth a chapter, this stretch of land a paragraph …’ Another metaphor follows: ‘I wrote from a kind of madness born of occluded vision.’ Then he mixes the metaphors: ‘I felt my way in the dark, pushing my roots into the soil.’ The perspective shifts here and Samuel goes from producing tree-words to being tree-words, with his (metaphorical) roots pushing down to the earth’s core. Then the actual Samuel makes the metaphor literal, removing his boots and socks to press his feet into the earth: ‘I walked, barefoot, until the earth came into my body … I learned the earth by accommodating my body to its lines. Just as I had to open myself to my brother’s work, walk its lines until it entered me.’ We learn that, for Samuel, trees are (metaphorical) translators of the earth. Finally, Samuel presses his bare feet, bare hands, and bare heart against the pages of his brother’s fiction, as an act of (metaphorical) translation.
Whether or not the bare feet and hands are as metaphorical as Samuel’s bare heart is impossible to tell by this point, but one thing is clear: like everyone who takes metaphors too literally, Samuel is something of an idiot. Sulway employs a fundamentally comedic conceit – a character’s failure to distinguish between figurative and literal language and thought – in deep earnest.
Samuel writes approvingly of Morgan’s ‘use of metaphor to awaken the reader, to make them, at last, responsible for the words they hold in their hands’ and ‘to make the latent actual, to puncture the reader’s lassitude’. The assumption behind this strategy seems to be that readers are not as active or attentive as they should be, and require metaphor-prods to keep them alert.
The novel’s symbolism is equally heavy-handed. After learning that Ana kept a pet crow as a girl, Samuel confides: ‘The wings of the black crow spread and cracked beneath my chest, pausing to glide.’ Ana is often found near
or in water, and she likes to open the car window so she can feel the rain on her face and hair. Indeed, the rain proves to be a great stimulus for a prospective romance – and the clichés gather apace. Sulway’s method of characterisation embraces caricature. Her protagonists are elaborately cultured and artsy, interested in fine food, rare books, and rustic living. The twins’ mother, Solange, is a sharp-minded, French-speaking librarian-cum-bookshop owner who knows Latin and can discuss Housman’s poetry and ‘the critical edition of Manilius’s Astronomica’ at careful length while receiving medical treatment. Their father, Paul, holds forth on diverse subjects like ‘economics, astronomy, natural philosophy, etiology, chance’, and celebrates the anapaestic tetrameters of Dr Seuss. Paul ‘circumnavigated the globe when he was seventeen, and perhaps the heavens’; he recites Homer while urinating and sings Norse hunting songs while fishing. Paul’s flaws are equally inflated, while his job as a fisherman is purely symbolic. In fact, all labour (especially translation) is pointedly symbolic in Sulway’s hands.
Coupled with this, the novel’s style is so fixed that Sulway cannot shift between points of view in a credible way. Everything is written in a lyrical mode, employing sensuous descriptions and untethered metaphors. Despite the two narrators’ vastly different personal histories, their voices are distinguishable only by a shift in pacing.
Ultimately, the world of Nahum holds more promise than the world of Sulway’s novel. She is a fine stylist, but the better qualities of Dying in the First Person – its resonant imagery and elegant phrasing – are undermined by an excessive devotion to metaphor and melodrama. g
Shannon Burns is a past ABR Fellow.
Going the distance Anthony Lynch
THE WISDOM TREE: FIVE NOVELLAS
by Nick Earls Inkerman & Blunt
$19.99 per pb, 684 pp, 9780992498573
In the final novella of Nick Earls’s quintet The Wisdom Tree, a benign security guard, Wanda, misquotes Tolstoy: ‘No family is perfect. But each family isn’t perfect in its own way.’ Crossing between continents, each of these intersecting novellas reveals characters who variously express love for the institution of family and opportunistically exploit it. Compromised ambition flourishes throughout. Narrators find themselves support acts to the aspirations of others. Success, with its brief euphorias, might or might not come, but compromise has its own rewards.
The series begins slowly. Gotham sees an Australian music journalist in New York to interview a young rapper, Na$ti Boi, who has agreed to talk while shopping for his ever-expanding wardrobe. Much of the action occurs in a department store, after hours. When our journalist–narrator, for whom the zenith of pop music was the Ramones and who is doing this interview purely for money, enters the store and meets Na$ti Boi, who is not so nasty but exhibits the predictable traits of misogyny, self-indulgence, and delusions of power and insight, few revelations ensue. The story strives for poignancy in a later scene in Central Park involving the narrator and Na$ti Boi’s long-suffering uncle and minder, Smokey, and their respective children – an affecting, if sentimental, denouement.
Venice sees the narrator, Ryan, a recently unemployed civil engineer, coopted as part-time carer for his sister’s son, Harrison. The sister, a successful artist working in the style of Patricia Piccinini, is sculpting a humanoid family from materials including horses’ heads collected from a macabre outpost
on the edge of the city. For the artist, family remains abstract, despite her mania for representing it in art. While she craves a gig at the Venice Biennale, and her dentist husband, home from work, ‘finds a chardonnay old enough or important enough to have a cork’, the victim of the mining boom bubble, Ryan, accepts his role of uncle and carer – the archetypal, forbearing Earls character in service to others.
Vancouver compels with a story reminiscent of Bernard Malumud’s The Natural (1952). In 2001, the narrator is visiting a former American footballer who stayed with his family in the 1970s when the narrator was a boy and the youthful footballer a giant whose regularly dislocating shoulder, injured during a prank, unhinged a spectacular sporting career. When the narrator’s father buys and sells Poseidon shares at the right time in 1970 – mining variously gives and takes in these novellas – he capitalises on his fortune by buying rights to sell American football to the antipodes. The young giant, who can hurl a football seventy yards – provided the narrator’s father shoves the shoulder back in its socket after each throw –is the uncomplaining performing freak helping sell this American dream. Boy and parents become de facto family for the giant. The footballer, also a budding writer, piques the boy’s interest in literature. Decades later, the narrator is a writer – giving rise to metafictional musing on the unpublishable nature of the novella – but in the wake of 9/11, for writers and giants, as for others, the world is unsettled. In the ex-footballer, Earls captures the power and vulnerability of a man who is a giant in more ways than one.
Juneau, the fourth novella, gains its name from the hard-to-reach Alaskan capital. The narrator, Tim, another post-mining boom casualty, escorts his uncommunicative father on a journey tracing the travels of the father’s longdead great-uncle. For much of the story it remains unclear why the father, neglectful of his immediate family, is set upon knowing the fate of his ancestor, or why Tim, another Earls character lacking agency, tags along. In Juneau’s museum, what became of the ances-
tor is revealed to be, nicely, counter to touristic myths of frontier conquest. As readers we might, nevertheless, wonder if this one was worth the journey.
The Wisdom Tree derives its title from a tree in northern Hollywood, or ‘NoHo’, near the famous large letters of the Hollywood sign. In a box beneath the tree people deposit poems, accounts of dreams, business cards – messages of hope both cinematic in scale and more intimate. NoHo, the last and finest of the novellas in this quintet, sees an Australian family pursuing a Tinseltown dream, and is engagingly told from the point of view of Charlie, whose sister is an aspiring child star.
Success with its brief euphorias might or might not come, but compromise has its own rewards
The prolific Earls has often, and tellingly, written about children. Frequently likened to Nick Hornby, in NoHo Earls is, in a good way, most like Hornby here. Charlie has ‘no sense there’s some big space inside me where a dream should go’, but he is a deadpan observer of his host city (‘There’s a lot of blonde hair in LA’) and of his sister’s obsession with One Direction’s Harry Styles, who ‘thanks whole cities for liking him’. He alone sees LA has a natural world: eagles (‘No one here sees eagles. I’ve asked them. No one looks up’), sparrows and finches, ‘small brown twitchy things’.
Attractively packaged by Inkerman & Blunt, The Wisdom Tree proffers its share of well-worn types. The bad dude rapper loves his mom, the ambitious yuppies are self-serving, the giant is gentle. But Earls nimbly and non-judgementally portrays driven characters and forgiving families. Those characters often wait a long time for doors to open. Sometimes the reader does too. But as NoHo shows, going the distance can bring rewards, if in unexpected ways. g
Anthony Lynch is an editor and writer. His work has appeared in The Age, The Best Australian Poems, Island, and Southerly.
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
Love and Friendship
by Anwen Crawford
‘Ihave no money and no husband,’ comments Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) in Love and Friendship, Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella, Lady Susan. The dilemma is common both to Austen’s heroines and to this American director’s: his five films have charted the romantic fortunes of young bourgeois women whose allowances won’t quite support their aspirations, and whose relationships with men are, in large part, tactical alliances of wealth and status. For sheer cunning, however, Lady Susan outdoes them all. She charms, she dissembles, she strategises like a military general. ‘In one’s plight lies one’s opportunity,’ she observes.
Lady Susan is an outlier among Austen’s works. It was written early, around 1794, when the author was in her late teens, but remained unpublished until 1871. It is an epistolary novel with no direct dialogue, an absence that Stillman, who scripts his own films, has turned into his own kind of opportunity. Stillman, free to invent conversations, does so with a wit sharp enough to match Austen’s. Love and Friendship is very funny, funnier still for its absence of moral reckoning. Lady Susan knows herself to be the smartest person in the room, but she is not required to submit to her intelligence to humility, as some of Austen’s later heroines must. Lady Susan has no virtues; she merely excels in affecting them. One cannot help but be dazzled by her, if only momentarily.
In her mid-thirties, Lady Susan is recently widowed. She and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), are dependent upon the kindness of relatives and friends; as the film opens they are in flight from a wealthy estate, Langford, where Lady Susan has created discord by flirting shamelessly with the married Lord Manwaring, to the discomfiture of his wife. She has also succeeded in detaching the silly baronet Sir James Martin (‘a bit of a rattle’) from his ostensible lover, the eligible Miss Manwaring, and transferring his attentions her daughter. Frederica has refused his proposals.
Lady Susan never loses track of her own suitors – among them Reginald De Courcy (Xavier Samuel), the handsome brother of her sister-in-law, Catherine Vernon (Emma Greenwell) – but the plot is really driven by a battle over the fate of Frederica. Lady Susan is determined to see her daughter married to Sir James Martin (played with comic exuberance by Tom Bennett), but the Vernon and De Courcy families have other ideas. They promote a match between Frederica and Reginald, sensing in the daughter a dependable modesty quite absent in her mother.
In Austen’s novel, correspondence flows between two main pairs: Catherine Vernon and her mother, Lady De Courcy; and Lady Susan and her intimate friend, Mrs Alicia Johnson. Although there is some use of letters in Stillman’s adaptation – including a scene where fragments of text pop up on screen, to amusing effect – the various exchanges and intrigues are mostly transferred to conversation. But the sense remains, carried over from the novel, that the main characters know they are engaged in a kind of performance, adapting their behaviour to suit their immediate audience. Lady Susan is ingratiating with Catherine, high-minded with Reginald, severe with Frederica, and gloriously nasty with Mrs Johnson. Chloë Sevigny portrays the latter as an American in exile.
Stillman’s casting of Kate Beckinsale and Sevigny reunites him with two performers he has used before, in not dissimilar roles. In The Last Days of Disco (1998), set during the early 1980s, the two played Manhattan editors vying for love and success. They were more rivals than friends, and Beckinsale, as the marvellously passive-aggressive Charlotte Pingress, was the more dominant character, as she is here. Her Lady Susan is the right blend of calculation and allure: even her mourning clothes are worn to catch the eye.
A good part of the pleasure of Love and Friendship derives from watching well-dressed people behave badly. The frocks are lovely, the coats dashing, the colour scheme buttery and light, all offsetting the rampant self-interest on display. Stillman favours mid-shots, the better to observe his characters as they move; like Austen before him he is preoccupied with codes of etiquette, and the function of these codes in social space. Love and Friendship involves much bustling in and out of rooms, just as The Last Days of Disco was concerned with who got past the nightclub rope and who didn’t. For Lady Susan, every space is a stage – and a staging post – for her schemes.
‘Artlessness will never do in love matters,’ she says. g
Love and Friendship is directed by Whit Stillman and distributed by Transmission Films.
Arts Update is generously supported by the Ian Potter Foundation. Anwen Crawford’s Live Through This (2014), is published by Bloomsbury.
‘A raving maniac of the cinema’
Invigorating blasts from Jonas Mekas
Philippa Hawker
MOVIE JOURNAL: THE RISE OF NEW AMERICAN CINEMA 1959–1971 by Jonas Mekas
Columbia University Press (Footprint), $59.95 pb, 453 pp, 9780231175579
‘Do you really want me to fall that low, to become a film critic, one of those people who write reviews?’ asks Jonas Mekas, responding with typical brio to complaints from readers. Between 1959 and 1971 he produced a regular movie column in the Village Voice, a polemical and poetic enterprise that has plenty of resonance for contemporary cinema and those who write about it. Movie
Journal is a collection of approximately one-third of those columns, some in full, some excerpted. It was published in 1972 but has long been out of print. This reprint is a welcome addition to the literature of film. The columns feel fresh off the page and scorchingly energetic; Mekas, still active at ninety-three, is around to add a jaunty afterword. Always proactive, Mekas virtually created the job himself. As he tells it, he went into the publication’s office to ask why the Voice lacked a regular movie column. Associate editor Jerry Tallmer suggested he write one, and Mekas filed his first instalment the next day. He was already a busy figure in the New York cultural scene, chiefly as a filmmaker and founder of the journal Film Culture and the Filmmakers Cooperative; during his Voice tenure he also set up the Anthology Film Archives. Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas came to the United States in 1949, after spending time in work camps and refugee camps in Germany and briefly studying philosophy at the University of Mainz.
These days, the image of American film writing in the mainstream press of 1960s and 1970s focuses on Pauline Kael at the New Yorker dispatching Bosley
THE PAPER HOUSE by Anna Spargo-Ryan Picador
$29.99 pb, 295 pp, 9781743535202
The Paper House begins benignly, even buoyantly, with a recently married couple, a new house, and the stirrings of pregnancy. But the intense grief that suddenly upheaves the narrative sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Set on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, this début is an affecting portrait of a family pulled together and wrenched apart by mental illness. After a loss, Heather sinks into a quicksand of sadness that threatens to pull her under. Anna Spargo-Ryan handles her fall with considerable empathy. Heather’s husband, Dave, shares her sense of dislocation, ‘For five days we sent our bodies into the world without us.’ But it takes more than just him to help shoulder and redistribute the pain; Heather’s sister, Fleur, and her father, Bruce, as well as a motley group of neighbours, rally round and help her, in their own idiosyncratic ways.
The book alternates between Heather’s and her mother’s experiences of succumbing to an invisible illness that manifests itself in myriad symptoms of distress and confusion. Though Spargo-Ryan explores hereditary sickness (what agency does an individual have or is she at the mercy of her genetic code?), she refrains from naming and specifying the medical condition that afflicts both her characters. Such ambuiguity adds to the poignancy of the story. It doesn’t matter, in the end, what Heather and Shelley suffer from; what’s important is the effect they have on those around them.
Despite the serious ambit of The Paper House, shards of light penetrate the dark. The reviving effects of Heather’s wild garden and the simple joy she takes in drawing her botanical subjects, as well as the generosity of her community of family and new acquaintances, provide restorative moments of grace.
Thuy On
Jonas Mekas, 2008 (photograph by Furio Detti, via Wikimedia Commons)
Crowther of the New York Times then squaring off against Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice, US proponent of the auteur theory. Sarris and Mekas were colleagues in more than one publication: Sarris co-edited Film Culture with Mekas, but the two often had strong differences of opinion.
Mekas is conscious of writing in a different register from that of Kael or Sarris. For a short time, he tries on the critic’s hat, but soon throws it away. ‘It is not my business to tell you what it’s about. My business is to get excited about it, to bring it to your attention. I am a raving maniac of the cinema,’ he says. The column’s title, ‘Movie Journal’ conveys the sense of a chronicle, a personal engagement. This takes many forms; he can write combative assessments, lyrical and visceral responses, brief notes, extended discussions, pieces of reportage. He conducts Q & A interviews, sends frontline dispatches, occasional pointed sallies against mainstream reviewers. He experiments with various ways of describing what he’s seeing or experiencing, or drawing the reader into a debate. He set himself to be an advocate for a particular tendency in filmmaking, for the work that he called ‘New Cinema’, but also ‘underground’ and ‘poetic’ cinema. Some of the filmmakers he writes about – Andy Warhol, Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Shirley Clarke, Yoko Ono, Stan Brakhage, and Ken Jacobs – have become familiar even famous names. Others are less well-known, and Movie Journal becomes a valuable resource, a testimony to art and endeavour.
Mekas’s own filmmaking revolves around the diary form, and his film writing has some of the same feeling. There is a sense of a creative life in action, across the spectrum of New York
culture, ranging from a vivid account of an important, hastily conceived project to film a Living Theatre production called The Brig; to numerous examples of battles with censorship that he met as a filmmaker, distributor and viewer. Yet from the beginning, the range of his interests is evident. There is a call for ‘a derangement of cinematic senses’; a poetic evocation of a new Maya Deren work, The Very Eye of Night (1958); a furious denunciation of the distributor who dubbed Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès and cut sixty-five minutes from it; a description of going to see the Rock Hudson–Doris Day comedy Pillow Talk (1959) in a posh new movie theatre with uncomfortable seats. He has a strong sense of immediacy, but he is writing for the future, and some of his dreams and predictions seem shrewd and prescient – not just about the movies but also about their context.
‘Films will be soon be made as easily as written poems, and almost as cheaply. They will be made everywhere and by everybody’, he wrote in October 1960. Four years later, he was imagining the means of circulation for these works. ‘Soon you’ll be able to buy prints of the films you like for three to five dollars for your own library, like books, like records, like tapes ... our films will be screened in every home.’
The editor of the second edition, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, writes an extended introduction with a biographical account of Mekas and an assessment of his critical position and its function. Mekas, he points out, is not a straightforward cheerleader for the avant garde. He can be a showman and a polemicist, and his positions and enthusiasms can be fluid and contradictory. He needs to be understood, Smulewicz-Zucker says, as a ‘Romantic humanist’ with a strong
commitment to the value of culture.
‘I have almost unlimited taste!’ Mekas declared in the column in October 1962 addressed to readers who seemed to be suggesting that he wasn’t a critic. Yet he is not talking about being uncritical or undiscriminating – he is referring to the breadth of his enthusiasms. In his afterword, looking back on the collection he declares himself very happy with what he said and what he singled out.
‘Here I am, fifty years later, rereading my columns, and I am very happy to tell you, dear reader, that I find that what I wrote is still very good. I am almost amazed how good I was and, also, how right I was.’ He has no feeling, however, that his work is done. ‘The arts of the moving images are again undergoing an intense transformation ... They are as in much in need of a midwife and a passionate defender as they were fifty years ago when technologies, content, and forms were experiencing similar change.’ Movie Journal is an invigorating blast, and reading it could well inspire writers to take up Mekas’s challenge. g
Hawker
GREEN ROOM
‘To set or not to set’
Brett Dean speaks to Michael Shmith about his new opera – and Peter Garrett
Brett Dean, perhaps Australia’s pre-eminent composer and certainly one of its most productive, is personable, witty, and engaging. He talks with heartfelt eloquence about his work, but always with a refreshing directness and clarity that illuminates rather than obscures. Humour, too. This takes a special talent when the subject is Hamlet. The gloomy Dane is uppermost in Dean’s mind at present, as he is fully occupied orchestrating the full score of his operatic version of the play, which will receive its première at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017. Colouring-in the score is, as Dean says, producing a simultaneous sense of wonder and achievement.
Cutting Shakespeare’s longest work down to size has been quite a challenge for Dean and his librettist, the Canadian writer Matthew Jocelyn. ‘To set or not to set, that is the question,’ Dean says, chuckling down the phone. (And, yes, the original line is in the opera. ‘It would be notable by its absence. It’s going to be there in one form or another.’)
Dean is speaking from his home in Berlin. It’s Saturday morning, and Dean’s wife, the artist Heather Betts, has already headed off to the local market to do the weekend shopping. Dean is joining her shortly. It’s a ritual. ‘Everyone is at the marketplace catching up,’ says Dean. ‘It’s very primal, and has gone on since Shakespeare’s time.’
Back to the Prince of Denmark. More than a few composers have attempted to adapt Hamlet – most famously Ambroise Thomas and, in the mid-twentieth century, Humphrey Searle – with varying success. What attracted Dean?
‘I was reticent when it was first suggested in conversations in Denmark, appropriately enough with a Danish tenor we know who’s a soloist at the Danish Opera. He
was keen to be the prince himself at some stage in his career. I was fascinated by the idea, but it took a while to warm to it.’ In the way was what Dean describes as ‘This bowing-down-to-the-giant aspect’, and having to remove ‘that burden of awe from the equation’.
Things became more positive when Heather Betts, inspired by the idea, started a cycle of Hamlet paintings. ‘She said to me, “What would Will himself have thought of it?” and he would have said “Go for it!”’.
That, Dean says, was the trigger. He began working in earnest with Matthew Jocelyn to create their own Hamlet. ‘Already, there are three published editions, two of which were published during Shakespeare’s own lifetime. By definition, any Hamlet on stage or screen is going to be some sort of conflation. Decisions have to be made on which direction or how much of it to use.’
The first thing composer and librettist did was sit down at Jocelyn’s Toronto home and read aloud between them the whole text. This took five hours. ‘That meant we would have to reduce it by three-quarters or four-fifths to get a suitable amount of text one could sing within a two-hour period.’
Before the opera proper, Dean and Jocelyn worked on a smaller piece, for soprano and string quartet, called And once I played Ophelia. ‘We took the opportunity to establish something of our working relationship and the style of the libretto itself.’ By focusing on Ophelia, this twenty-minute dramatic scena incorporates not only her words, but words said to her by other characters (for example, Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’). ‘This enabled us to get to grips with various characters –Hamlet himself in his love poem, but also Polonius and Gertrude.’ And once I played Ophelia was performed in 2015 in Melbourne with the Australian String Quartet and soloist Allison Bell. It has also been recorded for
Chandos, with Bell and the Doric String Quartet. Dean and Jocelyn also got to grips with matters metrical. ‘One of the questions I’m asked a lot is how do you cope with the iambic pentameters. The rhythms of it,’ says Dean. ‘Shakespeare is forever displacing the accents anyway: “to be …” is an inverted iambic pentameter, anyway, with two inversions in the one line. And he’s forever repositioning the accents so it almost becomes prose. Apart from anything else, there is the drama and beauty of the words. I’d like to say it just writes itself, but it not that easy. But it is a constant source of inspiration in its own right.’
‘I can’t really imagine composing without playing. That would be rather lonely’
With the music for the opera, the Ophelia-related material automatically found its way into the main piece. But central to the opera is what one could call, à la Tristan, the Hamlet Chord, which is heard through the piece and is at present Dean’s constant companion. ‘I started in a sense with this four-note chord that gives potential in various directions,’ says Dean. ‘I thought a nice way of symbolising Hamlet’s sense of indecision was a chord that can go in on itself or can expand. There’s a sort of diatonic implication that leads to the brightness and power of the major, but it can crumble inwards into a dissonant world as well.’
Glyndebourne itself, while not exactly Elsinore, had its part to play in the gestation of Hamlet. ‘The aspect of performances at Glyndebourne is that they are centred around the long dinner interval,’ says Dean. A few years ago, he discussed the idea of his opera with an old Glyndebourne hand, his friend Simon Rattle, chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. ‘He said there were two things to remember. First, because of the long interval, you want the second half to be shorter than the first. Second, that Glyndebourne has one of the greatest choruses in opera, with incredible young voices that are up for anything. I’ve tried to explore that in the scoring, and I’m looking at the option of having some voices in the pit with the orchestra. It’s not exactly a largely “people” story, but through Matthew’s clever and canny libretto, we’ve found some spots to use the chorus to populate it.’
In almost every respect, Hamlet could not be more different from Dean’s previous opera, Bliss, based on Peter Carey’s novel, which was staged by Opera Australia in 2010 and since recorded. ‘Well, they do share one common line, which Amanda [Holden, Bliss’s librettist] put into Harry Joy’s mouth when he’s confronted with the full extent of the horror of his own family and damns them for all time. Amanda puts in “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us”, which is what Hamlet exclaims when seeing his father’s ghost.’
Dean says there are other similarities between Bliss and Hamlet. ‘Certainly both works dealing with love, madness, death. Maybe that’s drawing a long bow with similarities. But they’re both dipping into the same pond of the human condition.’
Brett Dean is one of those rare musical creatures who, like Benjamin Britten before him and his contemporaries Thomas Adès and George Benjamin, is equally adept at composing, conducting, and playing. Which of these skills came first?
‘Obviously, it started with playing,’ he says. ‘Even nowadays, I see playing as a central part of the musician I am, and there’s something about the physical act that I find very vital. I can’t really imagine composing without playing. That would be rather lonely.’
Dean’s entries into composing and conducting occurred during his early days as a violist in the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-1980s, when he played with a group called the Scharoun Ensemble. ‘This was essentially an octet based on the Schubert Octet, with limited repertoire that ventured into commissioning new works. This gave me the experience of how to nut out a complex score and make it work without a conductor. But you had to have the conductor’s skill of taking it to pieces, look for what you’re listening for. That led me to thinking I’d like to try my own hand at some of this. One night, after I got back after a Scharoun rehearsal, I complained to Heather about some new piece we were working on. She said, “You know, you keep coming home saying you’d do that bit differently … well, why don’t you do it yourself?”’
The composing began at around the same time, when Dean was regularly improvising with a fellow Australian musician Simon Hunt, who was travelling with a rock band and whose fame as Pauline Pantsdown & Co was yet to come. ‘At Simon’s insistence or suggestion, I remember him saying, “Next time we get together, you bring along some ideas and we’ll record them as well.” That was the prod I needed; that I’d secretly been waiting for. So I thought, well, I’ll bloody well try.’
Dean, who has never formally studied composition, says he writes music in his own way, on his own terms. He has, he says, always been conscious of having a ‘voice’ as a composer, with his own particular style of music.
‘I do think that’s the single most important thing,’ he says. ‘All over the world thousands of people are writing music, which is amazing. But what is your voice? What constitutes your take on the aural world? What drives you to want to write music for others to hear? I do think there’s something recognisable about my music. I’d like to think so, and think that some of the success I’ve had is because of it. But what it is is hard to nut out.’
It’s also keeping that voice independent and honest. ‘I think the pieces I am less convinced by are the ones where I was trying to be someone else or live up to some-
one else’s expectations of what music in the twenty-first century should be. Or that I didn’t listen to the qualities that I know I possess myself. It is important to put one’s hand up and say there is a lyrical and expressive side to how I live and breathe and express myself in music. So don’t try to deny who you are. At the same time, I’m fascinated about finding new ways to create and play sound. That’s when it becomes more important then being yourself. “To thine own self be true.”’
At the same time, Dean says he always questions if he is an Australian composer or something more worldly that that. He recalls a recent discussion in Canada on Australian music. ‘Is that even important? Perhaps some of the strongest music from Australian composers isn’t strong because it sounds Australian, whatever that means. Should that be a defining factor or is it good or bad? I think a big part of whatever my voice might be, or why it’s important, comes from being a performer. Somehow, the performing gesture has always been very pivotal to me. Having been a player myself makes engaging with performers enormously important to me.’
Dean’s expectations of what twenty-first-century music is are embedded in his own reflections of how the expectations of society itself have changed.
‘I do think that the twenty-first century has brought undeniable differences, certainly politically and socially, in a different time. Geopolitics have changed hugely and very quickly. And the technological revolution has been a game-changer in so many avenues of life that it’s hard to ignore. Not all of this has been necessarily positive. I don’t want to bash the IT age. I also am the beneficiary of that technology. I use it to communicate and do my work as well. Of course, it’s changed everything in its own way.’
He cites accessibility as the prime reason for this change. ‘The long-term impact will be to break down the “grand composer” image of the past. Modern composers are getting out and doing it because it’s possible for anyone with the feel for it to get a laptop, readily available software, and start making their own music. That’s incredibly democratic. The great-composer-of-the-past tradition is much more grassroots. But what comes out, remains to be seen. It’s not that it will always result in great works of art.’
Brett Dean is also a teacher, although he has not as much time as he once did. He still passionately believes in musical education – just as he did when he was the director of the Australian National Academy of Music, in Melbourne (2008–10). ‘ANAM remains incredibly dear to my heart,’ he says. ‘It’s one of those very special places. The kind that doesn’t exist all that well elsewhere.’
Mind you, it’s not that long ago that the existence of ANAM itself was under threat. In 2008, the then federal arts minister, Peter Garrett, withdrew the institution’s $2.5 million annual government funding. It is thanks to a tireless campaign led by Dean and supported by
thousands of music lovers that ANAM was saved. Dean, it seems, has not forgiven Garrett. ‘My God! Garrett’s biography contained an unbelievable, infuriating couple of paragraphs about ANAM … so self-aggrandising … what a difference he made. Well, look where the place is now – in much better shape. He would have seen the place closed.’
A few weeks ago, a string quartet comprising ANAM students, Affinity Collective, was in Berlin as part of a study tour. Dean organised a concert which included a movement of his String Quintet, the composer on viola. ‘It was a delight to be able to rehearse with them, and to introduce them to a very knowledgeable older audience of friends and neighbours.’
Dean’s passion to teach is driven by a story told to him years ago by the great choreographer Jiří Kylián, who had been in the Northern Territory. ‘He saw an indigenous dance group and asked one of the elders what it is that motivates him. The man told him “I learnt it from my father and I have to teach it to my son”.’ g
A chronology of Brett Dean’s career appears in the online version of this interview.
Michael Shmith is opera critic of The Age and author of a biography of Gustav Mahler, and is editing the letters of his late stepfather, Lord Harewood.
Brett Dean at ANAM (photograph by Pia Johnson)
Twelfth Night
by Ian Dickson
In his introduction to the Folio Society edition of Twelfth Night, Peter Hall describes the play as a transitional work.
Moving on from the light-heartedness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Twelfth Night Shakespeare mixes grief and cruelty with the comedy. We are advancing towards the dark, complex world of Measure for Measure. Both Viola and Olivia are consumed with grief for the loss of their brothers. We are reminded again and again that life is fragile and brief that ‘youth’s a stuff will not endure’. The gulling of Malvolio, which starts as a simple jape, develops into something much harsher by the time we see him imprisoned and tormented. Even at the play’s buoyant close, Malvolio’s final words, ‘I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you’, still hang in the air. If that were not enough, Shakespeare ends his comedy with a mournful and sardonic little ditty which reminds us that ‘the rain it raineth every day’.
It is this darker subtext that is mostly lacking in Eamon Flack’s bouncy production at Belvoir. In his program note, Flack describes the actual Twelfth Night as a day of misrule and sees the play as a sort of saturnalian frenzy breaking through the dull normality of daily life. At the play’s opening, the cast, in what appear to be hospital whites, roam the stage as though they are about to launch into Marat/Sade ‘It’s a mad world my masters,’ Flack seems to be saying, and the lunatics are about to take over the asylum.
Flack’s signature minimalist style works well for a play which needs no extraneous stage clutter. Nick Schlieper’s lighting complements the rich colours, green floor, blue and gold backdrops, and pink wall of Michael Hankin’s joyous set. Ilyria, the country in which the shipwrecked Viola finds herself, is a country of the imagination, and Stephen Curtis’s witty costumes are riffs on Elizabethan dress. Twelfth Night is a play saturated with music, and Alan John’s score and Caitlin Porter’s sound design are vital elements in the production.
As Orsino, Damian Ryan launches the play with vigour. Too often Orsino is played as a languid fop, more in love with music and melancholy than his supposed paramour, Olivia. Ryan’s commanding, virile Orsino is a man unused to being rebuffed, and this challenge seems to make him obsess about Olivia rather than any real passion. Thus it is easier to believe in his sudden reversal of affection at the play’s conclusion. It is a pity that the growing attraction between Orsino and Cesario (the disguised Viola) and Orsino’s bewilderment at
it is somewhat underplayed.
Nikki Shiels is an energetic, forthright Viola. She brings out both the comedy and the pathos of this young woman grieving at the loss of her brother, Sebastian, and disguised as a boy who ‘cannot tell her love’. She has the measure of the verse and delivers the willow cabin speech beautifully without ‘singing’ it. Her confrontations with Olivia, the wonderful Anita Hegh, are much more aggressive and physical than usual, and her wonderment at the reappearance of her brother and her ability to disclose herself and admit her love for Orsino is moving.
Hegh’s Olivia is a delight. She is hilarious as she shows us this black clad, stitched-up woman unravelling as her sexuality awakens and lusts after the pretty youth Cesario. Her throaty, sexy ‘most wonderful’ as she beholds Viola and Sebastian together says it all. Sebastian is going to have his work cut out.
If there is a weakness in the production, it shows itself surprisingly in the scenes between Olivia’s kinsman Sir Toby Belch and his friend the foolish knight Sir Andrew Aguecheek. On paper the casting of those two splendid actors, John Howard and Anthony Phelan, promised much, but their scenes seem oddly unfocused. As their collaborator, Olivia’s maid Maria, Lucia Mastrantone is a bright, dynamic presence.
There are two linchpins to this production. Peter Carroll’s Malvolio and Keith Robinson’s Feste. Carroll’s whitefaced, spindle-legged Malvolio is all Puritan rigour and officiousness in the early stages of the play, but when he is caught up in the spirit of misrule and is persuaded that his mistress Olivia is in love with him and would look kindly on him if he appeared smiling and in yellow cross-gartered stockings, he breaks loose with a vengeance. The sight of him capering to I Got Rhythm is not merely a highlight of this production, it’s one of the great moments of this theatre season. Unlike many Malvolios, Carroll never plays for sympathy; he is self-righteous and unforgiving to the end, and his final threat is savage. He will be back.
Of all the play’s characters, it is the clown Feste who holds the balance between comedy and the darker elements. The clown who must entertain those whose failings he sees clearly is a staple of Shakespearean drama, and Robinson’s sardonic delivery makes it obvious that he has the measure of all the others. Sensibly, Flack has let him make supposedly ad lib comments on some of the more obscure jokes, which Robinson does with relish. The venom with which he confronts Malvolio at the play’s close is startling. An auto-immune condition has confined Robinson to a wheelchair, but there is nothing confined about his performance. Feste’s songs have been imaginatively shared among the cast. It is perhaps the most profound pleasure of this entertaining production to be able to witness this remarkable actor’s return to Belvoir. g
Twelfth Night, written by William Shakespeare and directed by Eamon Flack, was presented by Belvoir St Theatre. The production ran from 23 July to 4 September 2016. Performance attended: 30 July.
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
The Australian Quilt
by Margaret Robson Kett
With a needle on cloth, Mary Jane Hannaford preserved her sharp observations of people as stout appliquéd figures set amid interpretative renditions of Australian animals. Late in life she embroidered favourite verses and slyly captioned her pictures in quilts for her family. Close to one hundred years later, she has a room dedicated to her art in National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition Making the Australian Quilt 1800–1950
Leslie Levy, Executive Director of the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska, opened the exhibition with the remark that our familiarity with quilts as domestic items in daily use can discount them as an art form but the choice no longer had to be made between ‘utilitarian or on the wall.’ Co-curators Katie Somerville (Senior Curator, Fashion and Textiles at NGV) and Dr Annette Gero have honoured the stories and intentions of all the makers, even when unknown.
The eighty-eight quilts on show range from pristine, carefully preserved, unwanted gifts to the anonymous tatters of an old life treasured as social record. All but six are on loan from private and public collections in the ACT, New South Wales, and South Australia as well as regional Victorian collections in Kyneton, Wangaratta, and Queenscliff. Families have also lent their precious heirlooms – descendants of Sarah Louise Lording recently found her spectacular crazy quilt, made in 1888, in a family attic. ‘They have outlived their makers, and their voices can still be heard’, as quilt historian Margaret Rolfe says.
The exhibition has a chronological layout, divided into three periods. The influence of English work, brought or sent to Australia by the earliest arrivals; the gradual adoption of Australia as a new nation through the gold rushes and prosperous times; and ‘making do’ through the tough and testing years of early nationhood in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. The making of intricately decorated and pieced possum skin patchwork garments, long practised by indigenous women, is referenced in two quilts made about one hundred years ago, but this is emphatically an exhibition which celebrates European settlement and tradition. The exhibition stops short of the revivalist movement of quilt making and patchwork of the last forty years and the subsequent brilliant careers of quilt artists.
Appliqué artistry is in evidence in broderie perse of the early nineteenth century – the conservation of precious chintz led to imaginative and enhanced decorative work by makers such as Jane Judd and Elizabeth Hardy. Australia’s reputedly most famous quilt, and the only documented one made by convict women during their transportation, is the Rajah quilt, from the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. Spread in its display case like a filled sail, its central medallion’s appliqué of birds show the hand of Kezia Hayter, who supervised the work and presumably worded the inscription.
The velvets and silks of the mid 1800s dazzle and play with the senses of the viewer. At their best, the geometry challenges and delights while their brilliant colours and textures add depth to their story. (So many crazy quilts survive because they were never used – does this make them the art quilt of their time?) Like idiosyncratic textile scrapbooks, they showcased fashionable pursuits, favourite flowers and animals, sentimental scenes as well as the names of places and people. The establishment of agricultural shows and church fairs legitimised the public display of needlework skills, and there’s more than a whiff of that competitive spirit here.
The quilt made by members of the Hampson family subverted the contemporary fashion for red embroidery on cream or white ground in spectacular style. Part autograph album, part book of proverbs, the fifty-two squares depict local characters, allegiances to church, empire, and queen. Contemporary textile artist Lucas Grogan spoke during NGV’s Quilt Symposium held on Saturday 23 July, acknowledging the influence that this quilt had on his early career.
It is a relief, after the stuffiness of Victorian opulence, to see both fresh and faded testimonials to the end of the old queen’s reign giving way to the uncertainties of a federated country in the last rooms of the exhibition. Annie Percival’s patchworked cigar band table cover prefigures Rosalie Gascoigne (who made one traditional quilt herself.) The wagga, the rough and ready quilts made of whatever came to hand, evoke the corrugated iron and rough timber of itinerant workers’ lives. Their survival is the most remarkable, and Fanny Jenkins’ worn cretonne speaks of her attempt to make the most of a hard life.
The leafy green squares of Emily McKay’s Chronicle quilt from 1934 echo the border of Jane Judd’s broderie perse, made in England in the early 1800s, and neatly end the exhibition as it begins, with an appreciation of the artistic significance of patchwork, embroidery, and quilting. Both feature in Making the Australian Quilt 1800-1950, the superbly produced catalogue of the exhibition: it had sold out within thirty-six hours of the opening, but will be available again soon. g
Making the Australian Quilt 1800–1950 is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until 6 November 2016. The catalogue was written by Annette Gero and Katie Somerville (NGV, $39.95 hb, 159 pp, 9781925432145).
Margaret Robson Kett recently founded Kettlestitch Press.
The Mill on the Floss
by Andrew Fuhrmann
Everyone agrees that the end of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) is a disappointment. Suddenly and without much ceremony, Eliot has Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom drowned in a flood. It is a finale that has baffled and frustrated readers for more than a century and half. Can anything be salvaged from this shocking twist?
Director Tanya Gerstle has a solution, and it’s a good one. Using an adaptation of the book by British playwright Helen Edmundson, Gerstle projects the image of the drowned siblings backwards onto the narrative as if it were an organising metaphor. Thus, Maggie and Tom are drowning from the beginning, and their lives are only a futile struggle toward a surface that they can never reach.
It is a melancholy vision, but it makes for fascinating theatre. This atmospheric new play begins with the bright and inquisitive heroine Maggie Tulliver as a young child reading a description of the ‘ducking of a witch’ in Daniel Defoe’s The Political History of the Devil (1726). If the woman swims, she must be a witch and be executed; if she drowns, then she was innocent after all. Maggie herself is the victim of a similar kind of obstinate stupidity. Her intellectual gifts are ignored or disclaimed, and she is denied the opportunity to explore her potential.
Three actors take the role of the Maggie. The first is Maddie Nunn, who plays the young child, cheerful and precocious, keen on storybook adventures as well as the real-life kind. As a young adult, after her family is bankrupted and driven into what Eliot calls the ‘Valley of Humiliation’ (the title of the fourth book), she is played by both Nunn and Zahra Newman together. Newman represents the severe and self-denying nature that Maggie embraces as a way to manage the stresses of her family’s reduced situation.
Finally, Maggie in her late twenties is figured by Rosie Lockhart. Here she is modest and prone to gloominess and self-doubt, and is still struggling to control her unfulfilled desires. The effect of this clever device is magical. In one very fine scene, Maddie Nunn mischievously draws aside Maggie’s suitor Philip Wakem while Zahra Newman continues talking seriously and soberly about how she has forced herself to give up reading all books except the Bible. It is a beautiful stage interpretation of the moment in which Maggie’s natural vivacity shines through in spite
of her strenuous efforts at self-control.
The tripartite separation does more than simply codify Maggie’s character. It also suggests something of the secret changeling in her: the protean power through which her passions are sustained but periodically transformed in the face of opposition.
The Mill on the Floss is an intimate performance piece, seating a maximum of only eighty each night. The audience sit on three sides of the square stage area, and the action surges back and forth entering the space from all directions. The props are minimal and uncomplicated – chairs and tables and bits of rope – and the story seems to spring spontaneously from the deep dark corners of the large Theatre Works hall. The physical theatre aspects of the production jibe well with the adapted text and seem like a natural extension of Tanya Gerstle’s theme.
Lighting designer Lucy Birkinshaw has created an ambience suggesting deluge and submersion, as if the whole sad story was being restaged in the shadowy depths of the river Floss, moved by currents and eddies. Yahav Ron’s ragged-edged white costumes suggest ghostly goings-on.
Many fascinating patterns emerge. Again and again, performers are lifted off the floor, held briefly in the light, then pushed down and sent sprawling. The context is always different, but the ultimate trajectory is the same. In one particularly effective recurring motif, Zahra Newman, as a drowned witch, appears as if dancing under water, highlighted in a narrow column of light.
Given the importance of music – and especially song – in the book of The Mill on the Floss, it is appropriate that music and the fine voices of the cast are featured prominently in this production. The regional English accents are also done well across the entire cast.
James O’Connell is a charismatic Mr Tulliver, father of Tom and Maggie. The book includes one of the most moving portraits of the love between a father and daughter in all of Western literature; some of this is necessarily lost in Edmundson’s summary and in Gerstle’s emphasis on the patriarchal organisation of Maggie’s world. But O’Connell does enough to suggest the outline of Tulliver’s affection.
Grant Cartwright brings buckets of brooding intensity to the role of Tom, the chief source of Maggie’s suffering, reminding us that he too is frustrated and that he too is drowning. George Lingard and Tom Heath are apt contrasts as Maggie’s rival suitors.
To treat The Mill on the Floss as the story of swimmers in distress risks morbidity. But, despite its many darknesses, its many voices crying out, this play is fully alive. Gerstle and her fine ensemble have crafted a mood in which indignation at the unfairness of Maggie’s situation gradually takes hold. At least there is energy and excitement and life in that. g
The Mill on the Floss, written by George Eliot, adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Tanya Gerstle, was presented by Theatre Works and OpticNerve. Performance attended: 3 August 2016.
Andrew Fuhrmann was an ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow in 2013.
Pictures and power
Patrick McCaughey
ART IN BRITAIN 1660–1815
by David H. Solkin
Yale University Press (Footprint) $119 hb, 384 pp, 9780300215564
Amajor revolution swept through British art history in the 1980s. It shook up its genteel ways and turned it resolutely, even militantly, towards the social history of art. John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape, Michael Rosenthal’s Constable, Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology, and Marcia Pointon’s Hanging the Head were the key texts. The most incendiary of the new British art historians was David H. Solkin, whose catalogue for the Tate’s Richard Wilson: The landscape of reaction sent the Home Counties into cardiac arrest. Wilson’s stately landscapes of antique Rome and Augustan England now bore the hallmarks of the repression of the landowning classes for whom the artist was the willing and knowing agent. Interestingly, these art historians came into their own during the Thatcher Zeit of 1979–90. Years after she had passed into obscurity, one of the revolutionaries could not give a lecture on British art without a tenminute denunciation of Mrs Thatcher and her wicked ways. They fought back for another England through art history.
Solkin ruefully acknowledges his past, noting with gratitude that John Nicoll, then the editor of Yale University Press in London, commissioned the present work over twenty years ago from ‘a relatively young and not uncontroversial scholar’. Art in Britain 1660–1815 was to replace Ellis Waterhouse’s Painting in Britain 1530–1790 (1953), the first volume of the massive Pelican History of Art. Waterhouse did not belong to the genteel tradition, but his Pelican History was numbingly dull. It must have turned more students off British art than those rooms of English divines in the old National Portrait Gallery. Solkin introduces his intentions unapologetically. He has selected artists and objects for ‘their ability to illuminate …
the most significant historical trends, and not because they have secured the aesthetic endorsement of posterity’. He embraces those ungainly Graces of the ‘new’ art history: class, gender, and race. It is ‘the art historian’s first duty … to produce critical analysis of how visual culture has operated within a social field structured by relationships of power’. Happily, the book escapes from these grim and joyless strictures. Throughout a densely argued text, it remains an object-orientated history. Solkin has an eye for the unfamiliar but telling work such as Francis Hayman’s See-Saw to exemplify the ambiguous pleasures of Vauxhall Gardens – romantic assignations to the strains of Handel. Hayman’s painting was part of the Vauxhall decorations and shows a young girl tumbling off the bottom of the see-saw into the ‘rescuing’ hands of an over-eager youth. A scruffy tough, suspended at the high end of the seesaw desperately flails his arms to keep his balance. A third youth dashes into the scene, fist at the ready. It mirrors perfectly a state of ‘playful anarchy’, reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s famous antinomy of ‘the frail china jar’ and ‘the rude hand of chaos’. The complementary institution in London was the Foundling Hospital for the homeless and unwanted children of the capital. Established in 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram, it was an action equal in philanthropy and enlightenment. William Hogarth was a devoted early contributor. Solkin’s account of the institution and the support it generated among the leading artists of the day is nimble and instructive. How completely fitting that he reproduces, full page, Hogarth’s portrait of Coram, wigless but majestic, kindly and welcoming, one of the foremost humanist portraits of the age.
Portraiture looms large in Solkin’s account. The genre marks the occasion when the artists and the ruling élite shook hands on a contract of mutual benefit: money for the artist and status, even fame, for the sitter. There is a chapter on portraiture in each of the five lengthy sections, as there is for a growing interest in nature and an evolving market for landscape painting. These five sections, each covering three to four
decades, make for an authoritative, enveloping structure. You feel the change and expansion of the British art world over the eighteenth century. Solkin refuses to make artist’s careers the basic unit of his history (no ‘parade of individual “great” male artists’), but it means that many artists have their histories broken up and spread across different sections. Richard Wilson appears first on the Roman Campagna, but many moons and over seventy pages go by before we meet him again in London and Wales, the first British artist to paint ‘the wild’ and the Arcadian.
The biggest casualties of Solkin’s approach are two of the period’s most original artists: George Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby. We have little sense of the range or evolution of their art. Wright’s portraiture, one of the most distinctive in an age of portraiture, is represented solely by Brooke Boothby, reclining in a damp English wood, clutching his Jean-Jacques Rousseau MSS, keeping his stylish but jauntily worn hat aloft. In this history, Stubbs and Wright of Derby come off as marginal figures – regrettably.
One wishes that Professor Solkin had strayed off the ‘new’ art history reservation more often and allowed himself to respond more freely to the superb anthology of works he has assembled. He can read pictures sensitively and insightfully. As well as being documents of power and commerce, eighteenthcentury British pictures so often ‘make the heart dance’ in Gainsborough’s unforgettable phrase. Could we not have been vouchsafed a bit more of that? g
Patrick McCaughey is a former Director of the Yale Center for British Art.
Wanderer
John Arnold
THE VAGABOND PAPERS
by John Stanley James
Monash University Publishing $34.95 pb, 332 pp, 9781922235985
In March 2016 the Royal Historical Society of Victoria hosted a function to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Michael Cannon’s The Land Boomers, first issued in 1966 and several times since. The various speakers paid tribute to Cannon’s work as a freelance historian and editor whose many books provided fresh and accessible insights into nineteenth-century Australian life.
Cannon’s books on colonial Victoria include two edited collections of the journalism of John Stanley James, known as ‘The Vagabond’, extracted from the four volumes of The Vagabond Papers published in Melbourne in the 1870s. The first of Cannon’s selections dealt with urban life in Melbourne and Sydney, the second with James’s writings on life in country towns and the bush. This new edition of The Vagabond Papers effectively reprints the text of the first one with some minor rearrangement, and includes a new introduction by Cannon, an account of James’s time in America by Robert G. Flippen and ‘The Vagabond in New Caledonia’ by Willa McDonald.
James’s life was an interesting but
elusive one. As Cannon notes in his new introduction, James was ‘always skipping from one hot spot to the next, pretending … to be someone else’. Born in Wolverhampton in 1843, he was turned out of the family home after running away from school following victimisation. After a period as a wandering vagrant, he moved to London and eked out a precarious living as a freelance journalist. He went to Paris in 1870 to report on the Franco-German war, but was arrested as a spy for his support of the revolutionaries plotting to overthrow Napoleon III. Around 1873 he sailed for New York. When researching James’s life for the 1969 edition of The Vagabond Papers, Cannon drew a virtual blank on his time in America, and had to rely on the regular hints –not always true – that James provided in his journalism on his background.
The section in this new edition by Flippen fills in the gaps. James was in Framville Virginia by the mid-1870s, cultivating the image of a man of letters and being known as ‘Dr J.S. StanleyJames’. He gave public lectures, was a director of a local bank, married a widow, and built a large house for his wife and her children from a former marriage, probably paid for with her money.
James got into financial difficulties by foolishly agreeing to honour what turned out to be worthless securities. As a result, his high standing in the local community was ruined, and in 1875 James simply upped and left, leaving his wife and friends without any forwarding address. He fetched up in Melbourne as ‘Julian Thomas’ and was soon writing regular descriptive pieces on life in the city as ‘The Vagabond’ for the Argus. His middle-class readers lapped up everything he wrote. But James was not writing to titillate his readers in the same sense that some people today are fascinated by the activities of Mick Gatto and his ilk. He wrote with sympathy and insight about the lives of ordinary people, especially those at the lower ends of the social scale. Such was his standing that when he decided to move to Sydney to write for the Sydney Morning Herald he was presented at a testimonial dinner with a purse of 308 sovereigns.
From Sydney he went to New Caledonia to report on the suppression of a convict rebellion. His time there is detailed here with some revealing insights in McDonald’s essay. James later investigated the Kanaka trade and published an account of his Pacific experiences as Cannibals & Convicts: Notes of personal experiences in the Western Pacific (1886).
James returned to Victoria in the 1880s and was allegedly earning six to nine pounds a week from his journalism. But he was a poor money manager. He suffered badly from asthma and died in poverty in a squalid single room in Fitzroy in 1896, aged fifty-three. But he had not been forgotten. The hundreds of wreaths at his funeral included one from the Neglected Children’s Society and another from philanthropist Lady Jane Clark.
Although he also wrote about the middle class and sport – there is a very good piece on a Melbourne game of Australian Rules football – what was special about James’s journalism was his writings about the life of outcasts and down and outs, the ‘slum journalism’ pioneered in Australia by Marcus Clarke. James’s unique contribution to this genre was that he took it one step further than Clarke: he wrote both as an observer and as an active participant. He would spend a night in jail and a few days in the Benevolent Asylum; he worked as an assistant at Pentridge, and ate at sixpenny restaurants. He would talk and mix with the inhabitants and frequenters of these institutions, and then write up his experiences.
The writing name adopted by John Stanley James/Julian Thomas for this observatory and participatory journalism was a most appropriate one. James was a perceptive wanderer: a shrewd and observant vagabond. This reissue with the new information on his life in Virginia and his time in New Caledonia is both a good read and a valuable source on ordinary life in Melbourne and Sydney in the second half of the nineteenth century. g
John Arnold is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash and Editor of the La Trobe Journal.
This old man and that old woman
Patrick Allington
A LONG TIME COMING: ESSAYS ON OLD AGE
by Melanie Joosten Scribe
$29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925321371
Melanie Joosten begins the introduction to A Long Time Coming, her book of essays about ageing, by quoting Simone de Beauvoir: ‘let us recognise ourselves in this old man or in that old woman’. In doing so, Joosten makes a plea for heightened empathy towards older people, but she goes on to make it clear that empathy without action – without changed perceptions, changed behaviour – is insufficient. As such, A Long Time Coming is a challenging as well as eminently readable book.
Joosten’s tense novel Berlin Syndrome (2011) is distinctive for, amongst other things, its restrained but potent prose. A Long Time Coming stakes out different territory, and yet Joosten’s distinctive writerly ability – somehow, she is subtle and subtle as a sledgehammer – is on frequent display. She invites readers to reconsider how we understand and fret about the ageing process – in ourselves and, especially, in others. Anchoring this discussion is the political and social reality of Australia’s ageing demographic, which in turn sits in juxtaposition with what Joosten calls ‘our youth-loving culture’. As Joosten convincingly puts it, ‘Too often, older people are considered as a homogeneous mass – old, first and foremost, and therefore lacking distinctiveness.’
The eight essays, some of which have been previously published, cover a discursive but related set of topics, ranging from a visit to a nursing home in the Tiwi Islands, to feminism and ageing, to poverty experienced by older people, to dementia in fiction, and more. Frequently, Joosten employs a combina-
tion of interviews, learned commentary (she is a trained social worker and she works at the National Ageing Research Institute), and memoir, resulting in an intelligent but not stuffy writing voice that self-consciously focuses on the present and the future rather than taking convenient refuge in the past.
This mixed-medium approach to storytelling works best in the superb final essay, ‘As Long as Life Endures’. Anchored around Joosten’s visits to a woman called Betty, who lives in a nursing home, it meditates on loneliness, empathy, frustration, companionship, death, and a great deal more. Joosten is a participant in the action as well as an observer and interpreter. The story of the relationship she develops with Betty is frank, graceful and, at times, unnerving in its honesty. At one point, Joosten wonders if Betty is merely tolerating her visits. Another time, she asks Betty what she’ll be having for dinner. Betty replies, ‘Sandwiches, probably. Or a pasty. It’s all so … soft.’
None of the other essays matches this high point. Still, each of them contains insightful passages, whether it is Joosten’s critical analysis of both positive-ageing campaigns and the anti-ageing industry, her discussion of family violence and sexual assaults directed at older people, her observations about the aged-care workforce, or her deeply thoughtful examination of the way society perceives dementia. The essay ‘Invisible Women’ includes an absorbing discussion of photographer Ella Dreyfus’s exhibition Age and Consent (1999), which features images of elderly women’s torsos (Joosten’s original essay, in the autumn 2015 issue of literary magazine Meanjin, benefited from the inclusion of several of Dreyfus’s images). Joosten considers the possible objectification of the subjects, while maintaining that the photographs ‘are a quiet celebration of older women’s bodies, refreshingly arresting depictions that both honour and discard the cliché of the female nude’.
At times, the mix of interviews, memoir, and analysis doesn’t quite gel. With such a delicate balance in play, Joosten sometimes misses opportunities to dwell in more depth on such things
as government policies, funding models, reports about ageing, and the practices of accreditation bodies. Periodically, too, she questions her own limited knowledge or perceptions. At times, this seems apt, but at other times it sits awkwardly in the context of Joosten’s knowledge, relentless inquisitiveness, political combativeness, and, not least, capacity to ask pertinent questions. Self-questioning turns to selfjudging in the essay ‘Notes on Writing and Doing Good’, in which Joosten reflects on being a writer as opposed to being a social worker. In isolation, this essay is a purposeful exegesis in which Joosten asks valid questions about the importance of action beyond thinking and creating. But the essay also sits awkwardly here, disrupting the book’s cohesion. It resonates more powerfully in its first place of publication, the autumn 2012 issue of Meanjin
Still, ‘Notes on Writing and Doing Good’ helps makes clear that it is Joosten’s attention to the detail of language that animates A Long Time Coming. This sometimes manifests in her critical examination of phrases that slip into everyday use, such as ‘active ageing’, ‘positive ageing’, or ‘personcentred care’, the latter of which she calls ‘a rude tautology that robs every individual of their selfhood’. It also manifests in the quality of Joosten’s own phrase-making: ‘Neville’s conversation is a polite tugboat, ploughing resolutely through the choppy waters of my questions.’ And not least, it manifests in the questions Joosten asks interviewees, and the responses she elicits. At one point, a seventy-nine-year-old woman called Anne tells Joosten, ‘I mean, it’s very irritating being invisible, but I’m very confident about making myself visible by using my voice, and I enjoy working with other people to make that happen.’
As a provocation, A Long Time Coming is reasoned and impassioned in roughly equal measure. Joosten calls for a fundamental recalibration of the way Australians think about growing old, and the way we expect and imagine the elderly will and should live. g
Patrick Allington was the inaugural ABR Patrons’ Fellow in 2011.
Astonish me!
Kevin Rabalais
THE ABUNDANCE by Annie
Dillard
Canongate
$34.99 hb, 298 pp, 9781782117711
Read a few of the essays or chapter excerpts in Annie Dillard’s The Abundance, and you might find yourself writing a letter to the author. Part of that letter might look like this: Please tell me what kind of writer you are, Ms Dillard – an essayist, a naturalist, an explorer, a theologian, a philosopher? Dillard defies categorisation. In books such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), An American Childhood (1987), and For the Time Being (1999), she hopscotches among seemingly disparate genres and themes. Whether she investigates science and religion, history and philosophy, art, nature, or (more on this later) that square-one question of what it feels like to be alive, the commonality throughout her work remains an endless curiosity about the world.
The Abundance offers twenty-two previously published chapters and essays from a singular body of work. ‘What kind of writer is Annie Dillard?’ asks Geoff Dyer in his introduction. ‘One of those, she decided early on, who chose to define herself in extra-literary terms: “an explorer of the neighborhood,” “a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs,” and “a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself”.’ Dillard – a modern seeker in the vein of Henry David Thoreau – has spent her writing life striving (to paraphrase the author’s Transcendentalist hero) to unearth those details in the world that
enhance the quality of her days. To do so, she often looks no farther than her own window.
Consider Pilgrim at Tinker Creek For her second book, in which she explored the natural world near her home in Virginia, Dillard received a Pulitzer Prize. Here and elsewhere, she trains a sharp eye on the everyday. She wants to be astonished, and her curiosity and wonder can be infectious. In her attempts to comprehend religion, the natural world, and the fabric of existence, Dillard questions whether beauty is ‘the cruellest hoax of all … [h]ow many days have I learned not to stare at the back of my hand when I could look out at the creek? Come on, I say to the creek, surprise me; and it does, with each new drop. Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it.’
Here and elsewhere, she trains a sharp eye on the everyday. She wants to be astonished, and her curiosity and wonder can be infectious
Dillard’s seductiveness stems from her ability to see everything as though she is examining it for the first time. In an essay about the 1991 tsunami in Bangladesh, she writes, ‘It’s been a stunning time for us adults. It always is. Nothing is new, but it’s fresh for every new crop of people. What is eternally fresh is our grief. What is eternally fresh is our astonishment. What is eternally fresh is our question: What the Sam Hill is going on here?’ The important thing, she reminds us, is that we never stop asking the questions that might seem obvious but which linger just beyond our reach if we fail to examine them.
In The Abundance, Dillard guides us through the formation of sand only to ponder, several pages later, Galileo’s thoughts on comets, Ruskin’s theory of seeing, Thoreau’s reliance on the senses, and the religious concepts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. She has taken Henry James’s dictum, ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.’ Her work strives to comprehend
the question, simple yet undeniably complex, with which she begins ‘Waking up Wild’: ‘What does it feel like to be alive?’ To answer it, she takes those long glances that many of us fear make us look foolish. She collects creek water in a jar and carries it home, dumping it in a bowl so that she can witness the life inside. ‘What I see sets me swaying,’ she writes.
While Dillard has always been difficult to classify, her legions of admirers have never failed to locate the generous spirit within her work. She combines the sensibilities of a naturalist and essayist and philosopher with the soul of a poet. Most of all, she proves to be a great observer, even if she claims otherwise. ‘If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d likely notice,’ she writes. ‘But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I must maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m especially observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening.’
In The Writing Life (1989), her slim but abundantly inspiring book about work and the process of creation, Dillard writes, ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’ The following seems like advice for living as much as it does for writing: ‘Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.’
As Dyer writes in his introduction, Dillard is ‘a writer who never seems tired, who has never plodded her way through a page or sentence’. The Abundance is one of those books to keep close as company in our days. In it, we find a source of wisdom from a generous guide who reminds us, always, to seek and to open ourselves to wonder. g
Kevin Rabalais’s books include Novel Voices, The Landscape of Desire and Conversations with James Salter.
Other worlds
Satendra Nandan
IN OTHER WORDS: FORTY YEARS OF ESSAYS by Goenawan Mohamad, translated by Jennifer Lindsay NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 374 pp, 9781742235158
Goenawan Mohamad has been a formidable Indonesian journalist for half a century, chiefly as the founder and editor of the weekly Tempo. He is also the foremost public intellectual of his complex nation: one who has witnessed the many tragedies of our largest neighbour. Mohamad developed the short essay as a powerful and sophisticated literary vehicle to express both his freedom of thought and to defend his compatriots’ freedom of expression. In many Asian countries, risen from the ruins of empires, this democratic freedom needs constant vigilance.
Mohamad’s new collection is titled In Other Words, but the writer really takes us into many other worlds. In these hundred pieces, selected from a couple of thousand and crafted over five decades, the writer’s distinctive voice is vivid, and his desire to forge his nation in the contemporary world is profound and engaging. His gift is such that he brings to his readers the world of books and the lives of people so close to his Indonesian identity and experience. One can see how he tries to keep his readers both well-informed and well-educated through these 800-word weekly columns.
Indonesia is now the third-biggest functioning democratic country, after India and the United States. It is also the largest Muslim state in the world. Significantly, this huge archipelagic nation is our closest neighbour. Asylum seekers come to our shores via Indonesian seas and islands. ‘Stopping the boats’ is not necessarily the beginning of our enlightenment. More bridges of understanding between institutions and thinkers, and serious intellectual engagement and reading, are essential if we are to comprehend a unique civil-
isation with relics of Hindu-Buddhistanimist cultures. Islam came to Indonesia in the fifteenth century, followed by Dutch colonialism that lasted for three hundred years, then three years of Japanese occupation during World War II, followed by Sukarno’s brand of nationalism, which was finally overrun by Suharto’s prolonged military dictatorship. It is a complicated history of a palimpsestic culture full of the trials of history, and one that needs a voice like Mohamad’s to articulate it with understanding, empathy, and uncompromising insight.
This fascinating collection of essays was selected by Mohamad’s avid reader and translator, Jennifer Lindsay (whose ABR Fellowship essay on Mohamad, ‘Man on the Margins’, appeared in the February 2012 issue of ABR). It is arranged in three interrelated sections – ‘Indonesia on my Mind’, ‘Wider Worlds’, ‘Mythic and Sacred’ – with a fine foreword by Terence Ward, a writer and documentary producer with cultural-political interests in Indonesia. The essays are on a variety of subjects, ranging from 1968 to 2014. Mohamad is a highly erudite public intellectual of his country and a genuine thinker. These essays, originally written in Bahasa Indonesia, show a writer for whom everything human is his heritage – nothing human is alien.
Normally, the reaction of many post-colonial nationalists is to reject all imperial powers imposed on the native states and peoples: and yet many modern institutions, the very idea of a nation-state, even writing, have come to many of us from these imperial encounters, often brutal. If the bee sucked the nectar, it also pollinated the flower and new fruits were possible. The republic of the imagination has no borders; one senses this in the varied subjects on which Mohamad has written: no topic is too small for his lively mind and free spirit – from literature to life, politics to poetics, mythology to modernism, and, above all, his passion for books and writers, reading and writing, and travel.
The volume begins with his first essay on ‘Books’. Mohamad recalls his nationalist father being arrested and shot and the Dutch soldiers throwing two books
in the well: Mohamad was barely six years old in 1947, but the memory is sharp. Mohamad’s essay on ‘Indonesia’ begins starkly: ‘Sometimes I wonder what possibly could have crossed my father’s mind in the few moments before he was executed.’ That is poignant enough, but then he continues, ‘perhaps it is because homeland is memory and hope that involves the body: remembered fragrance of rice, the after taste of spices, the swift current that cannot be forgotten, the sound of father’s praise, a mother’s soothing song, grandfather’s cough, and the children’s stories that settle deep in the consciousness. And hope …’ Often in such ordinary details the humanity within us survives. In Other Words shows us how other worlds exist so close to us, even within us.
Reading these essays raises several stimulating issues: the potency of the essay in newspapers and magazines; the immense value of translation; the necessity of reading these writers in English in the region; the teaching of literatures in English and the global reach of a great language; and how we might make Australia a more exciting place for writers and intellectuals in exile, who often pay a heavy price for their thoughts. One might also ponder the silence of some academics who seldom question what is happening in certain countries in our own region.
Economic imperatives and political expediency seems to be the major motivations in our relations with the repressive regimes of the region. But that is no longer enough: some writers like Goenawan Mohamad tell us why –in their own words. g
Satendra Nandan, a former Fiji cabinet minister, is currently an emeritus professor in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra. ❖
THE SOUND
by Sarah Drummond Fremantle Press
$27.99 pb, 228 pp, 9781925163759
The Sound begins with the memory of loss, of shorelines marked with blood, and the acrid stench of charred flesh – a massacre wrought by colonial men with guns. From the outset, death pervades this impressive first novel.
Sarah Drummond’s début, Salt Story (2013), was a memoir that celebrated the ocean and the communities that call it home. The Sound, based on historical fact, charts those similar craggy coastlines but traces the bloody voyage of nineteenth-century seal hunters navigating the belly of the Australian continent. A young Maori, Wiremu Heke (Billhook to his new companions), follows this murderous procession. While Billhook seeks his own purpose, he is inevitably entangled in the violence of the ship’s crew, ‘helping the white man kill the black man’ until he becomes a ‘man he could not like’. Drummond has a real knack for crafting a sense of menace. Men have ‘piano-peg teeth’; they spit words like ‘gunshots, hard and fast’. A palette of blood red and briny grey dominates. The ocean itself comes alive; dangerous and surging, the waves with ‘white foam leering at their peaks’. Fish bones appear like ‘strange faces’ on the ocean’s surface. In more restful interludes, Drummond evokes the earthy smells and chattering sounds of the wild landscape, a world that feels organic and lived in. The detail in the rituals and stories of the indigenous people shows a keen historical touch. Less explored are the motivations behind the violence that fills The Sound. Are these men driven by more than sheer brutality? Do they feel remorse for their callousness? Some of these questions remain unanswered but the ambiguity can sometimes feel unresolved rather than unsettling.
Still, The Sound is challenging and powerful. This darkly rich work confronts the horrors of colonialism and introduces Drummond as an assured novelist.
Piri Eddy ❖
‘The grains of now’
Dennis Haskell
The last two lines of Tony Page’s Dawn the Proof (Hybrid Publishers, $25 pb, 87 pp, 9781925272239) ask ‘how to seize / the grains of now’. One of Page’s (implicit) answers is to relate the present to the past – a poem can provide a ‘glimpse / through history’s chink’ – but the relationship is not just to the human past. The title poem concerns ‘Geography’s vastness’, which ‘weighs anchor and sails / across the world’s mind’. Space and time have a vastness that dwarfs the human, but humans are consequential because they provide consciousness; it takes a human to recognise that vastness. This is a stance which just about constitutes the norm in developed Western nations: agnostic, seeking meaning with due humility, aware of others and conscious of our limited knowledge of them, curious about other times and other cultures, and knowing that some meanings are culturally constituted. It is certainly shared in the three books reviewed here. It is not a bad stance from which to write poetry, and its commonality is something to be celebrated.
Tony Page’s book is much less awkward than its title. It exhibits a wide range of interests, from China and Southeast Asia (where he has lived) to Socratic philosophy. Facing ‘the quandary / of this and every day’, his is a poetry that accepts uncertainties rather than disillusionment, a poetry of ‘pudgy self-acceptance’. His work is highly varied in quality. Poems such as ‘Island Tour in the New Asia’, with its ‘soft-bellied tourists white trash back home but king of the castle here’, seem all too obvious, while the anonymity of ‘the Vanishing Traveler’ reduces the reader’s potential for empathy. ‘Eagle’s View of the Kali Gandaki’ and ‘Freed at Fifty’ leave the reader with nothing to do, and ‘The Model to his Master, Caravaggio’ doesn’t add anything to our knowledge or sense of Signore Merisi.
However, at his best Page’s poems are balanced, considerate, and intelligent. Poems such as ‘My Brother Cannot Sleep’, ‘Bird Never Seen’, ‘A Language by any other Name’ (a poem about music), and ‘A Long Rest in our Cemetery’ are intriguing and sometimes witty.
In the fifth poem of his Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 75 pp, 9781922080608), Anthony Lawrence mentions his ‘love’ of ‘quiet attention to detail’, and many of his poems provide just this in evocative images: an eagle and fox feed ‘At the long black table / of the Eyre Highway’ and his grandfather’s hat carries a ‘pardalote feather in its band / like a thin smear of light’. He is one of our two major writers in the interesting sub-genre of ornithological poetry: Wedge-tailed Eagles, Honeyeaters, Wompoo Pigeons, Pheasant Coucals, and numerous other birds fly or call through these poems.
In ‘Ode to a Whistling Kite’, Lawrence ‘summons’ in his mind ‘the voweldriven variousness of your calls’. He shares with Seamus Heaney an interest in the matching of language to the natural world. Unlike Heaney, Lawrence’s inventiveness is not matched by self-critical awareness. It is hard to see what a poem such as ‘Directions’ is about, while in ‘Bogong Moths’ he does not really know what to do with the accumulated images of flocks of moths. ‘The Deep’ mentions ‘the world / record for a dive, undertaken / on one breath’; similarly to ‘Bogong Moths’, it is a two-
page poem in one sentence. These and other poems are themselves somewhat breathless. ‘Touch’ is a gentle, delicate poem, but its one-sentence form conveys a sense of wilfulness. His ‘like’ and ‘as when’ constructions often keep the poems going needlessly. Lawrence is unquestionably skilful but he doesn’t know when to stop, so the poems often seem less about their ostensible subject than demonstrations of his own verbal skill. Similes such as ‘she lowered her eyes and spoke like a fall / in barometric pressure’, like the occasional vocabulary of Eliotian exoticness (‘altramentously’, ‘rhyolite’, ‘caldera’, ‘katabatic’), seem far too clever. ‘Penumbra’ begins: ‘Faith is an old building, its windows papered with news / and the dark suggestion of activity in the air outside / as if the words winged and expeditious had been applied / to what we pinion with caution.’ Really? It emerges from the collection as a whole that Lawrence’s real subject is himself. There seems to me nothing wrong with this post-Romanticism, but Wordsworth showed much greater awareness that he was writing about the growth of a poet’s mind. Lawrence’s best poems are about his family, particularly his relationship with his father; there he feels less need to strain and the most frequent word in his book – ‘I’ – really belongs.
Geoff Page has a much greater sense of how to crystallise an issue or a single image, and his poetry is entirely lacking in self-regard. He views himself, and the world in general, with a wry humour, never despairing when others might and never really exulting. There is no push to the Romantic sublime or any belief in the illimitable individual; instead, there is an Enlightenment interest in general humanity. As in ‘the city of the fortunate’, the ‘temper is generous / but never quite naïve’. Gods and Uncles (Pitt Street Poetry, $28 pb, 98 pp, 9781922080509) presents issues and viewpoints that will be familiar to Page’s readers: the power of history, the social effects of war, his refusal of a life on the land, the value of compassion, the poignancy of death, and the improbability of God’s existence. In between dealing with these
large issues, Page has many humorous and acute observations on matters as diverse as entropy, apartments, the toadish, work and silly twirps (defined as smart-arses with ‘breeding’). Satire is never far from his voice. The ‘Twirps’ poem declares, ‘Sense of humour is essential’, and a keen sense of humour (often directed at himself) is one of his key strengths.
Page seems to genuinely like people, with all their foibles; who else would write of ‘the anonymity of cities / where all the streets are rich with strangers’? Above all, Gods and Uncles is a testament against dogmatism and moral censoriousness, whether it comes from gods, uncles, preachers, or paranoids – all those ‘joyously enriching death’ by arguing that ‘Annihilation’s not good enough’ for people who disagree with them.
Page sets against this moral certitude a liberal humanism and a sense of fun. He is surely our best contemporary public poet; his poems work because of his humanity, his authorial poise, and the wit and intelligence that lie just beneath his light touch. Page’s humour is serious and thoughtful, as poems such as ‘Times We Didn’t Know Were Final’ and ‘Call yourself a socialist?’ make clear. His poetry is skilful and respectful of an audience, his voice reassuring even when treating tough themes. Like his ‘drip-dry’ shirt ‘bought in ’63’, Page’s book is ‘a triumph over entropy’. g
Dennis Haskell’s most recent book of poems is Ahead of Us (Fremantle Press, 2016). He is currently Chair of writingWA.
Ron Pretty Poetry Prize
THE BRICKS THAT BUILT THE HOUSES
by Kate Tempest Bloomsbury
$27.99 pb, 399 pp, 9781408857311
Kate Tempest’s début is the expansion of a story she threaded through her 2014 album of protest hip-hop, Everybody Down. In its transformation to novel form it has become part love story, part state of the nation, part existential treatise. This much-admired spoken-word artist’s venture into prose is a compelling attempt at capturing the restlessness and anger of disenfranchised ‘millenials’ (Tempest was born in 1985), yet it is also surprisingly unimaginative in its style, and frustratingly tangential.
Londoners Becky and Harry are two twenty-something women whose unlikely romance buds amid violent botched drug deals, familial dysfunction, and self-doubt. Through their relationship, Tempest passionately condemns London as an unforgiving and dangerous Moloch, yet also sanctifies it as a soulful, kaleidoscopic source of inspiration.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is not so much about urban deprivation as about bewildered, listless young people beleaguered by the inauthenticity of mass culture and the fakeries of entertainment and the corporate world (though it is unfortunate that Tempest often insists on telling, not showing). It is also about money, and the strain of the tedious and compromising struggle to obtain it while still pursuing one’s passions – such as dancing for Becky.
The Ron Pretty Poetry Prize is running again. First prize of $5000. Submissions close 15 September. For full details and submissions please visit fiveislandspress.com
Tempest writes evocatively of her native South London neighbourhoods; the novel is best in its early stages when her natural, rhythmic dialogue bounces between characters. Less successful are the many inexplicable digressions to give even peripheral figures a back-story. A passage describing events in World War II (D-Day, no less) is particularly clumsy and disrupts the momentum established by Becky and Harry’s chemistry. Their dynamic is the novel’s heart.Though Tempest tries too hard to be the voice of her generation, there is enough depth here to suggest that any future experiments with prose may yield something less righteous, and more subtle.
Barnaby Smith
which PoetS hAve moSt inflUenced yoU?
Important early influences included Bruce Dawe, David Campbell, and Judith Wright, along with Americans such as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and e.e. cummings.
Are PoemS ‘inSPired’ or the ProdUct of crAft?
The original idea is usually beyond one’s control: i.e. it’s ‘given’ – as is the final result, in a sense. There’s usually a lot of hard work between those two points, however.
whAt PromP tS A new Poem?
Dreams, conversations, obsessive interests, moral and political annoyance, other people’s poems (that remind you faintly of one you now realise you’d always intended to write), research (on one poem which can lead to another), etc, etc.
whAt’S the difference between Poetry And ProSe?
Public oratory and prose fiction both need a significant degree of rhythm, but for almost all poetry (including free verse) rhythm is indispensable. Both genres use the ‘sound effects’ of assonance, alliteration, etc., but verbal music is more important to poetry than to prose.
whAt circUmStAnceS Are ideAl for writing Poetry?
Two or three hours of uninterrupted silence for the first draft. Revision can be done anywhere. Cafés are good. Feedback from a trusted reader is also important.
which Poet woUld yoU moSt like to tAlk to – And why?
William Carlos Williams, the Rutherford (New Jersey) doctor, who wrote fifty books (of all kinds) while working full-time. My poetry no longer shows much of his influence, but he remains an inspiration. Gwen Harwood would be good too. I did speak to her fleetingly a few times at writers’ festivals.
whAt do PoetS need moSt: SolitUde or A coterie?
Poets, away from their desks, tend to be collegial (much more so than novelists). Poets often help one
another to become more established, but a coterie is taking things too far. Coteries are too quick with their congratulations.
whAt hAve yoU leArned from reviewS of yoUr work?
Having written many reviews myself, I try not to take excessive notice of them, be they positive or negative. They’re important bearers of news, however. It’s almost universal for poets to remember the single reservation made by a reviewer when all else was praise. That reservation may (or may not) be useful.
if PlAto Allowed yoU to keeP one Poem or Poetry collection in hiS rePUblic, whAt woUld it be?
I’ve not much time for philosopher–kings (no matter how benign) but it’d be good to have Judith Wright’s Collected Poems in a secret cupboard somewhere.
do yoU hAve A fAvoUrite line of Poetry (or coUPlet)?
‘I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’ (Alexander Pope)
iS Poetry generAlly APPreciAted by the reAding PUblic?
Poetry is a fairly demanding form for the most part; it’s not a surprise that some people have no wish to make the effort. There’s no real reason, however, why poetry should not be at least as popular as literary fiction. The human need for story and for patterned language go equally far back in history (well before writing was invented).
geoff PAge is based in Canberra and has published twenty-two collections of poetry as well as two novels and five verse novels. His recent books include 1953 (2013), Improving the News (2013), New Selected Poems (2013), Aficionado: A jazz memoir (2014), Gods and Uncles (2015) and PLEVNA: A verse biography (2016). He also edited The Best Australian Poems 2014 and The Best Australian Poems 2015.
THE WORST WOMAN IN SYDNEY: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF KATE LEIGH
by Leigh Straw
NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 264 pp, 9781742234793
The Worst Woman in Sydney is the first biography devoted to the early twentieth-century Sydney underworld matriarch Kate Leigh. Leigh Straw attempts to tease out whether Leigh truly was the worst woman in Sydney or something closer to that of a loveable larrikin.
For such a colourful period in Sydney’s history (Straw is obviously nostalgic about her own years in Sydney, a point which is rather belaboured), the book fails to deliver a cohesive or compelling portrait of the notorious Leigh. Straw admits that there is an ‘absence of archival records providing insights into Kate Leigh’s private life and perceptions of her criminal career’. Unfortunately, in what feels like an effort to fill pages, Straw resigns herself to superficial history lessons on sly-grogging, accounts of Leigh’s court appearances from the public record, and incessant repetition and recapitulation.
Each chapter is interspersed with fictional accounts of ‘real’ scenes from the life of Kate Leigh, told through her eyes. These scenes may be intended to create a sense of intimacy between the reader and Leigh, but they resemble pedestrian historical crime fiction and fail to summon the spirit of Leigh. Perhaps, as non-fiction, these scenes could have provided the colour The Worst Woman in Sydney so severely lacks.
To the author’s credit, one assumes Straw is experimenting with the form of historical writing –through the inclusion of the fiction chapters and the author as a character – in order to write compelling non-fiction. Unfortunately, for the academic reader The Worst Woman in Sydney will feel sloppy and for a more general audience the story doesn’t follow an engaging storytelling arc.
Rachel Fuller ❖
LONELY CITY: ADVENTURES IN THE ART OF BEING ALONE
by Olivia Laing
Canongate
$34.99 hb, 336 pp, 9781782111238
In her mid-thirties, British writer and critic Olivia Laing moved to New York City to live with her partner. When the relationship ended, Laing found herself alone amidst the bustle of New York: ‘loneliness, I began to realize, was a populated place: a city in itself’.
Part memoir and part social commentary, The Lonely City is Laing’s exploration of the lives of New York artists whose work is often a manifestation of loneliness and marginalisation. One such artist is Andy Warhol, who experienced a lifelong struggle with alienation and aloneness. His story is a fascinating one, and Laing intersperses her real-time experiences with observations on Warhol’s life and work to create a compelling narrative. The son of Ruthenian immigrants, Warhol spoke his native tongue at home and struggled with English – his second language – at school, where he was teased for his thick accent. Laing related. ‘Since coming to America, I was forever botching the ballgame of language.’ Language, Laing attests, is our primary mode of communication, and even minor incidents of mispronounced words or misunderstood colloquialisms deepen feelings of isolation.
Secondary subjects, such as Valerie Solanas – Warhol’s attempted assassin and author of SCUM Manifesto (1967) – are given voice alongside the artists. According to Laing, Solanas ‘had been eaten by history, reduced to a single act’. However, Solanas was as brilliant as she was mad, and the reader is invited to question previously held biases, and to view Solanas’s work as worthy of consideration.
Finally, Laing shares her realisation that art ‘medicated my feelings of loneliness, giving me a sense of the potential beauty present in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need’. The Lonely City is a beautifully written meditation on what it is to be lonely, and on the healing power of art.
Alexandra Mathew ❖
MR UNPRONOUNCEABLE AND THE INFINITY OF NIGHTMARES
by
Tim Molloy
Milk Shadow Books
$21.99 pb, 190 pp, 9780992508258
Mr Unpronounceable and the Infinity of Nightmares is the third volume of Tim Molloy’s stories featuring Mr Unpronounceable, a modern-day shaman inhabiting a surreal universe of twisted and interfolded worlds. Time is relative here: each story is a section or a causal twist within another story. The narrative appears to make sense, only to be contradicted by the logic of ensuing story.
The book is frequently unsettling and chilling, as well as absurd and humorous. Mr Unpronounceable is subjected to unimaginable contradictions and monsters. The world is populated with creatures much like himself, neither hostile nor amicable. Rather, they are incomprehensibly volatile. This is underscored by Molloy’s beautiful, simple drawings. Though printed in black and white, the art draws the reader in, and frequently takes over the storytelling as the language itself dissolves into a fiction. Were the stories to be imagined without the art, it would not be a stretch to see the world they present as founded of Borges’s infinite libraries and populated with the unseen bureaucracy to which Kafka subjected Josef K.
Alhough the world presented by Molloy here is entirely different from our own, the book’s strength lies in its devotion to the absurd representation of reality. Mr Unpronounceable’s world is filled with nightmares, most of which seem to be of his own creation. Much like us, he attempts to control his destiny, often to find himself unable to escape the gripping torrents of his reality and to succumb to his destiny, whatever it may be. This book is a feast, and one that offers a wealth of nuance and scope that could be expected of a work twice the size.
Max Sipowicz
why do yoU write?
I’ve realised in recent years that without my writing I don’t quite feel like a whole person. It brings me joy –I constantly feel grateful that I’m able to work at something that is joyous – but it also allows me to make sense of the world, so much so that I actually think I would be lost without it.
Are yoU A vivid dreAmer?
I am that wonderfully unfortunate combination of a vivid dreamer and a very anxious person, which means my night-time world is often terrifying. Dreaming is not creative or poetic time for me.
where Are yoU hAPPieSt?
My favourite place is a half-filled café, at a table by myself with a book and a milky coffee. I love the ritual: deliberately taking the time and space away from the social world, whilst still being able to eavesdrop on strangers having gossipy breakfasts with their friends.
whAt iS yoUr fAvoUrite film?
Adaptation – Nicholas Cage’s best performance (not hard).
And yoUr fAvoUrite book?
There are too many to choose just one. My favourites this year are Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog and Rajith Savanadasa’s Ruins
nAme the three PeoPle yoU woUld moSt like to dine with.
Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion, and Virginia Woolf.
which word do yoU moSt diSlike, And nAme one yoU woUld like to See bAck in PUblic USAge.
Inspired by Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I’m trying to cut the word ‘sorry’ from my vocabulary, except for instances where I’m actually at fault and genuinely mean to apologise. And I’d love to hear the word ‘loury’ more often, it’s beautiful.
who iS yoUr fAvoUrite AU thor?
Margaret Atwood, for her guts and passion.
And yoUr fAvoUrite literAry hero And heroine?
Sally Banner from Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous (‘a rebel in word and deed’) and J.S. Harry’s ever-curious
Peter Henry Lepus.
which qUAlity do yoU moSt Admire in A writer? Curiosity.
nAme An eArly literAry idol or inflUence whom yoU no longer Admire – or vice verSA. My early poetry was heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas – full of beautifully strange strings of compound adjectives, of the ‘slow, black, sloe-black, fishing-boat-bobbing’ variety. It’s an incredibly joyful way to write, but I think it grows frustrating for a reader very quickly, so my poems now are much more sparse and pared-back.
whAt, if Anything, imPedeS yoUr writing? Self-doubt, my tendency to spread myself too thin, and the internet, in that order.
how do yoU regArd PUbliSherS?
They work incredibly hard and for far too little money, and are often just as passionate about our books as we writers are.
whAt do yoU think of the StAte of criticiSm? It’s far more robust than is usually credited, and full of lively discussions and agitations. I’m especially excited by the work that is happening around gender disparity and what we need to do to address that.
whAt do yoU think of writerS’ feStivAlS? I love festivals, partly because I enjoy performing, but also because it’s such a treat to spend entire weekends hanging out with other writers and like-minded misfits.
do yoU feel ArtiStS Are vAlUed in oUr Society? The recent attacks on the Australia Council and our small organisations make it evident enough that we are not.
whAt Are yoU working on now?
More essays, which I hope will be the start of a new collection, and are really about place – suburbs especially – and the way so much of our identity, built up through habits and rituals, is so firmly anchored in the places where we live and which we move through every day.
fionA wright’S book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the 2016 Kibble Award. She has poems in the New South Wales States of Poetry anthology on our website.
