At a lively ceremony at Potts Point Bookshop on August 10, David Malouf named Eliza Robertson as the winner of the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story ‘Pheidippides’. Robertson’s story ‘explores the changing relationships between a marathon runner, a journalist and his wife in the wake of tragedies. It is a powerfully observed, beautiful, and unflinching story that shows the different paths that people take to cope with grief and trauma,’ said Jolley Prize judge Amy Baillieu at the ceremony.
Eliza Robertson, who receives $7,000, commented: ‘I am overjoyed to win this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. My very first publication came from a magazine contest, so I know firsthand the opportunities they provide to new writers. I am incredibly grateful to ABR and the judges for choosing my story and helping me to connect with Australian readers.’
Dominic Amerena (Vic) receives $2,000 for his story ‘The Leaching Layer’ and Lauren Aimee Curtis (NSW) $1,000 for ‘Butter’. All three shortlisted stories appear in the August Fiction issue, which can be purchased online.
ABR thanks all those who entered this year’s Jolley Prize.
AusPicious Preludes
There’s been a huge response to our call for entries in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is now worth a total of $8,500. The Prize is open until December 3.
But what of the next generation of Peter/Peta Porters? How to nourish and inspire younger poets? Thomas Mann once wrote, ‘Who is the poet? He whose life is symbolic.’ No one illustrated this better than William Wordsworth. Oxford University Press has just published a new edition of Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude
(1805), which traces the growth of the poet’s creative imagination. Frank Kermode dubbed it ‘the greatest and most original of English autobiographies’. This is the first fully illustrated edition of The Prelude, a massive work in thirteen parts. In addition to 130 paintings and drawings, there are maps, marginal glosses, a chronology, and a lengthy introduction by the editors, James Engell and Michael D. Raymond. This superb volume is priced at $61.95.
Foreign AFFAirs
Australia abounds in periodicals, and none is more welcome – or timely –than Australian Foreign Affairs, from the Black Inc. stable. Contributors to the first issue – to be launched on 17 October – include Paul Keating, Linda Jakobson, and George Megalogenis. Jonathan Pearlman – a frequent contributor to ABR in the past – will edit Australian Foreign Affairs. He remarks: ‘Australia is increasingly affected by events beyond its borders, especially as global power and wealth shift towards Asia. The challenges facing Australia and the region are varied and complex, but they are also fascinating.’
on the Verge
Monash University Publishing has published the thirteenth edition of its creative writing annual Verge ($19.95 pb). The collection, edited by Bonnie Reid, Aisling Smith, and Gavin Yates, includes thirty original works from established and emerging writers. ABR volunteer Joan Fleming, who helps to select the poetry included in ABR’s pages, has two poems in the collection: ‘Allowances’ (Winner of the Verge Prize for Poetry) and ‘Trigger Questions’.
AwArds gAlore
With the Porter Prize underway, and the 2018 Calibre Essay Prize set to
open on 1 October, poets and essayists now have the chance to profit from the widespread exposure that attends ABR’s prizes. Award Winning Australian Writing 2017 (Melbourne Books, $29.95 pb), edited by Pia Gaardboe, collects works that have won fortyfour of Australia’s numberless prizes. Among them are Louis Klee’s poem ‘Sentence to Lilacs’, joint winner of the 2017 Porter Prize, and Josephine Rowe’s story ‘Glisk’, winner of the 2016 Jolley Prize. Both works can also be read on our website.
w ill y eom A n cur Ates the 2018 Perth writers’ FestivAl Not perhaps since Leo Schofield was hired to direct the Melbourne International Arts Festival (1993–96), followed by the Sydney Festival (1998–2001), has an arts journalist been invited to curate/direct an arts festival – until now. Widely respected WA journalist Will Yeoman has been named as Guest Curator of the 2018 Perth Writers’ Festival. He assumes this role following the departure of long-time program manager Katherine Dorrington. The Perth Festival runs from 9 February to 4 March 2018.
ingA clendinnen
It’s excellent to have a new, inexpensive, but still colour-illustrated edition of Inga Clendinnen’s indispensable book Dancing with Strangers, which won several prizes on publication in 2003. James Boyce, introducing the new Text Classics edition ($12.95 pb), writes: ‘Dancing with Strangers is an affirmation of the humanity of the Aboriginal people, the British settlers and the reader … The focus of the book is to help ordinary Australians better understand what happened when the British first settled on Aboriginal land … Its transformative power reflects this purity of purpose.’
The same-sex marriage debate
by Peter Rose
For decades, centuries, millennia, homosexuals (here as elsewhere) have been insulted, blackmailed, beaten, incarcerated, and murdered. Even now homosexuality remains one of the principal causes of suicide and despair in our society, especially among young males. In numerous countries, homosexual acts are illegal and punishable by death or imprisonment. Remember those two young men in Indonesia – our neighbour and ally – who were flogged and reviled in public? Only a fool or a bigot would suggest that homosexuals have never had it so good.
In Australia, the hard-won reforms of the 1970s and 1980s – absurdly belated yet ferociously contested in some states – came just in time. National self-respect is not endlessly plastic.
Yet the cultural warriors, serenaded by their ‘choir of the just’ in the media and the churches, still seem convinced that homosexuals are submissive, pliable, endlessly patient – forever grateful for the scraps of humanity they have been vouchsafed.
The recent debate about same-sex marriage has been one of the most unseemly episodes in our recent history. A legal entitlement that has been endorsed by untold opinion polls – with clear majorities across the country –has again been delayed because of internecine strife in the federal coalition. A postal ballot with dubious legal weight or status will further delay same-sex marriage and result in a divisive public debate – at quite a cost too. How far would $120 million go in our schools, our hospitals, our theatres, our laboratories? Yet again, gays and lesbians (plus their children) will be talked about and debated in ways that heterosexuals would find insufferable.
Do these people – these conservatives with their furrowed brows and anxieties – never stop to consider the indecency of judging our readiness or entitlement to behave like everyone else? Do they never consider our feelings during these torrid and tendentious debates? Do we not have organs, feelings, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Are we such misfits, such nonentities?
How would these stalwarts like to have their morality, their fitness to marry, their sheer legitimacy incessantly debated, as if they were not even present in the room? One thinks of thoughtless parents gossiping about vexing children seated a few feet away – taking it all in.
Well, we have come this far, and we will not go back, and we will not be patronised indefinitely. Something ugly happened in August, and it will not easily be forgotten or excused. We know why these cultural warriors insisted
on this postal ballot: to exploit unreason and to inflame prejudice.
Not all of us wish to marry. Some of us, truth be told, see no point in perpetuating that particular heterosexual model. But many gays and lesbians – law-abiding, taxpaying, peaceable citizens – do wish to marry. Why on earth should they be prohibited from doing so? What fool in government or the pulpit would seek to keep the loving and the loyal apart in the eyes of the law?
It says much for the power of love and the obstinacy of convention that a class that has been hurt and humiliated, taunted and trashed, imprisoned and grudgingly pardoned, should still crave acceptance in the eyes of government.
If and when this otiose and stupid opinion poll is conducted and reveals its likely message – overwhelming support for same-sex marriage – politicians would do well not to crow about it. There should be no homilies, no victory laps. Send us no salad bowls or condescensions. It will be years before some homosexuals forget the insults and fatuities of the past few weeks; years before the indignation and the bitter taste in our mouths have dissipated.
But if the bigots have their way and the No vote prevails, how craven Australia will seem in the eyes of most foreign countries. Already they look on us – with our British queen, our refugee policy, our freshened xenophobia – with mystification. A No vote would reinforce Australia’s reputation as an increasingly illiberal society – one burdened by prejudice and timidity.
For some of us, even more depressing than the homophobic pulse in this debate is the further evidence of a deepseated and pathological fear of change in this country –change of any kind really. Few other wealthy, educated, secular societies are so unnerved by reform. It’s as if any reform – however harmless, sensible, popular, obvious – threatens the cultural warriors’ birthright or raison d’être. Remember Tony Abbott’s casual linkage of same-sex marriage with religious freedom and freedom of speech? What specious thinking and despicable tactics. How do fond exchanges of wedding vows threaten our freedom of speech? Abbott’s miserable interjections reminded us why he was unfit to be prime minister and why his premiership was so short-lived and inglorious.
If this innocuous social reform isn’t approved, there will be little hope for systemic reform in this country –little hope for major constitutional change or social advancement – and even less for civilised debate and intelligent politics. g
Peter Rose
John Rickard
Sue Kossew
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Philip Jones
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Danielle Celermajer
Fiction
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Catherine Fox: Stop Fixing Women Tali Lavi
Memoir
Jim Davidson: A Führer for a Father Brian Matthews
The same-sex marriage debate
Rediscovering Alfred Deakin
J.M. Coetzee – a new collection of essays
Sofie Laguna’s new novel New stories from Tony Birch
Beyond Songlines
A new translation of Patrick Modiano
Yitzhak Rabin – hawkish general to peacemaker
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of the Month Richard Walsh
Christopher Menz
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Jake Wilson
Jane Sullivan
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Francesca Sasnaitis
Parsifal
The Merchant of Venice
The Lost City of Z
Ink
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The King’s Choice
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Australian Book Review
September 2017, no. 394
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Sydney Ideas
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
The forgotten leader
Rediscovering Alfred Deakin
John Rickard
THE ENIGMATIC MR DEAKIN
by Judith Brett
Text Publishing, $49.99 hb, 490 pp, 9781925498660
There has been an argument going on in the Liberal Party about the nature of the Menzies heritage – was Robert Menzies, the founder of the modern party, a liberal or a conservative? Notably absent from this discussion has been the national figure who was the first leader of a united anti-Labor party and who also happens to have been a father of Federation, Alfred Deakin. If our politicians still read books – and sometimes one does wonder – Judith Brett’s new biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, should be required reading. As Brett has pointed out, the minority governments of the Federation’s first decade were extraordinarily productive in laying the legislative foundations of the new Commonwealth, in stark contrast to the parliamentary paralysis of recent years.
Australian academic historians were slow to embrace biography, tending to regard a book about the life of one person as not being ‘real’ history, which they saw as requiring a capacity to generalise. J.A. La Nauze’s twovolume biography of Deakin (1965) did much to change attitudes, but that was more than fifty years ago, and although much has been written about Deakin and the politics of Federation since then, there has been a need for a new synthesis, a new ‘life’, for our times. Brett is well equipped for the task, knowledgeable in the politics of anti-Labor as the author of Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) and Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (2003). La Nauze began his biography in traditional style, describing the voyage of Deakin’s English immigrant parents, William and Sarah, to Australia. Brett, on the other hand, cheekily sets up a comparison of Alfred, born in Melbourne in 1856, with another nativeborn Australian, Ned Kelly, born just one year earlier. Deakin actually witnessed Kelly’s hanging in 1880, possibly as a representative of The Age, but it seems we don’t know how he reacted to the execution. The son of an Irish convict, Kelly has been incorporated into one version of the Australian legend associated with the unionised
shearers. But Deakin, Brett suggests, as a middle-class, religiously inclined intellectual, ‘sits uneasily as a representative Australian figure’. Courteous, well-educated, urbane, and much liked, ‘Deakin was never a mate’. For all his charm and friendliness (he acquired the nickname ‘Affable Alfred’), ‘he always held himself a little aloof’. A Canberra suburb, a federal electorate, and a university bear his name, but most Australians would have no idea who this Deakin was. Why should we know him better? What might he have to say to us?
Deakin’s story is a complex one, because in a sense he had two lives – the public career centred on colonial and federal politics, culminating in his three terms as prime minister (1903–4, 1905–8, 1909–10), and his intensely private inner life, a continuing meditation and negotiation with his god, which his family and friends knew little about. La Nauze provided a masterly survey of Deakin’s political career, but was uncomfortable with his inner journey of faith and doubt. Brett’s great achievement is to bring the two together and show how each impacted on the other, a dialogue that could be either inspirational or a cause for frustration and guilt. Thus in turn she places Deakin in the context of a closely knit family in which there were developing tensions.
Almost from the start, ‘Deakin knew he was special’. He was the centre of attention in the small Deakin family: he was William and Sarah’s only son, and his elder sister Catherine, rather than resenting this precocious new arrival, ‘worshipped the baby as I have the man during all our lives’. He was full of energy and enthusiasm, a voracious reader and remarkably articulate; indeed he could instinctively command an audience. He was at first uncertain where to deploy his talents. He studied law at Melbourne University, and briefly and unsuccessfully went to the bar, while fantasising about a career on the stage. He threw himself into the spiritualist movement, which, with orthodox religious dogma under attack, had the attraction of novelty with the drama of the seance;
he found that he had a gift as a medium, and within two years was presiding over the movement’s Sunday school. It was through his spiritualist connections that he met his future wife, the ‘graceful, translucent’ Pattie Browne, who had the distinction of being a child medium.
Still undecided about his future career, Deakin did some casual journalism for The Age, which was owned by David Syme, the acknowledged powerbroker of Victorian politics. It was through this connection that he was, as he famously put it, ‘whirled into politics’ in 1879 at the tender age of twenty-two. By 1883 he was a minister in a government coalition of conservatives and liberals, and two years later had become the leader of the liberal faction (this was a time when parties, in the modern, organisational sense, hardly existed). In the depressed 1890s he withdrew to the backbench and devoted himself to the federal cause, which in turn led to his crowning achievements in the federal sphere from 1901 until his retirement in 1913.
The young Deakin had a certain glamour: tall, charismatic, with eyes described as ‘mesmerising’ and ‘the compelling physical presence of a great actor’, he attracted both mentors and followers. Among the former were the conservative James Service and the radical Graham Berry. Brett stresses the importance of oratory in nineteenth-century culture. Political meetings were the lifeblood of democracy. Speeches two hours long were not uncommon, and Deakin’s astonishing ability to shape a speech, bringing the audience with him to its triumphant conclusion, was much remarked upon. His legendary (and much shorter) Bendigo speech to the Australian Natives Association in 1898 had such an extraordinary impact that it put an end to The Age’s opposition to the draft Constitution and ensured the success in Victoria of the referendum that followed.
Just as Brett is careful to place spiritualism in its ideological context to explain its appeal, so she is insistent that when interpreting the Deakinite policies of the early twentieth century, sometimes described as ‘the Australian Settlement’, ‘we need to exercise our historical imagination’, particularly to understand how Australians could regard White Australia as ‘an expression of high ideals’. Yes, of course the racist sentiments expressed then are abhorrent to us now, but, as Brett points out, the nineteenth-century ideal of the nation-state was bound up with the attainment of self-government and political democracy: for Deakin ‘the unity of Australia is nothing if it does not imply a united race’. And he was capable of holding this belief while having a great interest in Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. And it should not be thought that this is an uncritical biography. Brett scrupulously details Deakin’s investments in the 1880s when he succumbed to the Melbourne boom mentality: he was on the board of four companies that collapsed and was chairman of a building society which went into voluntary liquidation. He lost his own and his father’s money, which was a cause for
guilt and shame, but, when forced to go back to the bar to maintain his middle-class income, cool pragmatism took over, and he defended in court several prominent landboomers who fell foul of the law. And Brett is clearly surprised and disappointed – as I am too – that a man of such intellectual curiosity and wide cultural knowledge had no interest in the Aboriginal people and their culture.
Earning an income and providing for his family was always an issue for Deakin. This partly explains his secretly writing as an Australian columnist for the London Morning Post from 1900 to 1913, even when he was prime minister. One senses a certain ironic piquancy when he wrote about himself, and Brett’s title, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, is a phrase from one of his despatches. He took elaborate precautions to disguise his identity; indeed, if it had leaked out it would have been a political disaster.
For a man of such intellectual capacity, blessed with an extraordinary memory, it was a tragedy that from 1907 he was conscious of his mental world decaying. The main concern of his private reflections became to chart his own decline. As the book approaches the end of his career, there is a slight sense of haste in bringing this remarkable story to a close. The crucial 1909 fusion negotiations between the protectionists and free-traders are dealt with a tad too briskly, and Brett doesn’t notice that Deakin’s one-time close friend, Fred Derham, was a dominant figure in the Victorian Employers Federation, which, in league with interstate employer associations, would in large measure be funding the new party. If I have a criticism of the book as a whole, it is that I would have appreciated a firmer sense of structure, though maybe its thirty-six sometimes quite short chapters are expressly designed to encourage and engage readers. And it is a pacey, colourful narrative.
This is a fine biography – accessible, perceptive, and, in the best way, sympathetic. Deakin has found the interpreter he deserves for a modern audience. And if Deakin doesn’t fit as ‘a representative Australian figure’, perhaps that is precisely the point of his story – that politicians should be various, so that it is possible for a well-read, imaginative intellectual, with a talent for communication and compromise, to be an appealing and successful prime minister.
The ‘Australian Settlement’ associated with Deakin has received a bad press from neo-liberals, but the growing disillusion with privatisation and the corruption it has legitimatised makes the Deakinite agenda, with its reliance on a proactive state, look not half so bad. Perhaps the last word should rest with the patron saint of the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies, who, incidentally, was not a neo-liberal. He described Deakin as ‘this remarkable man’ who was Australia’s greatest prime minister. g
John Rickard is emeritus professor at Monash University and the author of A Family Romance: The Deakins at home (1996).
CAN EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY BE
Monash Arts
Making a difference through research
For two decades, Dr Natalie Doyle, Deputy Director of the Monash European and EU Centre, and Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, has researched a specific strand of French social and political theory, with a particular interest in the intellectual heir of its leading figures Marcel Gauchet –whose major project, a four volume history and theory of European democracy, has just been published. Dr Doyle has also pursued research into the crisis of the European Union and the risk of ‘co-radicalisation’.
In this podcast, we speak with Dr Doyle about her forthcoming book coming out this year, a world-first analysing Gauchet’s early writings to the present day.
Entitled Marcel Gauchet’s ‘Loss of Common Purpose: Imaginary Islam and the Crisis of European Democracy’
it synthesises her three main research projects, offering an analysis that provides a context with which to understand the nature of today’s issues, crises and phenomena.
Building on Gauchet’s argument on the crisis unfolding in Europe, Dr Doyle elucidates the underlying pathology and provides a new analysis on the risk of ‘co-radicalisation’, much of which is relevant to other Western countries. And in questioning other more dominant theories, Dr Doyle brings to light the new investigations into the symbolic structures of social life, the role of imagination and the possibility of reimagining – particularly with the future generations.
Access the full interview at arts.monash.edu.au/news/gauchet-natalie-doyle
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WAn inside view
The master of slow reading Sue Kossew
LATE ESSAYS: 2006–2017
by J.M. Coetzee
Knopf, $29.99 hb, 297 pp, 9780143783374
hile it is true that the essay as a genre has a long and continuous history, it is not always an easy form to categorise or define. J.M. Coetzee has himself contrasted the ‘rather tight discourse’ of criticism with the relative freedom of writing fiction. Indeed, essays – like those collected in this volume – require ‘slow reading’, a term derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that he was a ‘teacher of slow reading’. Coetzee’s essays, twenty-three of which are collected here as Late Essays: 2006–2017, are exemplars of his own careful reading while also providing engaging, accessible, and informative insights into writers and their works. They have all been previously published, either as introductions to new editions of books, as book chapters, or as reviews (most notably in the New York Review of Books, to which Coetzee regularly contributes). Unlike his novels, the essays are direct and unambiguous, offering not only one writer’s evaluation of another writer but also the astute assessments of a lifelong teacher of literature.
This is the third in what now can be seen as a trilogy of essay collections gleaned mostly from Coetzee’s published reviews, the previous two being Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (2001) and Inner Workings: Literary essays 2000–2005 (2007). His earlier academic essays, published in White Writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa in 1988, have become standard reading for anyone wishing to gain an understanding of South African literary culture; as has Doubling the Point: Essays and interviews (1992), in which Coetzee’s essays are contextualised with interviews that probe his intellectual autobiography.
The scope of this new collection is wide, encompassing familiar and less
familiar writers. It includes four essays on Australian writers, including Patrick White (two essays), Les Murray, and Gerald Murnane; and a couple on writers whose literary influence is clear in Coetzee’s own novels (Daniel Defoe, Heinrich von Kleist). Coetzee revisits the work of two writers he studied academically (Samuel Beckett and Ford Madox Ford, on whom he wrote his PhD and MA theses respectively) and shows the transnational reach of his reading by including essays on German, Spanish, French, Argentinian, and Russian writers (in translation). Most of the essays focus on particular works, some lesser known, including Argentinian writer Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama (1956) and those of the fairly recently ‘discovered’ Russian Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky, who wrote in French. There is an affecting short reflection on Juan Ramón Jiménez’s book Platero and I (1917) that reads it, not primarily as a children’s story about a donkey, but as showing the ‘mutual bond between man and beast’ including the potential for ‘the moment so urgently longed for in the fantasy lives of children when the great divide between species crumbles away’, touching on Coetzee’s interest in the lives of animals.
Some essays cast new light on familiar works, such as the suggestion that Madame Bovary shows Flaubert’s ability to ‘formulate larger issues … as problems of composition’; a masterly discussion of the ‘mobile meaning’ of the allegory in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (including the wonderful phrase, ‘Roger Chillingworth, who chills whatever he touches’); and scholarly analysis of the complex connotations of ‘nemesis’ in the piece on Philip Roth’s novel of that name. Some include echoes from Coetzee’s own fic-
tion: Beckett’s Molloy, who needs ‘to ride a bicycle with only one good leg’ is a reminder of Paul Rayment in Slow Man (2005); the description of the dance in White’s The Solid Mandala – where ‘the mysteries can more easily be explored through the physical, intuitive, nonrational medium of dance than through the rational medium of language’ –suggests The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) The final essay in the collection takes a slightly different direction, providing a more historical than literary perspective on the life of Hendrik Witbooi, a Nama captain who fought the Germans in what was then South-West Africa (Namibia), through his letters and diary.
So why read essays written by an author whose own works have been the subject of so much literary criticism but who has consistently refused to com-ment on them himself? As Derek Attridge suggests in his Introduction to Inner Workings, the two obvious reasons for reading Coetzee’s critical prose include the hope that these essays will ‘throw light on the often oblique novels’ and the belief that a writer of such note will have ‘much to offer’ on the work of other writers: an inside view, as it were. Additionally, whereas each essay, review, or lecture was previously available to be read only in isolation, the collection of such essays in one volume affords the reader more concentrated exposure to Coetzee’s literary judgements, encourages one to read them in relation to one another, and enables comparisons across time periods.
One may pose the question, for example: have Coetzee’s opinions changed between the early and the ‘late’ essays? Here, the reader may compare the four ‘late essays’ on Beckett in this volume (published between 2009 and 2015) with the three ‘early essays’ in Doubling the Point (dated from 1970 to 1973). One clear difference is the more experimental style of the ‘late essay’ entitled ‘Eight Ways of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, which is part-parody, parthomage, and is written in an impressionistic way that is quite different from the other essays and reviews, incorporating echoes of Beckett’s work and including a somewhat startling comparison with Moby-Dick. It includes the
intriguing thought experiment in which Coetzee ruminates on how history may have been changed if Beckett had been appointed to a lectureship in Italian at the University of Cape Town in 1937 (which he apparently applied for and was not offered), the very university at which Coetzee himself was a student and at which he was first appointed as a lecturer in English thirty-five years later. The thought that a Professor Samuel Beckett may have encountered a young John Coetzee as a student is a tantalising one.
The other essays follow a fairly similar pattern: an outline of the writer’s life and biographical details (often including the personal circumstances surrounding the writing of a particular work), the historical and literary contexts, deft summary of the plot, and investigation of the text’s narrative and linguistic strategies. They are carefully researched and are always alert to the cracks, ironies, and discontinuities in the texts. His interest is in delving into the writer’s mind, the circumstances surrounding the work and the thinking processes that led to writerly choices in terms of form, style, and themes. While – as a critic and reviewer – he comments on the ‘success’ and ‘failure’ of the works he writes about (for example, he prefers Les Murray’s earlier poems to the later ‘lesser’ works and advises him to ‘let go of old grudges’ against ‘official’ Australian culture), Coetzee sometimes writes in the role of the reader, using the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ to intimate a community of readers reading alongside him.
His concern as a critic/reviewer is always with the language of literature, as may be expected from one who studied linguistics. His insights are those of a fellow writer who faces similar issues in tackling problems of narration, but one who has, in addition, the sensibility of a literary scholar and teacher. Above all, he brings the perspective of one who has much to teach us about slow reading. g
Sue Kossew is Chair of English at Monash University. She has an essay in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to J.M. Coetzee, edited by Jarad Zimbler.
Nullabri
James Ley
THE CHOKE
by Sofie Laguna Allen & Unwin
$32.99 pb, 371 pp, 9781760297244
The Choke is full of holes. I mean that literally, which is also to say (since we are talking about a novel) symbolically. It contains any number of insinuating references to wounds, ditches, gaps, and voids. The primary implication of these can be grasped if one recalls that ‘nothing’ was Elizabethan slang for female genitalia. Sofie Laguna’s narrator, a ten-year-old girl named Justine Lee, who has a nervous habit of thrusting her tongue in and out of the gap created by her missing teeth, is constantly being reminded that she has ‘no thing’. In the masculine world of knives and guns she inhabits, the secondary status this lack bestows upon her is reinforced in all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, often with an element of innuendo and menace. On the very first page, one of her two older brothers threatens to shoot her with his slingshot in the ‘hole’ of her gummy mouth if she smiles. Shortly after a scene in which she is attacked by an aggressive rooster named Cockyboy, which slashes her face, the idea that her femaleness is not simply a deficiency but a form of mutilation is made explicit when Jamie, the teenaged scion of the rival Worrley family, attacks her on the way to school, having first taunted her by grabbing at her skirt and calling out ‘show us your scar’.
The novel is set in the early 1970s in a fictional flyspeck town named Nullabri (another negation), located somewhere on the Victorian side of the Murray River. The basic elements of the plot are familiar tropes of hardscrabble rural realism. Justine is a lonely and sensitive child who lives in poverty with her alcoholic grandfather, a war veteran traumatised by his experiences as a prisoner on the Burma Railway. Her mother is long gone; her father is a violent criminal who visits only
occasionally. She is failing at school because of her undiagnosed dyslexia. Her only real friend is another social outcast, a disabled classmate named Michael Hooper. The limited and generally unhappy nature of her existence is underscored by the fact that Nullabri is a cultural wasteland: Justine’s only windows to the wider world are the old John Wayne films her Pop likes to watch on his snowy rabbit-eared television.
Laguna works these tropes for emotional and sometimes melodramatic effect. The Choke is interested in the combination of oppression and neglect that exposes Justine to the worst aspects of the adult world, yet at the same time leaves her in a state of ignorance, which in turn makes her confused and vulnerable. The Murray flows through the novel as an ambiguous symbol of her predicament. The title of The Choke refers to a point where the river narrows. The term evokes the intimidating atmosphere of violence – and specifically sexual violence – that pervades the novel and ultimately determines the course of Justine’s life. But the ‘choke’ is also depicted as a sustaining place of natural beauty and solace, where she can retreat into her imagination and try to piece together some kind of understanding of her troubling experiences.
Laguna’s style and the general tenor of her fiction are at times reminiscent of Tim Winton or Gillian Mears, and, more distantly, Sonya Hartnett, who, like Laguna, has over the course of her career written for both children and adults, while maintaining a thematic focus on the travails of childhood. But The Choke, despite the obvious worthiness of its subject matter, lacks the the vitality and the key animating ingredients which set those writers apart. It has neither the genuinely impassioned quality of Mears, nor the psychological depth that gives Hartnett’s dark vision of childhood its integrity. It is for the most part soundly written, but without that William-Faulkner-meets-SteeleRudd quality that characterises Winton at his most lapidary, or anything approaching his vivid sense of a natural world touched with sublimity.
It is possible to write about regional settings in ways that are not clichéd –
Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds (2012) comes to mind – but The Choke makes little effort to rise above its received tropes. It is content to perpetuate the rather tired notion that rural Australia is a site of poverty, backwardness, alcoholic indolence, and dysfunction. Its three principal adult male characters are hard-drinking, working-class, and violent. The only supportive characters Justine encounters are her lesbian aunt Rita, who has escaped her lowly origins by becoming a nurse and moving to the city, and her friend Michael, who has an obligatory heart of gold, and whose family provides the novel with its ideal of bourgeois respectability. The Hoopers decamp to Sydney once they have provided Justine with a glimpse of an alien world in which people read books, treat each other with kindness and respect, and enjoy the occasional bubble bath.
In The Choke’s short second section, which moves the action forward three years, Laguna contrives an effective dramatic climax which celebrates the enduring power of the maternal instinct, in defiance of the masculine principles of domination and violence that have pervaded the novel. Something can come of nothing after all. It is hard not to notice, however, that this moral triumph is achieved by quarantining the novel’s coarseness and violence within a disreputable underclass and establishing a set of structuring oppositions that ultimately make its uplifting message seem like something of a fait accompli. g
Ventriloquism
Susan Midalia
PULSE POINTS
by Jennifer Down
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 225 pp, 9781925355970
Barbara Kingsolver, praising the skill required to write a memorable short story, described the form as entailing ‘the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces’. Her description certainly applies to Jennifer Down’s wonderful début collection, Pulse Points. Using the typical strategies of suggestion, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness of those ‘tight spaces’, Down’s fourteen realist stories raise important questions about family, sexual relationships, and the role of place and social aspiration in the shaping of identity. While these are familiar subjects for literary fiction, Pulse Points is especially memorable for its range of characters and voices, and for its often haunting expression of the partial nature of knowledge generated by the short story form.
One of the most moving enactments of Kingsolver’s claim is the story ‘Aokigahara’, which won the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Narrated by a young Australian woman who travels to Japan in search of ‘answers’ following her brother’s death, the story uses shards of her memory, a structure of repeated deferral and the preternatural setting of a real forest, the notorious Sea of Trees, to evoke a melancholy sense of incompletion. It is also a story about the inadequacy of language to express profound grief, or to resolve the sister’s barely acknowledged feelings of guilt, or perhaps her own desire for oblivion. We hear all these possible meanings echoed in her affectless, passive voice. We also hear, in her repeated use of conventional syntax, enervated sentences which seem to lead nowhere in the very act of utterance. At times it feels like reading Samuel Beckett, leavened with the compassion of Alice Munro.
Other voices require equally attentive listening. The stories throughout
the collection offer absorbing acts of ventriloquism: we hear the voices of different genders, sexualities, social classes, and ages, as we bear witness to characters whose struggles for autonomy or connection are often written on the body. There is the girl in the story ‘Vaseline’ who has ‘rage in [her] veins’ but is unsure about crossing the boundaries of her workingclass existence. In ‘Pressure OK’, there is the voice of an ageing widower whose seeming equanimity masks feelings of sensorial deprivation and being adrift in the alien world of the young. We hear in the title story the dislocated, increasingly panicky voice of an immigrant gay man unable to articulate a coherent idea of ‘home’. One of the collection’s most disturbing voices is that of a collective misogyny – dismayingly casual, brutally unthinking – in the story ‘Dogs’. Set in country Australia, it is also a tale of unexpected outcomes, with some darkly humorous touches.
The stories are also interested in the emotional dynamics and politics of the family, caught up in the contest between the spoken and the silent. In representing family, Down is particularly skilled at creating the illusion of a larger world beyond the confines of the relatively few words on the page, and at offering moments of affirmation between siblings. Consider the childless sister in the story ‘Peaks’, remote from her maternal sister through experience and education, but finally able to share an exhilarating sense of risk. In ‘We Got Used to Here Fast’, a woman separated from her brother seeks to rescue him from his distressing isolation. The enduring bond between them is suggested by a beautiful metaphor at the emotional and structural heart of the narrative: two children speaking to one another using two small satellite dishes, their words mysteriously amplified, carried across distance and ultimately through time.
The collection also creates a vivid sense of place, both Australian and global, as projections of the inner life, or as ideological sites representing the power, or powerlessness, of various characters. The hiking trail in ‘Eternal Father’ provides a woman with sanctuary from her dead-end jobs and the religious narrowmindedness of Johnson City, Texas. An
James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne.
Like reading Samuel Beckett, leavened with the compassion of Alice Munro
airport terminal in ‘Hungry for God’ is a poignant correlative of a man’s muted feelings of regret. Descriptions of Paris in the story ‘Convalescence’, from the confines of an apartment to the unbearable beauty of Sacré Coeur, trace a woman’s increasingly anguished inability to speak her unexpected grief. In the concluding story, ‘Coarsegold’, a woman’s restless movement between American locations parallels her troubled questioning of self and other. What responsibility does she owe to her partner or to the women of her town? Where, if anywhere, might she try to escape? Here, as with the stories as a whole, there are no easy answers. ‘Coarsegold’ is also the collection’s longest story by far, and it uses the more expansive space of thirty-four pages to reveal the most conflicted place of all: the one inside our head.
Pulse Points is an impressively poised and even collection. It defies Flannery O’Connor’s famously withering pronouncement that ‘so many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence’. Down’s stories are alive with psychological acuity and technical dexterity. They offer thoughtful, sometimes heartbreaking, insights into our anxieties and desires. They demonstrate the value of emotional restraint, and spare, often sub-textual dialogue. They can deploy pared-back but resonant language to create complex effects. Their conclusions are often surprising and sometimes unsettling, but always completely earned. At less than thirty years of age, Jennifer Down has already been awarded prestigious prizes for individual stories, shortlistings for her novel, Our Magic Hour (2016), and named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year for 2017. Readers of her intelligent, subtle, and affecting prose clearly have much to look forward to. g
Susan Midalia is the author of three short story collections. Her first novel, The Art of Persuasion, will be published by Fremantle Press in 2018.
Connections
Fiona Wright
COMMON PEOPLE
by Tony Birch
University of Queensland Press
$29.95 pb, 218 pp, 9780702259838
The characters who populate Tony Birch’s Common People are striking not so much because they are the ordinary people, the commonplace or everyday people that the title would suggest – they are, mostly, people living in or with extremity and trauma – but because the thing that unites them in these stories are discoveries of small moments of common humanity. Some of these are exchanges, or gifts – a packet of cigarettes, a bowl of spaghetti, a kiss – others encounters with beauty or sublimity: a glass mural ceiling in an art gallery, a strain of music, a baby, a star.
Birch’s characters are all fringedwellers, in one sense or another. Most are poor, like the two single mothers desperate for work in ‘The Ghost Train’; others work precariously or illegally, as prostitutes, drug dealers, or car thieves. Others yet are dealing with pain, illness, or addiction, disrupted families or downright brutal institutions. Many live in historically hard places and times, such as isolated country towns in postwar Australia, or the fearful and conservative Howard era. But the most striking of Birch’s characters are his Aboriginal children: Noah Sexton, dismissed and belittled by his teacher and his peers because his family is ‘well known to the police’; the precocious Sissy and her friend Betty, students at a strict convent school in the city; the unnamed protagonist of ‘Colours’, cared for by his extended family on a reserve.
Each of these characters, living on the margins and always facing various kinds of repression and aggression, is carefully drawn – indeed, some of the stories read almost as portraits – and always depicted with great empathy and kindness. Despite their circumstances, that is, these characters are never hard or harsh.
Much of this strength in characterisation comes from Birch’s great facility with dialogue and with dialect. There is often a real sense of play at work here, as well as an agility with the quirks and unexpected poetry of spoken language. At its best, this plays out in marvellous – and often beautifully lewd – exchanges of banter, such as that of Marian and Lydia, as they drive through the night towards a semi-legal shift at a meatworks:
‘Well I’d reckon he’d probably fuck a nun.’
‘He probably has […] And wouldn’t she go off?’ she laughed.
‘Who?’
‘The nun. Imagine that. Locked away in a convent for years and getting out for her first ride. She’d light up like a pinball machine.’
‘Not if she was stiff enough to end up in bed with my old man. You know they named a movie after him?’
‘Which one?’
‘Gone in 60 Seconds …’
These are deft and telling exchanges, revealing so much about the speaking characters and their relationships with each other and the world. Birch has excellent control over how information is released in these stories, which never feel forced or overblown.
So too do all of these stories eschew sentimentality, despite the depth of barely suppressed emotion that animates them. They are directly told, and deceptively simple in their narration, with little adornment or spectacle. It is precisely this that gives them their strength, because it is difficult, at times, to look so directly and nakedly at these kinds of disadvantage and struggle, not to mention injury and hurt. The strongest stories are largely about loneliness, be it that of the old man Joe Roberts, who never had a family and doesn’t have friends, living alone in a down-at-heel flat; the recovering alcoholic Lola, who finds it easier to connect with a homeless woman than to reconnect with her own daughter; or the adolescent Dominic, wildly grieving after his brother’s death. Others are haunting in the intensity of their imagery. The final scenes of ‘Party
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Lights’ and ‘Colours’, for example, linger on highly charged and quite mysterious tableaux that are incredibly powerful for their small departures from the realism that dominates so much of the book.
Often, in these stories, very little happens, at least in a narrative sense. Instead, Birch is interested in capturing the minute operations of his characters’ inner lives, and it is these alone that draw the reader across each story. Mostly, these characters and their voices are extremely compelling, but where the stories are weaker, it is usually because this interiority isn’t charged with as much tension, or seems less tightly focused. In ‘Raven and Sons’, for example, the genealogist Sophie, working a shortterm contract in a funeral parlour, is largely unemotional – although she does admit to being ‘driven by a commitment to historical accuracy, not emotion’ – and the result is that the final scene falls somewhat flat. Elsewhere, some of the symbolic gestures that close the stories feel too easily won, as in ‘The Good Howard’, which is nonetheless a tender and charming tale.
Common People is a book of great empathy and even greater faith: in the goodness of people, even in bad circumstances, in the desire for, and power of, human connection, and in resilience and the ability to recover, regardless of whatever damage, half-understood or otherwise, has come before. These are quiet stories, and gentle, and because of this they always feel like an honouring of these remarkable, strong characters, of the lost past in which so many of them live, of their hopes for, and often inarticulate attempts to build, a better future. g
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor, and critic from Sydney. Her books include Small Acts of Disappearance (2015).
Emily and Tom Patrick Allington
A NEW ENGLAND AFFAIR
by Steven Carroll Fourth Estate
$29.99 pb, 228 pp, 9781460751091
In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to resemble a pizza with too many toppings. Mostly, though, Carroll’s approach to fiction succeeds even when it seemingly shouldn’t. If it’s a mystery –a minor miracle, even – that the various techniques he employs come together to create stylised and yet fresh prose, then that mystery itself becomes part of the pleasure of reading a Carroll novel. Carroll is also a serial serialist. A New England Affair, as with The Lost Life (2009) and A World of Other People (2013), riffs from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Here, Carroll makes use of Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941), inspired by rocks off the Massachusetts coast, where Eliot grew up. When Carroll animates the rock, the waves, the wind, the coast, what is striking is how comparatively fragile his human characters are as they move through the physical and metaphysical world, making mistakes, enduring, ageing.
As with many of Carroll’s novels, the aching passage of time anchors A New England Affair: ‘The lead foot of Emily Hale steps on the accelerator, speeding into the past.’ The novel is a portrait of a long but secretive, platonic, and odd companionship between Eliot – American by birth, English by preference – and fellow New Englander Emily. Tom and Emily – or T.S. Eliot and Miss Hale, to give them their public titles – are a couple of sorts, their bond sometimes excruciatingly real but sometimes seemingly more akin to a sham.
While Eliot’s fame, his failed first marriage, and his particular approach to work and life hang over everything, Emily is at the heart of this story. She is, at various times, ‘difficult’, ‘jumpy’, ‘broken’. But she is also resilient, as solid as her car. We see her as a spirited young woman who aspires to the stage; we see her waiting (and waiting and waiting) for a different type of relationship with Tom; we see an old woman who teaches acting and singing to a new generation of girls and women: ‘You young people, with your freedoms and your love bites.’ Although this is a novel about companionship, Emily comes most fully to life when she is physically apart from Eliot: teaching and influencing ‘her girls’; standing on a fishing boat in rough seas, on a personal mission; silently and devastatingly admonishing a young man for a misdeed.
Eliot, meanwhile, inhabits the story like a reticent ghost: he is ‘Tom, not quite real’. While he is by no means a repellent character, he frequently comes across as an empathy-free zone, willing to hide behind his fame and his straitjacketed religious and moral beliefs. At one point Emily ponders, ‘How many Toms were there? A Tom within a Tom within … And did anybody ever get to glimpse the real Tom? Did she?’
At times, the portrait of Emily and Tom’s complex bond is tender, their version of love authentic precisely because of its awkwardness. But at other times it is excruciating to watch them circle each other, each playing a predetermined role. Whenever Emily loses patience – whether with Tom or with the gendered and mannered world that she inhabits – it’s hard to do anything other than cheer.
The reader faces choices when reading A New England Affair. There is a temptation, at times encouraged by the way Carroll frames the story, to seek out Four Quartets and other Eliot works, collections of his letters, biographies, and literary analyses. (Carroll’s accompanying essay about his research sometimes heightens this effect, but sometimes reminds the reader of the importance of speculation). Underlying this are questions such as ‘how true is this story?’, ‘how real are these
characters?’, and ‘where is Emily in the poems?’ In such moments, it seems as if a fascination with Eliot the real person, and perhaps even a reverence for his writing and publishing life, is a prerequisite for complete absorption into what is ultimately a fictional story. But to focus on historical or literary contexts is to obscure the point of the novel, which is to ponder ‘the lives we live and the lives we don’t’.
A New England Affair benefits from sitting beside its two companion novels, particularly The Lost Life, which focuses on Tom and Emily’s time together in the Cotswolds in 1934. I am not suggesting that the new novel cannot be read independently. But thinking of all three novels as parts of a whole makes the characters richer and, especially, adds to the poignant way that Carroll addresses the passage of time, including the anchoring event of World War II.
Carroll’s Four Quartets series is not the equal of his Glenroy series, about Melbourne suburbia and the world. In part, that is because Carroll has made such fine use of the characters of Rita, Vic, and Michael from the Glenroy novels, creating a family saga that celebrates and interrogates life, including the everyday, without descending into triteness. There are plenty of moments of celebration and interrogation – especially interrogation – in A New England Affair. But there are also times when the juxtaposition of T.S. Eliot the famous poet and Tom the private person becomes a little wearying and repetitive. And there are times when I pined for less of Tom and more of Emily. g
Showtime
Lyndon Megarrity
THE SHOW: ANOTHER SIDE OF SANTAMARIA’S MOVEMENT by
Mark Aarons and John Grenville Scribe
$32.99 pb, 282 pp, 9781925322316
The Movement was a secret organisation which radically reduced the power of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) within the union movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Initiated by B.A. Santamaria, the Movement was very active in several Australian states and worked with the general knowledge and approval of key Catholic Church bishops. The Movement (or the Show) ultimately aimed to steer the Australian Labor Party (ALP) towards Catholic political aims. The ALP split in the mid to late 1950s was partly the result of the sectarian tensions exacerbated by the Movement’s activities. Following pressure from the Vatican, the Movement’s formal links with the Catholic church ended in late 1957. The Movement’s work continued with the creation of the National Civic Council (NCC), although as the decades progressed, its relevance and impact on Australian public life gradually faded.
Mark Aarons (with John Grenville) has produced an intriguing new study of Santamaria’s Movement, based on careful study of archival sources and the information and insights of labour movement figures and Santamaria associates. The focus of the study is less on Santamaria’s ideas and policies, and more on the Movement’s strategies for weakening the grip of CPA members on the labour movement, with some emphasis on the election of union officials. As the authors skilfully detail, in working to defeat communist influence in the industrial arena, the Movement gathered much intelligence (some dubious) on CPA figures which was shared with official intelligence agencies such as ASIO.
A major theme of the book is the extent to which the Movement’s work as a communist fighting machine mimicked the organisation and tactics of the
CPA in order to wield influence over the labour movement. Like the CPA, the Movement was not above using propaganda and other underhand methods in order to increase support for its cause. The similarities did not end there. The organisational work of both the CPA and the Movement was based on tight discipline and top down hierarchical control. Activities and policies were driven from central headquarters, and little dissent was permitted.
The authors imply that the Movement’s emphasis on Santamaria’s role as leader was a form of Stalinism. Indeed, Santamaria did largely run ‘The Show’ in a centralised fashion and treated it as his personal fiefdom, but it is probably a stretch to describe Santamaria himself as a ‘Stalinist’ leader. Unlike Stalin, Santamaria did not control the State or its military, and any purges within the Movement did not possess the stark brutality of those in the USSR. True, Aarons and Grenville provide much evidence which suggests that Santamaria, like Stalin, was economical with the truth when it suited his tactical purposes. But ultimately, the Stalinist metaphor outstays its welcome. The authors even see Stalinlike revisionism at work in Santamaria’s recollection that a sensitive Movement document found its way into communist hands when Brisbane Archbishop James Duhig left it in a train under a pillow. This anecdote seems too good to be true, but in his old age Santamaria may simply have preferred to believe it because it was a better story than the more prosaic explanations offered by the authors’ sources.
For all the emphasis on Santamaria, he is a shadowy presence in the book. The concentration on industrial battles and internal Movement disputes leaves little time for understanding the Santamaria phenomenon that made it all possible. A little more historical context on the nature of sectarianism in the postwar years and more information on Santamaria’s agrarian policies would have helped the reader more fully to understand the stakes involved.
On the other hand, the authors convincingly portray Santamaria as fostering a ‘cult of personality’: he certainly appears to have been less than open towards
Patrick Allington teaches at Flinders University.
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Rachmaninoff on Fire
Piano Concerto No.3
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, well known from the film Shine is a virtuoso tour de force! Featuring Australian Piers Lane as soloist.
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DEAN Fire Music
RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No.3
Brett Dean conductor Piers Lane piano
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Wed 18 Oct, 6.30pm Thu 19 Oct, 1.30pm
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Sibelius and Mahler
Janine Jansen Returns
Outstanding Dutch violinist Janine Jansen returns to Sydney to play Sibelius’s great Violin Concerto, an audience favourite everywhere. Then Mahler’s sublime and dazzling First Symphony.
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King Christian II: Highlights from the Suite SIBELIUS Violin Concerto MAHLER Symphony No.1
Thomas Søndergård conductor
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Megan Washington is one of the defining Australian singers of our age. Enjoy great songwriting from an original voice, featuring new songs and favourites.
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competing intellectual views within his own organisation. From surviving clips of his long running Point of View television commentary series, it can be clearly seen that Santamaria had an intense and quietly forceful manner, but it is hard to imagine this prim, judgemental figure as a charismatic leader of men. It may be that despite being a layman, he was seemingly cloaked with church authority, as for many years he had powerful supporters within the Catholic hierarchy. The unquestioning authority given to Catholic bishops by the laity in the midtwentieth century may have been all too easily transferred to Santamaria and his Movement.
The Show, meticulous in its referencing, is well-written and presented. However, the decision to provide modern estimates of monetary values along with the old (e.g. ‘£3000 [$203,000]’) is not very useful to the reader, as money notoriously changes its value over time. References to average wages and costs of specific eras would have better assisted the reader trying to comprehend the historical value of pounds, shillings, and pence at a certain time in history.
The authors are to be congratulated on bringing the stories of the Movement to life. In doing so, they have highlighted the human cost of adherence to a secretive and undemocratic organisation that ultimately outlived its purpose. The Show is a poignant reminder of how Australian politics and social life have changed radically since the 1960s. As Aaron and Grenville’s book demonstrates, the Movement depended on the CPA for its mission and vitality. They declined in tandem. g
Lyndon Megarrity is a Queensland historian and co-author of Made in Queensland: A new history (2009).
The canary in the cage
Europe, but not as we know it
Colin Wight
THE END OF EUROPE:
DICTATORS, DEMAGOGUES, AND THE COMING
by James Kirchick
DARK AGE
Yale University Press (Footprint), $44.99 hb, 288 pp, 9780300218312
‘The obscurest epoch is today.’
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)
Abook that attempts to predict the course of contemporary affairs is always a dangerous enterprise. Events, political events, in particular, have a way of turning like the proverbial worm. Brexit and the election of President Trump are simply the latest and most shocking examples of just how wrong social forecasting can be. James Kirchick’s The End of Europe: Dictators, demagogues, and the coming Dark Age does not hold back in its predictive potential. The end of Europe, Kirchick declares, is upon us. This is a statement, not a question. But this is not the end of Europe as an institution or the demise of the continent. This is Europe, to paraphrase Scotty from Star Trek, but not as we know it.
One way to interpret the overall thesis of this book is to read it as yet another rejection of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis. The end of Europe for Kirchick would be the return of history, but a history, so dark, so bleak, and so Hobbesian in form that we should all be doing everything we can to forestall its coming. In this sense, despite all of his pessimism, Kirchick’s book is a call to arms on behalf of Europe, not the pronouncement of its death.
Kirchick formed his views during his time working as a journalist travelling in Eastern Europe. His analysis of the state of contemporary Europe is primarily based on geopolitical issues rather than economic concerns. In many respects, Kirchick suggests that Europe is sleepwalking into exactly the kind
of enervated state desired by Vladimir Putin. The causes of this demise are economic stagnation, populism, disenchantment with liberal democracy, and rising social tensions, primarily driven by the immigration crisis, but also the rise, once again in the heart of Europe, of anti-Semitism.
None of these issues is necessarily unique to Europe, and although Kirchick claims that the problems are largely of Europe’s making, he is at pains to point out that whatever is visible in one country can spill over borders and reverberate across the continent. In addition, Europe faces external pressures and threats that only heighten the consequences of the problems it faces. A resurgent Russian nationalism is one of these, but equally problematic is the election of Donald Trump. Indeed, Kirchick sees Trump as representative of exactly the kind of European ethno-nationalist movement that Americans have always been so scathing about and that Europeans believed was behind them.
It is here, however, that the course of history makes fools of those who would dare to predict. There is no doubt that Putin and Trump represent a return to a form of hyper-nationalism, and Brexit too could be read in that way. But the trends are not all in one direction. The utter collapse of UKIP following the Brexit vote, and the failure of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France suggest that the public’s commitment to hyper-nationalism is less a long-term trend than a sense of deep satisfaction with the economic consequences of globalisation, the global financial crisis, and the failure of economic and political élites to acknowledge these issues.
STOP FIXING WOMEN: WHY BUILDING FAIRER WORKPLACES IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS
by Catherine Fox
NewSouth Publishing
$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781742235165
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf instructs women to ‘write calmly’ and ‘not in a rage’. Commentator Catherine Fox writes ‘calmly’ about contemporary realities with great potential to spark rage.
Stop Fixing Women operates partly as a rejoinder to Sheryl Sandberg’s popular manifesto Lean In (2013), which addressed ‘internal obstacles’ for women. Fox’s argument is that women’s workplace conditions are not rapidly changing and, on some levels, are regressing. Furthermore, mainstream rhetoric around this issue blames women, albeit sometimes subtly, for their predicament. Fox contends that this displays fallacious reasoning, ‘How can women be both the problem and the solution when they make up just under half the workforce but still a tiny minority of decision makers?’
The writer outlines how real change occurs when power-holders actively deconstruct a system flawed by bias and discrimination. Although chiefly Australian in her focus, Fox references other Western countries. Those claiming that her argument is antiquated are promptly discredited by the plethora of case studies and data referenced, largely from 2010 onwards. What might initially be experienced as an onslaught of information is justified by its wider context of dissent and denial. An otherwise bleak narrative is steered towards a more uplifting one by its female and male beacons; notably the Male Champions for Change, two of whom are Simon Rothery, Goldman Sachs Australia CEO, and former chief of the Australian army David Morrison. Morrison’s account of his ‘road to Damascus’ conversion is riveting.
Whilst Lean In has its place, change will only transpire when more men actively cede or share authority. Fox admits this takes courage, as the backlash can be vociferous. Stop Fixing Women should be required reading for men in senior positions. The stakes are high; enhanced female power will engender a more racially diverse, intelligent, and prosperous society for us all.
Tali Lavi
One of the problems of the far left’s analysis of the emergence of right-leaning populism has been to attribute it almost exclusively to racism and Islamophobia. But, given that Brexit and Trump collectively represent something close to 120 million people, if they are all racist then ‘Houston we have a problem’.
It would be all too easy to write off Kirkchick as some alarmist alt-right doom mongerer. No doubt the ‘regressive left’, as Maajid Nawaz, calls them will do so. But that is far too simplistic. It has become symptomatic of the contemporary ‘post-truth’ era that any attempt to provide sophisticated political analysis from a middle-ground liberalism is attacked by all.
Kirchick’s book can be read as a plea for a return to honesty. Honesty in acknowledging the problems Europe faces. Honesty in accepting what needs to be done, and quickly, before the problem is beyond our control. And honesty, in recognising the source of the problems; which is as much to do with the denial of them as it is the source of them. For according to Kirchick, it is the unwillingness of political élites and liberal publics across Europe to confront the problems that has created the far-right backlash against them. The far right gains traction not because the establishment left has it wrong but because they deny there is a problem in the first place.
In this respect, the crises facing Europe represent a crisis of liberalism. And this is a crisis of forgetting; in particular, the forgetting of the horrors of illiberal ideologies that generated World War II, the Holocaust, and the Gulags. And it is here, in this forgetting, that Kirchick believes the real source of Europe’s problems can be located. Hyper-nationalism, populism, economic stagnation, and the rise of anti-Semitism are simply symptoms of a deeper malaise – a malaise that extends far beyond European borders and affects the underlying logic of our commitment to liberal democracy.
As Kirchick puts it, ‘the problems described in this book have in common a loss of faith in the universal, humanistic values of what might be called the
European idea’. This European idea is that of Enlightenment itself, and without this commitment to the principles of the Enlightenment, we will return to the coming Dark Age. Hence underpinning all of Europe’s problems, according to Kirchick, is the moral relativism and self-doubt that saps the West at every turn. And make no mistake, Kirchick believes that although the coming Dark Age may emerge in Europe first, it can only become a global phenomenon, the early roots of which can already be seen on the American continent with Trump’s victory.
Thus, although this well-researched, well-written, well-argued book is on the surface concerned with the potential decline of Europe, the consequences of its analysis are much broader. And it is not just the geopolitical and economic factors that we need to address, but rather, it is the demise of the underlying belief structure that we have values worth defending that represents the most dangerous aspect of the contemporary age. Americans, and perhaps the rest of the globe, can sit back and reflect with a little satisfaction that the Europeans might be about to get what they deserve. And there is some logic to this, given two wars that began in Europe but which became global in scope, not to mention European colonisation and imperialism. But if Europe is the canary in the cage, then what is killing it won’t stop there. g
Colin Wight is a Professor of International Relations and current Chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.
Beyond Songlines
by Philip Jones
This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, one of the most influential books about Australia to reach an international audience. It appeared just months after The Fatal Shore (1986) by Robert Hughes, and a year before the first major international exhibition of Aboriginal art, Dreamings, opened in New York City, at the Asia Society. The Songlines was a best-seller internationally and sold well in Australia too; it has been in print continuously since 1987. Chatwin died barely eighteen months after the book’s release. Indeed, the book’s deviations from its own plot in its second half, and its rather fractured recourse to journal entries reflected Chatwin’s sudden intimation of mortality.
Shortly after Songlines’ release and at the height of its popularity Chatwin was approached by a filmmaker with a suggestion for a documentary, but he demurred on the grounds that it was a work of fiction. This sounds disingenuous, for Chatwin’s books all shifted shape between travel-writing and the novel, fiction and non-fiction. His realisation that several key propositions in Songlines could not be sustained in a documentary seems a more likely explanation. Chatwin’s main anthropological informants in Australia shared similar impressions of his readiness to make five from two and two, and that he would not always let the facts get in the way of a good
story. One of Chatwin’s biographers has described the book as a blend of philosophical enquiry and fiction, identifying its structural models as Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître (similarly a narrator in dialogue with enlightened informants), and Plato’s Symposium and The Apology.
This might not matter much were it not for the fact that it has been no light matter to transform popular understandings of Aboriginal culture during the course of Australian history. Chatwin seems to have done that with a single word. It is the word many people turn to when they are asked to account for Aboriginal religion, spiritual belief, or cosmology. The other term most often used is ‘Dreaming’, or its earlier variant, ‘Dreamtime’. What interests me about these terms, and even earlier words or phrases such as ‘walkabout’ or ‘never-never’, is their indeterminate character. They have no solid centre and their definitions remain elusive. The reasons for that are intriguing and they take us into the history of engagement between Aboriginal and European cultures.
‘Songlines’ had entered the lexicon by the early 1990s. It is now embedded in several dictionaries, although none seems to agree on a consistent interpretation of the term. Here is the Macquarie Dictionary’s rather question-begging entry: ‘a Songline is a path made by the ancestors in the Dreaming and
The Songlines (Franklin Press, 1987 edition)
recorded by the Aboriginal peoples living along its sometimes very great lengths’. Is it an actual path or not, and if not how is that people live along it? Whose ancestors? What is the Dreaming? How did Aboriginal peoples record it? How long are ‘sometimes very great lengths’? The Australian National Dictionary entry is more succinct, conveying both the nature of an ‘ancestor’ and what the ‘recording’ might be: songline: ‘a route taken by an ancestral being or beings on a journey through a particular landscape and recorded in song’. But this definition also misses the mark by inferring that a songline might drift free, as a route frequented only by ancestral beings, rather than by Aboriginal people themselves, for example. With its navigational coda, Wikipedia’s entry comes closest to Chatwin’s formulation:
Within the animist belief system of Indigenous Australians, a songline, also called dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land (or sometimes the sky) which mark the route followed by localised ‘creator-beings’ during the Dreamtime. The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting.
A knowledgeable person is able to navigate across the land by repeating the words of the song, which describe the location of landmarks, waterholes, and other natural phenomena … By singing the songs in the appropriate sequence, indigenous people could navigate vast distances, often travelling through the deserts of Australia’s interior.
sampling cultures by immersion between writers’ festivals and stints in New York and London. For Chatwin’s principal biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin understood ‘nomadism’ to be an ancient driving force in world cultures and Australian Aborigines ‘were a people on whom he could graft his 15-year-old theory’.1
Chatwin’s main anthropological informants shared similar impressions of his readiness to make five from two and two
Chatwin’s own definition appears early in the book, for the term had not previously appeared in relation to Aboriginal religion or mythology and he was introducing his international readers to a fresh set of ideas. The term ‘songline’ itself was not a neologism; it had been used previously in musicological contexts in discussions of verse, in Australia and beyond. Indeed, in 1987 musicologists Catherine Ellis and Linda Barwick published a paper titled ‘Musical Syntax and the Problem of Meaning in a Central Australian Songline’ in Musicology Australia. This was a distance adrift of Chatwin’s notion of song-derived lines on landscape, but it is quite likely that his interest in nomadic song had brought the term into view.
In fact, Chatwin had already committed himself to the ‘songline’ paradigm before arriving in the country for the first of two brief visits during 1983 and 1984. His stated interest on arrival was in ‘nomadism’, and it seemed logical that he would seek out Australian Aborigines, having already written firsthand accounts of other nomadic and hunter–gatherer peoples. Nomadism had a particular resonance for Chatwin. He had become rather a nomad himself as he moved around the world,
That may be, but the real interplay in the book is not between Chatwin and Aboriginal people but between Chatwin and the desert itself. For having located dystopia in the townships and truckstops of Central Australia, Chatwin’s desert utopia emerges from his conversations (often cryptic and incomplete) with a select cast of anthropologist–savants and cryptic Aboriginal informants. In pursuing his interrogatory technique, modelled on Jacques le fataliste, Chatwin believed that he was tapping the eternal cultural truths he had encountered in forgotten corners of other continents, in manuscripts or paintings he had handled as an agent for Sotheby’s auction house, or in the texts of books he admired. This sense of individual epiphany, as evoked by the powerful sense of ‘homecoming’ he had felt while sleeping under the stars with the nomadic Beja people of Africa, far from civilisation, helps to explain why it is that The Songlines is, when all’s said and done, mainly about Bruce Chatwin himself. The thing to remember about Aboriginal religion and the way it has been constructed in the Australian imagination is that very little of its understanding has been conveyed directly by Aboriginal people themselves. Or to put it another way, the key insights which have been made into Aboriginal cosmology can often be traced to rare and privileged encounters between remarkable Aboriginal men or women who saw the benefit in brokering their esoteric knowledge to a particular, rather select group of Europeans. A smaller number of those Europeans – men and women such as Carl and T.G.H. Strehlow, Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, R.H. Mathews and Daisy Bates, Ursula McConnel and Alfred Howitt, Howard Morphy, Nicolas Peterson, Nancy Munn, Les Hiatt, and Peter Sutton (to name a few) – have possessed the gift of communicating that knowledge. But how many Australians are aware of it?
At first sight one might draw a contrast between the versions of Aboriginal cosmology which have become accessible in a limited way through academic texts, and those which have become widely accessible through art, particularly in the period since Western Desert paintings began appearing over the shoulders of politicians and company directors. Accessibility does not imply understanding, of course, and one only has to read the reductive captions for Aboriginal artworks in major galleries to understand that, once again, we encounter that familiar feeling of encountering a concept without
a hard centre. Aboriginal art has shifted so quickly over a short span, during which ideals of innovation and dynamism have largely displaced those of conservatism and reiteration, that the naïve viewer of the works must be experiencing something akin to encountering Carravaggio, Renoir, Constable, Cézanne, and Lichtenstein in the same room. It is hard enough to distil chronologies of style, let alone to discern how the Dreaming might inform the sequence of works, and, if so, whether that concept becomes explicable at all.
Of course, if one attempts to run the thread of ‘the Dreaming’ or ‘songlines’, or even ‘country’ (perhaps the most recent esoteric term), through a gala exhibition of artistic expressions in various media by Aboriginal people from the tropics to the desert and from urban centres and country towns, it is axiomatic that the common denominator will not be resonant with meaning. Even if the popular appetite for such content-rich offerings still seems to be expanding, it is easy to see that the core philosophical concepts of Aboriginal religion are now so diluted in such events that they are close to meaningless. It is arguable that this slippery decline began long before Songlines, perhaps as long ago as 1788.
WAboriginal song poetry, and he may have unwittingly supplied the link Chatwin required between the classic corpus of ceremonial song and an individual Aboriginal traveller’s itinerary and obligations. Elkin’s text related to song cycles performed in ritual contexts, in which idealised routes and ancestral paths were reiterated, but his reference to ‘an aid to memory’ may well have suggested something more exciting and radical to Chatwin:
The Songlines is, when all’s said and done, mainly about Bruce Chatwin himself
These journeyings took a long time; so do the chanting and singing. The ‘roads’ or routes must be followed and everything of significance sung, because the past is perpetually and casually related to the present … There is therefore geographical and temporal sequence in the order of the songs and chants, and this is an aid to memory … While a Songman was chanting unfalteringly, and without notice, the Ngurlmak (or Ubar) ritual psalm-like chants for half an hour’s taperecording, a headman sitting near by commented that the Ngurlmak according to the text, was now in that country, then in another place, and so on, ever coming nearer, until at last it was just where we were making the recording.7
hat of the texts, and particularly those informing Chatwin’s research for Songlines?
There is no doubt that Chatwin did an amount of anthropological reading before reaching Australia in 1982. Two authors loomed large from the classical canon: T.G.H. Strehlow and A.P. Elkin. Both discussed Aboriginal song, but not as Chatwin came to see it. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia (1971) was unavailable in most overseas libraries, and Chatwin did not sight it until he reached Australia.2 He made a particular point of visiting Strehlow’s widow in Adelaide and spent a morning reading through his manuscript material. It provided the revelation Chatwin was seeking: ‘I sat down, only for a morning [and] suddenly realised everything that I rather hoped these songlines would be, just were’.3 Strehlow had been the first to study and publish extended series of Aboriginal verse forms, although he had ‘wavered between calling these poems, ‘songs’ or ‘chants’.4 Chatwin was familiar with Elkin’s work and he may have read his Arnhem Land Music, copublished in 1953 with the musicologist Trevor Jones.5 Elkin mentioned song cycles and lines along which songs were traded in Arnhem Land. It is here, perhaps, that we can see the origins of Chatwin’s misconception. Elkin and Jones were among the first to discuss and map ‘song routes’, although they made it plain enough that these routes related to the distribution of ceremonial songs, rather than any individual records of travel from site to site.6 Elkin was to become a great enthusiast for
This was the compelling idea underpinning the construction of Chatwin’s ‘songlines’. It is worth noting that when he came to account for this formulation in the book, he did so without reference to any anthropological authority or even to an orthodox view, but only to the knowledge he had gleaned through his visits to Central Australia, particularly through the fictional outsider–anthropologist Arkady, his story’s lead character who had ‘learned of the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as “Dreaming-tracks” or “Songlines”…’8 Chatwin’s narrator and Arkady finessed the concept in their rather platitudinous question-and-answer repartee. ‘He went on to explain,’ Chatwin writes, ‘how each totemic ancestor, while travelling through the country, was thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of his footprints, and how these Dreamingtracks lay over the land …’ This was poetic and harmless enough, but in the uncertain terrain he was negotiating between fact and fiction, Chatwin had more to say:
‘A song’, he said, was both map and direction-finder. ‘Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’
‘And would a man on “Walkabout” always be travelling down one of the Songlines?’
‘In the old days, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Nowadays, they go by train or car’
Chatwin was by no means the first or the last to reduce complex human behaviour rooted deep in
sophisticated cultural mores to such simplicity. In his defence, he had taken the bewilderingly labrynthine Songs of Central Australia as his key text and must have wrestled hard with it. He was unable to glean more from it, though, than the base principle that sites could be revealed through song, and that Aboriginal song had all the qualities and grandeur of epic poetry found elsewhere in the world. The fact that Strehlow’s work lent no credence to the idea that the ritual elicitation of sites along Dreaming trajectories could be harnessed and consulted for everyday commuting across the desert, much like a series of bus routes, seems not to have bothered Chatwin.
important to understand that while ‘Dreaming’ emerged at least partly from discourse between Aboriginal and European people engaged in performance and elicitation of ritual knowledge, ‘songlines’ arrived in Bruce Chatwin’s suitcase.
Very little of the understanding about Aboriginal religion and the way it has been constructed in the Australian imagination has been conveyed directly by Aboriginal people themselves
For many of those who have grown accustomed to its use, the term ‘songlines’ seems to transmit something essential about Aboriginal cosmology and religion; perhaps the notion of Dreamings conforming to single directional lines appealed to a culture grounded in Kantian linearity. The term posited a simple antidote to the toxic notion of terra nullius; by proposing that the vast continent is laced with songlines, one need not go into ponderous enumeration of the number of Aboriginal languages, or the distribution of Aboriginal groups either pre- or post-contact. As a metaphysical framework, ‘songlines’ are simply there, like a network of broadband cables under the pavement. In fact, I recall the conversations with Peter Sutton and Chris Anderson thirty years ago, when we were preparing Dreamings, as to whether we might include a map of the London Underground in the book, to better illustrate the concept for a broader public. At the time it did appear that if you had the right ticket and knew the song, you could take the Ancestor Line through all the desert stations; I’m sure it was Sutton himself who demurred, having already worked on a dozen land claims and knowing that it was never that simple. It is the complexity of the Dreaming system – the baffling sets of branch lines which diverge and may not converge again, the way the ticket machine works and how the fare is collected, not to mention the hairpin bends and spaghetti junctions.
There is little doubt that Chatwin himself would be astonished to know that the term has stuck, and that it has even more currency today, thirty years later. Partly for that reason it is worth exploring just what he meant by it, how far adrift of the facts he might have been, and whether we might do better today in terms of understanding and explaining the mechanisms of Aboriginal religion, relationships to land, mythology, and song. Of course, every English term for an Aboriginal concept will fall short, but it is
The fact that it has been taken up by popular culture and, indeed, by some anthropologists, does not alter the fact that the expression also entails other risky assumptions. Chatwin considered that the desert model of long lines of sites applied across Aboriginal Australia, for example, but this is unlikely to have been the case. While all Aboriginal groups for which we have data believe in (or believed in) totemic ancestors, whose actions helped form the landscape and introduced precedents for kinship, language, customs, and material culture, these ancestors were not necessarily the travelling, route-finding ancestors of Central Australia. Indeed, if we turn to the great body of anthropological research still locked away in land-claim files, or to the reports summarising that research, there is a clear consensus that three forms of Dreaming applied in Central Australia:
AALITRA
The Australian Association for Literary Translation
TRANSLATING
AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE
AALITRA presents ALICE PUNG
KAREN VIGGERS
LILY YULIANTI FARID
2pm – 5.30pm on Saturday, September 16 2017
Boyd Community Hub 207 City Road, Southbank, VIC 3006
Thanks to the support of Copyright Agency, this is a free event but bookings are required.
Please email Elaine Lewis (elaine.lewis@gmail.com) or phone 03 9614 0494
Travelling Dreamings are those which went on long travels, crossing several estates. Their songs and rituals often involve a meeting of several different groups. Estate Dreamings are those which travelled generally within the estate of a group. Localised Dreamings are those which moved only in a certain locality within an estate; they are usually associated with a particular geographical feature.9
No one has satisfactorily mapped the relative proportional distribution of these three main types, but it seems clear that Dreamings of the first type, lending themselves most obviously to the model of extensive Dreaming tracks, are concentrated in the desert regions. Dreamings of the second type become more numerous in northern Australia, and more sedentary Dreamings of the third type are concentrated in south-eastern Australia, where the extended Dreaming tracks model appears least applicable.
Chatwin may not have been concerned by the fact that his songlines model was overtly male in character, having apparently little to do with the lives or trajectories of Aboriginal women. He arrived in Australia too soon to witness the phenomenon of Aboriginal women taking a lead role in the Western Desert art movement, initially at Yuendumu in late 1984, followed by other centres. In the meantime, he reasonably assumed that Aboriginal men were the main decision makers when it came to travel and following ancestral trajectories. He
would have been correct in that assumption, although Nancy Munn’s study of Walbiri iconography (1973) would have given him pause for thought if he had consulted it. Munn acknowledged the primacy of the ‘sitepath’ framework in the iconography of men’s drawings, by which movement across the landscape is depicted by a sequence of concentric circles (named sites) joined by lines or tracks:
Because of men’s more extensive and precise geographical knowledge, circle-line figures are in wider use among men than women; the close association of this geographical information with the ancestral routes brings it into the sphere of knowledge linked with masculine cult. A woman’s information, on the other hand, is confined primarily to the names of a few major sites along tracks of ancestors within her own segment of the community country… [H]er attention centres upon the various ancestors within her country at large, rather than upon the details of particular ancestral routes. Thus when I asked some women for more precise information regarding site names and the routes of ancestors, they said that I should address these queries to men.10
Munn has not been the only Central Australian anthropologist to observe the distinction between men’s and women’s approaches towards conceptualising and mapping their respective cultural landscapes, although
the Aboriginal women’s iconography has rarely been studied in its own right.11 That is understandable perhaps when it is realised that anthropologists such as Norman Tindale, Mervyn Meggitt, Fred Myers, and even Munn herself were faced with documenting elaborate, multi-site drawings made by men, while women’s drawings tended towards simplistic circled renderings of single sites. At Ooldea in 1934, for example, Tindale recorded an eight-metre long ground drawing by senior men, detailing aspects of the encounter between the Kunkarunkara (Seven Sisters) and the Wati Nyiru. The drawing was traced as the story was told over a twohour period, during which ‘the audience had shuffled and moved along the sandy ground, without rising to their feet and thus had kept place with the growth of the pictographic record of the progress of the story’.12 A comparison of this particular drawing with crayon drawings documenting the same set of mythological events (gathered by Tindale and Charles Mountford, among others) makes it clear that the drawing’s execution and content – in terms of what it included and omitted – reflected the knowledge and contributions of those present on that day at Ooldea in 1934. On other occasions, with a different mix of senior men, the drawing might contain a core set of the same desert waters, but might include a range of other localities and apparent detours. To return to the London Underground analogy, we might expect individuals domiciled or based at different points along different tube lines to return variant maps of the system, omitting some sections and including others, if they were asked.
The rhythm and tempo of Dreaming itineraries is/was not set out in any particular form, let alone proscribed by songs, for those performances might also vary considerably, depending on the presence of key individuals. This is not to say that those individuals would not be reproducing their store of verses with absolute precision. Fred Myers has provided a cadenced account of the travels of the Pintubi man, Maantja, and his various companions around their Western Desert countries during the early twentieth century; we can only conclude that these young men went more or less where they pleased, and with whom, while remaining perfectly aware of the idealised templates of Dreaming ancestors. While there were occasions on which individuals (particularly initiates) would travel under instruction from designated site to site, those were exceptional events. As Myers put it:
Groups were fluid in composition and travelled according to varying circumstances and stimuli, social and environmental rather than ordained by the Dreaming: Individuals or small aggregates of families moved through the landscape for purposes of their own, seeing evidence of other people nearby, going to visit them, travelling with them for a time, and then returning to their own more typical grounds.13
One might add that it was this very informality of movement that threw into relief the order, sequence, and logic of the Dreaming-track template, which ritual and song impressed on all those traversing the country in those former times, and which still resonates today, to varying degrees.
The point is that there might be two explanations for the annoying tendency of ‘songlines’ to vary sufficiently from the ideal, settled state assumed by Chatwin. The first is that accepted knowledge of the Dreaming tracks was never crystallised or codified into a single version. It was reconstituted afresh through an endlessly repeating series of differing ritual contexts – endless that is, until the chain of transmission began faltering during the twentieth century.
The second explanation for the variation is allied to the first, but relates to the fact that the Dreaming lies somewhere between a narrative containing a sequence of events, told in historic terms (albeit not necessarily sequential), and a timeless state in which history is collapsed. It is precisely the combination of those two qualities or characteristics, which makes the Dreaming, Jukurrpa, Altjira or whatever else it may be called across the Australian continent, such a remarkable cosmology, one that should not be allowed to slip into reductive caricature. The combination allows the Dreaming to be seen both as a referent for ‘secular’ existence, and as a suddenly expanding sacred field which infuses all and everything.
If the Dreaming has a source and state of stasis, it is in the landscape itself, or its particular features whose genesis can be sheeted home to particular Ancestors, but it is never confined to the landscape. It emanates, and the evidence for its presence (aside from the proof in the landscape) is found in song, art, and embellishment, sacra and knowledge, as well as the living receptacles of ancestral presence – people, animals, plants, things, the elements and any nameable phenomena. All are classified in Dreaming terms, nothing stays outside, and anything strange must be assimilated or shunned altogether.
That the Dreaming can be regarded as a philosophical system or construct has been more or less evident since Spencer and Gillen intensified their fieldwork studies of the Arrernte and related groups during the 1890s. Subsequent anthropologists, particularly Ashley Montagu, William Stanner and Elkin (himself a theologian), came much closer to defining it in philosophical terms. Out of that discourse, which a succession of anthropologists have pursued over subsequent decades, it is possible to distil some defining elements. These seem to apply across Australia, whether in the Western Desert, where the networks of multi-stranded ancestral routes link adjacent local groups and even broader language groups, or in regions such as Arnhem Land or south-eastern Australia, where the site-path framework tends to be reduced to single ‘master narratives’, often
overshadowed by more discrete Ancestral ‘events’ and more local allegiances.
The nuances within and between the forms are bewildering in their complexity, but perhaps three main features emerge. The first is that the Dreaming exists without an original cause. The second is that it synthesises the past and the present, reducing history to events extending only so far as one’s grandparents’ time, beyond which timeless totemic identities supersede or extinguish individual identities. The third is the primary role of ritual and associated sacra in enabling what Ashley Montagu termed the ‘essence of the non-apparent’ to be revealed, particularly through initiation. Elkin formulated the Dreaming more than once, but hardly more succinctly than in these terms: ‘For the Aboriginal philosopher or simple believer, the cosmos is the appearance in phenomena, inorganic and organic, of the Dreaming, which in itself does not become phenomena, but without which the latter would not be.’14
Now this three-part formulation may well be clumsy or difficult to grasp, and it may not satisfy many anthropologists, but perhaps it offers a means of understanding the Dreaming as an actual philosophical system with a core, rather than a cosy zen-like state that might be somehow activated by being ‘on country’ or by knowing the right song. Formulating or defining the Dreaming carries its own risks of course, not the least being to invite criticism from those who might regard any attempt to authenticate a ‘classical’ version as exclusionary and élitist. Surely it is up to Aboriginal people themselves to pronounce on which versions qualify as ‘Dreaming’, and to suggest that transmission has either ceased or no longer delivers the authentic product is a fraught exercise, in political terms at least. That is not my intention, however. I am reminded of Tarkovsky’s extraordinary film Andrei Rublev (1966), in which a fourteen-year-old boy claims that his father, a master bell-maker, had passed him the secrets of the craft before his violent death in a Russian village devastated by civil strife in the Middle Ages. A prince’s emissary who comes to the village specifically to commission a new bell reluctantly engages the boy, with the threat of execution if he is lying. The bell rings truly and one expects to see the boy triumphant. Instead he is devastated, for he had lied. His father had told him nothing – and yet transmission had occurred. This cannot be unlike the situation in which many Aboriginal people find themselves today. Their link to the Dreaming has been severed by colonialism and its effects, but the nature of their inheritance should not be dismissed. Something unique to their experience must fill the gap; the bell need not crack.
Songlines, it had become necessary for anthropologists to qualify their analyses of the Dreaming. This stemmed partly from an awareness that its power and effect had greatly diminished in the wake of Western influence. It also derived from the realisation that the Dreaming need not always conform rigidly to the classical ideal, or to the three precepts mentioned above. The notion that the Dreaming collapses time (or eliminates chronology to the extent that history effectively disappears) has been effectively challenged by the anthropologist Erich Kolig. He observed that while in the idealised Dreaming ‘the world was seen as unalterably determined in its major patterns and quite logically, historical process and knowledge of it paled into total insignificance’, the reality was that the content of the Dreaming was ‘far from stable and unchanging, being constantly subject to revision through the incorporation of new experiences – as long as these could be absorbed without causing a rupture of the traditional doctrine’.15
Aboriginal people were intrigued by the missionary proposition of something responsible for the Dreaming itself
We can imagine that the ideal paradigm, in which ‘the past was within the present and the future’, to borrow Elkin’s phrase, with no room for variation or change was tested to the limit on the Arnhem Land coast during the early eighteenth century with the annual arrival of the Macassan fishing fleets, bringing entirely new commodities such as cloth and metal. Records of mythology as well as bark paintings produced during the early twentieth century (not long after the trade was halted by the new federal government in 1911) confirm that the Dreaming system of the Yolngu people did, in fact, accommodate this intrusion. The Macassans were not invaders; they did not threaten the structures of the Yolngu community. Nor, one can say, did the first missionaries in Arnhem Land, or elsewhere in Australia.
By the 1960s, a generation before Chatwin’s
In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that Aboriginal people were intrigued by the missionary proposition of a first cause, something responsible for the Dreaming itself. If that argument could be accepted, then the presence of God could be accommodated as an adjunct to the Dreaming, without necessarily replacing it. This seems to have been what occurred in several mission fields, particularly in Central Australia. In 1967 for example, when Pastor Tom Fleming negotiated with senior Warlpiri men and women to build a church on land at Yuendumu, he addressed a full meeting of the community with the proposition that God had seen their Warlpiri and their Dreamings develop but would now like to settle down with them, in a church built on their land. Would they be prepared to give the land back to God, he asked? Fleming’s proposition was translated into Warlpiri, discussed, and was agreed. The church was completed in 1968. A plaque at its entrance com-
memorates the Warlpiri decision ‘to give the land back to God’. In the meantime, ceremonial life continued unabated; five years later, Fleming installed a stainedglass window featuring shield designs based on the key Warlpiri Jukurrpa.
During the 1970s and 1980s there was general agreement among anthropologists that any discussion or evaluation of the Dreaming must take historical change into consideration, and that the paradigm itself had shifted. Two factors intervened to arrest that trend, or at least to prevent that awareness spreading to popular understandings of Aboriginal cosmology. The first was the ongoing effect of the legal claims under the 1976 Northern Territory Land Rights Act; this rigorous process distilled and valorised undisturbed knowledge of Dreaming Ancestors, tracks and sites. While it became obvious that this store of knowledge was retained by a dwindling number of elderly men and women of high degree, with rather thin evidence for continued transmission to a younger generation, this mattered little in the context of the Act and its implementation. The test lay in the moment, not in the future, even as that future descended upon community after community.
The second factor was the extraordinary efflorescence of Aboriginal art, in Arnhem Land but particularly in the Western Desert, where the movement was especially stimulated by the energising effects of the land-claim process and the rise of the outstation movement. This context also spawned a new generation of quasi-anthropologists – often students or individuals seeking an alternative life away from large cities – who became engaged in service industries associated with Aboriginal tourism and most particularly, the remarkable expansion in Aboriginal art centres. This sector began generating its own interpretations of Aboriginal spirituality, forming close relationships with senior men and women, and coming to know the country through Aboriginal eyes. ‘Songlines’ was an accepted term of art among this loose grouping, but a new phrase was also coming into use: being ‘on country’ (without the definite article), indicating the appropriate degree of empathy and insight.
The art movement brought the terms ‘Dreaming’ and ‘songlines’ into everyday discourse in mainstream Australia, from multinational corporate boardrooms to education department curricula. In these contexts, the terms were especially soft-centred, hardly amenable to definition; few felt the need to define them (even in museums and art galleries), and few asked for those definitions. It seemed best that this all remained rather hazy, open-ended and non-exclusive – particularly in terms of who, among a broader range of people defined as Aboriginal, might actually possess the Dreaming and its songlines. There was no doubt at all about the baseline –desert communities and Arnhem Land, Cape York and the Kimberley. As older artists who had grown up ‘footwalking’ the desert or the Arnhem Land plateau began to fade from the painting scene and younger artists took over, it was easy to assume that they had received their elders’ full knowledge. Certainly, the captions attached to paintings in art centres and galleries did not suggest that any slippage had occurred.
In this way, those earlier initiatives by anthropologists, and some historians, to mark the disjunctions in transmission of the Dreaming, and the fundamental shifts in its hold on Aboriginal cosmology, were somehow diluted and even denied. The media, the art industry, and even museums developed a stake in bolstering the sense of the Dreaming’s continued vitality – so much so, in fact, that the Dreaming seems to have become redefined as a dynamic, innovative force. For the general public, the proof of this lies in a rapidly expanding Aboriginal arts industry embracing all genres in a festive, affirming spirit in which the Dreaming is routinely evoked. In this way, the Dreaming has become assimilated to a timeless and invigorating paradigm of renewal, ahistorical in its character, oddly mirroring the understanding of an ‘eternal present’ held by its own most conservative practitioners.
Are we talking about the same thing? Is the ‘Dreaming’ of the present assimilable to the ‘Dreaming’ which anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century considered to be under such stress? Is its contemporary elasticity an illusion? Has some other dynamic replaced or sidelined
Bruce Chatwin, 1984 (photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)
the Dreaming so that only a handful of ‘old believers’ and an even smaller number of younger recipients retain the ‘essence of the non-apparent’ which once dominated every flickering campfire across the continent? Was Strehlow correct when he spoke half a century ago of a ‘terrible silence descending’ across the ritual grounds of Central Australia? Is the hyperactive contemporary Aboriginal art scene a defiant attempt to forestall that inevitability, or has it simply gained a momentum which will re-render the Dreaming as an amalgam of beliefs around a ‘songline’ concept ?
These questions are worth asking, for they assume that the Dreaming documented in the texts, audiofiles, films, and land-claim testimonies must have a hard centre, and even if that centre cannot endure in its old form, Aboriginal people have already ensured that enough of it is known and preserved to constitute a treasured cultural possession which should not be further softened or diluted.
There is no doubt that Chatwin’s Songlines filled a vacuum in the popular imagination. Its durability over three decades suggests that a popular and accessible version of Aboriginal cosmology was always needed, at least as much as the terms ‘never-never’, ‘walkabout’, and ‘Dreamtime’ which constituted earlier attempts to fill that void. But these are poor substitutes for any term which derives directly from Aboriginal philosophical thinking.
The quest is not new of course. One way or another, the idea has exercised the best minds in Australian anthropology and jurisprudence, but the discourse has been largely confined to the academy and the rarefied zone of the land-claim process. Tracing that discourse to its roots in the bush, to the generosity of Aboriginal men and women who have witnessed the vanishing intellectual capital of their own elders and understand the stakes involved, should be the aim.
Thirty years after its publication, it is evident enough that Bruce Chatwin’s book was much less about Aboriginal culture, or ‘songlines’ in particular than about his own rather strained efforts to find a universal human rationale for the nomadic, self-sufficient lifestyle he and his moleskin notebooks now represent. It is probably too easy to belittle Chatwin’s efforts to ‘graft his theory’ onto Aboriginal people of the Western Desert and to place his songline template over their complex cultural processes relating to landscape, belief, and oral literature. After all, Chatwin risked a lot in the name of literature, and in hindsight he trod more lightly than many others in his quest. But whether the Dreaming retains its core or not, it should surely be understood in the terms of its original practitioners and adherents, now that sufficient of us are prepared to listen. Perhaps ‘songlines’ will be overtaken by a new terminology that emerges from Aboriginal languages themselves, terms such as the Warlpiri Jukurrpa, the Warumungu Wirnkarra or the Arrernte Altyerre. g
Philip Jones is a historian and museum ethnographer specialising in the historical trajectories of objects and images across cultural boundaries. Based at the South Australian Museum, he is writing histories of the Yuendumu Men’s Museum and of the artist–naturalist George French Angas.
ABR Patrons’ Fellowships, now worth $7,500 each, are funded by ABR’s many Patrons. We thank them warmly for enabling us to publish long-form journalism and for enabling writers and scholars to devote several weeks or months to a substantial topic.
Endnotes
1. Shakespeare, N. 1999. Bruce Chatwin. Harvill, London, p.404.
2. Pers. comm. P. Memmott, February 2017.
3. Shakespeare 1999, p.411.
4. Strehlow, T.G.H. 1971. Songs of Central Australia. Angus & Robertson, Sydney, p.xiii. During the book’s extended editing and publication process Strehlow had made his data available to the musicologists Alice Moyle and Catherine Ellis. The latter freely used the term ‘Aboriginal songs’ in her publications of the 1960s, based partly on Strehlow’s material.
5. Elkin, A.P. and Jones, T.A. 1953. Arnhem Land Music (North Australia).Oceania Monographs no. 9, University of Sydney.
6. Ibid, pp.23-26.
7. Elkin, A.P. 1979. The Australian Aborigines (revised edition), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp.303-304.
8. Arkady was based firmly on the Central Land Council contract anthropologist, Toly Sawenko.
9. See paragraph 30 of Murranji Land Claim, Report to Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 1987. The quotation is attributable to Peter Sutton (pers. comm. Feb. 2017). See also claim reports for Ti-Tree Station, Katherine, Tanami Downs, North Simpson, Mistake Creek, Muckaty, Tempe Downs & Middleton Ponds, among reports downloadable at: http://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/indigenous-australians/ publications-articles/land-native-title/aboriginal-land-commissioners-reports.
10. Munn, N. 1973. Walbiri iconography. Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp.130-131.
11. Christine Watson’s Piercing the ground. Balgo women’s image making and relationship to country ( Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003) provides a notable exception. See also Meredith Rowell, Para 160, Anmatjirra and Alyawarra Land Claim, Report to Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 1980 (ibid).
12.Tindale, N.B. 1959. Totemic beliefs in the Western Desert of Australia. Part 1: Women who became the Pleiades. Records of the South Australian Museum, vol.13, pp.305-332, at p.308.
13.Myers, F.R. 1991. Pintupi country, Pintupi self. Sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines. University of California Press, Berkeley, pp.88, pp.79-89.
14. Elkin, A.P. 1969. Elements of Australian Aboriginal philosophy. Oceania vol. 40, pp.85-98, at p.88
15. Kolig, E. 1995. ‘A Sense of History and the Reconstitution of Cosmology in Australian Aboriginal Society: The Case of Myth versus History’. Anthropos 90, pp.49-67, at p.53.
‘Myths and lies’
Billy Griffiths
THE VANDEMONIAN WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S TASMANIAN INVASION
by Nick Brodie
Hardie Grant Books
$29.99 pb, 422 pp, 9781743793114
Nick Brodie, a medievalist and ‘professional history nerd’, enjoys writing in a revelatory tone. His latest book, The Vandemonian War: The secret history of Britain’s Tasmanian invasion, claims to unveil ‘for the first time’ the ‘real story’ of the Tasmanian conflict in the 1820s and 1830s known as the Black War or the Vandemonian War. It is an argument against the generations of historians who have ‘failed to see through the myths and lies’ about Tasmania’s intensely militarised past. These nameless individuals, he contends, neglected crucial documents about the invasion –‘even when they knew of them’. The real Vandemonian War remained hidden, Brodie argues – ‘until now’.
The basis for Brodie’s claim is his ‘discovery’ of the inbound and outbound correspondence from the Colonial Secretary’s Office in the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office in Hobart, designated CSO1/1/320 and CSO41/1/1 (7578). Brodie seems to be unaware of Tasmanian Aboriginal curator Julie Gough’s ongoing project to transcribe the ‘7578’ files and to publish them online; he brushes over the extensive study of part of the ‘7578’ archive offered by N.J.B. Plomley in Friendly Mission (1966); and he declines to engage with the work of the ‘tiny fraction’ of historians who have breathed meaning and insight into this archive over recent decades. Indeed, he dispenses with this rich vein of scholarship in his first two footnotes and does not refer to the work of a single contemporary scholar in the text. Instead, he embarks on a fine-grained discussion of the primary source material: the troop orders, mission reports, and arms catalogues that ‘capture history as it happened’.
The Vandemonian War certainly
brings a wealth of rich material on frontier violence into the public domain, yet it will be difficult for most readers to discern what is new here, as Brodie claims that everything he has uncovered is new. ‘Everyone will be shocked,’ he warns at the start of his grand exposition: ‘Whole societies were deliberately obliterated. And genocide, I have come to realise, can be a starched white-collar crime.’
The book provides a detailed account of the military logistics in Tasmania between 1828 and 1832. Brodie’s characters are administrators, militiamen, paramilitary parties, regimental soldiers, mercenaries, brigadiers, commanders, sergeants, corporates, privates, special forces, and ‘Aboriginal auxiliaries’. He translates the conflict into the language of war, describing the various tactical strategies, pincer movements, and intelligence operations undertaken by the British. He even playfully opens one chapter with the line, ‘All was relatively quiet on the western front in early winter 1830.’ This embrace of the genre of military history underlines his core argument about the Vandemonian War: the conflict was industrial and intensely militaristic, but has been ‘de-militarised’ in popular memory ‘in favour of a narrative focused on sporadic skirmishes’.
The relentless blow-by-blow description of the individual campaigns is successful in conveying the systematic attempts by the British military and paramilitary to ‘harass Aboriginal people into surrender or degrade them into annihilation’. And the fact that Brodie hews so close to his sources will make the book a valuable resource to other scholars seeking easy access to this fragile archive. The sources provide a fascinating window on the transitory world of the frontier, and they are sometimes enriched by a discussion of the layered nature of the archive. In January 1830, for example, Richard Tyrrell reported an encounter with two Aboriginal people roasting kangaroo by their fires near the highland lakes. Suspecting others would be nearby, Tyrrell felt ‘reluctantly obliged to fire at the Two’. The Colonial Secretary later underlined this phrase, writing a single word in the margin of the report: ‘why?’ It is a revealing glimpse of puzzlement.
But the question of ‘why?’ remains unanswered in The Vandemonian War. Brodie gives little consideration to the intent behind the repeated missions, aside from broad statements about conquest and genocide. What was the purpose of the policy of ‘conciliation’? Was it simply, as he suggests, another word for ‘ethnic cleansing’? What of the humanitarian rhetoric, even genuine concern, expressed by colonial leaders? This is where some dialogue with other scholars – such as Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, James Boyce, Nicholas Clements, Fae Dussart, Murray Johnson, Tom Lawson, Alan Lester, Ian McFarlane, and Rebe Taylor – would have strengthened the analysis.
There is also remarkably little space given to the Aboriginal people against whom this war was waged. What strategies did Aboriginal people employ to resist the ‘mass military mobilisation’? Brodie struggles to move beyond the documentary record, instead lamenting that ‘The surviving Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land mostly died in exile and the Vandemonian War disappeared from public memory with them.’ Nevertheless, he claims credit for highlighting the ‘complex spectrum of inter-cultural interactions that has been too often overlooked in Vandemonian history’, adding, tautologically, ‘But cultural exchanges often went two ways.’
If framed differently, The Vandemonian War might have become another important contribution to the so-called ‘history wars’, for it makes a strong case for the Tasmanian frontier to be viewed through the lens of formal warfare. Yet Brodie only makes a single veiled reference to the charged debate, and in doing so he groups both sides together, dismissing it as a fight over ‘different versions of the same lie’. It is only now, he asserts, that the ‘lie’ of sporadic skirmishes has been vanquished: the Vandemonian War was more warlike, more orchestrated, and more horrific than anyone ever thought or believed – until Brodie wrote this breathless military history. g
Billy Griffiths is a historian and Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation.
Shifting sand
Shaun Crowe
REBOOT:
A DEMOCRACY MAKEOVER TO EMPOWER AUSTRALIA’S VOTERS
by Richard Walsh
Melbourne University Press
$24.99 pb, 128 pp, 9780522872156
For the past few years, teaching at the Australian National University, I have asked first year politics students whether they would personally consider joining a political party. The question usually produces a few enthusiastic Labor activists, one or two Greens members, and the odd brave Young Liberal. Once, a student flirted with the Sex Party. But the overwhelming majority, though intelligent and socially engaged, find the suggestion distasteful. In three years, the total rarely exceeded five per cent of the cohort.
Academic studies, both local and international, usually tell a similar story. Peter Mair, a political scientist and expert on party systems, claimed that advanced democracies were now experiencing ‘democracy without a demos … [with] the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics’. As Mair found in his final book, Ruling The Void (2013), major parties were eroding on almost every front, with fewer members, less ongoing social loyalties, and declining lifelong voting patterns. As a result, elections were more volatile, built as they were on softer, shifting sand.
These changes have produced a persistent anxiety in Australian politics, at least since Kevin Rudd’s first demise in 2010. A procession of prime ministers, the rise and fall of micro parties, the reappearance of One Nation; politics is in flux. For pessimistic observers, it feels like the system is moving in a more uncertain, less productive, perhaps even ‘broken’ direction.
After a lifetime of working around politics – as a youthful agitator with Oz magazine, and later journalist, editor, and publisher – Richard Walsh has produced his own remarkably comprehensive solution to this malaise. Reboot: A democracy
makeover to empower Australia's voters calls for nothing less than a complete constitutional revolution: with an elected, but mostly ceremonial president, an indirectly elected prime minister whose Cabinet is populated by apolitical experts, and a House of Representatives liberated from party politics.
Like Marx, Walsh argues that tradition, weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living, is holding the country back (“the structures we have inherited are themselves a product of our cultural and historical traditions; they also, to some extent, legitimise those traditions”). Reboot reimagines Australian politics from the ground up.
Walsh’s proposed system is complicated, sometimes bafflingly so, but its main target is the political party. He seems to genuinely detest the institution. In his depiction, parties are little more than snake-pits. They elect dull hacks for public office, depend on corrupt institutions to survive, and suppress any civic spirit that might otherwise prosper: ‘Only the hyper-ambitious and factional stooges are prepared to give up their valuable time to attend branch meetings. Anyone with half a brain knows that these organisations are breathtakingly undemocratic – the important decisions are top-down, not bottom-up.’
Because of this, the core of Reboot ’s new political model is the ‘uncoupling’ of political representation and advocacy. This means taking ideological activists out of parliament, and replacing them with ‘good and independent people … not beholden to any political party’. Walsh’s ideal representative is unclouded by ideology or group loyalty, open to the best available argument and evidence.
This alternative universe is founded on its own normative model of political behaviour. While never stating it explicitly, Walsh is inherently suspicious of any collective approach to politics. The idea that people could be united by an ongoing set of interests, ideas, or social preferences – and that a group of voters could feel a lasting affinity with that platform – is perplexing, even sinister to him. He claims that parties could only attach themselves to trade unions or corporate enterprises because of financial depend-
ence, never an alignment of purpose.
If there is an analogue in Australian history to Walsh’s analysis, it is the now defunct Australian Democrats. Throughout the party’s history, Democrat politicians claimed to transcend the conflicts shaping political competition; suggesting that demands could be reconciled through a commitment to evidence and expertise. In the same spirit, Reboot believes that parliament should be defined by blank-slate deliberation, rather than social representation. While any call for better faith dialogue is welcome, not all political disputes can be overcome through this kind of discussion. Some issues involve fundamentally conflicting positions, because of either finite resources or different images of the good life and society. The Democrats themselves learned this in the late 1990s, when they split over economic policy and the Goods and Services Tax. We can never fully remove politics from parliament.
But while Walsh’s solution might be misguided, he is right that the party system is under great stress. In increasingly complex societies, political preferences are fractured along more than one cleavage. It is possible that, rather than posing a threat to the concept of parties, the growth of smaller groups is simply the system adjusting to the new demands being placed on it. If true, and if parliament is going to function, the old and new parties will need to learn to work together. Voters will also need to react more maturely. This is to say that politics will be different, but not necessarily fatal to parties. My skeptical university students are still invested in politics, and their passions frequently overlap with party policy; their energy can still be harnessed in new ways. Importantly, major organisations seem to be slowly reassessing their relationship with members and activists — understanding them as electoral assets, rather than ideological burdens. If parties wish to prove Walsh wrong, and take themselves off the endangered species list, these new challenges need to be embraced. g
Shaun Crowe recently completed his doctorate at the Australian National University, writing about political parties and Australian democracy. ❖
Not quite the book he wanted
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Portrait of a colonising and ruthless father
Brian Matthews
A FÜHRER FOR A FATHER: THE DOMESTIC FACE OF COLONIALISM by Jim Davidson NewSouth, $29.99 pb, 264 pp, 9781742235462
When some years ago I read Jim Davidson’s outstanding biography, Lyrebird Rising (1994), I was initially concerned by what seemed to be his potentially distorting fascination with the scene-stealing Louise Hanson-Dyer. But I soon discovered I needn’t have worried. Jim Davidson is not the sort of biographer whose obsession with his subject overcomes proportion. On the contrary, his sense of humour, his alertness to the fallible, the ridiculous, and the noble reinforce rather than compete with his respect for, and absorption in, the recorded life. A style full of elegance, wit, and, when called for, irony, ranging from gentle to corrosive, constantly works sharply against any temptation to be over-impressed. In A Führer for a Father, however, this armoury is strained to its limits.
The title stands as an early warning: either it is ironic, pointing a little bleakly to an overbearing, uncompromising, but broadly acceptable tendency in the father, or it is meant to slide away from metaphor towards the meaning that the ordinary German word ‘führer’ has inevitably taken on since World War II: Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes – a title only ever accorded to, and assumed by, one man. Any doubt or equivocation on this point that we may entertain as we begin reading A Führer for a Father, Davidson clears up in the first sentence of the first paragraph:
There is a photo – inaccessible to me now – of my father (with Hitler moustache) gravely advancing towards the camera. He has just stepped off Princes Bridge, so part of the city of Melbourne is ranged behind him; he always drew on it more
than he cared to admit. In his right hand there’s a walking stick, with a silver top: it had been given to his grandfather by a prominent Chinese merchant of the town. Father’s firm grip indicates a governing principle of his life, the control of the exotic. Functionally, the stick would turn a limp after a motor accident into a stylised, emphatic strut. It became an instrument of authority.
Given its brevity, this is extraordinarily proleptic. The strut; the ‘swagger stick’ (as it was known in the Australian army) with its ornate top; the hint of pre-eminence (the city ‘ranged’ behind him); the posturing; the authoritarianism; the penchant for exoticism and adventurous travel – all these and much else will emerge graphically as the memoir gathers pace and detail. And the import of the initially rather gnomic subtitle – ‘The domestic face of colonialism’ – is also gradually revealed: the father establishes an ‘imperial dominance’ based on patriarchy; he seeks moral control over the family and its various outliers; like a colonising intruder he dominates and manipulates social relations and aspirations and attempts to exploit people economically. Davidson père is a monster – a narcissist, a pathological controller, in short a führer. A description of a formal photo of his parents not long married, taken, as many such photos were, at the Zoo, captures the sense of something at odds here, of vague yet nagging disquiet. His father is ‘almost elegant, standing in a fine coat with hands held by his side, plus his Hitler moustache … he looks at Olga commandingly … Olga returns the gaze, warily. Her smile
is checked, and not just by the camera. The Zoo, with its exotic contents, would have appealed to Jim as a suitable backdrop. But Olga was beginning to feel captive herself.’
The other important strand in Davidson’s narrative is of course his own memoir: it will be intermittently darkened, burdened, interrupted, and temporarily destabilised by the powerful intrusions of his colonising and often ruthless father, though it has its lighter moments. There are many successes and achievements, and there is his moving compassion for his mother who is no match, in all senses of that word, for the man she married and whom Davidson is above all concerned to re-establish in the family story – his own quiet version of the empire writes back.
Davidson is an accomplished biographer, one of whose several skills is the vignette. There are, for example, snapshots of his father’s serially adopted and discarded mistresses. At one point, Davidson explains, he ‘had two women on the go, and seems to have alternated them. One was … a toothy piece who displayed her bust like a built-in trophy, and didn’t have a great deal to say.’ The other, ‘pleasant and gently resilient … told me, as generous to him [the father] as to me, how he had ended their affair by saying that his first duty was to his son. She said this a few times, with such sincerity that for a time I believed it – as a new and mitigating aspect of him I had not seen. But eventually I realised that once again he had used me – as a cover for returning to the buxom one.’ Then there was his father’s new wife, Eve.
Eve inherited her [mother’s] small stature; was bustling and purposeful and dressed practically in slacks. Over
a strong jaw she had appealing brown eyes, and a pleasant subtle smile; she was less anxious than appraising. Generally she spoke in short sentences, occasionally breaking into what was less of a laugh than a cackle. Although her own art was pleasant and descriptive, she was drawn to the faces of Modigliani. Those slit eyes and blank faces looked pretty much alike to me, their severity a form of distancing from the world.
Threaded through the machinations of his – to put it mildly – unlikeable father are Davidson’s schooldays, his self-deprecating account of his university career (‘In my formal studies – until the very end – I was not distinguished’), his slowly emerging recognition of his sexuality, his travels and life abroad, especially in South Africa and London, and his developing research interests as a historian and writer. As he grew and matured and began successfully to follow academic and intellectual paths, Davidson would have pleased any father who was not intent on competing with him, who was not potentially homophobic, not consumed with ‘constant self-dramatisation’, who did not have a sturdy ‘sense of himself as the centre of the action’, and who was not vaguely racist. ‘The more I read about “the white man”,’ Davidson muses, ‘the more I recognised my father. Like so many boys across the Empire – right up to the 1950s, when Biggles was still taking flight – he grew up on imperial romances.’ The educated, urbane son and the restlessly competitive, disapproving, and, in certain half-admitted ways, disappointed father is a volatile mix, and volatility – to use a word that scarcely does justice to the cataclysms of some of his father’s interventions –duly ensued.
The book’s recollected emotions end ‘[I]n tranquillity’, but the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ brings only a troubled calm. Davidson is too canny an observer not to recognise tranquillity’s potential, after such insults, ‘malice’ and personal hurt, to come across as mere tranquillising, a species of cop-out. His father’s spirit, like Julius Caesar’s, is ‘mighty yet’; it has dominated the narrative, sometimes, especially towards the end, exasperatingly, and still ‘walks abroad’ enacting revenge through the unforgiving family. And so Davidson plays the last hand in this extraordinary, sombre, but utterly compelling memoir: he attacks the narcissist at his most vulnerable point: ‘I have come to accept [the behaviour of the family]. But my father’s ruthlessness is something else. I suspect he rather fancied a book being written about him … Well, here it is. Not quite the book he wanted.’ g
Brian Matthews’s books include a memoir, A Fine and Private Place (2000), and Manning Clark: A life (2008), which won the National Biography Award in 2010.
HARNESS THE POWER OF THE
WRITTEN WORD
‘A missing fraction’
Loneliness and disenchantment
Shannon Burns
THE TOWN
by Shaun Prescott
The Lifted Brow, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9780994606822
Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murnane’s filmmaker, Prescott’s narrator is a writer who claims to be researching ‘a book about the disappearing towns in the Central West region of New South Wales’. These towns ‘had not deteriorated economically, its residents had not flocked to the closest regional towns in search of work, the buildings had not been dismantled’. Instead, they had ‘simply disappeared’. When this project fails, he decides to write a history of the town he now lives in, in the hope of uncovering its ‘essence’.
The town’s inhabitants have a curious relationship with their history. According to the local librarian, ‘Nothing of note has ever happened in this town, and by the time it does, there will no longer be any point in remembering it … No one remembers how it got here, or why the presumed founders built it ...’ If it does have a significant history, the townspeople have since forgotten or wilfully expunged it.
The town is positioned somewhere between a coastal city and the deep interior – rural with a suburban flavour – with its outer region bordered by a mysterious shimmering ‘edge’. The main street is dotted with corporate franchises, and the ‘tentacle roads’ of the outer districts house ‘normal’ people who are nostalgic for an obscure past, own multiple cars, drink heavily, and resent outsiders.
The narrator befriends an assortment of eccentrics: a lonely and disenchanted male librarian, a lonely and disenchanted male bus driver (Tom), and a lonely and disenchanted unemployed man (Rick) – all of whom reflect the male narrator’s loneliness and disenchantment. The women in the novel are similarly melancholic, but less passive and pathetic: Ciara is an inquisitive and strong-willed radio announcer, Jenny a no-nonsense publican.
Most of the characters suspect that something has gone awry with their town. Jenny believes that it is in decline, Ciara is convinced that its blank history has rendered the townspeople docile and incurious, and the bus driver claims that ‘nothing in the town was one hundred per cent. There was always a missing fraction …’ The librarian speculates that ‘the truth of the town was uglier than we could imagine, even if no one knew what it was’, and some townspeople eventually theorise that ‘something bad had happened long before’ and ‘this unknown something was somehow connected’ to their bleak predicament.
Instead of speculating about the town’s deficit, Rick, who spends his days wandering the aisles of Woolworth, embodies its malaise. He is ‘yet to properly cross the transformative threshold’ into meaningful adulthood. This troubles him for a while, but Rick ultimately embraces his deficiencies and resolves to ‘plug’, ‘distort’, and ‘repurpose’ his memories, to reinforce his stunted life.
Late in the novel, a group of men who share the same name threaten the narrator, partly because he is an outsider who fails to behave in an ordinary way, and partly to protect the town against his scrutiny. ‘We now have everything
set perfectly in place,’ one of them says, ‘and so nothing needs to happen anymore.’ For these exemplary townsmen, ‘Nothing that happens now here is historical’ (Prescott is a master of tortured phrasing) and ‘History is in the past ... This is what people worked for. Farmers, builders, Anzacs, the lot … History can end, you know. It doesn’t need to keep going.’
Some readers may genuinely wonder what Prescott is driving at, but most will quickly identify the missing piece of the town’s puzzle, and the reason for its absence. Unlike The Castle or The Plains, The Town’s moral, social, and existential concerns are hard to misidentify.
The Town ’s surreal qualities and peculiar tone will make it compelling enough for many readers, despite the unevenness of Prescott’s prose. The repeated use of the passive voice is arguably fitting, given the narrator’s distinctive passivity, but dozens of sentences exhibit a cockeyed grammar that appears more careless than purposeful. Prescott also, occasionally, uses the wrong word. For instance: ‘I told them everything was true about England, that I could detect it in all of their proximities.’ He must mean ‘whenever I drew close to them’, but the literal meaning of what is written is far more puzzling. Others include: ‘Wherever the hole lead, it must surely arrive back’; and ‘… it was possible in my book to write that the town was suffused with “a barely perceptible sadness”, and it was possible to feel confident, as I was writing this sentence, that it did’. The last word of
that final sentence should, of course, be ‘was’, and Prescott clearly means ‘led’ or ‘leads’ in the one before it – but even then the sentence barely conveys what I take to be the intended meaning. The narrative logic is also hard to track. At one point, the narrator (who claims to have forgotten where he comes from) goes for a walk to the edge of the town. ‘At that remove,’ he says,
… the town existed only as a memory, and not a very vivid one. I was unable to remember the specific layout of its streets with any clarity. Only certain building façades came to mind, completely at random, and when I thought about Ciara I couldn’t picture her. She was a name and a series of barely connected facts, and none of these cohered.
Leaving the town means forgetting the town. Because of this – and given that the story is told in the past tense – we have to assume that everything reported about the town was recorded within its boundaries, as material for the narrator’s (seemingly abandoned) book. Yet we encounter exactly the same voice and narrative thread, without any reference to a subsequent loss of memory, after the narrator flees the town, and there are no clues about where or when the latter part of the account is recorded, if it is recorded at all. Perhaps the author abandoned the earlier logic in order to compound The Town’s unsettling effects, but I was more disenchanted than unsettled. g
Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and a past ABR Patrons’ Fellow.
PAlmost nothing A laborious translation of Modiano Phoebe Weston-Evans
SO YOU DON’T GET LOST IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron Quercus, $19.99 pb, 155 pp, 9780857054999
atrick Modiano’s most recent novel, published just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014, is his twenty-sixth to date, though one of a great number to arrive almost all at once in the English-speaking world. In the post-Nobel flurry to translate Modiano into English, the past two years have marked a shift in the author’s status from practically unknown to international renown.
Critics often remark that Modiano keeps reworking the same material, encouraged by the author’s own stated ‘impression’ of having written the same novel for the last thirty years. But just like the ostensible clues found in his work, such remarks should be taken with a grain of salt. There is much more at play than simple repetition. Rather than be the one to tell you something, Modiano is more likely to throw you off the scent.
Modiano is a writer of atmosphere – brooding, cinematic atmosphere conjured up by the most minimal means. So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, begins with the words, ‘Presque rien’ – ‘Almost nothing’, a stark Beckettian opening that perfectly captures a style that has become increasingly purified and condensed over the decades.
The setup is classically Modianesque The protagonist, writer Jean Daragane, bearing a considerable degree of resemblance to the author himself, is plunged into a mysterious investigation, obliged to play the amateur sleuth. The subject of the search remains tantalisingly – or excruciatingly, according to one’s tolerance for ambiguity – just out of frame. It all starts with a phone call out of the blue from a certain Gilles Ottolini, who has found Daragane’s address book and wishes to return it. This is no innocent
good turn; Ottolini has identified someone in the address book about whom he hopes to extract some information. The problem is that Daragane can’t –or won’t – remember anything about the individual in question.
After setting up the initial mystery, the investigation leads to a more personal and distant search, leaving the first case more or less in limbo. It involves a woman from Daragane’s past, Annie Astrand, in whose care he was left as a child. It is no spoiler to say that Annie vanishes only to reappear years later, raising the questions of why, where did she go, and did she really go to prison. Layers of stories within stories are recounted so evocatively that, although you think you know what has happened, when you try to pin anything down it falls away like sand.
On the surface, Modiano’s novels appear quite straightforward, which is partially due to his minimalist prose, but the structure loops and folds through complex temporal layers that can create a sense of vertigo. And not just within the space of one novel; Daragane describes a recurring dream about being cross-examined over his suspected involvement in a serious event in the past, but he is incapable of answering his interrogators’ questions. This scene, while perfectly coherent here, refers back to an earlier novel, After the Circus (1992), which begins with an oddly similar interrogation.
Readers already familiar with Modiano’s novels will note the reappearance of the couple from Out of the Dark (1996), Van Bever and Jacqueline, here renamed Chantal and Paul, as well as Colette Laurent, who appears in Afterimage (1993). There is also the village based on Jouy-en-Josas, the setting of Suspended
Sentences (2006), among others These are just some of the fibres of a rich and complex tapestry weaving back and forth across the length and breadth of Modiano’s literature. While this is one of his shorter novels, it is also one of his densest; with each Modiano novel, the intertextual richness increases further.
The novel sets in motion the complicated relationship we can have with our own past selves. Daragane is consumed in a tug of war between holding on and letting go, the desire to discover the truth. and the desire to allow things to remain in silence. This tension and ambivalence is symbolised by a suitcase stuffed with mementos from his childhood and adolescence: ‘He could not part with it, but he was nevertheless relieved to have lost the key.’
Modiano’s novels often refer to the Occupation. Here, this dark period in France’s history is not quite absent, but is now at a greater distance. The space left is taken up with meditations on time, the perception of its incongruity and, fleetingly, its annihilation. Eras and epochs are described as layers of cello-
phane, fragile and transparent.
In what is otherwise a smooth and faithful translation of deceptively simple prose, there are a couple of awkward features. Cameron tends to emulate the French preference for negative formulations, and at times the use of the pluperfect is clumsily navigated, resulting in a number of ‘had had’ formulations, as well as this zinger: ‘If anyone were to have asked him nowadays which writer he might have wished to have been, he would have replied ...’ The novel’s vague temporal flux is not only created through shifts in tense and these need not be slavishly followed. These features may come down to a stylistic or ideological decision, choosing to reproduce French syntax and linguistic propensities. Cameron is free to make such choices; however, the overall effect is somewhat laborious and, more galling, it departs from the purity and sparseness quintessential to Modiano’s style.
At the end of the novel, having started with presque rien, we seem to conclude with even less. While unanswered questions and ellipses remain, both the open-
ing phrase and the novel’s title reappear, revealing their full, poignant significance. Modiano reaffirms an unsettling trope of circularity which falls short, naturally, of closure. g
Phoebe Weston-Evans’s translation of Modiano’s Paris Nocturne, published by Yale University Press and Text Publishing, was nominated for the 2016 PEN America Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Australian Academy of Humanities Translation Medal.
Heart and hope
Josephine Taylor
THE GULF
by Anna Spargo-Ryan Picador
$29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781743537176
Shortly after her son, Luke, was murdered by his father, Rosie Batty spoke of the non-discriminatory nature of family violence: ‘No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone.’ If Batty’s is an example of the less easily imagined site of domestic violence, Anna SpargoRyan’s second novel, The Gulf, presents us with a more conventional alternative: a disadvantaged environment, a mother (Linda) who loses herself in each man she encounters, and her children, Skye and Ben, who pick up the slack. But when Linda meets Jason, a shady bloke in ‘import–export’, and the three move from Adelaide to his home in ‘shithole’ Port Flinders, incipient violence turns overt, erratic mothering becomes neglect, and Skye is forced to protect herself and Ben, and to make decisions that will affect them all.
By creating a stereotypically dysfunctional scenario, setting it out immediately – with impressive economy – and making sixteen-year-old Skye the narrator, Spargo-Ryan averts a deep consideration of moral and psychological ambiguity in domestic abuse –what brings a perpetrator to this point? How might a partner collude with him or her? Shades of grey are reserved for Skye and her young half-brother, with other characters generally broadbrushed good, or not. Linda’s compulsion to impress Jason through a desperate kind of subservience, for instance, is unexamined and unequivocal. It is also frighteningly funny:
Jason whispered into his phone. Mum buzzed around him, sweeping and straightening. She bought a vacuum cleaner from Kmart and pushed that around him too, picking up dust that hadn’t had time to accumulate yet.
‘Linda,’ he said, ‘can you fucking not?’ and pointed at his ear.
‘I’ll put it on eBay,’ she said, and sat next to him on the couch with her hand on his knee.
With character and setting explicit, and Jason’s ascendancy established, the interest lies in the escalating tension, in the siblings’ response to a hostile world, and in questions central, also, to SpargoRyan’s first novel, The Paper House (2016): what is mothering? and what is a family? As Skye tells her new friend, the perpetually ‘warm’ Raf, ‘I miss getting up in the morning and knowing where I fit in the world.’ Spargo-Ryan also uses a similar structural and narrative device in both novels: interweaving the familial past with the present. The strategy is not as successful here, perhaps because Skye’s past with her father and Nonno only figures in small vignettes that serve less to illuminate the present than to provide alternative possibilities of love and care, loss, or mystery.
What the novel might lose in moral complexity, it gains in voice; here, Spargo-Ryan excels. It is Skye’s perspective through which we view this world, her wry and savvy cynicism that generates humour, her loving, armoured heart that creates poignancy. For the sake of the plot, Skye cannot understand what she might reasonably be expected to do; Spargo-Ryan deals with this by making her a loner, and allowing her only fleeting attentiveness to ‘clues’ – in selective naïveté, or a form of denial. Yet, while only on the cusp of adulthood herself, Skye is forced to be the parent, to monitor her highly intelligent and anxious brother: ‘His voice ran frantic and urgent, the way it always did.’ As the ‘gulf’ in the family widens, the scenes in which Skye and Ben function as a caring unit become ever more affecting:
He looked over at me. ‘Are you sad?’
‘Nah,’ I said. ‘Not sad.’ He came and sat next to me. His feet barely touched the floor. ‘You look pretty,’ he said. ‘Thanks, mate.’
Skye is very different from the nar-
rator in The Paper House, her personality sassy and pragmatic, her actions in the world more dynamic – even combative. Fittingly, then, the language is less sumptuous here, evoking a larger, sparser landscape: ‘Even from the bridge, I could hear the little girl’s laughter. Like cymbals. It came sprinting down the road and went under the bridge and out into the wheat fields.’ Through the symbol of the tortoise, an intricate sense of mothering, family and home is built: the Galápagos tortoise is the figurative and pictorial motif of the novel, Ben’s tortoise its narrative expression. Trains act as a complex metaphor of violence and possible responses – of harm towards self or others; of not caring and not taking care; of possibilities and beginnings.
The Gulf brims with topical issues, reflecting the multicultural and multifarious reality of this country. Realism is also effected through dialogue, especially the vernacular, and the clichéd way in which inexcusable behaviour is accounted for: ‘I should have known better than to ask questions when he was already tired.’ Acts of violence are presented with a dispassionate realism that makes them all the more disturbing; Jason’s dog, Murray, is a potent example of what comes of violence and neglect. However, while realism is not sacrificed in the denouement, there is some cause for optimism, and believable maturation in the narrator.
The Gulf is a timely reminder of the protean forms of domestic violence and its devastating effect on family and home. Spargo-Ryan continues to bring heart and hope to the difficult subjects she writes about: mental illness, grief, suicide. Her beautifully crafted blogs, consummate essays, and sensitively realised fictional worlds augur a robust future. g
Josephine Taylor is a writer and freelance editor, and an adjunct lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
AUSTRALIA DAY
by Melanie Cheng
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781925498592
The characters in Melanie Cheng’s collection of short stories are all outsiders or misfits in some way. Some feel conspicuously out of place, such as the Lebanese immigrant Maha, in ‘Toy Town’, who is struggling with suburban Australian life, or the Chinese medical student Stanley, who is visiting the family farm of a friend in the titular story. Stanley freezes when he is asked at dinner to nominate his AFL team: he has never watched a game of football in his life. Other characters feel isolated owing to their beliefs or temperament.
One of the strongest stories in the collection is ‘Clear Blue Seas’, which charts the increasing discomfort of a young bride on her honeymoon in the sun-soaked Maldives. Kat is ill at ease with the obsequious hotel staff, but her new husband, Raf, a wealthy Iraqi migrant, feels at home among the frosted champagne glasses and the foot massages. He chides Kat that any one of the hotel staff would swap places with her ‘in a heartbeat’.
Other stories explore the subtle power dynamics of the patient–doctor relationship. In ‘Macca’, a young doctor worn down by other people’s problems begins to wonder about the fate of one of her patients. The word loneliness is seldom used in the stories, but the emotion is everywhere. In ‘Allomother’, a woman who was a surrogate mother for her sister grapples with her sideline role in the life of the child she has carried.
Cheng has a remarkable sense for the portentous drama in everyday lives. She focuses on the way her characters respond to change or tragedy rather than on dramatic plot turns, and she does this with a deftness and an economy of language that is breathtaking.
Johanna Leggatt
Fugitives
Brian Castro’s verse novel
Patrick Holland
BLINDNESS AND RAGE: A PHANTASMAGORIA: A NOVEL IN THIRTY-FOUR CANTOS
by Brian Castro Giramondo, $26.95 pb, 224 pp, 9781925336221
Lucien Gracq, the hero of Brian Castro’s verse novel Blindness and Rage, wishes to be a writer, though he has written only love letters to women, which achieved tragicomic results, or none at all. When Gracq retires from his job as a town planner in Adelaide, it seems he will have the time and freedom to write the epic he has dreamed of, but he is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given fifty-three days to live, enough time, perhaps, to compose something worthwhile. But Gracq must overcome a more fundamental problem: he is terrified of leaving his mark upon the blank page, and on the world.
Gracq moves to Paris and joins a secret society of experimental writers Le club des fugitifs, who erase their names from their works, bequeathing them to others so as to reject the tyranny of authorship: both the distorting fame it bestows upon the writer, and the misinterpretation of texts it invites: ‘plagiarism in reverse’ says the group’s leader, Georges Crêpe (the surname an anagram for Perec), ‘to provide a cleansing service before oblivion’.
Our Supermodern age is nostalgic. Ethnographer Marc Augé has suggested that those things which traditionally conferred identity upon us – namely geography and the narratives of time – have dissolved with the rapid communication of language and people around the globe. Blindness and Rage dismisses the linear river of time and acknowledges instead a pool of time we may dip into. Without warning or scaffolding, the novel moves between twenty-first century Adelaide to a Paris that seems made of many times, in which you can take photos on your iPhone but also meet long-dead authors such as Italo Calvino.
The novel’s form is similarly playful. The thirty-four cantos recall the Onegin Sonnet, but also The Divine Comedy. There is even a contemporary, Parisian Beatrice. Indeed, it is an epic poem Gracq writes for the secret society, in ‘an age which had no idea of such a form’: ‘Relieved only by dreams / Of a vast and streeling sea / Of dangerous currents / And drowning sirens.’ The ‘drowning’ of sirens is crucial. It is Gracq’s relationship with death, and the relationship between writing and death, that is at the heart of Blindness and Rage.
Writing may bestow, of course, a kind of immortality; yet recent theorists have acknowledged the potential for writing to produce the erasure of the author. Foucault said writing is ‘creating a space in which the writing subject constantly disappears.’ The immortality function belongs to the past, the heroic ballads and epics; the effacement belongs to modernity.
Words have not been good to Gracq. Having intercepted a letter Gracq intended for a lover, his wife leaves him and dies in a plane crash. This death haunts the novel, but it comes to the reader, as to Gracq, in flashes and fragments. At last we feel that his wife’s accidental death over water, in no man’s land, motivated by the desire to escape social bonds at Supermodern speed, poses special representational problems for Gracq, the author of an epic. In the epic mode, death is typically meaningful: even a tragic death is attributable to some moral failing in the hero, or else a failing of the world to prove equal to the hero or heroine’s greatness of soul.
Blindness and Rage presents Gracq with a way out of language’s inefficacy, out of death, and the ironic literary pos-
turing of the Fugitives. Having heard her music coming in from the apartment next door, Gracq enters a relationship with pianist Catherine Bourgeois. She is an enemy of the Fugitives, and as Gracq’s relationship with her deepens, his cancer goes into remission. Here, Castro makes an extraordinary link between cancer and irony, suggesting the former is a disease of modern cynicism and intellectual superiority, the refusal to be taken in. Just so Gracq determines to: ‘Go deluded into that dark night / And try not to live half a life / In perpetual treatment for cynicism.’ And so it is he devotes himself to Catherine, whose name he reconstructs, rather than deconstructs, to make her the more
ideal (‘Her name, she said, was Catherine, / A name of magic and torture, / A saint upon a wheel of fire, / Queen with a carriage’).
Gracq has been searching for language that speaks directly to experience, just as the notes of Catherine’s piano refer to no signified beyond themselves, but are their own truth. Gracq does not complete his book. At last, as Wittgenstein said we must when language fails us, when we confront life’s great truths, Gracq turns to silence. His travels take him to the Far East and, at last, back to Australia, where the reader awaits the denouement with Catherine.
Blindness and Rage is a novel capable of superb humour. This when Gracq la-
Art Detective
I lie on the couch like a beaten dog as Philip Mould advances on his latest art forensics and there are these absolutely free and liberated daubs of greens and browns in close-up on the screen. They are of the earth in a surprising and counter way to all that sateen, country houses, rich people by the yard. And from my beaten dog pose I potentially fall in love with Gainsborough. How could I have not before?
Philip Mould’s suit combos are impeccable. He is always consulting experts, always moving crisply through the weak light of investigation sites – the galleries – but his eyes look infinitely tired as if he has done so much looking for us.
I trust his close-ups.
ments old age and the coming of death: ‘I am a hollow man upon life’s station / where tall weeds grow in cracks, / turning desire in means winds, G-strings / stretched over emptiness.’ And it is capable of such exquisitely realised tragedy as this when speaking of the letter that undid Gracq’s marriage and led to the death of his wife: ‘And for the brief pleasure of a girl / Who he supposed would turn out ideal, / No one will meet him in the underworld.’
The world becomes richer when I read Castro, and I think Blindness and Rage is his finest book. g
Patrick Holland’s most recent novel is One (Transit Lounge, 2016).
After enough experts and trailing about, there is Gainsborough again with his louche letters and unsympathetic wife, his treatment of waistcoats and his small garden tray arrangements that look touchingly a lot like the moss tray gardens of childhood only more elaborate with water features and places to arrange a nymph or two, a satyr.
They are a step up from what one could get at the model shops, though proximate, small feathery trees and a brittle feeling of those bags full of fake glittering lawn.
It leaves me unaccountably sad that Gainsborough had to live with someone who threw out all his dirty letters. What a loss Philip Mould’s prim side-kick says off-guard, says passionately, as the camera hovers over the tray garden – this little grave of creativity –and she’s right.
Lucy Dougan
Lucy Dougan’s poem will appear in the 2017 Western Australian States of Poetry anthology.
Too much, too little
Geoffrey Blainey
A LITTLE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS
by Niall Kishtainy
Yale University Press (Footprint)
$37.99 hb, 256 pp, 9780300206364
For maybe one century the subject called Economics was monarch of the social sciences. Then the Western world was poorer than it is now, and many economists promised to find a pathway towards the abolition of hunger and unemployment. They also hoped to abolish war: the eager ideologies of free trade were believed by their disciples to be long-term recipes for international peace.
This Little History of Economics , beginning with the ancient Greeks, reaches 1776 after only five chapters. We see Adam Smith, after a sleepless night, walking in his dressing gown along a country road and mentally composing what ‘would become arguably the most celebrated book in the history of economics’. In The Wealth of Nations, this Scottish philosopher proposed that selfinterest produced social harmony rather than chaos. As summarised in this valuable book, people do best for their nation by chasing their own interests rather than by playing ‘the Good Samaritan who wants to help strangers’.
The book consists of forty short essays, most of which pivot on one idea or individual. Adam Smith is followed by
a procession of famous or once-famous names, including David Ricardo, a British sharebroker whose technique of ‘building up a long chain of cause and effect became that of economics’. He was said to bring ‘a new standard of reasoning into economics’, but he did not persuade Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, or Robert Owen, a Welshman. Radicals in their day, they in turn did not convince Karl Marx, who appears in chapter ten. Marx and John Maynard Keynes, who appears in chapter eighteen, are the two main power points in the book.
Karl Marx denounced nearly all his predecessors. He saw little hope until private property was eliminated. Perhaps Marx would have changed his mind if today he could see millions of ordinary Russians, under capitalism, enjoying their privately owned cars and holiday houses? Kishtainy says ‘no’. Marx would have still viewed them as ‘cogs in a giant machine’ and, by the nature of their work, ‘disconnected from their humanity’.
The global Depression of the 1930s and the Cold War that mesmerised the world from 1945 to 1990, provided a boxing stadium for economists. In the capitalist West, Keynes became, step by step, the hero, even in the United States. His theory in its heyday came to rely also on the work of Bill Phillips, a New Zealander who also spent two short periods of his life in Australia.
While the book offers short personal sketches of most of the leading economists, it neglects Phillips’s unusual life. A prisoner of war in Japanese camps in Java, Phillips was a postwar student in London, where at first nobody thought that this restless chain-smoker would ever be a star thinker. His exam results were lowly. It turned out that he performed poorly in written exams partly because he was not allowed to take cigarettes into the exam room. Author of the Phillips Curve, he preached that when unemployment was low the rate of inflation tended to be high: the opposite also was true. It was the world’s stagflation of the 1970s that did much to dethrone Keynes and Phillips.
Milton Friedman arrives in chapter twenty-nine, a determined American, the son of poor Jewish migrants from
Hungary, and the champion of ‘the Chicago school of economics’. In the new boxing ring, Friedman chastised the long-dead Keynes. He insisted that the acute economic problems of the 1970s were ‘the result of too much government, not too little’. And then the financial crisis hit the world in 2008: ‘The crisis was a complete shock, even to economists.’ So Queen Elizabeth chided her hosts when she visited the London School of Economics. It is fair to say that economic life in modern times is like a fast-changing surf, in which nearly every champion board rider is ultimately dumped or drowned. One economist who could have held his head high (he died in 1996) was Hyman Minsky, an American of Russian Jewish ancestry. He had often warned that even a successful economy is not safe from disaster.
If you hunt elsewhere for the detailed background of the London author of this engaging, smallish book – bare of footnotes and bibliography – you find this matter of fact note: ‘I’m a writer, economist and historian.’ A photograph, not in the book, shows a neat dark beard and inquisitive face. His prose is clear and everyday: young people repelled by the jargon of mainstream economics are amongst his chosen audience. He tries to make important economic distinctions in simple language. Fiscal, an adjective much used by economists and treasurers but rarely by the public, is explained thus: ‘In ancient Rome, the fiscus was the treasure chest of the emperor, so fiscal policy is about the state filling up its coffers with taxes and emptying them by spending.’ Keynesian economists preferred fiscal policy to monetary.
Academic economists might complain that Niall Kishtainy simplifies too much. I doubt whether that is a fair criticism. He insists that even the smartest economist tackling the most daunting problem has to simplify his theories: ‘To explain anything, you have to leave out what’s least important to reveal what’s most important.’ g
Geoffrey Blainey’s many books include the second volume of The Story of Australia’s People (2016). He was professor of economic history at Melbourne from 1968 to 1976.
The A-plus team
Robyn Williams
RADIO ASTRONOMER: JOHN
BOLTON
AND A NEW WINDOW ON THE UNIVERSE
by Peter Robertson
NewSouth
$59.99 hb, 432 pp, 9781742235455
What shocks me, as I consider this important new book, is how completely John Bolton has disappeared from the public mind. Just consider, he pioneered extragalactic radio astronomy, built two superb radio telescopes, was worthy of a Nobel Prize, hired or mentored a generation of top scientists – and was played by Sam Neill in the film The Dish (2000). Neill’s character was not called Bolton in the Working Dog movie, but co-producer Jane Kennedy and co-writer and director Rob Sitch ensured that Neill saw plenty of photographs of the Parkes director and knew of his firm but enterprising leadership style.
I remember Bolton as a thrillingly informal Yorkshireman – no nonsense, foot up on a gate post as he rolled yet another slim cigarette, recounting yarns of staggering achievement or woeful mishap. His store was inexhaustible. ‘You know what happened with Apollo 13?’ he asked me, lighting another fag. ‘They had the front of the rocket bolted to the floor in the shed at NASA and someone lifted it with a crane. Without undoing the bolts fixing it to the floor! About eleven systems in the module got broken. They fixed all but two.’ It was the temperature control for one of the tanks that went wonky on the flight. ‘Houston, we have a problem!’ There was an explosion. As we saw in the film starring Tom Hanks, it was a combination of brilliant calculation to change the course home plus true grit that got the crew safely back to Earth. But it was Bolton’s casual indiscretion telling the story that has always stayed with me.
Bolton grew up in England, gained scholarships to good schools and Trinity College, Cambridge, served in the navy (crucial in giving him hands-on experi-
ence as an engineer), and then found himself with that legendary band of ex-radar boffins who came to Australia from the forces after World War II. This was the A-plus team. They made this country the world leader in a scientific revolution, and their importance should not be forgotten.
Who outside the profession recalls their names today? I dread to think. There was Paul Wild, a great solar scientist who went on to head CSIRO; Harry Minnett, who adapted his cosmic skills to invent a landing system for aircraft (I am reminded of Dr John O’Sullivan from the same CSIRO department of Radiophysics, who adapted the technology he was using to find mini black holes to invent WiFi and change the world). There was the original boffin, dubbed so by Winston Churchill: Robert Hanbury Brown, professor of astronomy at the University of Sydney for twenty-seven years. I once introduced him to the staff at the History of Science Museum in Oxford in the 1990s. For them it was like meeting Elvis or Obama; they shook with delight. Yes, these were superstars just one generation ago. Taffy Bowen was the leader of the radar gang, most of whom knew their engineering and physics but damn all about astronomy; they had to bone up stargazing as they went along.
The only woman whose name appears in this list is the tragic Ruby PayneScott. She made crucial contributions to the radio revolution but was eventually discovered to have broken a sacred rule: she had got married, in secret. When this was discovered Payne-Scott had to resign from CSIRO. Recently, Brian Schmidt, Nobel Laureate and vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, told her story and burst into tears at the travesty.
Then there was the British contingent, still based there but with strong Australian connections: Bernard Lovell, of Jodrell Bank Observatory fame; and Fred Hoyle, another Yorkshire contrarian with his own maverick ideas on cosmology and the celestial origin of germs.
Author Peter Robertson tells how Bolton set up shop (more like a concrete shed) on Dover Heights, just up from Bondi Beach. It was there that they
managed, for the first time, to pinpoint the radio signals from another star. The observatory was elaborated from an early warning system for spotting enemy aircraft during World War II and turned to the cosmos in the late 1940s and 1950s. Next, Bolton left Australia for Caltech and led their design of a radio dish to give Pasadena a nudge on the way to exploit the new ‘window’ on the universe.
And so, to Parkes. One feature of this book is that there is a surprise on almost every page. It turns out that it was Barnes Wallis, father of those bouncing bombs and the Dam Busters, who designed the famous dish put up in the sheep paddock. It quickly, under Bolton’s leadership, cracked new records: finding quasars – quasi-stellar objects each emitting energy exceeding the lifetime heat of the sun – and more pulsars, once thought to be signals from Little Green Men, than all other telescopes put together.
Then came Apollo 11. It was the triumph of The Dish and the stuff of legend that Parkes turned from a back-up carrier of the signal from the moon in 1969 to the only class act. Armstrong and Aldrin were seen by the world that day by means of the telescope in the bush. And it has served with supreme magnificence ever since.
Bolton was a Pom who went native. I can think of few others who adapted so completely to life in an Australian country town while maintaining academic life at the highest level. Peter Robertson has brought us the incredible story of The Right Stuff Down Under. g
Robyn Williams has presented The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975. He first wrote for ABR in 1989.
Tabula rosa
Nick Haslam
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE MIND: HOW OUR BRAIN THINKS, FEELS, AND DECIDES
by Mariano Sigman
William Collins
$32.99 pb, 267 pp, 9780008225568
Along time ago in a university far, far away, I received an application for graduate study in psychology. The applicant claimed to have no particular orientation to the field, just a broad and open-minded curiosity. In her own words, she was a ‘tabula rosa’: a rose tablet. The student had misrendered John Locke’s famous tabula rasa, the empiricist metaphor of the human mind as a blank slate on which experience writes knowledge. This rose by another name smells of nothing at all.
Mariano Sigman’s The Secret Life of the Mind is an attempt to unLocke cognition. The ruling idea behind this entertaining book is ‘the quest to make human thought transparent’, and it does so by revealing some of the preconceptions, predispositions, and brain mechanisms that enable our mental capabilities. Sigman, an Argentine neuroscientist whose high public profile has been crowned by a popular TED Talk, brings ideas from philosophy, education, linguistics, behavioural economics, and computer science to his task of discrediting the tabula rasa.
Writing on the origins of mind, for example, Sigman argues that we come into the world furnished with more cognitive powers than most of us realise. Although they may give the appearance of being incapable blobs, infants have primordial ideas of number, the persistence of objects after they have been hidden from view, and even morality. Six-month-old babies prefer to look at shapes that help rather than hinder a struggling triangle in a geometric morality play, and they have an ability to distinguish speech sounds that adults lose if their language does not employ them. In both cases, infants come pre-equipped with sophisticated mental capacities
rather than merely learning from scratch. As Sigman writes, ‘the brain is not a blank page on which things are written, but rather a rough surface on which some shapes fit and some don’t’.
After discussing infancy, Sigman moves on to the study of decision making in a chapter that bounces frantically from topic to topic and puzzlingly claims to be about the borders of identity. It starts with the role of gut feelings and intuitions in choice (they may be more reliable than rational deliberations when we face more complex decisions), moves on to the influence of pheromones on desire, jumps to the downsides of optimism and empathy (one promotes risk-taking, the other erodes impartiality), and finally, explores the challenges of self-control and social corruption.
More successful are a pair of chapters on consciousness and its vicissitudes, notably hallucinations, dreams, and drug-altered states. Sigman is compelling on the neural basis of consciousness, which he presents as an electrical reverberation through the brain’s neural networks when a stimulus reaches a threshold of excitation. He is equally lucid when discussing the ownership of experience. Auditory hallucinations in psychosis may represent a failure to recognise the personal authorship of inner voices, and our inability to tickle ourselves occurs because knowing our intentions undermines our capacity to surprise ourselves. One researcher has overcome this problem by designing a mechanical tickler with an inbuilt halfsecond delay, enough to fool the user that the provoking touch is alien to the self.
The Secret Life of the Mind concludes with two chapters on learning and teaching. Much learning involves a process of automatisation through practice, in which slow and deliberate effort gradually develops into rapid and unthinking competence. Sigman argues that this process involves a movement from the top of the brain to the bottom, from ‘dorsal’ to ‘ventral’, a distinction much less familiar to most readers than left brain versus right brain, the focus of much pseudoscience and dualistic claptrap. Learning comes easy to us and our brains are always transforming, but
teaching come naturally as well, Sigman going so far as to propose we have a ‘teaching instinct’. His enthusiasm for exploring the pedagogical implications of neuroscience shines brightly.
The book skips along at a rapid pace, enlivened by good-humoured asides and a Latin American sensibility that litters the text with references to Borges and soccer stars. Numerous experiments are described to give concreteness to abstract ideas. The book’s weaknesses are chiefly matters of framing. It is set out as an exploration of how the brain works its cognitive magic, but most of the evidence it musters is brainless. Much of it comes from psychological, economic, linguistic, and educational research on mind and behaviour, with no direct examination of the brain or reference to its processes. In doing so the book follows the common pattern of popular neuroscience gradually purloining psychology’s territory. Sigman recognises this land-grab when he dismisses the ideas of a left brain/right brain quack –‘referring to the brain … only served to appropriate the prestige of a scientific field for marketing purposes’ – but his book is not entirely innocent of the same appropriation. Of course, minds emerge from brains, but re-describing behavioural and cognitive science as neuroscience involves a degree of overreach.
Even so, Sigman’s book largely succeeds in its mission of making thought transparent. Readers who want to understand the limitations of the tabula rasa view of the mind might be better off reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002), those interested in the mental capability of infants might prefer Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby (1998), and those eager to understand the neuroscience of consciousness might more profitably read Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain (2014). But for those keen to buckle in for a charming jaunt through all of these scenic topics, The Secret Life of the Mind is a transporting read. g
Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, where he teaches social and personality psychology.
Forging the war for peace
The journey from hawkish general to peacemaker
Danielle Celermajer
YITZHAK RABIN: SOLDIER, LEADER, STATESMAN
by Itamar Rabinovich
Yale University Press (Footprint), $39.99 hb, 272 pp, 9780300212297
On the final page of his biography of Yitzhak Rabin (1922–95), Itamar Rabinovich tells us that he contemplated an alternative subtitle for his book, ‘The image of his native landscape’. Because this particular life was so closely tied to a political project, it is similarly tempting to read Rabin’s biography as a story of the State of Israel, and to respond in kind: first according to your position on that State, and second according to how you evaluate Rabin’s performance against your ideal Israel. If you regard the 1948 War of Independence as an act of violent colonialism, then Rabin’s role in the Palmach (the proto-Israeli military) damns him to complicity, one that became active perpetration when he took on the task of transforming the infant Israeli Defence Force into an ironclad machine, and leading it, as chief of staff, in the 1967 Six Day War. If you regard the Oslo Accords as a betrayal of the Jewish people, on either religious or security grounds, then as the prime minister who authorised them, Rabin, as image, becomes the reckless traitor. It is a good thing that the author decided to discard this subtitle, because if one were to read the book thus, one may as well not read it at all. This is, after all, Israel we are talking about, and for almost every reader that die will already be cast.
Unless one is seduced by the ideology of self-creation, it is something of a truism that we are all shaped by our social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. What makes the story of a life intriguing are those myste-
rious junctures where it diverges from the foretold plot; what Hannah Arendt called the spaces between past and future, where authentic thinking and action occur, and the new comes into the world. In Rabin’s case, the new were the moves to make peace with Israel’s Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat, and the Syrians under Hafez al-Assad. I leave to the side here the myriad criticisms one might level against what Israel envisaged that peace ought to look like, and how appallingly the Palestinians have fared since Oslo. One can always ask why Rabin was not Mandela, or an unalloyed universalist. More interesting is to ask why he was Rabin; how he moved from being a hawkish general and prime minister of a state whose political identity was forged in trauma, religious nationalism, and existential threat, to, in his own words, forging the war for peace.
There are intimations of a humanist universalism from the outset. When Rabin wrote in his autobiography about
the psychological difficulties that his soldiers experienced expelling Palestinian civilians from Lod and Ramla during the 1948 War, he explains their suffering as the moral conflict such actions provoked for young Jewish men ‘inculcated with values such as international fraternity and humaneness’. Interestingly, like the censors who edited Rabin’s autobiography, when Rabinovich recounts the reflection, he omits these last words. And then there was Rabin’s radical mother –‘red’ Rosa Cohen – who broke with both her wealthy orthodox Jewish family and the Communist Party in Russia, and moved to Jerusalem, not because she was a Zionist (on the contrary), but because she thought it might offer her the space to create a life. Amidst a story dominated by forceful and frequently egoistic men, one senses the imprint of Rosa’s independence of mind on her son’s, especially when he reached an age beyond her forty-seven years.
Unlike the other ‘great men’ in the history of Israel alongside whom Rabin migrated from military to political leadership, Rabin did not lead his life teleologically, set from the outset on the march towards a pinnacle. Each identity – commander, general, chief of staff, ambassador to the United States, member of parliament, prime minister (1974–77, 1992–95) – grew incrementally from the one preceeding it, and he occupied each in a similarly organic (and thus often imperfect) way.
Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, 13 September 1993 (photograph by Vince Musi, The White House)
Perhaps it was this quality of presentism that allowed him to act responsively in each role; to understand that principled action is not action obedient to a set of transcendent laws or metaphysical forms, but responsiveness to context, informed by a well set moral compass. This would certainly make sense of the answer that Bill Clinton recalls Rabin gave when he asked him, privately, after the signing of Oslo II, why he had done it. First, he said, his country was his life, and unless the State of Israel found a way of sharing the future – including the land – with the Palestinians, very soon Israel would either cease to be a democracy, or cease to be a Jewish State. Either, he said, would violate their solemn obligations. Second, he said, Palestinian children are also humans and they too deserve to grow up with a sense of home.
What I am calling responsive principle though, others deemed treachery deserving death. The circumstances of Rabin’s assassination are etched in history, but many may not know about the rabbis who lent religious sanction to the murder, the extreme right-wing political groups who incited it, and the Likud members who created a permissive environment for hatred to flourish. In 1994, as the incitement campaign was gaining strength, Benjamin Netanyahu, then the new leader of the Likud party, attended an anti-government march in a town north of Tel Aviv, organised by the ultra-nationalist Kahane Hai. He was seen marching between a coffin inscribed ‘Zionism’s murder’ and a person carrying a gallows.
As history alone, this makes for a deeply sobering image. In a contemporary political scene where democracy is increasingly giving way to incitement against those whose vision departs from one’s own, it ought to call each of us to be more than an image of our native landscape; or to imagine that landscape more capaciously. g
Danielle Celermajer is a Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Power, Judgment and Political Evil: Hannah Arendt’s promise and Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology ❖
Damn cowboys and fireside chats
An authoritative study of the US presidency
Andrew Broertjes
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT: FROM TEDDY ROOSEVELT TO BILL CLINTON by William E. Leuchtenburg Oxford University Press, $49.95 hb, 900 pp, 9780195176162
The president of the United States looms large in contemporary politics, a powerful figure dominating news and popular culture: from newly elected president Donald Trump bestriding (or, depending on your political leanings, besmirching) the world stage, to Kevin Spacey as the Machiavellian Frank Underwood in House of Cards. For the modern observer, it is difficult to imagine an era in which the US president was not a significant global figure. The transformation of the president across the course of the twentieth century is a fascinating narrative, one that is well documented in William E. Leuchtenburg’s The American President: From Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Leuchtenburg
has devoted a lifetime to chronicling the presidency, most notably a series of works on Franklin Delano Roosevelt that remain set texts for understanding the transformation of executive power in the first half of the twentieth century. The American President represents a rigorous and highly readable capstone to a remarkable academic career.
Leuchtenburg begins with the transfer of power from the assassinated William McKinley to Vice President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. McKinley’s re-election campaign in 1900 had a number of important firsts, including the use of filmed footage of the president as part of promotional efforts. But the addition of Roosevelt to the ticket, in an attempt by Republican powerbrokers to
Richard Nixon on the hustings, 1968 (photograph by Ollie Atkins, The White House)
sideline him from his reforming governorship of New York, made the greatest mark on the future of the presidency. Influential GOP insider Mark Hanna was furious, stating: ‘What is the matter with all of you? Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one heartbeat between that damn cowboy and the presidency?’ McKinley’s death at the hands of anarchist Leon Czolgosz showed Hanna’s warning to be prophetic. Roosevelt, who switched easily between rough-riding frontier cowboy and the New York aristocrat, captivated not just the United States but the world: the first president who was a media personality as much as a political leader. He possessed, as one contemporary put it, a ‘singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter – the quality that medieval theology ascribed to God – he was pure act’. Roosevelt’s willingness to use the government to intervene in the domestic sphere, particularly regarding regulation of the trusts and monopolies of the robber barons, heralded a major shift in both the perception and the reality of what the federal government and the president could do. In the foreign sphere, his peace deal between Russia and Japan in 1907 led to him being the only sitting US president until Barack Obama to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But Roosevelt’s desire to make the United States a global power sowed the seeds of later US foreign policy, best exemplified in the decision he made in 1907, without consulting Congress, to dispatch the Great White Fleet around the world, a stunning display of US naval might. The idea of the United States as a global power broker continued into the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, whose idealistic attempts to form a more integrated global community were shattered on the rocks of an obstinate Senate.
The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt cemented the changes that had developed from the presidency of his distant cousin Theodore onwards. FDR remains the longest-serving president, winning an unprecedented (and since the advent of the two-term limit, unlikely to be repeated) four terms. Unsurprisingly, his presidency forms the core of the book, as well as its long-
est chapter. Elected during the darkest moments of the Great Depression, Roosevelt fundamentally altered the way American citizens saw their government and their president. His ‘fireside chats’ on the radio exploited mass media in ways no president had done before, and his voice in living rooms across the United States helped calm a population experiencing the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history. The 1930s saw, at FDR’s hands, the creation of the modern welfare state, as well as the massive public works projects that transformed the United States. In some parts of the nation, the name Franklin Roosevelt meant electricity, clean drinking water, roads, and bridges. He laid the foundation for a style of governing that would remain until the present day, as both Republicans
‘Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one heartbeat between that damn cowboy and the presidency?’
and Democrats sought to echo different aspects of his presidency. And his leadership during World War II was vital in establishing the United States as one of the world’s super powers.
The presidents who came after FDR had an intimidating legacy to uphold, a point already explored by Leuchtenburg in In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama (2009). For some, the attempt to achieve sweeping changes both domestically and abroad would come unstuck, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose Great Society programs and early successes with civil rights were counterbalanced by the disaster of the Vietnam War. For others, significant achievements at home and abroad were undone by darker impulses, as Richard Nixon found with the Watergate scandal. That scandal, which led to the unprecedented resignation of the president in 1974, combined with Vietnam to transform the US population into one much more cynical and distrustful of government. As Leuchtenburg notes in his conclusion, for all the positives that US presidents can engage in:
the dark underside of presidential power cannot be ignored. Too often, presidents have lied to us. Too often, they have wasted the lives of our children in foreign ventures that should never have been undertaken. They are both the progenitors and the victims of inflated expectations, and when they overreach, they need to be checked.
This balance between light and shade is perhaps the greatest strength of Leuchtenburg’s work. From the presidential giants of the twentieth century like Harry Truman to the lesser presidents like Warren Harding, each subject is treated with scrupulous fairness by the author. Tying together all of the trenchant analyses are wonderful anecdotes that humanise these historical figures. Ronald Reagan could poke fun at himself, saying at one point that he ‘was concerned about what is happening in government – and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon’. When asked if he could bring his wayward teenage daughter into line, Theodore Roosevelt wearily replied: ‘I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot do both.’ And of the taciturn Calvin Coolidge, it was said that he could be ‘silent in five different languages’. Slightly daunting at nearly nine hundred pages, William E. Leuchtenburg’s The American President is a crisp, readable introduction for any reader seeking to learn more about how the US president became the ‘leader of the free world’. g
Andrew Broertjes, who teaches history at the University of Western Australia, is currently working on a book about controversial US presidential elections from 1800 to 2000. ❖
War stories
Seumas Spark
THE SHADOW MEN: THE LEADERS WHO SHAPED THE AUSTRALIAN ARMY FROM THE VELDT TO VIETNAM edited by Craig Stockings and John Connor NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 279 pp, 9781742234748
First, a quibble. In the first paragraph of his introduction, John Connor writes that few Australians could ‘name a significant figure of the Australian Army’, John Monash and Simpson (and his donkey) aside. I am less sure. A generation after his death, Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop remains a familiar name. Two of the past three governors-general, including the incumbent, served in the highest ranks of the army. The governor of New South Wales is David Hurley, another former general. David Morrison had not long retired as head of the army when he was named 2016 Australian of the Year. Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most highly decorated living soldier, is chairman of the National Australia Day Council. In recent years, Australians have moved closer to Americans in their veneration of all things military, and with this development the nation’s bravest and most senior soldiers spend more time in the public eye. The army does not want for attention in modern Australia.
This book presents potted biographies of the ‘shadow men’, ten highranking soldiers who were influential in shaping the form and character of the Australian army, but whose careers are largely forgotten. Some lurk deeper in the shadows than others. Students of
Australian history may know of William Bridges, who helped found the Royal Military College (Duntroon) in Canberra and who in 1915 was shot dead at Gallipoli; most probably will not have heard of Edward Hutton, who moulded the forces of the six Australian colonies into a national army. The editors have chosen their subjects well.The ten ‘shadow men’ include officers whose influence was exerted away from the battlefield, while the fact the biographies cover the period from the time of Federation to the end of the Vietnam War is a pleasing reminder that Australian military history is more than Gallipoli and Kokoda. I did not expect to learn so much about early twentiethcentury Australia.
A difficulty of writing military history is in making it interesting to people who are not military historians. The subject involves endless acronyms, and words and concepts that mean little or nothing to most people: corps, ordnance, second echelon, and many more. Some military histories drown in detail that readers other than the keenest specialists find dull. In this book, the editors and authors have done well to avoid minutiae and military jargon as much as possible. The detail that remains does not get in the way of the biographies. The authors succeed also in placing the lives of their subjects in a broad context, telling of the people and tenor of the times of which they write.
The late Jeffrey Grey, author of three of the ten chapters, does an especially good job of linking military history to social history. His portrait of Colonel E.G. Keogh, a scholarly officer, begins: ‘The army, like Australian society generally, is usually mistrustful of intellectuals and uncomfortable in dealing with them.’ I wanted to read on. Grey begins another chapter, on Brigadier John William Alexander O’Brien, by noting the ways in which World War II has shaped modern Australia. Thus we learn not just of O'Brien’s career in the army, but how the decisions he made were important in the context of the development of postwar Australian society. O’Brien was responsible for providing soldiers with equipment to fight the war, a job that involved balancing the army’s need
for precious resources with that of the civilian economy. Construction of another tank meant less metal was available to lay new railway track or build a hospital. Military history is most important and engaging when it extends its boundaries.
The army does not want for attention in modern Australia
In this vein, the editors might have invited women to contribute to this book. While military history has been, and still is, written mostly by men, gradually this is changing. There are more and more female scholars in this field in Australia, many of them young. The work of early career historians is included here, and for that the editors are to be commended. But not one is a woman.
An interesting element of The Shadow Men is what the book reveals about the army as a social and political organisation. The biographies tell of the part that timing, luck, influential patrons, and animus play in army life. For an organisation that works on the idea of individuals uniting to serve the national good, ego and jealousy are surprisingly powerful forces. In his chapter, Karl James explains how Sydney Rowell’s career was hijacked by the breakdown of his relationship with Thomas Blamey, Australia’s senior military officer in World War II. Blamey sacked Rowell from the command of New Guinea Force in 1942, then sought to force his retirement from the army. Politicians and a senior public servant protected Rowell, but even then he spent years in exile, kept from important jobs by Blamey. Not until after the war had ended and Blamey retired did Rowell’s career resume in earnest.
Who will read this book? Devotees of military history, certainly. But it deserves a wider audience. In telling of the life and times of their subjects, the contributors have produced biographies which offer something for all those interested in modern Australian history. g
Seumas Spark is a historian employed at Monash University.
Justice
Elisabeth Holdsworth
JEWISH ANZACS: JEWS IN THE AUSTRALIAN MILITARY
by Mark Dapin
NewSouth
$39.99 hb, 452 pp, 9781742235356
Towards the end of this handsome work, Mark Dapin makes the following observation: ‘There are many more holocaust memoirs written by Jews who emigrated from Europe to Australia than there are personal histories of Australian-born or raised Jewish soldiers. Everywhere in the world the Jewish story is focussed on persecution – the plight of refugees; the unspeakable horrors of the death camps – followed by redemption in the form of the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. In Australia ... there is another history: that of a diaspora community that fought the Axis powers with courage, strength and a large measure of military skill.’ A military skill, Dapin suggests, that was in evidence from the very foundation of the colony of New South Wales.
Among the convicts who arrived on the First Fleet was a ‘Hebrew’ thief called Esther Abrahams and her infant daughter. Esther formed an alliance with Lieutenant George Johnston of the Royal Marines ‘while on the water’. In 1790 the couple had a son, Robert. At thirteen, Robert Johnston became the first native of New South Wales to join the Royal Navy. He saw action at Montevideo, Corunna, Cadiz and Chesapeake Bay. Back home, his father led the Rum Corps rebellion of 1808 replacing Governor Bligh to become lieutenant-governor, and the former convict Esther Abrahams became first lady. Robert rose to the rank of Commander of the Royal Navy in 1865, the same year John Monash was born in Melbourne.
By the time the British Army left Australia in 1870 there were volunteer militias and Rifle Clubs in every town and city. For an emerging Jewish middle and moneyed class, the militias were a
way of advancing socially and of displaying a heartfelt patriotism toward a country that had allowed Jews to flourish. In subsequent decades, campaigns in the Sudan and the Boer Wars established a precedent whereby influential rabbis declared their fervour for these engagements from the bimah, wealthy men paid for arms and strong men served.
And women! Rose Shappere, the first Jewish woman in Victoria to qualify as a nurse, barely survived the infamous siege of Ladysmith (1899–1900). She later gave an excoriating interview to a British newspaper: ‘I never really know how we nurses ever managed to come out of the siege alive ... the military hospital camp was mismanaged. Everything was to our disadvantage ... Everything seemed to go wrong.’ Shappere was mentioned in despatches.
Although active in both the militias and rifle clubs, John Monash did not go to South Africa. A charismatic, driven man with qualifications in civil engineering and law, Monash designed his own gun to replace antiquated musketry. He wore his Jewish/German ancestry with ease and sophistication as he advanced in business and soldiering. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, Monash commanded the Victorian section of the Australian Intelligence Corps as a lieutenant-colonel (1908). He left for the war as a full colonel in command of the Fourth Infantry Brigade as a self-described ‘Australian soldier, citizen and Jew’.
Monash bestrides Australia’s military history like a colossus, a logistics genius who regarded soldiering as a science. His British masters at Gallipoli had a fatally different view. Although the final evacuation from the Peninsula came to be regarded as a brilliant feat, the final toll for the AIF was 8,141 dead and 20,000 wounded. Among the dead were thirty-six Jewish Anzacs.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, Jewish soldiers were able to reconnect with the biblical past in actions in Palestine. Louis Salek, a Jewish New Zealander, had the honour of hoisting a Magen David, the Zionist flag, at Jerusalem, the first time that potent symbol had ever flown there.
Promoted to brigadier at Gallipoli
and then major general on the Western Front, Monash won enormous respect from the British High Command, who wanted him to command a single Australian Army Corps. C.E.W. Bean railed against Monash and his ‘Jewish capacity for worming silently into favour without seeing to take any steps toward it’. Monash exulted that a native-born Australian had achieved the nation’s ambition of having its own commanderin-chief. George V knighted Monash on the battlefield, the first such honour to be granted by a British monarch for two hundred years.
A generation later, Australia’s military was involved in fronts all over the world. Winston Churchill called the fall of Singapore the worst disaster of British military history. Fifteen thousand Australians were captured and sent to places such as Changi and the Burma railway. Maurice Ashkanasy, assistant general for the AIF in Malaya, did not fancy surrendering to the Japanese. With a party of English soldiers, he stole a lifeboat and, after many adventures, made it to Sumatra where they met an assistant Dutch commissioner. Ashkanasy made an agreement on behalf of King George with Queen Wilhelmina to sell the lifeboat to the Dutch navy in exchange for towage up the river. Our hero made it to Fremantle, as did the Indonesian Dutch government in exile.
To date, some 7,000 Jews have served in Australia’s military, of whom 340 have lost their lives. Mark Dapin has done them justice. g
Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize in 2007. The subject of her current ABR RAFT Fellowship is progressive Judaism.
Hiding in full view
A forensic analysis of modern universities
Robert Phiddian
SPEAKING OF UNIVERSITIES
by Stefan Collini
Verso Books, $34.99 hb, 296 pp, 9781786631398
It stands to reason, apparently, that universities are inefficient creatures that need ever more market discipline and corporate responsiveness to fulfil their potential. After all, what is education but an industry, and British industry is plainly more successful than British universities. Or perhaps not. Stefan Collini points acerbically to the fact that British industry (with its mixed record) has for decades been held up as a template for the transformation of Britain’s world-leading universities. Why do we think like this? Why don’t we instead require banks to restructure along the lines of universities?
Collini’s is a very British book, yet the story he tells is eerily resonant in Australia. Often, we got there first. And ‘there’ is a collective loss of nerve in the value of education and research as something broader than a strict accounting of dollar value to individuals and the economy. I simply do not get up every morning singing the Flinders University song and burning with a desire to lift our place in global rankings. My commitments are to educating students in the richness of literature, to researching interesting and meaningful things in culture, and to participating in a collegial world of scholars. Were I properly motivated by profit and prestige, I would have stuck with that Law degree I abandoned in 1982. Education is full of pitiful victims of false-consciousness like me. It wouldn’t work without us.
Collini has three searchingly Socratic questions about universities’ present obsession with rankings: ‘1) What do they actually provide reliable information about? 2) Whose interest is served by them? 3) Why do they persist even in the face of quite devastating criticism?’ The effective (if not the logical) answer
to all these questions in Australia is that international students use rankings to choose their place of study. Universities can charge them substantially more than locals, and this makes the difference between deficit and profit in all their budgets. The saddest consequence is the perverse incentive to move effort and resources into research, so as to go up in the rankings, so as to attract more students who are then overwhelmingly taught in large groups by sessional tutors paid insecurely by the hour. The coin of prestige for academics is a buy-out from teaching for research. This is not healthy.
So the pursuit of rankings success actually undermines the educational experience for students. Does this matter if those students get prestigious degrees with a minimum of disruption to their working and social lives? If we are a service industry, clearly no. The maximum satisfaction for the minimum expense of energy at the highest marginal profit should be what motivates us all. Fortunately, I do not work with many people (students or colleagues) who actually think this way.
Collini puts it particularly well: ‘The paradox of real learning is that you don’t get what you “want” – and you certainly can’t buy it. I can bustle about and provide a group of students with the temporary satisfaction of their present wants, but … the really vital aspects of the experience (a condition very different from “the student experience”) are bafflement and effort.’ When Cornwall puts out Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear, should I give my second-year students a nicely packaged explanation to parrot back in essays? Or should I take them to that dark place and let them work it out for themselves? In practice, we talk about the horror, and come to a
conclusion more through a dialogue of intellectual and emotional generosity than through relentless competition. We are naughty consumers.
Students and academics could agree to ask and give less of each other, and it might be all right, for a while. It is not market forces or a commitment to excellent service delivery that have so far kept us from going down that path, but a shared sense of vocation in learning. This may be economically irrational, but it is the engine that makes the whole thing work, and it is only moderately amenable to quality assurance, as Collini demonstrates at length.
There is far too much wit and wisdom in Speaking of Universities to fit in a review. It is full of stuff that is shockingly true about the corporate tide in universities, and that has long been hiding in full view. This is not, however, a jeremiad bewailing a lost Eden, but rather a forensic analysis of the gaps between rhetoric and reality in the world of access, efficiency, impact, and excellence. Collini does not think governments should just hand over the money to academics and leave us alone. Yet he rightly questions the opportunity cost and perverse effects of the vast managerial apparatus designed to ensure responsiveness to each abstract noun presently in vogue.
He argues relentlessly that higher education policy has to derive from a clear understanding of the range of things that universities are actually for, not from a handful of econometric proxies that assume it is a service industry functionally indistinguishable from health or retailing. There is a public value and mission as well as a private value to students who get credentials or
Freddie takes Daisy for a Walk
Diana Duncan
…This story seems especially relevant today, when adults and children alike feel pressured to excel. The book’s snappy pace and likable characters t its theme well, quickly drawing readers into the action.
-by BlueInk Review
Sam the Scaredy Cat Dog
Diana Duncan
…the rhythm of Duncan’s work is consistent and appealing. This strength- and the message that it is equally important to be a lasting force for comfort and good as it is to conquer bullies- make this book a worthwhile read-aloud selection for young children.
-by BlueInk Review
Dressing Basil Up and Down
Diana Duncan
…The story’s rhythm is infectious and the languageplay fun. The pages are brightly illustrated and contain loveable characters. Children will chuckle at Basil’s expression as he sulks under the bed “With a Barbie tiara on top of his head.”
-by BlueInk Review
Pete Goes to School
Diana Duncan
Diana S. Duncan’s rhyming children’s book, Pete Goes to School, explores the inseparable bond between a boy and his dog. Pete Goes to School brings readers a classic tale of a dog’s loyalty, delivered with mostly e ective rhymes.
-by BlueInk Review
companies that get subsidised research. There need to be some anchoring assumptions which articulate this.
Collini is always aware of the risk of special pleading. The apparently reasonable belief that public value costs money so it should be measurable in dollar terms is hard to shift, but we don’t ask the same questions of health or defence. These, too, should be businesslike in many respects, but are both more and less than ‘pure’ corporate businesses. Similarly, it would be nice to ensure that government was supporting research only of substantial real-world impact, but there is no reliable way of knowing what this will be. Big data gives us the illusion that an algorithm will solve this, but only really allows us to see more complexity.
These are hard problems and they point, as in so many areas of our current public life, to a deficit of trust. Univer-
The coin of prestige for academics is a buy-out from teaching for research
sities are manifestly fallible institutions which need reasonable external checks and balances, but they have delivered for a long time. Their commitment is not the clear and urgent one to shareholders, but a complex compact across decades and even centuries, to cities, regions, alumni, staff, and scholarly disciplines. Collini argues that they work best with some autonomy from the ruck of corporate and political life. If you consider successful universities (and none has ever failed after reaching university status in Australia), he seems to be right. Would it be a victory for anything other than market ideology if a university went broke in the wonderful world of higher education competition, as is now happening regularly in vocational education?
Collini’s gadfly question, the one he keeps coming back to, is ‘what are universities for?’ Our present reflex answers are pretty unsatisfactory. g
Robert Phiddian teaches literature at Flinders University and is especially interested in political satire, parody, and humour.
Cured but frizzled
The
devastating effects of illness on Robert Lowell Ian Dickson
ROBERT LOWELL: SETTING THE RIVER ON FIRE: A STUDY OF GENIUS, MANIA AND CHARACTER
by Kay Redfield Jamison
Knopf, $54.99 hb, 551 pp, 9780307700278
‘Great wits to madness sure are near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’
For no one were Dryden’s partitions thinner than for Robert Lowell, as Kay Redfield Jamison’s exploration of the links between his work and the manic depressive illness which dogged him for most of his life makes clear. Previous biographers have, with varying degrees of compassion and opprobrium, chronicled the chaos and hurt caused by his manic outbursts. These echoed the reactions of his friends, partners, and acquaintances, which ranged from W.H. Auden’s nannyish, purse-lipped disapproval to Elizabeth Hardwick’s hard-won, loving, patient understanding. No previous writer on Lowell, however, has attempted to show the effect of manic depression on his life and work from the inside, as it were.
Jamison is dauntingly qualified to take this approach. The Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she is also an honorary professor of English at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of An Unquiet Mind (1995), a forthright account of her own struggles with manic depression, and Touched With Fire (1993), a comprehensive exploration of the links between mania and creativity. In Setting the River on Fire, she has written a fascinating, if sometimes uneasy, amalgam of case history, literary biography, and medical chronicle.
Jamison eschews a conventional biographical outline and approaches her subject circuitously. She divides her book into five segments: Origins, Illness, Character, Illness and Art, and Mortality. Using Lowell’s copious descriptions
of his manic and depressive states and having full access to his medical records, Jamison attempts to juggle a clinical narrative of Lowell’s manic depression, a description of how his disease shaped his life and work, and a potted history of manic depression dating back to the ancient Greeks and Hippocrates.
Robert Lowell, born in 1917, was the unwanted son of two impeccably credentialed Boston Brahmins. His mother, Charlotte, was a cold, selfish hysteric, inordinately proud of her patrician Winslow heritage and contemptuous of her weak-willed, ineffectual husband, Robert. Like his mother, Lowell was haunted by his ancestors. In History he writes: ‘They won’t stay gone, and stare with triumphant torpor, / as if held in my fieldglasses’ fog and enlargement.’ He writes movingly about his close relations – grandfather, uncle, children. Perhaps his most tender and loving poem is ‘Fourth of July in Maine’, dedicated to his beloved cousin Harriet. But he also frequently calls up others from his distinguished family tree. In ‘Origins’, Jamison covers these, but, as someone who has written much on the genetic links of manic depression, she is mainly interested in tracing the ‘Mayflower screwballs’ among his forebears. This section also reveals the book’s main problem: the lack of a strong editorial hand. Jamison does not appear to have come across a detail or a quotation that she feels she can leave out. We begin in 1845 with poor Harriet Lowell being carted off to the McLean Asylum for the Insane, where her great-great grandson would later receive treatment. Before we know it we have been whisked away to the Orkney Islands and a discussion on the first inhabitants of Skara
Brae, on an expedition to track down a distant ancestor.
As well as being swamped with examples, the reader has to contend with much repetition. As anyone who has lived with manic depression, or has been close to someone who does, knows only too well, one of the most dispiriting, one might even say tedious, aspects of the disease is its repetitive nature. Along with the stress involved comes a dreary sense of déja vu. For Lowell, the pattern was invariably the same. Hypomania, or a state of heightened energy and flow of ideas coincided with some of his most productive spells, work which Jamison says became ‘the rough material for later and great poems’. This led into a
Jamison does not appear to have come across a detail that she feels she can leave out
severe manic state with complete lack of inhibition, delusions, and paranoia, followed by a deep depression. In ‘Home After Three Months Away’, written after a major attack, Lowell describes himself as ‘Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.’ Jamison includes a huge number of medical reports from the various hospitals and clinics to which Lowell was admitted, all of which say essentially the same things. Most of these could usefully have been placed in an appendix.
Jamison is at her considerable best when writing about the devastating effects of Lowell’s illness on his life, his relationships and his work. Even in his sane periods, Lowell was constantly under stress, dreading the return of mania. Jamison quotes his third wife, the heiress, alcoholic, and serial muse Caroline Blackwood. ‘I don’t think people generally realized the terror he was in that he might lose his mind minute by minute.’ Jamison writes well about Lowell’s second wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, with whom he shared a twenty-three-year marriage which ended when he deserted her for Blackwood. ‘He was the most extraordinary person I have ever known’, Hardwick said. But she also had to come to terms with the fact that Lowell’s manic behaviour
‘cause[s] me and other people real suffering. And for what?’ Jamison describes with deep understanding the fortitude with which Lowell faced the shame and guilt in the aftermath of his manic episodes. ‘Lowell endured the kind of suffering that brings most to their knees or to suicide. And, more remarkably, he did it without irredeemably ceding his work, dignity or friendships.’ Reading the poetry through the prism of Lowell’s madness, Jamison accentuates his resolve. Unlike the ‘confessional’ poets who followed in his wake, Lowell’s poetry never descends to self-pity.
Having been overpraised in his youth, after his death Lowell’s reputation went into a decline and the literary sharks, led by Ian Hamilton, whose 1983 biography ‘[taught] the rest to sneer’, smelling blood in the water, circled around to finish it off. In Robert Lowell: Essays on the poetry (1986), edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, Marjorie Perloff moves in for the kill. In an essay astonishing for its reverse snobbery and almost wilful underplaying of Lowell’s illness, she describes ‘a cult of madness … certifying poetic power … giving evidence of greatness’, as though Lowell’s mania were a deliberate performance. Perloff quotes the dancer Vija Vētra, to whom Lowell, in the throes of mania, declared ‘undying love’, only to abandon her. ‘Heartless, absolutely heartless’ was Vētra’s understandable reaction. Perloff scoffs that Vētra ‘did not know who the Lowells of Boston were and did not appreciate that her lover was a Great Poet’, as though Lowell were callously committing droit de seigneur. Such facile opinions were common at the time, though they have faded somewhat; even Perloff has managed some grudging respect for Lowell in later writings.
The true toll of Lowell’s manic depression has never before been fully explored. Jamison’s book, in spite of its divergences and repetitions, conclusively puts paid to these reactions and gives us the flawed, courageous, resilient poet Robert Traill Spence Lowell. g
Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.
THE HOPE FAULT
by Tracy Farr Fremantle Press
$29.99 pb, 340 pp, 9781925164404
The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault. The unrelenting rain that forms the lugubrious backdrop for much of the novel conjures up the same rich, atmospheric setting of the late Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), and suffuses the story with a sense of foreboding.
Farr’s five adult characters journey to an old seaside holiday house, peripheral to their existence yet laden with meaning, to prepare it for sale. The chief protagonist, Iris, sweeps through the house with her son Kurt, her niece Luce, her ex-husband Paul, his second wife Kristin, and their newly born child. A looming spectre is Iris’s mother, Rosa, an ailing matriarch living out her days in a retirement home.
A character study rather than a plot-driven narrative, The Hope Fault is demarcated into three distinct sections. No single encounter bears more resonance than another, reminiscent of everyday life where things only assume significance in retrospect. The middle section is a year-by-year account of Rosa’s life, moving backwards from her present day into her multilayered past as a mother, writer, lover, and wife. Though unanchored from the four days in which the story unfolds in real time, Iris’s life is a palimpsest of Rosa’s, with her mother’s decisions playing out in forgotten diaries and unacknowledged memories that are brought to the fore when the holiday house is unsheathed.
The family depicted in Farr’s pages is unusual but exceedingly relatable – one that may have been initially bound by legal and matrimonial ties but that remains interwoven by an intimacy forged through pain, loss, and understanding.
Sonia Nair
When Is It Going to Rain?
Gina Sano
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5245-2197-4 Hardback
978-1-5245-2195-0 Paperback
978-1-5245-2196-7 E-book
In this enchanting children’s tale, a girl asks everyone when it is going to rain and learns interesting predictors of a change in weather. She has the chance to determine which answer is true as the clouds finally darken.
Origin & Insertion Charts for Massage Therapists
Thomas Vas-Don
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5245-2156-1 Hardback
978-1-5245-2154-7 Paperback
978-1-5245-2155-4 E-book
This book makes it easier to understand the principals of massage, anatomy, trigger points, and referral pain patterns. You will see the body broken down into sections from origin and insertions, range of motion, to pain referral patterns with pictures.
Canticle for Calyute
Robert Halsey
www.partridgepublishing.com/Singapore
978-1-4828-3026-2 Paperback
978-1-4828-3027-9 E-book
Canticle for Calyute is a collection of 25 diverse short stories that transports readers on a journey through vivid settings and eclectic characters facing a variety of challenges. These stories raise self-consciousness and encourage introspection.
The Ten-Pound Adventure
Derrick Woolhouse Paxton
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5245-2025-0 Hardback
978-1-5245-2024-3 Paperback
978-1-5245-2023-6 E-book
Create a positive attitude and leave the “what if” and turn it into the “I can.” What you can achieve will surprise you. Blood has more meaning than we realize. Be a witness to The Ten-Pound Adventure!
Snapshots
Colin Nettelbeck
A HISTORY OF MODERN FRENCH LITERATURE: FROM THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
edited by Christopher Prendergast Princeton University Press (Footprint) $98 hb, 736 pp, 9780691157726
On the acknowledgments page of this vast compendium, Christopher Prendergast describes the creation of the work as an ‘arduous task’ and the book itself as an ‘unwieldy vessel’. One can sympathise with the difficulty of presenting as a history of five centuries of French literature what would more accurately be described as a chronological anthology of essays by more than thirty different scholars; but few historians would accept Prendergast’s introductory affirmation that his ‘collection of glimpses, angled and partial snapshots … is all history can ever be’.
A second introduction, by David Coward, provides a firmer historical context for the essay collection, tracing the development of French cultural distinctiveness across time: the gradual spread of the hegemony of the French language; the rise of the ‘author’ and the ‘intellectual’; and the evolution of readership from a tiny percentage of literate upper-class people to a mass audience. Coward outlines the complexities associated with the arrival of the printing press and the impact of various censorship regimes, and offers a history of literary criticism and an analysis of how French literature today, like any other, faces the challenges of the digital age. He does indeed provide what Prendergast calls ‘the arc of a story centred on the nexus of language, nation and modernity’.
Despite the shaky framework, Prendergast has gathered an impressive group of contributors from Britain, Ireland, and North America, many of whom are deservedly renowned literary historians. Not all of them meet the book’s ambition to be accessible to a general public: some succumb quite badly to
the temptation faced by many academics – to demonstrate their erudition through specialised language and stiflingly numerous allusions and references. But a good majority of the individual essays are outstanding, often brilliant, and serve as heartening evidence for the continuing vitality of French literary studies around the world today. Some do this by showing how the historical specificities of a particular author or work meld with pertinence for present-day readers. Hassan Melehy, for example, of the University of North Carolina, joins a very current debate through his reflection on Joachim du Bellay’s sixteenth-century argument for a renewal of French literature through transnational and multilingual borrowing – that is, the adoption of a principle of openness to external influence, rather than a cringing defensiveness. Susan Maslan (Berkeley) explores analogies between the psychological and socio-political concerns of eighteenth-century playwrights Marivaux and Beaumarchais and contemporary issues of power and gender. Joanna Stalnaker (Columbia), through an insightful examination of Rousseau’s Confessions and Promenades, raises many engaging points and questions about the now familiar and pervasive genre of writing of the self.
In other instances, some of the great figures of the French literary canon have stimulated inspired new interpretations: Timothy Hampton (Berkeley) on Montaigne, Nicholas Cronk (Oxford) on Voltaire, and Michael Lucey (Berkeley) on Proust all make for rewarding, thought-provoking reading. Roger Pearson (Oxford) uses Mallarmé’s celebrated A Throw of the Dice (1897) as a starting point for a masterly and scintillating review of French poetic practice from the French Revolution into the twentieth century.
Further diversity, both entertaining and instructive, occurs in various pieces scattered across the collection. Larry F. Norman (Chicago) turns the late-seventeenth-century Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns into a prism through which to project an account of the tectonics at work in the formation of French cultural identity from the Middle Ages to the Romantic
period; Catriona Seth (Oxford) mounts a compelling argument showing that male-dominated historical neglect of the voices of many significant eighteenth-century women has produced serious distortion of what Enlightenment France was; Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) – perhaps somewhat paradoxically for a professor of English – seeks (in my view successfully) to explain why we should consider Samuel Beckett principally as a French writer.
As David Coward points out, a persistent thread found in many of the essays is the relationship between literary production and political power. It is particularly evident in two pieces that analyse so-called ‘francophone’ literature – the very substantial body of work from those parts of the world which were once part of the French empire. This is a rich field, and a fraught one, where the use of French by writers who are often seeking to expose the debilitating and destructive effects of colonial rule simultaneously exposes their work to appropriation by the ‘mother’ culture in its nostalgic desire to affirm its continuing global relevance and reach. Both Mary Gallagher (University College Dublin), in her overview of the work of Aimé Césaire, and Nicholas Harrison (King’s College London), in his study of Assia Djebar and the ‘birth’ of francophone literature, illuminate the complexities, contradictions, and achievements of this field with admirable lucidity.
In sum, while this book does not provide the unified historical overview promised in the title, most of its essays, which all come with a bibliography and suggestions for further reading, offer informed and original insights into many of the major figures and movements of the French literary tradition, as well as others who are less well known or who have been forgotten. Given its price, it is perhaps more likely to be purchased by libraries than by individuals, but it will be of interest and value to a wide range of cultivated readers. g
Colin Nettelbeck is an emeritus professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French.
How to connect
Mark Williams
CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?: PERSONAL ESSAYS
by Ashleigh Young Giramondo
$24.95 pb, 280 pp, 9781925336443
Ashleigh Young is one of a number of writers currently distinguishing themselves as the latest generation to emerge from the creative writing program at Victoria University in Wellington. The course, founded by Bill Manhire in 1975, maintains the supply of excellence that attracted so much resentment as its ‘spectacular babies’ – from Barbara Anderson to Eleanor Catton – carried off the prizes and earned international praise.
Five of the eight categories in this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were taken by VUP authors, among them Hera Lindsay Bird, whose eponymous volume won Best First Book for Poetry. ‘Keats is dead so fuck me from behind,’ sings Bird, a long way from the austere feminist politics of Dinah Hawken in the 1990s. Yet one observation about VUP writers has been that they have made poetry ‘unpoetic’. If Bird confirms this, Young reverses it, making the personal essay a work of resonant literary art. Can You Tolerate This? took both the Ockham non-fiction award and Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize.
Much of the book centres on the writer’s preoccupation with the body and its dissatisfactions, around which philosophical and medical discourses gather. ‘Bones’ frames the concern by recounting the life of a boy with a hideous disability; from the age of five, a ‘second skeleton’ grows around his natal one. An unsettling agency is ascribed by Young to this extra skeleton that ‘seemed to want to fuse him to a single spot and keep him safe there’.
For New Zealand readers, the image of the dead boy displayed in a museum, his bones fused without the aid of wire, might recall Allen Curnow’s famous poem ‘The Skeleton of the Great Moa
in the Canterbury Museum’ or Bill Manhire’s ‘Phar Lap’ where the bones of the great horse in the National Museum stand, articulated. Young, as an editor at Victoria University Press, will know the echoes, but her purpose is not to engage in intertextual teasers or bow before her national literary ancestors (in ‘Katherine Would Approve’ she neatly eviscerates the genteel literary worshippers of a faux Mansfield by recounting her time working in the great one’s birthplace and shrine). ‘Bones’ directs our attention to the actual person visited by suffering more extreme but no more arbitrary than that of any human life, and to the writer thinking about bodily imperfection.
Worried bodily self-consciousness is insistent in these stories, the writer herself suffering from (parent-induced) hair and weight anxieties. These personal anxieties are placed alongside narratives of extreme abnormality, like that of the ‘Hairy Maid’. The body, though, is not all painful self-regard. In ‘Witches’, the author recalls early childhood when ‘Each of us begins in the nude.’
The children look at the world of parents, place, and things, but not inwards – ‘at everything but ourselves’. Before the fall into self-consciousness, the body feels ‘inconsequential’. After, it carries a personal sense of imposition, even imprisonment; it becomes an extra skeleton, ‘a thing both apart from and forever clinging to our back’.
Reading these essays at times recalls Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women transposed from small-town Ontario to a kiwi parochialism. But the essays are not fictive. The author is a poet, so literature is part of the personal life explored, along with philosophical and ethical thinking. And Te Kuiti, the scene of the writer’s childhood, is not a fictional version of an actual place. In the rich dairy land of ‘The King Country’ (where the Māori king and his followers went into exile after the British conquered the Waikato), the writer’s family straddles the distances between town and country, accountancy and farming. Growing up sensitive, Young is not wholly isolated. She has her brothers with their bands, music, and eccentricities, and she has an imaginary friend. Walking the hills near Te Kuiti, the author imagines herself
discoursing with Paul McCartney before his face began its ‘slow collapse’. As his teenage understander, she transports herself into the larger world, and the gap discovered between local and worldly is both immense and intimate: ‘I wanted to walk beside someone from a different universe, someone who would turn Te Kuiti into something else.’ In fact, she moves to Wellington, a cultural city in its own right.
Provincialism, for Young, is not where you are; we all live, as Manhire puts it, ‘at the edge of the universe’. Listening to old tapes she recognises ‘a Romanticism of the King Country: it was as if this place, for my father and his friends, was as potent as Liverpool in the 1960s’. Here, the dream of escape is linked to another province imagined as a centre, another unexpectedly generative province of the cramped soul.
In Maurice Duggan’s 1963 story ‘Along Rideout Road That Summer’, the narrator, an educated young man working for a summer on a farm, rides an ancient tractor while intoning ‘Kubla Khan’ and watching the farmer’s beautiful daughter, Fanny Hohepa. His problem, ‘How to connect…’, is also one for our essayist who recalls wishing to ‘turn Te Kuiti into something else. Its armyblanket green would become a romantic backdrop.’ But kiwi romanticism is not endorsed, and the older Young prefers the dangers of biking around Wellington to the boredom of the bush walk. Te Kuiti, Liverpool, Wellington – in these naked, beautiful essays about self and its exoskeletons, where one is and where one longs to be, Ashleigh Young has connected unlikely parts. g
Mark Williams is a New Zealand poet, writer, academic, critic, and editor. He is Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington. ❖
Tricky terrain
Anthony Lawrence
SELECTED POEMS 1968–2014
by Paul Muldoon
Faber Poetry
$34.99 hb, 240 pp, 9780571327959
Paul Muldoon’s friend and mentor, the late Seamus Heaney, once remarked that reading Muldoon was like being in a room with two informants: one a compulsive liar and one who always tells the truth. The trick, Heaney suggested, is ‘trying to formulate a question that will elicit an answer from either one that can be reliably decoded’.
Muldoon’s poems are renowned for their sleight of hand, for saying one thing then offering alternatives to whatever it is that a word or image has provoked. If variety of ideas and theme can make for engaging poetry, Muldoon has made association his own, inimitable domain. For readers new to his work, this can be unsettling. Expecting immediate accessibility and transparency can lead to frustration. One way of negotiating the tricky terrain Muldoon has mapped, often without scale, is to go along for the ride, to enjoy the scenic route with a guide who may or may not be offering a reliable commentary on what’s encountered along the way. Muldoon has been accused of being wilfully obscure, but this is harsh, as it overlooks the poet’s own admission that language can be unpredictable and spontaneous, despite the resulting work being the product of an intense editorial resolve.
Selected Poems 1968–2014 is a radical departure from Poems 1968–1998, which contained the complete texts of every book between New Weather (1973) and Hay (1998). At almost five hundred pages, the earlier collection is a formidable body of work from a poet in his late forties. This new, honed-back selection finds Muldoon in minimalist form, offering only five poems from the twelve collections which take up where Hay left off, and ending with One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015).
Muldoon’s central themes, while being reduced in scope, are still given
room to breathe and move here – landscape, family and community, animals, relationships, and language itself – represented by shorter, lyrical poems as well as a number of the longer narratives that traditionally bookend his collections. Muldoon has long been recognised as a master of rhyme and formality. His sonnets can remain true to the Italian or Elizabethan form, they can merge the rhyme schemes and stanzaic structures of both, or they can be composed in any way Muldoon feels is appropriate at the time. It is hard to argue with someone who knows that for experimentation to work there must first be an understanding and mastery of the technical aspects of the form being deconstructed. ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’ (The Annals of Chile, 1994) contains fortynine stanzas, each one a sonnet. ‘Incantata’, based on Yeats’s elegy for Major Robert Gregory, employs the same end-rhymes that Muldoon used in the long poem ‘Yarrow’ (also from The Annals of Chile, but not included here) in reverse order.
The poems containing animals are among Muldoon’s finest works. These creatures never make random appearances, and are often seen in terms of local history and cultural significance. His books are filled with horses, pigs, badgers, armadillos, beavers, frogs, fish, birds, rabbits, foxes, and panthers. While his concerns are largely anthropomorphic, he also celebrates an animal’s natural form and habitat. From the earliest Robert Frost-inspired poems from New Weather (1973) like ‘Dancers at the Moy’, in which horses abandoned at a sale are left to starve to death, and ‘Hedgehog’; to the more autobiographical, Louis MacNeice-influenced poems that range, often parabolically across subsequent volumes, Muldoon’s visionary, transforming approach ensures that no pastoral or portrayal of animal will ever rely on linear description.
Some critics have called attention to Muldoon’s use of cliché. He has made them part of the fabric of many poems, yet he does so playfully, mischievously, as a way to compare and contrast ideas while tipping his hat to MacNeice, whose poem ‘Homage to Clichés’ would almost certainly have been an influence on the younger poet: ‘You can lead a horse to water
but you can’t make it hold / its nose to the grindstone and hunt with the hounds. / Every dog has a stitch in time. Two heads? You’ve been sold / one good turn. One good turn deserves a bird in the hand.’ (‘Symposium’, from Hay)
Some readers may sense, having read through these linguistically complex poems, that Muldoon has passed over genuine feeling to achieve technical brilliance. His ornate, intricate explorations of the sonnet, sestina, and extended narratives tend to focus our attention on his mastery of balancing vowel and consonant to achieve music that best suits his subject matter. And yet, despite his deliberate attempts to disrupt and unsettle syntax, there is an undercurrent of intense order and crafted design that attends to even the strangest, most disorienting poems. ‘Incantata’ is a fine example. An elegy to his friend and ex-partner, the printmaker Mary Farl Powers, it is Muldoon’s most ambitious poem, and repeated readings unearth linguistic delights rarely seen in the work of his contemporaries. There are riddles and nods to Samuel Beckett (Sam Bethicket), references to the massacre at Culloden prior to the Scottish ‘Clearances’ and to the slaughter of Mexicans at Chickamauga. The violence is both historical and intensely personal as it backgrounds Muldoon’s lament for the terminally ill Powers.
In these twisting, elusive, yet strangely intimate poems, Muldoon is asking us to investigate Robert Frost’s ‘straight crookedness’, where the poet should trust in the unknown for the poem to arrive at its own destination, in the form it takes on, along the way. Even with the sonnet and sestina, Frost’s philosophy has been taken seriously. In the hands of a poet like Muldoon, the borders of a particular form offer no constraints.
Paul Muldoon is conspiratorial, incantatory, subversive, self-conscious, and extravagant. He is a poet for whom the word ‘etymology’ seems perfectly suited, as he loves nothing more than to follow the paper or electronic trail to where a word hits a wall, or breaks into other parts worth tracking down. g
Anthony Lawrence’s most recent poetry collection is Headwaters (Pitt Street Poetry, 2016).
Fragmentation
Joan Fleming
THE BLUE DECODES
by Cassie Lewis
Grand Parade Poets
$23.95 pb, 102 pp, 9780994600202
REDACTOR
by Eddie Paterson
Whitmore Press
$24.95 pb, 118 pp, 9780987386687
Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, re-membered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time.
The idea of hopefulness is central to Lewis’s collection, which has been twenty years in the making. Images of the sacred and the profane, temple and town, host an oscillating meditation on the notion of hope. Sometimes
hope is the unclaimed joys of youth, ‘a memory of happiness you couldn’t use’; sometimes hope is cast as an oddly watchful force exerting pressures on human follies and wounds. Lewis’s day job as a nurse is subtly evident in images of the rawness and brutality of the human work of being in the world. Other times, the collection’s voice finds itself in a stand-off with its central preoccupation: ‘What would hope do to me if I couldn’t stare it out?’ The poems’ speakers and characters betray longing for the transcendence that ritual or worship might provide, but this is a book of irreverent religious feeling, not of religion or religiosity. The exchange of forces that religion promises is often sought and found in the act of writing poetry: ‘Between the page and the eye is where the power happens.’
Some of her sparer poems lack the subtlety of feeling in the collection’s shining majority. A section of pocketsized poems, some ironic, some scribbly, read as scraps that might be integrated into a textual performance like the one sustained in ‘Bridges’, the long, wandering poem that concludes the book. Some phrases are recycled, like the beautifully humble description of the poet’s writing work in the wee hours: ‘to type is to construct little shanties for the night’. The book’s heart is a section of prose poem vignettes that are quite perfect. Here, the tension of spiritual grapple relaxes into koans like: ‘I read that leaving cold places one might feel, now it’s me who’s made of ice.’
A push and pull between the will to categorise and claim life, and to simply be in it, lends many of the poems their exquisite tension. The rare moments when the speaker performs the poet’s classic function of inciting the reader to intensive awareness or gratitude feel earned: ‘Today I’m the addressee of all that’s perfect’; ‘Don’t enlist your time on earth / just love it / and the four humours will let you speak your name.’ This is a substantial and mature collection that has been worth the wait.
In redactor, Paterson acknowledges his debt to the cut-up, the collage, and the ‘ready-made’. Processes of reusing found objects have become central to the visual arts, but have still not found
full credence in poetry. The collection revels in the sheer stupid pleasure of re-contextualisation. For example, census figures of religious orientation are spliced with figures of book sales: ‘catholics up 7 anglicans down 8.5 uniting down 15.5 novels up 17’. The poem ‘christmas instructions’ is a fine example of instructional text de-contextualised to pointed, worrying effect: ‘christmas was bought in 3 stories / & it is very important that they stay / merchandised in their stories … / please / do not / spread christmas around the store.’ The book delights in the peculiarities and overplayed seriousness of such forms of writing. However, redactor is not thoroughly found poetry. The poem ‘flying into melbourne’ describes the jolt the speaker feels when he realises that what he is looking at is not, in fact, what he is looking at: mistaking ships for blimps, the harbour for the sky. That jolt is everywhere in the collection, as school notices and random email trails and news stories are recognised afresh as poetry. However, part of the book’s intelligence and fun is that the reader does not know what is reproduced verbatim, and what has been doctored. Everywhere, the poet’s sense of humour and wry aesthetic prevail. The book’s central conceit of joyfully and ironically ‘censoring’ the flood of information and bad writing that saturates our screen-based lives is balanced by love poems and intimate email poems, which culminate in a kind of self-portrait. Despite the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of source texts Paterson incorporates into his project, the last word of the book is still ‘me’. g
Joan Fleming is the author of two books of poetry, Failed Love Poems (2015) and The Same as Yes (2011). ❖
ABR Arts
Andrea Goldsmith on The Merchant of Venice
Opera
Christopher Menz
Parsifal (Opera Australia)
Theatre
Jane Sullivan Ink (Almeida Theatre)
Film
Francesca Sasnaitis
The King’s Choice (Palace Films)
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
Michael Honeyman, Kwangchul Youn, Jonas Kaufmann, Pinchas Steinberg, and Michelle DeYoung in Opera Australia’s Parsifal (photograph by Keith Saunders)
Parsifal
by Christopher Menz
Of all Richard Wagner’s operatic works, it is Parsifal that divides audiences most. As with the Ring, its ambiguity lends itself to multiple interpretations. The music has been praised and admired by the greatest of critics and musicians, including those who heard it when it was new: Mahler, Sibelius, Berg, Debussy, George Bernard Shaw. It is the text, drama, and characters, the overblown religiosity, ritual, the piousness and passivity of the hero and his denial of sex and sexuality that cause the problems. Indeed, the only character Debussy found sympathetic was Klingsor, the evil one in the piece who has castrated himself in order to achieve power by his immunity to sexual desire. Whatever Debussy thought of the text, however, the music captivated him, and musical references to Parsifal appear in Pelléas et Mélisande, which he composed after hearing the work of the Bayreuth master.
Wagner’s final opera, first performed in 1882 at the second Bayreuth Festival, was the longest of his works in gestation. He first read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s twelfth-century epic Parzival in 1845. The first prose sketch for what became Parsifal followed in 1865, and a completed draft in 1877. In translating the poem into a workable text for opera, Wagner made several changes, the most interesting of which is combining several female characters into one: Kundry. She is the figure who laughed at Christ on his way to the Crucifixion and has been condemned to screaming and wandering ever since; she is the penitent Magdalen; the servant of both Klingsor and the Grail knights; the great seductress; and possibly Parsifal’s mother.
Parsifal is the clueless innocent (or ‘innocent greenhorn’, to use Shaw’s translation of der reine Tor) who stumbles into the drama and by his actions (or more truthfully inaction) brings about redemption and the establishment of a new order. This is a similar theme to the one Wagner used in the Ring, where comparisons can be found in the pairings of characters: Klingsor and Alberich, Parsifal and Siegfried, Kundry and Brünnhilde. However, Kundry, although at times enslaved, is self-aware throughout the opera, and it is Parsifal who gains insight and understanding through compassion. Parsifal is a noble role: his only misdemeanour is shooting a swan in a holy place. His insight comes like a thunderbolt from Kundry’s kiss in Act II, when, suddenly, he understands the significance of Amfortas’s wound. Like the Ring,
Parsifal also has its share of magic, as well as a good deal of sickness and blood (the Grail and the bleeding wound), and of course the Holy Grail itself.
Parsifal ’s journey to Australia has been a slow one. The first and only complete Australian fully staged performance, mounted by the State Opera of South Australia in Adelaide in 2001, was memorably conducted by the late Jeffrey Tate but marred by Elke Neidhardt’s unsympathetic production. As recently as December 2016, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Simone Young, performed extracts from Act II with Michelle DeYoung as Kundry and Stuart Skelton as Parsifal.
Jonas Kaufmann, fresh from his first Otello at the Royal Opera House, made a welcome return to Australia following his début here for Opera Australia with recitals in Sydney and Melbourne. Kaufmann first sang the title role at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 2013 to considerable acclaim. He was joined on the Concert Hall stage by Michelle DeYoung (Kundry), Kwangchul Youn (Gurnemanz), Michael Honeyman (Amfortas), Warwick Fyfe (Klingsor), and David Parkin (Titurel).
Concert performances of Parsifal enable us to luxuriate in this extraordinary score, to focus on the voices, and to follow the opera without being subjected to voguish directorial excesses. This superb and moving performance of Parsifal should do much to encourage further concert performances of great operas. All the singers were in fine voice. Gurnemanz, is the central figure who narrates much of the history in Acts I and III, was commandingly sung by Kwangchul Youn. It is Gurnemanz who meets Parsifal on both occasions and leads him to the Grail ritual. Michael Honeyman gave a thrilling performance as Amfortas in his long, crazed aria on his endless suffering. His final Ermbarmen! (Have mercy!) was heart-wrenching. Warwick Fyfe’s Klingsor was a dramatic and powerful interpretation. Michelle DeYoung inhabited the role of Kundry, showing great lyrical beauty as the seductress as well as in the screaming extremes elsewhere in this demanding role. As Parsifal, Jonas Kaufmann was magnificent both vocally and interpretatively, showing the transformation from innocent youth to compassionate saviour. The German tenor maintained beauty of tone and focus throughout, both in the passages of greatest volume and intensity and in those of great delicacy, most effectively the final and tender öffnet den Schrein! (Open the shrine!). The rest of the cast was strong and impressive throughout. The other star role was the Opera Australia Orchestra under the baton of Pinchas Steinberg. The playing was superb, particularly the wind sections, and Steinberg shaped this long opera with an assured hand. The pacing was perfectly measured, with careful attention to performance details of phrasing and dynamics. Rarely has four and a half hours of opera been so engrossing from start to finish. g
Parsifal was performed by Opera Australia in the Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House on 9, 12, and 14 August 2017. Performance attended: 9 August. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.
Christopher Menz is an arts and development consultant.
The Merchant of Venice
by Andrea Goldsmith
The Merchant of Venice is a troublesome play. I have seen productions that have played up the comic aspects to an absurd and irritating degree while confining Shylock to the stereotype that bears his name. Some interpretations exploit the play as anti-Semitic propaganda. And none of the productions I have seen has united the two main narrative threads to any satisfying degree. Not surprisingly, The Merchant of Venice has remained one of my least favourite of Shakespeare’s plays.
What a difference an evening can make. Bell Shakespeare’s new production, under the inspired direction of Anne-Louise Sarks, is a brilliant, illuminating, dramatically compelling interpretation in which the comic and tragic are perfectly balanced. It has made me see the play anew.
Sarks’s production reveals a culture of entrenched racism and discrimination, a culture in which the penalties of being an outsider never subside. Before Shakespeare’s opening lines are uttered, all the Christian characters, each wearing a prominently displayed crucifix, kneel down and recite the Lord’s Prayer. Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, remain off to one side, shut out from this act of social cohesiveness because they are Jews. And playing in the background is a Semitic melody, gentle and beguiling and signposting the sympathy this production engenders for Shylock.
The Christian characters flaunt their disparagement of Jews, tossing off insults with fun and frivolity. In contrast, there is a gravitas to Mitchell Butel’s Shylock, a quiet meditative almost inward-looking aspect to him. (Michael Hankin’s costumes are powerfully effective here. Shylock is dressed as an orthodox Jew, a sedate-looking figure when compared to the other male characters in their sharp suits.) From the outset, audience sympathy is with Shylock; by the time he mercilessly demands his pound of flesh we understand him and are firmly on his side.
Shylock is not the only outsider. Sarks has introduced
Mitchell Butel as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (photograph by Prudence Upton)
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a subtle homoerotic element into the character of Antonio. This is no kowtowing to modern sensibilities; on the contrary, the homoeroticism works so well within the drama of the play that one wonders at not having seen it before. As for women being outsiders, Portia and Nerissa gain in power only when they pass as men. There is a delightful touch when the women reveal a wry, sensual pleasure as they discard their female garb and replace it with male attire. A sort of feminist striptease.
I have never considered this play a comedy, but there are laugh-aloud moments in the Bell production. Jacob Warner’s Launcelot alone would be sufficient to convert me to the comic aspects of this play.
The pivotal speech in The Merchant of Venice occurs in Act III Scene I. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ Shylock asks. ‘Hath
The Merchant of Venice has remained one of my least favourite of Shakespeare’s plays. What a difference an evening can make
not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ It is you who have made me what I am, Shylock suggests. Far from shying away from the complex relationship between oppressor and oppressed, as so many productions have, Bell Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice makes it central.
This is a gripping production. The acting is superb, the stagecraft sublime. The music extends the drama and texture of the narrative in a subtle yet effective way. The stage is uncluttered and deceptively simple. At the rear hangs a full-length curtain of gold; centre-back is a narrow rectangular trolley on wheels carrying the three caskets which will determine Portia’s marital fate (this is brought forward when the action demands it). All the characters remain on stage throughout; if not involved in the action they are seated on benches that line the perimeter. This helps to bring the two narrative strands of the play together. Indeed, in the final scene, when all the Christians are whooping it up having made their fortunes and defeated the Jew, Shylock sits bent and broken and absolutely still at the back of the stage. You cannot forget that the cost of their delight is the ruin of a man. This production is not to be missed. g
The Merchant of Venice (Bell Shakespeare) continues at The Playhouse, Canberra Theatre Centre from 13 to 21 October, and The Playhouse, Sydney Opera House from 24 October to 26 November. Performance attended: 20 July.
Andrea Goldsmith is a novelist and reviewer.
The Lost City of Z
by Jake Wilson
Cinema has always provided a venue for dreams of the exotic, but few directors in these post-colonial times can revive such fantasies without guilt. This is the dilemma with which James Gray, among the most intelligent of modern American filmmakers, must grapple in The Lost City of Z, his epic account of the career of Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Fawcett (1867–1925?), regarded by some as Britain’s last great explorer. Based on the 2009 book of the same name by New Yorker writer David Grann, the film chronicles Fawcett’s obsessive quest – which lasted well into the twentieth century – for the ruins of a fabled lost city in the jungles of ‘Amazonia’. Reports suggest that the film became something of an obsession for Gray himself, who battled to get it made over a number of years. At one point, it was meant to star Benedict Cumberbatch, whose angular patrician looks are a close match for the impact made by Fawcett in photographs.
Instead, we get Charlie Hunnam, who is probably best known for turning down the chance to play the lead in Fifty Shades of Grey. Hunnam will never be mistaken for a movie star, but he is an effective presence in his own gentler fashion. Although he sometimes overdoes the trick of speaking in a slow semi-whisper, his greatest strength is his mellow voice, which enables him to convey highminded dreaminess without sounding overly posh or fey. Also surprisingly effective is the usually unbearable Robert Pattinson in the semi-comic role of Fawcett’s aide-de-camp Henry Costin: masked by spectacles and a heavy beard, he shows a playful eccentricity that suggests he would make a natural Edward Lear.
Everything Gray does is worth pondering, but this is not, to my mind, a masterpiece on par with his greatest and most mysterious film, The Immigrant (2013). Part of the achievement of that film lay in its suspension of meaning, with the moral question arising in the course of the story – such as the agonised choice by the Polish Catholic heroine (Marion Cotillard) to sacrifice her ‘virtue’ – viewed from the early twentieth-century vantage point of the
characters themselves, rather than through supposedly wise modern eyes.
Here, by contrast, Gray ensures our sympathy with Fawcett by making him a humanitarian who speaks up on behalf of the South American ‘natives’, consciously modifying the real man’s unconcealed racism. On the other hand, when his wife, Nina (Sienna Miller), asks to join him on his journey through the jungle, he turns her down flat – and here, too, there is no question about what any enlightened modern viewer is supposed to think.
There is also a sense that Gray, shooting on location in Colombia, is going against the grain of his own sensibility, in that he is not an artist anyone would look to for the thrill of high adventure. His spare, romantic melodramas are about as contemplative as American genre cinema gets – to the point where they are sometimes tagged as ‘classical’, though this word means something different in film criticism than what it does elsewhere.
In essence, this so-called classicism consists of combining a sense of yearning with a reluctance to waste shots or linger on them once the point is made. Typical of this economy is a scene in which Fawcett reads aloud to Costin from Kipling’s poem ‘The Explorer’, which crystallises his dream of ‘something lost behind the ranges’. As the recitation switches from his voice to that of Nina, who originally transcribed the poem, we are shown a series of distant shots of the two men travelling on foot over the mountains – summing up their journey as she might imagine it, and prompting the question of whether it is she who is the real dreamer.
However that may be, the Fawcett of the film is the most metaphysical kind of explorer – a kindred spirit to the seekers in the films of Werner Herzog, or Patrick White’s Voss. There is a tricky balance here, which Gray does not quite successfully maintain. Fawcett is meant to be genuinely open-minded and curious about the cultures and peoples he comes across in his travels, but we are also meant to feel that the jungle, for him, is pure symbol, that what he is really seeking is not to be found in this life.
This point is evident from early on, and the limitation of the film is ultimately less its distortion of history or its failure to resolve certain ideological issues than the fact that it eventually runs out of places to go. Much of what Gray is trying for here was already done by Terrence Malick in The New World (2005), an even more romantic vision of colonialism: specifically, in the scene where Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) asks her former lover John Smith (Colin Farrell), ‘Did you find your Indies?’ and he answers, ‘I may have sailed past them.’ g
The Lost City of Z (Studio Canal), 140 minutes, written and directed by James Gray. Based on The Lost City of Z: A tale of deadly obsession in the Amazon (2009) by David Grann.
Jake Wilson is a freelance writer who reviews films regularly for The Age.
by Jane Sullivan
Rupert Murdoch is one of those towering but flawed figures of power beloved of dramatists. Shakespeare – with a time machine – would have used him. David Williamson had a go in his play Rupert (2013), and is reported to be writing a screenplay for a US television miniseries. Now the Brits have tackled Murdoch, in the shape of James Graham’s play Ink, which has had its world première in London at the Almeida Theatre.
Graham takes us back to the ‘Dirty Digger’ days in 1969, when a younger pre-phone tap scandal proprietor, fresh from Australia, took over a moribund rag called The Sun, jacked up circulation to stratospheric levels, and permanently changed not only Fleet Street but the whole of Western print media. And he was only getting started.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this splendid play, so well served by Rupert Goold’s lively production, is that travelling with Murdoch is such an enjoyable ride. The story is a variant on the legend of Faust, with The Sun’s new editor Larry Lamb as a dour Yorkshire Faust and Murdoch as a brilliantly seductive Mephistopheles – brash, foul-mouthed, impatient with old-school journalism and determined to give the readers what they want. He might be a devil but he has all the best tunes. You start to wonder whether he might be right.
As an old hack myself, I felt right at home with the nostalgic aspects of the scene: the smoky, scruffy newsroom, with everyone bashing away at typewriters; the pouring of hot metal and the roar of the presses; the assortment of recognisable newspaper characters, from the woman’s page editor, tougher than most of the men, to the prissy deputy editor whose idea of fun is adapting the minor works of Émile Zola (there’s a frustrated intellectual on every tabloid).
However, you don’t have to be an insider to appreciate this drama. You don’t even have to know all that much about newspapers. At the heart of the story is an intensely contemporary dilemma: what happens when you let the populist genie out of the bottle? This is one
very significant step on the road that led to Donald Trump, to the everyone’s-a-journalist world of the internet, the likes and the clickbait and the fake news.
But what fun it is, what a romp. And what a battle with their arch rivals, the Daily Mirror, and its oldschool editor Hugh Cudlipp’s ideal of a campaigning working-class paper putting pressure on the UK government to improve the lot of the people. Murdoch and Lamb make Cudlipp look stuffy as they steal his thunder and delight in saucy stunts such as Pussy Week (it’s about cats) and headlines such as ‘Headless Body in Topless Bar’.
Cudlipp fumes and warns that if you are going to pander to basic instincts, you will have to keep feeding the beast. And so it proves. After the interval, things get considerably darker as Lamb, at first a reluctant convert, begins to out-Murdoch Murdoch in his zealotry. A tragic kidnapping comes much too close to home. But the darkest scene comes when Lamb, full of a very British embarrassment, tries to persuade one of the paper’s glamour models to become the first page three girl. This is all the more effective because it is a subtle to and fro that refuses to reduce the girl to a victim. And yet we sense that a fatal line is being crossed that is about much more than bare breasts.
We know this story, if not the finer details. What enchanted me was the exuberant seduction, that feeling that Orson Welles as Citizen Kane summed up in a similar story of a great media mogul sinking into corruption, when he said he thought it might be rather fun to run a newspaper. Clearly it was fun, until that genie got out.
One of the chief pleasures of this production is the performances, which are uniformly fine, but the outstanding scenes lie in the tension between Richard Coyle’s Larry Lamb and Bertie Carvel’s Rupert Murdoch. Carvel lights up the stage as the Dirty Digger, with his slightly stooping walk, his easy assumption of power, his fiendish way of turning the tables: ‘That’s what you taught me,’ he keeps telling Lamb, branded with a double mark of Cain – a mysterious scar on his forehead and a faceful of printer’s ink.
With a play that is at once universal and also very specific in its appeal, Ink will surely be picked up in Australia. We should all have a chance to see this study of ‘our own Rupert’: revolutionary, iconoclastic, a force of nature. Devilish, certainly, and yet you can’t sheet all the blame home to him. He wanted to sell lots of papers, he picked an editor to do his work, dirty or otherwise, and then he moved on, leaving his indelible mark. g
Ink, written by James Graham and directed by Rupert Goold, ran from 17 June to 5 August 2017 at the Almeida Theatre, London. Performance attended: 2 August.
Jane Sullivan has been a print journalist in Britain and Australia for more than forty years. She has never worked for Rupert Murdoch.
The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man
by Andrew Fuhrmann
It is a provocative idea: disability as superpower. Can we imagine Joseph Merrick (1862–90), the Elephant Man, as some sort mutant hero whose disfigurement is a gift? This is what the latest Malthouse production seems to be suggesting in its variation on the true story of a man with severe deformities who became a minor celebrity in Victorian England. And what does this superpower consist of? Why, simply the power to fascinate and to bewilder.
‘I am the most extraordinary thing in this massive city,’ Merrick declares to the astonishment of the hospital nurses. They are trying to keep him out of sight, to hide him in the cellar. He refuses to go gently into the darkness.
In this version, directed by Matthew Lutton with a text by Tom Wright, the Elephant Man has the power to upset any desire for order, any ingrown yearning for labels and systems and diagnostic perspectives. Like a Dionysus abroad at a time of industrial revolution, he confronts his world with the real chaos of nature, the seething energies that modern civilisation tries vainly to efface.
We are more comfortable with the idea of great powers as their own form of setback or flaw or fatality. This conception apparently dominated the most recent Broadway revival of Bernard Pomerance’s original 1977 stage version of The Elephant Man, where Bradley Cooper – according to legend the most attractive man alive – played the role of Merrick, as if sex appeal were a disfigurement or an affliction to be pitied.
Then there is the myth of great powers as a compensation for disability. Let’s call it the Tiresias trope. A man is blinded by the gods, but gets the gift of prophecy as a consolation prize. This theme predominated in the David Lynch version of The Elephant Man (1980), with John Hurt in the title role. Lynch insinuates that the extraordinary gentility of Merrick’s soul, its unusual delicacy, is compensation for his grotesque appearance.
But the Malthouse is not giving us Pomerance’s play or a stage version of Lynch’s famous movie. Wright’s script uses the same source material, but the argument he constructs is much more ambitious. The familiar incidents are all here, but the depiction of institutional structures, in particular the hospital where Merrick lives out his days, is given a critical twist. Here, the doctors are just cruel examiners, policing the human body, intent on correcting aberrations or hiding them.
Daniel Monks was brought in earlier this year to replace Mark Leonard Winter in the role of Merrick. Monks is partially paralysed on his right side, the result of a childhood operation on a spinal cord tumour. Fair enough, but does he fascinate and dazzle? Is he, beyond this, a Dionysus? His Merrick is not without dignity or feeling, but he lacks the sort of outsized Nietzschean charisma which this particular version of Elephant Man seems to call for.
This is a script that celebrates nature in all its mutations, even where it bleeds and aches, even where it blooms only for a moment before suffocating on its own exuberance. Wright’s Elephant Man sees himself not as a failed human being in need of a cure, but as a creature who has escaped classification, who is in fact no longer human but rather a free variation in the rainbow of life. Monks is not really on the same page as the writer. He seems unwilling to have someone else’s radical anti-humanism inscribed on his disability. It is one thing to accept superficial equivalences, complicating the voyeuristic impulses of the audience; but it is something else to acquiesce in a depiction of abnormality as a miracle and the human as something sloughed off.
board, either. For the most part, this production lacks any dynamic which would invoke emancipation. With the bright exception of Emma J. Hawkins in one of four supporting roles, this production feels disconnected from the vitalism that animates Wright’s text. Hawkins has an artistic brio nourished by a circus and musical theatre background. I wonder if this show needed more of that sort of flair, something more rapid and self-consciously theatrical.
The rest of the cast have their moments, but this feels like a production which is at odds with itself, hesitating before the extremism of its own doctrine. Designer Marg Horwell’s London is a thing sculpted out of smoke and shadows, and her costumes have style and character. The action takes place in a bare room that is a torture chamber with victims subjected to random blasts of steam. Jethro Woodward’s sound design is full of unsettling clunks and ghostly murmurs, a symphony of disquiet.
And yet, for all its difficulties, the play does end on a high note. The Elephant Man wanders into the snowy streets and there is a sudden elevation of mood. The effect is similar to the famous final paragraph of ‘The Dead’, the story from Dubliners in which James Joyce has snow falling throughout the universe and drawing all things together. Here, in the final moments of this play, it’s as if redemption and unification take place under the snow, merging the city and the surrounding landscape and the body of the outcast.
This, at least, is an image the mind can surrender to. g
The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man (Malthouse Theatre Company), written by Tom Wright and directed by Matt Lutton, was performed at the Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse from 4 to 27 August 2017. Performance attended: 9 August.
I am not sure that Matthew Lutton is entirely on
Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic.
A photograph of Joseph Merrick published in the British Medical Journal following his death in 1890 (via Wikimedia Commons)
Daniel Monks in The Real and Imagined History of The Elephant Man (photograph by Pia Johnson)
The King’s Choice
by Francesca Sasnaitis
In 1905 a Danish prince was elected to the throne of Norway. The King’s Choice begins with grainy archival footage of the arrival of the new royal family. The streets are lined with people. The cheering crowd scenes segue into a different kind of rally, and then Adolf Hitler’s familiar hectoring face fills the screen. Norway, like many smaller nations, was neutral at the start of World War II. Neutrality did little to prevent invasion. When a German naval flotilla arrived in Oslofjord on 9 April 1940 and was fired upon by Colonel Birger Eriksen (Erik Hivju) and the recruits under his command at Oscarsborg Fortress, King Haakon VII was sixty-eight years old and suffering from severe back pain. The successful torpedoing of the cruiser Blücher delayed the German invasion long enough for the government and the royal family to escape before Oslo fell. The King’s Choice follows the ensuing pandemonium of the next three days.
Director Erik Poppe honed his eye for composition as a newspaper photographer and cinematographer for commercials. He has directed four feature films to date, including A Thousand Times Good Night (2013), with Juliette Binoche in the role of a photojournalist who is torn between her addiction to war zones, her duty to the people she photographs, and her family. Duty, with its sense moral obligation, service, and self-sacrifice, is rarely the focus of contemporary film or literature. Responsibility is the preferred concept, compatible with accepted notions of blame and accountability. But it is the burden of duty that occupies Poppe’s major characters, including the Norwegian king and the German envoy charged with negotiating a peaceful capitulation.
That we care about the fate of the royal family is due largely to veteran Danish actor Jesper Christensen, who plays Haakon with a complex range of emotions from doting grandfather to severe father, subtle diplomat, imperious monarch, and a man on whose conscience the responsibility for a nation’s welfare weighs heavily. Christensen has the craggy features and rheumy-eyed gravitas suited equally to kings and crims, and will be remembered for his supporting roles in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013), and as the pokerfaced Mr White in the James Bond films Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), and Spectre (2015). The Norwegians are less formal
than what cinematic versions of the British royals would lead us to expect; we see the king first as a family man, not above rolling around on the floor with his grandson. His black-clad figure, silhouetted against a snowy landscape as he plays hide-and-seek with his grandchildren, prefigures the game of cat-and-mouse the king will soon be playing with the soldiers sent to capture him. Snow is the uncredited star of the film, an icy contrast to cosy interiors and fiery bomb blasts. Poppe and his cinematographer, John Christian Rosenlund, use the frozen countryside as a grand, dramatic backdrop to the royals’ flight.
‘Let’s not end up on the wrong side in this war,’ says Anneliese Bräuer (Katharina Schüttler) to her husband, career diplomat Carl Bräuer. The marvellously sunkencheeked and crooked-nosed Karl Markovics (Wolf in The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014) plays ‘Herr Envoy’ with increasing agitation, caught as he is in an unenviable position between duty to his uncompromising and unreasonable führer, his respect for Norwegian sovereignty, and his desire to save his family and his life. In his attempts to negotiate first with the government and then directly with the beleaguered king, he is at odds with his counterpart Lieutenant Colonel Hartwig Pohlman (Andreas Lust), who is intent on a military takeover.
The mechanics of war and diplomacy are superbly realised, with more suspense than a retelling of the facts might imply. Poppe’s technique of alternating intimate family scenes and subdued conversations with battle scenes creates palpable tension. The claustrophobically tight cinematography makes the viewer part of the action, the camera weaving between figures, focusing only for seconds on a body, a building, a face, flitting from object to object in a vain attempt to find purchase in the chaos. As Johan Söderqvist’s expressive soundtrack thunders in response to the bombing, we find ourselves flinching in our comfortable cinema seats as if we were under attack and party to the characters’ terror.
When Bräuer finally finds the king and presents Hitler’s demands, Haakon is forced to make the decision we have been waiting for: to capitulate and save his countrymen from further bloodshed, or to resist. He reminds the cabinet of Hitler’s earlier words to the effect that ‘a nation that yields to an aggressor does not deserve to live’, and makes it clear that he will abdicate in the name of his whole house before appointing Hitler’s pawn, the leader of Norway’s fascist party Vidkun Quisling as prime minister.
The outcome is, of course, a matter of historic record, but as Poppe says in the coda which stands as his directorial statement, this is not a documentary, but only one version of events – and there will be others. The King’s Choice may not have the impact of Andrzej Wajda’s harrowing but brilliant Katyń (2007), but it is nevertheless an impressive and affecting piece of historical cinema. g
The King’s Choice (Palace Films), 130 minutes, directed by Erik Poppe. Francesca Sasnaitis is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.
Publisher of the Month with Richard Walsh
What was your pathway to publishing?
In 1971 I founded the weekly newspaper that became Nation Review. Soon afterwards my proprietor, Gordon Barton, acquired Angus & Robertson and offered me the job of running the publishing company. I jumped at the opportunity.
What was the first book you published?
My first acquisition was Dennis Altman’s Homosexual, which had recently been published by a small press in the United States. Three months after publication it was the number two non-fiction bestseller here, ultimately establishing itself as an influential classic.
Do you edit the books you commission?
I am normally involved in the books I commission from a very early stage, usually before they are actually formally contracted; I mentor the author and undertake a preliminary edit of the text.
How many titles do you publish each year?
Eight to ten new books.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
I don’t ask much of my authors – merely that they have outstanding originality and that the two of us are compatible!
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
My greatest pleasure is when you persuade an author to a particular course of action and they later come to realise how useful your advice was and their book enjoys success. For me the greatest challenge is having to overcome the terrible despondency that engulfs you when a book you utterly believed in does not prosper in the way that you and the author had hoped.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
My latest book, Reboot (2017), is my ninth (I even co-wrote a pulp novel in my youth). I’ve written for both television and the stage; I’ve been an advertising copywriter. I think experiencing the highs and lows of all that, and particularly the writer’s great need for useful feedback, guides me in my publishing life. I try to deal with authors as sympathetically as I, a onceneedy writer, always wanted to be dealt with.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire (from any era)?
In the 1970s I admired most what Hilary McPhee and Di Gribble achieved; also Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s success in creating Lonely Planet, the first truly global Australian publishing house. Today I am delighted by the energy and creativity my lifelong frenemies, Henry Rosenbloom and Morry Schwartz, continue to display; my former colleague, Michael Heyward (I was for a time on the board of Text), and my current colleague, Jane Palfreyman, are giants on today’s publishing landscape.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
While each year there are many successes that are predictable, the real joy is that quirky titles can still spectacularly surprise us all. Who among us would have predicted the extraordinary sales achieved by Girt or The Rosie Project or The Barefoot Investor?
On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?
All of the above, but nothing will ever beat the satisfaction of exceeding the sales target appropriate for any particular book.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?
Most publishers still commit themselves to the gamble of publishing quality fiction. The fact that each year some of these novels go on to win important prizes and fame for their authors, who are then widely embraced by readers, ensures that this process has considerable momentum these days.
Richard Walsh was founding editor of OZ and POL magazines and Nation Review. From 1972–86 he was managing director of Angus & Robertson Publishers, and from 1986–96 he headed Australian Consolidated Press. Currently he is Consultant Publisher at Allen & Unwin. His most recent book, Reboot, is reviewed on page 33.
