*INC GST
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize Worth $12,500
Truganini
Billy Griffiths
Felicity Plunkett Philip Mead
The AAP closure
Johanna Leggatt
At Her Majesty’s Pleasure Jenny Hocking on John Kerr and the Palace Letters
Coronavirus and Australian Book Review
A
fter a summer of bushfires across the nation and phenomenal loss and destruction, Australia – like the rest of world – now faces a health crisis of fearsome scope. As we go to press (earlier than planned because of present uncertainties), the scale of the threat, unprecedented in our times, is becoming stark. Australian Book Review is mindful of the enormous challenges posed by COVID-19 and by the real threat to people’s health, movement, livelihood, and recreation. We have readers, contributors, and partners around the world, and we are thinking of them. The most important thing is to stay healthy. I and my colleagues wish our friends and associates well. Literature, art, music, ideas matter more than ever at times like this. Never has reasoned argument or cogent journalism been more important than it is now. ABR is committed to providing such, notwithstanding any changes to our present situation. It is impossible to predict what will happen in coming weeks and months. ABR is doing its best to prepare for closures, stringencies, or contractions. We anticipate delays in the delivery of the print edition in coming months. We apologise in advance for any disruption. Our friends in the performing arts are gravely affected by the coronavirus. Festivals, concerts, whole seasons in fact are being cancelled or negatively impacted. We feel for these professionals immensely. With most theatres, festivals, galleries, and museums presently closed – and cinemas likely to follow – ABR Arts will be much reduced for the foreseeable future, but once this crisis is over ABR Arts will be there with bells on. Literature and journalism have a unique dispensation – and responsibility – in the digital age. The online edition of ABR will be unaffected by any interruptions to printing or postal services. We’re taking steps to ensure quality, diversity, and regularity. Our website – with its growing archive stretching back to 1978 – may assume even greater importance in coming months as a platform for reviews, essays, commentary, and creative writing. The new ABR Podcast will also enable us to communicate freely with readers. In late March, for instance, a dozen noted poets and close associates of the magazine will read poems that seem to speak to these anxious-making times. All current individual print subscribers are entitled to complimentary access to the online edition. If you have not signed up for the latter, we encourage you to do so by emailing Grace Chang at business@australianbookreview.com.au or by ringing (03) 9699 8822 to request log-in details for the digital edition. This way you will have constant access to our digital resources. Since 1961 Australian Book Review has provided readers with thoughtful reviews, incisive commentary, and fine new writing. Ours is a small team – just five of us, which sometimes surprises people – but it’s full of purpose, camaraderie, and resolve. Enjoy this issue of ABR – and all the ones that will follow. Meanwhile, let’s hope this new pestilence is quickly eradicated.
Peter Rose, Editor
The ABR Podcast ‘‘is is a breath of fresh air. Each episode offers a snapshot into Australia’s literary scene, review culture and arts world. Highly recommended.’
Astrid Edwards,
e Garret Podcast AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Australian Book Review April 2020, no. 420
First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces managed studio, Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop)
Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present.
Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Billy Griffiths, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Elissa Newall (Observership Program)
Cover Image Queen Elizabeth II departing Australia at Sydney Airport, farewelled by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, 1973 (National Archives of Australia, NAA A6180, 2510733)
ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016)
Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au
ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Editorial Advisers Frank Bongiorno, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Sue Kossew, Johanna Leggatt, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Alison Stieven-Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Peter Tregear, Ben Wellings, Rita Wilson Monash University Editorial Interns Perri Dudley, Elizabeth Streeter Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
Cover design Jack Callil
Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.
ABR April 2020 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
4
Carla Lipsig-Mumme, David Holmes, Michael Henry, Ben Brooker, Michael Morley, Vivian Morrigan, Yves Rees
COMMENTARY
8 21
Jenny Hocking Johanna Leggatt
John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets A worrying portent of our democracy
INDIGENOUS STUDIES
11 12
Billy Griffiths Jan Richardson
Truganini by Cassandra Pybus On Red Earth Walking by Anne Scrimgeour
MILITARY HISTORY
14 15
Kate Ariotti Joan Beaumont
The Great War, edited by Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves Staring At God by Simon Heffer
POEMS
16 40
Peter Rose Chris Wallace-Crabbe
‘Come, Memory’ ‘We Play and Hope’
POLITICS
17
Andrew Broertjes
Going Dark by Julia Ebner, Antisocial by Andrew Marantz
SOCIETY
25 47 50
Nicole Abadee Adrian Walsh Russell Blackford
Great Cities Through Travellers’ Eyes by Peter Furtado How Fear Works by Frank Furedi Conformity by Cass R. Sunstein
LETTERS
18
Paul Kildea
The Letters of Cole Porter, edited by Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh
UNITED STATES
20
Samuel Watts
The Fire Is Upon Us by Nicholas Buccola
ESSAYS
23 24
Shannon Burns Caitlin McGregor
Essays One by Lydia Davis Blueberries by Ellena Savage
LANGUAGE
26
Amanda Laugesen
Sounds and Furies by Jonathon Green
FICTION
28 29 30 32 33 35 36 36 49
Alice Nelson Geordie Williamson Alison Broinowski Susan Midalia Naama Grey-Smith Kirsten Tranter Sonia Nair Cassandra Atherton Astrid Edwards
Desire Lines by Felicity Volk The Dickens Boy by Tom Keneally Amnesty by Aravind Adiga Four auspicious début collections The Loudness of Unsaid Things by Hilde Hinton The Good Turn by Dervla McTiernan The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham The Hypermarket by Gabriel García Ochoa Below Deck by Sophie Hardcastle
SCIENCE
37
Michael Adams
Waters of the World by Sarah Dry
POETRY
38 39 41
Philip Mead David McCooey Geoff Page
A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett Three poetry collections Eagerly We Burn by Barry Hill
INTERVIEWS
42 54
Ali Alizadeh Cassandra Pybus
Poet of the Month Open Page
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
43 44 45 46 48
MUSIC & ART
51
Josh Black Ten Doors Down by Robert Tickner Jack Callil Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner Elisabeth Holdsworth Last Stop Auschwitz by Eddy de Wind Carol Middleton The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code by Judith Hoare Ben Brooker The Grass Library by David Brooks Peter Tregear British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1950, edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton Christopher Menz Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond by Philip Goad et al. Sheridan Palmer Australian Galleries by Caroline Field
52 53 ARTS
56 57 58 59
FROM THE ARCHIVE
60
Michael Shmith Fiona Gruber Diane Stubbings Patrick McCaughey
Salome The Curtain Emerald City The Art of Robert Klippel
Gerard Windsor
The Plains by Gerald Murnane AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Ian Donaldson (1935–2020)
Advances
As we were going to press on March 18 we learned that our dear friend and colleague Ian Donaldson had died earlier that morning after a long illness. Ian, one of Australia’s most distinguished and influential scholars, was educated at Melbourne and Oxford Universities. He returned to Australia in 1969 as Professor of English at ANU. One of his major creations was ANU’s Humanities Research Centre, of which he was Director from 1974 to 1991. That year he returned to the UK as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. In 1995 he became Grace 1 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge. ABR’s and my own association with Ian Donaldson really began in 2004 on his welcome return to Australia. He was a member of the ABR Board from 2009 to 2017. In 2011 he delivered the ABR Fiftieth Birthday Lecture at the National Library of Australia. He wrote for us twenty times between 2006 and 2019. Fittingly, his final contribution was a review of his old friend Keith Thomas’s magisterial book In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and civilization in early modern England ( January–February 2019).
Australia’s dangerous global role
It is indeed instructive to compare the cases of Australia and Canada, since both countries are impacted by political division around climate change, both are experiencing more extreme weather (including fire in places where it has never previously occurred), and both countries have enormous opportunities to take action. In the weeks before Black Saturday, Canadian firefighters came to assist in the Victorian Alps. While the Spruce and Fir forests in Canada are much denser, they could not believe how much more heat was radiating from eucalypts, much of that energy released from the canopy. ‘Fuel-load reduction’ does not happen at the canopy, so preventing the severity of such fires 4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
A Passage to India
Thank you for your many interesting and thoughtful contributions to the Passage to India competition. In the circumstances, ABR and our partner Abercrombie & Kent think it would be incongruous to announce the winner at this stage, when international travel is moot at best and when such grave issues are uppermost in everyone’s mind. We will name the winner in coming weeks. [A longer version of Advances will appear online]
Letters
Dear Editor, David Holmes’s article ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ is superbly written, and quite terrifying (ABR, March 2020). I live in both Melbourne and Ontario, and this story must get to Canada: Australia’s dangerous global role in the climate crisis needs to be told in, and to, the global north. The ‘Labour leadership in the climate crisis’ Canadian-funded research project, now twelve years old, has begun exchanging tactics and strategies with some Australian unions. Let there be more action, more information, more exchanges. Carla Lipsig-Mumme, York University, Canada (online comment)
David Holmes replies:
Ian’s magnum opus was Ben Jonson: A life (2011). It followed a lifetime’s research into his beloved Jonson, and was complemented by the seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson in 2012, of which Ian was an indefatigable General Editor. Anyone who knew Ian was struck by his charm, his modesty, his erudition, and his phenomenal range of friends and associates (though one had to winkle the stories out of him). Time and again he steered ABR towards bright young scholars, for he was a model of intellectual generosity and leadership. His contribution to this magazine was second to none. We mourn his passing and celebrate an exceptional life. Peter Rose
in the future is about addressing climate change, as attribution studies have already found. Paradoxically, many of the same politicians who are now listening closely to medical science on the coronavirus (about which little is known) ignore climate scientists on climate change (about which we know a great deal).
Rapacious gangs
Dear Editor, Jordan Prosser’s review of the film True History of the Kelly Gang (ABR, March 2020) led me to watch the film on Stan and to regret that the film spent so little time in cinemas. The landscape and cinematography were excellent, by far the best aspects of the film, but their impact was mitigated by the screen size. A home screen, no matter how large, cannot do such a film justice. I wonder how many other quality films will be rushed straight on to Netflix or Stan or Disney+, and their best features thus diminished. I hope we are not about to experience the contraction of the visual scope of new films, to essentially suit only a home television screen. I hope that the rapacious competition between streaming services will not tilt new films away from grand vistas and stunning natural landscapes. And I hope that ABR will continue to review important films, whatever their source and outlet. Michael Henry, Melbourne, Vic. Indeed we will. Ed
Taking issue
Dear Editor, I must take issue with Michael Morley’s appraisals of perhaps the two marquee shows at this year’s Adelaide Festival, Requiem and The Doctor, both of which he reviewed for ABR Arts. I went to the latter with low expectations; it sounded exactly like fifty talking-head British plays on ‘topical’ themes I’d seen before. On the other hand, I couldn’t wait to see Requiem by renowned Italian director Romeo Castellucci, whose Go Down, Moses was, for me, the high point of the 2016 Festival. Morley praises Requiem for its memorably ‘evocative, poetic, and, yes, musical images’ and finds The Doctor fatally misjudged and, well, hard to hear. To the contrary, I thought Requiem a shadow of Moses – a banally conceived and grindingly staged funeral service for the planet (and one that, as anyone familiar with Castellucci’s previous works will know, replayed many of the director’s greatest hits, including the distracting gimmick of a live baby). Where Requiem was boring, making me wish I could just hear Mozart’s glorious music with my eyes shut, The Doctor was riveting from the moment it began. I was seated on the balcony and had no trouble at all hearing (and seeing – it seems the import of writer–director Robert Icke’s gender- and colour-blind casting was lost on Morley) this whip-smart contemporary drama unfold one devastating, unforeseen twist at a time. Ben Brooker, Brompton, SA
Michael Morley replies:
While there may be differing, subjective views about the colour- and gender-blind casting in The Doctor, the question of audibility and poor diction is, dare I suggest, more objective. Last time I had my hearing checked, it was okay. Last time I sat in The Playhouse, I heard every word. And although one might hesitate to offer Bertolt Brecht’s advice to the audience in the interlude to Man Equals Man (‘If you can’t follow the plot, don’t worry: it’s incomprehensible. If you want something full of meaning, I suggest you pay a visit to the Gents’) as something to follow on every occasion. The conversations overheard in this environment at the performance I attended ranged from ‘Can’t hear or understand what they’re saying’ to ‘Me neither: we’re leaving.’ I acknowledged in my review that there would be a range of responses to the theatrical imagery Romeo Castellucci conjured up to accompany Mozart’s music. On balance, it seemed to me that his approach was of a piece with Igor Stravinsky’s (only slightly ironic) disclaimer from decades ago: ‘I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.’ I was unaware that Castellucci had deployed the image of a real baby in a previous production, but given that creative artists are regular plagiarists (the Greeks, Shakespeare, Joyce et al.), I don’t quite see how borrowing a baby can be seen as child- (or theatrical) abuse.
Ethics of the self
Dear Editor, I agree with Yves Rees that transgender stories are a valuable addition to the memoir genre (ABR, March 2020). I want to learn more about transgender experiences and how they represent an ethics of the self, especially in their relations with the medical-industrial complex and those they love and relate to. However, I reject both her accusations that gender critical views such as mine are transphobic and her disrespectful use of the label TERF. To question is not a hate crime, just as it is not belittling to raise concerns about the consequences of the current trans fashion on natal women as a class. Vivian Morrigan (online comment).
Yves Rees replies:
I am glad that Vivian Morrigan is keen to learn more about transgender experience. We all have much to gain from the stories of people unlike ourselves. Empathy, compassion, and the celebration of difference are desperately needed in the world right now. In regard to her critique, I stand by my argument that the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) position is transphobic. The TERF insistence that transwomen are not legitimate women and represent a threat to cisgender women is a hateful stance that causes real, measurable harm to the trans and gender diverse (TGD) community, transwomen in particular. TERF campaigns to exclude transwomen from ‘women-only’ spaces such as female bathrooms give rise to the idea that transwomen are predatory imposters whose presence poses a risk to others. This demonstrably false position only further stigmatises and discriminates against an already vulnerable community. Transwomen, along with all TGD peoples, experience shocking rates of mental and physical illness, suicidality, homelessness, unemployment, and violence. This is not because being trans is itself pathological but rather because TGD peoples live in a hostile and transphobic world. To describe attacks on the trans community as merely ‘gender critical’ is a disingenuous euphemism, one that misrepresents hostile and harmful actions towards an already oppressed minority as reasonable and necessary critique. Furthermore, to suggest that the rising profile and incidence of TGD peoples is a mere ‘fashion’ is an extremely poor choice of words, implying that being trans is a choice or phase rather than a real and legitimate expression of human diversity. The recent vogue for adult colouring books is a fashion; being transgender is not. Finally, I note that Morrigan misgendered me in her comment. I am not a woman, and all public information about me clearly indicates this fact. Instead I am a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them pronouns. However, Morrigan twice referred to me as ‘her’ – a disrespectful mischaracterisation, typical of the micro-aggressions and erasures that all trans people experience daily. A longer version of this letter appears online. Ed.
Image credits and information Page 27: Blue Malayan Coral Snake, United States (photograph by Seshadri.K.S, via Wikimedia Commons) Page 55: Vida Miknevičiūtė in Salome (photograph by Craig Fuller) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Comment
At Her Majesty’s pleasure Sir John Kerr and the royal dismissal secrets
by Jenny Hocking
T
he dismissal of the Whitlam government by the governorgeneral, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November 1975 was one of the most tumultuous and controversial episodes in Australian political history. The government had been elected on 2 December 1972 and returned at the May 1974 double dissolution, with Whitlam becoming the first Labor leader to achieve successive electoral victories. The prime minister was at Yarralumla at 1 pm on 11 November to sign the final paperwork for the half-Senate election that he was to call that day. Kerr had agreed just that morning on the wording of the announcement that Whitlam was to make that afternoon in the House of Representatives. That Kerr dismissed Whitlam at that moment and without warning only added to the legal and political furore at the time and ensured its continuing contestation ever since. With such extraordinary provenance, at once fascinating and disturbing, it is hardly surprising that the rancour, division, and fierce debate that greeted Kerr’s actions have never ended. The dismissal raised fundamental legal and political questions about the relationships, responsibilities, and conventions of parliamentary democracy in a constitutional monarchy, and personal questions of propriety and ethics in high office. It is as irresistible, operatic, and compelling today as it was forty-five years ago. In terms of the historiography, the last decade has been a sharp corrective to history, propelled by a series of archival revelations that have gradually and collectively recast our understanding of the dismissal and challenged even its most established historical facts. It is remarkable that even today, more than four decades later, critical documents about the dismissal remain secret, hidden from public view and from history. The ‘Palace letters’, correspondence between Queen Elizabeth, Sir Martin Charteris (her private secretary from 1972 to 1977), and Kerr relating to the dismissal are among Kerr’s papers held in the National Archives of Australia. They are embargoed ‘on the instruction of the Queen’ until at least 2027, after which their release requires the approval of both the governor-general’s official secretary and the monarch’s private secretary, giving the monarch an effectively indefinite veto over their release. We cannot see the letters until the queen or her successor, King Charles, says we can. 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
The importance of the Palace letters lies in the evolving history of the dismissal of which they are the last of the ‘unattainable archives’, without which the history will remain flawed and incomplete. In the continuing process of revelation and historical (re)construction that has reframed the history of the dismissal in recent years, Kerr’s papers in the National Archives have been of unparalleled significance. It was there that I discovered Kerr’s notes revealing the role of the then High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason, who was Kerr’s secret confidant and ‘guide’ over several months before the dismissal, ‘fortifying me for the action I was to take’, as Kerr described it. Mason’s role extended to drafting a letter of dismissal for Kerr. As Paul Kelly has said, the only possible conclusion is that Mason ‘was implicated in the dismissal’. In its fracturing of what had become the central dismissal orthodoxy – that Kerr had acted alone, reaching ‘a lonely and agonising decision’, as the veteran journalist Alan Reid flamboyantly described it – this was the most significant of the dramatic revelations to come from Kerr’s papers in recent years. A more profound breach of the separation of powers, not to mention personal probity, would be difficult to find, and yet Mason’s role had been kept secret for thirty-seven years, at his own insistence. In this Mason was not alone in seeking to hide his role in this troubling moment in history. The construction of a flawed, at times even false, history by those involved is one of the more disturbing aspects shown by the tumble of revelations in recent years. One of the more dramatic, and frankly shocking, instances of calculated distortion was revealed in correspondence released by the Archives in 2019, eight years after I first requested it. These letters, between the queen’s private secretary and Kerr in 1978, after Kerr had left office, show the Palace overseeing the final version of Kerr’s autobiography, Matters for Judgment (1978), to ensure that there would be no mention of Kerr’s secret discussions with Charteris at the time of the dismissal. Kerr assured the Palace, ‘I did my very best of course to omit any reference to the exchanges between Martin Charteris and myself.’ This is history by carefully structured omission, a royally sanctioned whitewash of history. It shows Kerr to be as unreliable in print as he was in office.
Kerr’s ‘exchanges’ with Charteris at the time of the dismissal are documented elsewhere in his archives: in his 1980 journal in which he details discussions with Prince Charles and Charteris and cites some of his letters to and from the queen; and in a handwritten list of fourteen key ‘points on dismissal’, which includes ‘Charteris’ advice to me on dismissal’. The clear connection between the Palace and Kerr’s planning for the dismissal of the government is impossible to avoid since, according to Kerr, the queen’s private secretary had advised him on it. That the ‘Palace letters’ are tremendously important historical documents is beyond dispute. They are a contemporaneous record of Kerr’s version of the circumstances of the dismissal, including the dismissal itself, and at the same time they constitute part of that history as it unfolded. Their release would fill one of the last remaining gaps in the historical record of the dismissal. The National Archives has denied access to the letters on the grounds that they are ‘personal’ communications and not ‘Commonwealth records’, and that, as a consequence, the open-access provisions of the Archives Act (1983), under which they would have been available for public release after thirty years, do not apply. That correspondence between the monarch and the governor-general, two positions at the apex of a constitutional monarchy, could be seen as ‘personal’ is, on a common-sense reading, manifestly unsupportable. Kerr himself described them as ‘despatches’, as part of his ‘duty’ as governor-general, and they were deposited in the archives in 1978 by David Smith in his capacity as official secretary to the governor-general, after Kerr had left office, and not by Kerr himself. The Archives contends that as ‘personal’ records the letters are strictly governed by what it terms ‘Kerr’s instrument of deposit’ setting out the conditions of access to them: ‘When the Archives accepts such a [personal] collection, we undertake to adhere to arrangements agreed to with the depositor.’ The quandary here is that Kerr did not agree with and sought to change his ‘personal’ terms of access. It was no secret that he wanted his correspondence with the queen to be released, believing that it would vindicate his version of events surrounding the dismissal. Adding to the confusion is that the original Instrument of Deposit attached to the Palace letters by Smith was later changed ‘on the Queen’s instructions’ after Kerr’s death. (I’m not sure how that works for Kerr’s apparently ‘personal’ conditions of access.) It was this change that gave the monarch’s private secretary a lasting final veto. All of which is extremely difficult to reconcile with the concept of the letters as Kerr’s ‘personal’ property. The Archives Act (1983) makes no such explicit exclusion of the governor-general’s records in general or the vice-regal correspondence with the monarch in particular from its provisions. The designation of the letters as ‘personal’ means that not only are they not subject to the open-access provisions of the Act, but there is also no means of administrative review of the decision to deny access to them. The label ‘personal’ has set an impenetrable legal catch-22, denying both access and review through that single powerful word ‘personal’. The only avenue to challenge the denial of access to personal records is through a Federal Court action. In September 2016, I launched legal action against the National Archives of Australia in the Federal Court, seeking the release of the ‘Palace letters’.
The case centres on the critical question of whether the letters are ‘personal’ or Commonwealth records, which is defined in the Archives Act in terms of property. The core question is: are these letters between the queen and the governor-general the property of the Commonwealth or the property of Sir John Kerr and his family? The case has been supported by a crowdfunding campaign, Release the Palace Letters, with a legal team working on a pro bono basis led by Antony Whitlam QC at trial, Bret Walker SC at the Appeal and the High Court, with Tom Brennan throughout and instructing solicitors Corrs Chambers Westgarth. After nearly four years, the case has been through the Federal Court and the full Federal Court on appeal. In February 2020 all seven judges of the High Court of Australia heard the case on appeal. In March 2018 the Federal Court acknowledged the ‘clear public interest’ in the Palace letters, which address ‘topics relating to the official duties and responsibilities of the Governor-General’, relating ‘to one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation’. Nevertheless, the Court found that the letters are ‘personal’ and not Commonwealth records, effectively continuing the queen’s embargo over them. In our appeal against that decision, the majority of the full Federal Court in a split 2:1 decision again ruled that the Palace letters are ‘personal’ records. In his strong dissenting judgment, Justice Flick found that it would be ‘difficult to conceive of documents which are more clearly “Commonwealth records” and documents which are not “personal ” property’. The Palace letters, Justice Flick stated, concern ‘“political happenings” going to the very core of the democratic processes of this country’.
This is history by carefully structured omission, a royally sanctioned whitewash of history Questions on notice in parliament in 2019 from Julian Hill, the Labor member for Bruce, have revealed that prior to the High Court appeal the National Archives had spent close to $700,000 contesting the case. This expenditure comes at a time when the Archives has faced resource pressures, diminishing budgets, and the loss of twenty-five per cent of its staff in the last decade, economies that the director-general of the Archives, David Fricker, has acknowledged have impacted severely on service delivery. The federal attorney-general, Christian Porter, intervened on behalf of the Archives, and the attorney-general’s department has contributed twenty-five per cent of Archives’ costs at the High Court appeal. These federal government bodies have now spent more than $800,000 fighting this crowdfunded case, reinforcing the formidable institutional imbalance faced in taking this action. The Tune Review into the Archives was completed last year with the common theme recurring in submissions from historians and researchers being the inordinate and unacceptable delays in dealing with requests for access to its records. I am by no means alone in having twenty requests for access, requests that the Archives is statutorily required to deal with within ninety days, still pending after nine years. The Archives appears a broken AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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The Archives appears a broken institution, paralysed by delay, hamstrung by resource pressures, and indifferent to its core function These enclosures are particularly important in understanding the influences and authorities Kerr was relying on as he considered the dismissal of the government. They would also tell us just what version of the highly polarised political situation Kerr was conveying to the queen. Did he reveal to her, for instance, his negotiations with Sir Anthony Mason, his discussions with Sir Garfield Barwick, or his secret communications with the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser? Most importantly, did Kerr inform the queen of Whitlam’s decision to call the half-Senate election? What is not in the letters will be as important as what is in them. The Palace letters case has provided a rare opportunity to
challenge in open court an entrenched presumption (even in our own National Archives) of royal secrecy, a residual ‘colonial relic’, as Whitlam described such lingering imperial pretensions. The ‘personal’ status of the letters reflects the easy means by which royal communications have been kept from the public both here and in Britain in order to protect the vaunted ‘political neutrality’ of the Crown. This simply confuses secrecy with neutrality and keeps hidden examples of royal political intervention under the guise of ‘personal’ communications. The powerful archival descriptor ‘personal’ appears at best a misnomer and at worst a sophistry which maintains a veil of secrecy over the queen’s communications with the governor-general at a time of great political controversy, in which the question of the prior knowledge of the queen is singularly important. As Professor Anne Twomey has said, ‘If neutrality can only be maintained by secrecy, this implies that it does not, in fact, exist.’ It is entirely fitting that these fundamental questions of access and control over our archival records, of the functions and powers of the governor-general, and of our national autonomy – questions that go, as Justice Flick said, ‘to the very core of the democratic processes of this country’ – will now be determined by Australia’s highest court, and not the queen. g Jenny Hocking is emeritus professor at Monash University, Distinguished Whitlam Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University, and the award-winning biographer of Gough Whitlam. Her latest book is The Dismissal Dossier: Everything you were never meant to know about November 1975 – the palace connection. Her appeal against the decision of the full Federal Court in the ‘Palace letters’ case was heard by the High Court of Australia on 4 February 2020.
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An unmissable anthology Drawing on his extensive In the late 19th century four The charming autobiography by twenty-four Australian travels—from remote provinces pioneering writers, Ethel Turner, of Picnic at Hanging Rock grandmothers. Featuring in China and Cambodia to Barbara Baynton, Nettie Palmer author Joan Lindsay is now a contributions from Helen Garner, pre- and post-war Yiddish and Henry Handel Richardson Text Classic, introduced by Gillian Triggs, Maggie Beer, Poland, and Indigenous and changed Australia’s literary Phillip Adams. A reminiscence of Ali Cobby Eckermann and more, present-day Australia—beloved landscape. Now, one of Australia’s her marriage to Sir Daryl Lindsay these thoughtful and provoking storyteller Arnold Zable shares most eminent historians offers and their life and travels, essays reflect on the many stories of dispossession, readers an inside look at the Time Without Clocks also reveals aspects of being a grandmother survival, healing and joy with intricacies of their intersecting Lindsay’s fascination with the in the 21st century. insight and compassion. and entwined lives. ambiguities of time.
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institution, paralysed by delay, hamstrung by resource pressures, and indifferent to its core function ‘to connect Australians to the nation’s memory, their identity and history’. The case has already revealed important details about the nature of the letters, and about the curiously arcane relationship between the Palace and the governor-general. Kerr wrote frequently, at times writing several letters in a single day. Central to their correspondence was the prospect of Kerr’s possible removal of the Whitlam government, which Kerr states in his papers he had first raised with Prince Charles in September 1975. Kerr’s letters included other material, commentaries about the political situation and about the governor-general’s powers, and copies of other people’s letters to Kerr.
textpublishing.com.au
Indigenous Studies
Imagining Truganini
and Plorenernoopner lose hold, while Truganini, who was a famously strong swimmer, clings to the logs, urging the convicts to abandon the makeshift vessel. They refuse, she loses her grip, and A history of turbulent times the raft splinters on the sandbar at the rivermouth; the convicts’ Billy Griffiths bodies are swept out to sea. This story is relayed in a paragraph, and Pybus offers two sentences on what the incident must have meant for Truganini: ‘Truganini was distressed to witness the final moments of these men, who had accompanied her on several missions and had always been kind to her. She was deeply Truganini: regretful that she had lost hold.’ Journey through the apocalypse I repeat this story as it is characteristic of the drama of the book and the pace of the narrative. But how do we know of this by Cassandra Pybus incident? Indeed, how do we know what Truganini thought and Allen & Unwin felt? As Pybus acknowledges in her introduction, ‘There is no way $32.99 pb, 336 pp I can know what she thought or how she felt. I cannot imagine ruganini: Journey through the apocalypse follows the life what it was like to be her, or to feel what she experienced. It would of the strong Nuenonne woman who lived through the be inappropriate to attempt it.’ And yet, this is a book that does dramatic upheavals of invasion and dispossession and attempt to imagine Truganini’s life and experience, and it strains became known around the world as the so-called ‘last Tasma- against those limitations. nian’. But the figure at the heart of this book is George AuAs to how we know about the incident with the raft, the gustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary and chronicler who reader simply has to trust Pybus, who is opaque about her was charged with ‘conciliating’ with the sources. There are no footnotes and no Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. It is priengagement with secondary literature. marily through his journals that historiThe immense historiography that surans are able to glimpse and piece together rounds Truganini is either ignored or the world fractured by European arrival. taken to be assumed knowledge. The In this book and in earlier works, writer only oral history Pybus appears to have and historian Cassandra Pybus provides one consulted is that of her own family, whose of the most complex and compelling porancestors told the story of an old Aborigitraits of this vain, ‘problematic fellow’, with nal woman who wandered across their farm his class aspirations and ‘cramped puritan on Bruny Island in the 1850s and 1860s. spirit’. He oversaw and led the decimation of In many ways, Truganini can and the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, and should be seen as a companion piece to yet was often fighting back against even Pybus’s first book, Community of Thieves more indifferent authorities. He also ‘fan(1991), which follows the same events, cied himself an ethnographer’ and took features the same characters (even the detailed notes of the life of his companions, same plates), and is also framed through which confers on him an outsized role in the Pybus family connection to the lands Aboriginal histories of Tasmania. As Pybus of the Nuenonne. But these are very laments, ‘Truganini and her companions different books. Community of Thieves are only available to us through the gaze of questions silences and fills them with inTruganini, Billy Lanne, and Bessy Clark pompous, partisan, acquisitive, self-aggranference, speculation, and conjecture. The (studio portrait by Charles Woolley, 1866; printed by J.W. Beattie; courtesy Tasmanian dising men who controlled and directed the text is littered with uncertainty – ‘I am Archives and Heritage Office) context of what they described.’ not sure’, ‘I cannot tell’, ‘It seems’ – and Although the book is framed as a biogit is all the richer for it. When Robinson raphy, Truganini remains elusive in its pages, always seen through turns his back on Truganini in 1842 and dispatches her back to the eyes of others, always at the edge of their vision. Often several the desolate settlement on Flinders Island, Pybus intuits it as a pages pass between mentions of her name. What Pybus offers betrayal: ‘How can I know what effect this final betrayal had on instead is a vivid retelling of Robinson’s journals, and a narrative Truganini..? I do not know. I cannot know. I have no evidence exploration of Truganini’s turbulent times. Pybus sets out to ‘lib- that they were aware of Robinson’s rejection. But they knew.’ erate’ the Aboriginal peoples trapped within the colonial records. While Community of Thieves is ‘a personal meditation on As a descendant of a family that usurped Nuenonne Country, history’, Truganini is written as a capital-H History. she deems her task to be ‘no less than a moral necessity – these The book opens with an idyllic vision of the pre-invasion are people whose lives were extinguished to make way for mine’. world of the Nuenonne: a ‘healthy, happy’ people who live a harThere is a moment in the book when Truganini, Pagerly, monious existence of ‘timeless reassurances’. Truganini is born in and Plorenernoopner are travelling with two convicts along a 1812 into a very different world. She experiences the violence, river and their raft is pulled into a dangerous current. Pagerly trauma, and mayhem of dispossession. At the age of four her
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mother is violently killed on a beach off the southern end of Bruny Island. Ten years later, her sisters, Lowhenune and Magerleede, are abducted by the sealer John Baker. She never sees them again. Her fiancé is mutilated by sawyers. In April 1829 she meets Robinson, who is drawn to her obvious intelligence, grasp of English, and striking looks. Their lives are deeply entwined for the next thirteen years as she joins him on his so-called Friendly Mission across Van Diemen’s Land to the desolate offshore processing centre on Flinders Island and then on to Port Phillip. They were never sexual partners, as other biographers have suggested. The role Robinson cast for himself, Pybus argues, ‘was even more intimate and binding than that of a lover: he was the good father who would protect and save her’. In Port Phillip, ‘the good father’ loses interest in Truganini; her name drops out of his journals. ‘Effectively, he had closed the book on her.’ In 1842 she returns to Flinders Island, where so many of her compatriots died, and then in 1847 moves on to the Oyster Cove Aboriginal station, where she lived until it closed in 1871. She died in Hobart in 1876. Truganini, of course, is known as much for her afterlife as for her life. She has been the subject of myth-making, fantasy, and fabrication; her life has been interrogated and dramatised in many novels, plays, films, poems, and biographies, as well as volumes of fine-grained historical research. Pybus has chosen not to engage with these myriad accounts of Truganini’s life, ‘such as can be found on any Google search’. Rather, she is determined to use the ‘original eyewitness accounts’ to return Truganini’s life to the centre of her story: to explore ‘how she lived, not simply that she died’. ‘I set myself the rule because I am sick of all the myth-making ... I wanted the contemporaneous accounts.’ W hile there is something beautiful about this rationale, the decision not to engage with the historical context, not to confront the myth-making, has unintended consequences. In searching for ‘the woman behind the myth’, Pybus does not unpack how and why Truganini has become famous: the countless ways in which she has been sensationalised, sexualised, and slandered; how her story has been mobilised to reinforce racial hierarchies and narratives of extinction, extermination, and inevitable demise; and how her life has been reclaimed by the Tasmanian Aboriginal community today as a symbol of rights, identity, ownership, and survival. Instead, Pybus replaces the myth with History. She writes vividly of ‘the dispossession and destruction of the original people of Tasmania’, describing invasion as their ‘apocalypse’ and their story of struggle as a ‘regrettable tragedy’. The final section of the book is even titled ‘The Way the World Ends: 1842–1876’. It is powerful, seductive language. And yet, the world didn’t end for Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. It was transformed. This narrative arc lies at the heart of Pybus’s earlier work – indeed Community of Thieves tackles extinction narratives head-on – but in Truganini this knowledge is assumed. But how does this story of survival change the moral legacy of Truganini? And can one truly understand her without engaging with it? These are serious questions, because while its use as a scholarly source is limited, Truganini will reach many readers. It is written with literary flair, compassion, and insight, particularly into the complex character of George Augustus Robinson and 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
his peculiar cognitive dissonance. And it is beautifully produced, with luminous colour plates and an appendix of accessible potted biographies. The striking cover features a photo by Peter Dombrovskis of giant kelp strewn over the rocks of Macquarie Island, its thick black tentacles glistening in the half-light. It powerfully captures the dark mood of the book, summoning an image of the waves of invaders that have crashed against Tasmanian shores, sweeping away much that was there before. But not all. What remains is a story that is eerie, at times beautiful, but most of all monstrous. g Billy Griffiths is a historian and lecturer in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University. His latest book is Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018). Indigenous Studies
‘Sour bread and Kangaroo’ A legendary workers’ strike Jan Richardson
On Red Earth Walking: The Pilbara Aboriginal strike, Western Australia 1946–1949 by Anne Scrimgeour
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Monash University Publishing $39.95 pb, 510 pp
t was only seventy years ago that Aboriginal workers in the north-west of Western Australia emerged from virtual slavery on the pastoral stations in the Pilbara region. Through their own efforts, and with encouragement from some white supporters, they radically changed the industry and undermined a colonising process of government control over them. Their protest is known as the 1946–1949 pastoral workers’ strike, which Anne Scrimgeour declares ‘has the quality of a legend’. In On Red Earth Walking she verifies the story. Her meticulous archival research and evidence, from those whose planning and actions were mostly not recorded, lead her to new understandings. It is her relationship with the strikers and their descendants that makes her book unique, for she conveys their response to colonisation through their eyes. Colonisation in Western Australia resulted in legislation ‘to make provision for the better protection and care of the Native inhabitants’ (Native Administration Act, 1936). An interpretation of protection as control underpinned government policy in the Pilbara’s pastoral industry, which depended on ‘native’ labour. This industry contributed enormous wealth to the state, and so ‘protection’ meant safeguarding industrial relations favourable to the employers, and the state. Pastoralists had permits to employ, i.e. control, ‘natives’. Under the Act, officers named Protectors, often doubling as policemen, controlled the ‘natives’. Aboriginal people had learned from bitter
experience to be afraid of the police, who assisted the Protector to sources. Showing how a previously subservient people organised secure their compliance. More than twenty Pilbara stations could resistance to the status quo, she introduces their anecdotes to therefore be run by a few white men with the help of hundreds enrich insights into previously concealed responses to their situaof Aboriginal men and women. tion. She documents their perseverance in confronting strategies ‘Help’ was a euphemism for labour that was not properly remu- designed to force them back to the stations, substantiating these nerated and in many cases was coerced. ‘Natives’ could be under- through official reports. These objective facts are brought to life paid or not paid at all; they were not provided with the accommo- when she introduces oral testimonies that show how the authordation or amenities supplied to white workers. Scrimgeour reveals ities became only one part of the world they used to dominate. how apparently obliging, apparently happy Aboriginal people produced a stable industry but secretly resented being exploited. The workers kept silent until they had an As Lawman Clancy McKenna later said, ‘Sour bread and kanopportunity to challenge the injustices garoo, old tea and no pay, that’s not right.’ The workers kept silent until they had an opportunity to challenge the injustices. They met local white man Don McLeod, who supported their Scrimgeour’s book is the first published account of how the cause and advised about union strategies of striking to claim ‘station natives’, as they were known, developed ‘an ideology of workers’ rights. Emboldened, they told their bosses that if they resistance through group action’. It complements the memoir of did not get better wages and conditions they would strike. Such striker Monty Hale (Minyjun), Kurlumarniny: We come from the was the pastoralists’ and Protectors’ incredulity that Aborigi- desert (2012), which she edited, and the recently published website nal people could be capable www.pilbarastrike.org, of organising themselves that on which she collabthey did not take these deorated with historian mands seriously. Instead, they Bain Attwood. With imposed the usual methods of so much information, threats and arrests to maintain she could have obcontrol. Power had, however, scured the storyline by changed hands. drowning the narrative On 1 May 1946 many in detail. Instead, she Aboriginal pastoral workers interweaves strikers’ went on strike. McLeod backed testimonies with rethem in the Pilbara and sympaports from other acthetic citizens in Perth formed tors in the drama, ina committee to publicise their cluding police reports demands and raise money. and interpretations by Over the next couple of years, other academics, anasome workers returned to the lysing the meanings stations. Those who remained from all sources. Step Some of the original strikers photographed in 1983 (photograph by Anne Scrimgeour) on strike suffered greatly as by step, she builds the they battled to support themcase that the strike, selves at a subsistence level. Their greatest asset was their cultural which at first seemed ludicrous and unattainable, became logical cohesion, one that was not recognised by pastoralists or state and inevitable. officers. Obedient to the traditions of the desert and coastal clans, Before 1946 the status quo was unchallengeable. The winners their senior law carriers organised disparate groups to work coop- were the pastoralists and the state, and the losers were the Aborigeratively for the benefit of all. That they survived beyond the pre- inal workers. During 1946–49 the losers had taken control and the viously controlled environment was anathema to the state. Gov- relationships of power were shattered. Hundreds of Aboriginal ernment authorities tried to regain control; strikers were jailed or pastoral workers had begun a ‘decolonising movement’. It is a harassed by pastoralists who stood to lose their cheap labour force. story told by a fine historian whom the people trusted to listen The strikers were resolute and remained on strike until Au- to their truths and faithfully represent them publicly. gust 1949, by which time they had achieved modest increases in Anne Scrimgeour died just before her book was released in wages and better conditions. Even more significantly, they had February 2020. Her words will, however, like the story, increase established their independence from state control and brought in their influence as more people come to understand their about a fundamental shift in government policy towards Aborig- meaning. Her carefully edited book contributes insights into an inal people. Most never returned to the pastoral stations. These astonishing event in Australia’s past, her polished writing style facts have been examined by others, but Scrimgeour adds a new makes reading the specifics easy, and the quality of her research dimension, thus changing the narrative to reflect a deeper reality. convinces the unbeliever. What she has retrieved and achieved Scrimgeour allows the story to emerge from the participants’ ensures that this new reality can never be erased. g experience, drawing from her interviews with the strikers and their descendants, and from exhaustive documentation of archival Jan Richardson is writing a biography of Don McLeod. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Military History
Pushing against the myths Anzac in the national psyche Kate Ariotti
The Great War: Aftermath and commemoration edited by Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves
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UNSW Press $34.99 pb, 304 pp
he centenary of World War I offered a significant opportunity to reflect on the experience and legacy of one of the world’s most devastating conflicts. In Australia such reflection was, on the whole, disappointingly one-dimensional: a four-year nationalistic and sanitised ‘memory orgy’ (to use Joan Beaumont’s wonderful phrase). It did, however, galvanise historians to produce important new studies of the war and to tackle long-standing questions about Australians’ attachment to Anzac. Many of those historians, established and early career, feature in The Great War: Aftermath and commemoration. Editors Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves take the reader on an almost chronological journey through the aftermath of the war and into the centenary period. The challenges faced by military officials charged with bringing home thousands of potentially unruly soldiers are explained, as are the ways in which Australians responded to the news of the long-wished-for armistice. Australia’s role in the postwar imperial project and its attempts to shore up its strategic position in the Pacific are placed in the context of the fear of another world conflict. Other chapters reveal the effects of war on Australian politics and society. Though it may not have created the political wasteland it has long been accused of, the war (and the issue of conscription in particular) exacerbated tensions between Catholics and Protestants and led to heightened discrimination against Irish Australians. Indigenous veterans also experienced discrimination; the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia advocated on behalf of many, but their sporadic efforts reflected a broader social apathy towards Aboriginal Australians in the interwar period. Cultural representations of the war and its commemorative history are also considered. We learn how the Australian Official War Art scheme developed to present a narrative of the war that privileged the masculine domain of the battlefront, and how Remembrance Day became ‘the poor cousin’ of Anzac Day on the Australian commemorative calendar. Recent efforts to perform on Brisbane stages ‘unconventional’ histories of the war, including the bitter debates about conscription, demonstrate that public consumption of history occurs in diverse settings, and that documentary theatre can offer more educationally focused rather than emotionally driven portrayals of Australians at war. The evolution of the Anzac legend into its modern, almost spiritual form – ‘Anzac 2.0’ – rounds out the book. 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Several essayists are frank in their assessments that despite the incredible amounts of money, time, and effort that were poured into marking the centenary at the national and local level, certain myths about Australia’s involvement in the war still endure. They are also clearly frustrated that the commemorative splurge has embedded the belief that Anzac is Australian history even more deeply in the national psyche. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, who first posed the question ‘what’s wrong with Anzac’ in 2010, continue in their respective contributions to challenge the oft-touted claim that World War I gave birth to the Australian nation. They argue that the war in fact curtailed years of democratic and social growth and reform, resulting in a divided country tied firmly to the apron strings of Britain. David Stephens, who was instrumental in establishing the Honest History association in 2013, details its commitment to reminding Australians of the ‘non-khaki parts’ of their history and reflects on the network’s attempts to challenge the official approach to the centenary. Bruce Scates offers a noholds-barred comparative analysis of the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, France’s principal World War I museum, and the new Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux – ‘the single most expensive undertaking of the Anzac centenary’. He convincingly argues that the Centre is focused on eliciting emotional responses and aggrandising Australian involvement in the war rather than, like the Historial, educating visitors about its complex history. Scates, along with other prominent historians, resigned from his advisory role during the Centre’s development. The history and memory of the war continue to be entangled and politicised; Scates, Lake, Reynolds, and Stephens show that this often comes at the expense of fostering real historical understanding of the conflict and its consequences. One of the most provocative themes in the collection is a pushback against the dominant trope of the traumatised veteran. Joan Beaumont exhorts us to shift our focus to ‘remembering the resilient’, those men who seemed to better adjust to, or cope with, life after war. Martin Crotty reveals the relative generosity of the Australian ‘Repat’ system of pensions, medical care, and other benefits for veterans, and Thomas Rogers shows how war service does not adequately explain or excuse the actions of one of the men accused of massacring at least thirty-one Aboriginal people at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928. While it is true that thousands of former servicemen bore visible and invisible scars of their service for years after the war, recognising that not all returned soldiers were necessarily ‘shattered Anzacs’, and that for many their war experiences were just one chapter in the lengthy story of their life, adds important balance to the history of the war’s individual, familial, community, and national impacts. This is a valuable collection – accessible, engaging, considered – that clarifies, challenges, and complicates understandings of Australia’s experience of the war, and of the war’s place in the broader sweep of Australian history. The centenary revealed, as Carolyn Holbrook writes, that not all Australians are interested in extending their knowledge of World War I. The Great War makes a compelling case for why we should. g Kate Ariotti is a Lecturer in History and a member of the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle. ❖
Military history
Wider impacts Adapting to ‘total war’ Joan Beaumont
Staring at God: Britain in the Great War by Simon Heffer
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Random House $59.99 hb, 926 pp
t seems hard to imagine that we need more books on World War I after the tsunami of publications released during the recent centenary. Yet, here we have a blockbuster, a 926-page tome, Staring at God, by Simon Heffer, a British journalist turned historian in the tradition of Alistair Horne and Max Hastings. Heffer opens by stating that Staring at God is neither a military history of the war nor an international history of the war. It is a social, cultural, and political history that tells the story of ‘how the government and people of a great naval and mercantile power, shaped by the tenets of laissez-faire, broke with the traditions of their culture, liberties, doctrines and customs, and adapted to total war’. It considers how Britain managed to adapt its economy and society to the demands of industrialised war, and how the British state ballooned and gained unprecedented control over the lives of its people. Heffer also focuses on a ‘second conflict’: that between the British state and Ireland. Denied Home Rule by the outbreak of war in 1914, Ireland would erupt in violence in 1916 and progressively descend into partition and civil war. Heffer’s focus is thus on high-level British politics, the men who directed the nation’s strategy, its mobilisation of manpower, and its vast industrial war effort. The actual battles, which caused such revolutionary changes in Britain and which fuelled corrosive disputes between British political and military leaders, are left in the wings. This, Heffer explains, is because so much has been written about them elsewhere, as indeed it has. Many pages are devoted to the struggles for power between politicians and to the role of the Northcliffe press in these manoeuvres. Key dramatis personae are Herbert Asquith (prime minister, 1908–16), Andrew Bonar Law (leading conservative and later prime minister), the press baron Viscount Northcliffe, and Asquith’s successor, David Lloyd George, a man who, for all his charisma and extraordinary achievements in mobilising the British economy, does not seem to win Heffer’s approval. This all makes for interesting reading, given that these politicians left sources that Australian historians of the war must envy. Asquith was besotted with a young woman, Venetia Stanley, to whom he wrote obsessively, even during cabinet meetings and sessions of the Council of War. With astonishing indiscretion, he confided not just his political woes but also sensitive information, including troop movements. Asquith’s long-suffering wife, Margot, and Lloyd George’s mistress (later wife), Frances Stevenson, also left eminently quotable material. All of this, and
more, Heffer mines to great effect, although, for this Australian reader, the detail about the intrigues of the British political class was excessive. Do we really need to follow Asquith’s final fall from power in late 1916 for about thirty pages?
With astonishing indiscretion, Herbert Asquith confided not just his political woes but also sensitive information, including troop movements Heffer certainly addresses the wider impact of the war: the introduction of conscription; the rapid growth of the munitions industry; the impact of Zeppelin raids on civilians; the use of the Defence of the Realm Act for purposes of control, including censorship; propaganda; the cultural responses to the war; food rationing; industrial unrest; and of course, the Easter uprising and its implications. Yet, in the end, the voices that come through most strongly are those of British leaders, not the people they led. No oral history sources seem to have been used. What does this book, which assumes a knowledge of British history, offer Australian readers? Most obviously, it throws into relief Australia’s own experience of the war. Australians were profoundly traumatised by the 62,000 deaths, possibly the highest mortality rate proportionately of any of the British Empire’s armies. The debates about conscription and the rising cost of living also tore Australian communities apart, leaving a toxic political legacy. Yet in Australia there was nothing comparable to the structural changes in the economy and the workforce that Heffer documents vividly in Britain. While women formed 46.7 per cent of the British munitions workforce by the end of the war, in Australia women were largely consigned to traditional gendered roles: nursing, knitting, fundraising, and packing parcels of comforts for their soldiers. This book also reminds us of how remote Australians were from the physical dangers of war. Not for them the Zeppelin raids which in one day alone in 1917 killed ninety-five people in Folkestone. Nor did Australians face dire food shortages, however troubling the inflation in commodity prices was during the war. When compared with Britain, then, Australia did not really experience ‘total war’, though this term is arguably not as relevant to Britain in World War I as it was in World War II. Other points of interest are Heffer’s discussion of the financing of the war effort. In the interwar years, Australians complained about the cost of servicing of the war debt that they had incurred in funding the operations of the Australian Imperial Force. But Britain, too, incurred massive debts by borrowing from the real ‘winner’ of the war, the United States. At the time of armistice, Britain’s national debt was fourteen times the level of 1914. Britain owed its overseas creditors £1,365 million, and was itself owed £1,741 million, most of which it had borrowed from the United States and then lent to allies. One such ally was Russia, which repudiated its debt with the coming of the Bolshevik revolution. Even had the British Treasury wanted to – and not all of its officials did – it could not have been more generous regarding Australia’s debt. Australian readers might also appreciate the detailed AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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account of the Dardanelles campaign from the British perspective. Winston Churchill has long been pilloried by Australians as the ‘bungler of the Dardanelles’, and Heffer reveals the deep, almost visceral distrust of Churchill among the British political élite. From the vantage point of 1915, it seems impossible to imagine his iconic leadership of 1940. Asquith told Venetia Stanley: ‘I regard [Churchill’s] future with many misgivings. He will never get to the top in English politics ... to speak with the tongues of men & angels, and to spend to laborious days & nights in administration, is no good, if a man does not inspire trust.’
Interestingly, too, Australians scarcely feature in Heffer’s account of Gallipoli. But then, how often do Australians acknowledge that the British and Irish fought at Gallipoli; let alone that they lost more than 21,000 dead as opposed to Australia’s 8,000? For all the transnational commemorations of recent years, much of World War I history and memory remains incurably national. g Joan Beaumont is Professor Emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University. Her books include Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013).
Come, Memory
‘Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.’ Donald Justice, ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’
I think of you now for the first time in about five times as many years as you actually lived, so uncomplainingly, they always said, as they do of the dead. Your name shadows me as we shadowed your small coffin, toggle-straight in our uniforms – why, I have no idea, for my memories are all school ones, not Scouting: playing at tents or precipitous pranks, crossing perilous roped bridges in front of elders and getting stuck halfway, intimations of later strandings. Not so much your face (smooth though it was, olive, Scandinavian?) as your manner comes back to me, masculine as your forthright name (‘Ahoy for Murray Hoy’ we chanted). Yes, manly somehow, though you were nine or ten when you eventually died, shunning the ‘bald of hell’, the titans of accomplishment. Short though you were, shorter than I and most of the boys (though not Beverley Wattle, who shot up like the skyscrapers we traced in exercise books) – what made you so precocious, gifted you with such gravitas? Was it Death they told you about in private classes, the notion spared us as we pecked each other behind saplings and practised lethal samurai attitudes?
Peter Rose Peter Rose’s most recent poetry collection is The Subject of Feeling (2015). 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Politics
WASP Love and Deploraballs Examining extremists Andrew Broertjes
Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists
by Julia Ebner Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 351 pp
Antisocial: How online extremists broke America
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by Andrew Marantz Picador, $32.99 pb, 380 pp
n 15 March 2019, the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s history took place at the Al-Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch. Fifty-one people were killed and forty-nine injured as they gathered for Friday prayers. Sickeningly, the gunman, Brenton Tarrant, livestreamed the event on Facebook. A manifesto written by Tarrant quickly surfaced, full of coded language and references best understood by the alt-right community on online platforms such as Reddit, 4Chan, and 8Chan. In court, as he waited for charges to be read out, Tarrant flashed the ‘okay’ signal, once an innocuous hand gesture, now transformed by the culture of the alt-right into a symbol of white supremacy. The Christchurch mosque shooting and the 2017 protests at Charlottesville in the United States have become the most public face of far-right extremism. In Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists by Julia Ebner and Antisocial: How online extremists broke America by Andrew Marantz, the origins, motives, and methods of online extremist groups are examined. Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank based in the United Kingdom. For Going Dark, she went undercover, using a range of aliases and, in some cases, physical disguises to penetrate extremist groups. With Marantz, who writes for The New Yorker, his methodology hews to that of an embedded journalist in a war zone: he attends various rallies and far-right meetings, and interviews members of the global far right. The Brexit vote, the rise of Donald Trump, and displays of far-right fury across the Anglo-European world have been fuelled by the growth of social media. In Going Dark, Ebner seeks out extremists from across the political and cultural spectrum. It is the far right, however, and the iteration known as the ‘alt-right’, to which she keeps returning. Their language and concerns, particularly around the racial and cultural degeneration of ‘the West’, have found their way into mainstream conservatism. Nowhere has this been more apparent than with Trump, who regularly references and retweets far-right and alt-right thinkers and Twitter accounts. In the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, with one counter-protestor killed and far-right protestors chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, Trump commented that there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides. Even though Ebner explores some of the darkest aspects of humanity, her writing remains deft and light, with occasional
sardonic dryness to leaven the mood. Writing about a dating site and community called ‘WASP Love’ (described as ‘Tinder for Nazis’), she dryly notes: ‘Some WASP Love users confess they have received negative feedback on the mainstream dating apps. I am not surprised; imagine that awkward situation when you sit with a Tinder date who tells you that Jewish policymakers, bankers and journalists have been plotting to wipe out the white race.’ Similar groups also utilise online-culture-friendly formats. ‘Reconquista Germanica’ (‘Reconquista’ being the crusades that pushed the Moors out of Spain in the fifteenth century) badges itself as Live Action Role Play, but is devoted to trolling liberal and left-leaning politicians and journalists across Europe; it played a leading role in trying to subvert the German election in 2017. The undermining of democracy through online forums and social media has become widespread, with the Oxford Internet Institute finding ‘evidence of formally organised social media manipulation campaigns in forty-eight countries in 2017 … Most campaigns involved the circulation of misinformation in the runup to critical junctions such as elections, referendums and crises.’ This distortion of electoral processes is now part of the ‘new normal’. Ebner is no sideline critic, and her work lays out clearly and directly what needs to change. Of the ten steps she lists, it is digital literacy that stands out as being the most important, particularly for ‘digital natives’ such as the millennial generation, who have never known a world without smart phones and social media but who remain vulnerable to misinformation.
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his misinformation forms a key part of Marantz’s Antisocial: How online extremists broke America. Tackling the problem differently from Ebner, he openly interviewed both alt-right and far-right extremists, as well as more conventional technology disruptors. While wit and humour, and an almost gonzo-journalist approach, help maintain a fast-paced narrative, underneath Marantz carefully, almost forensically, considers why we have reached this point. Although the subtitle of the book is a sly wink at some of the online hyperbole Marantz analyses, he reaches similar conclusions to Ebner. The development of the internet and social media is crucial to Marantz’s work. He is careful, however, to intersperse the development narratives of the contemporary online world with those of the players themselves: the extremists who have thrived and profited in online spaces such as Facebook, Reddit, and 4Chan. In the former, Marantz focuses not just on the giants of the field but also on smaller disruptors. His profiling of Emerson Spartz, who made a fortune as the founder of the Harry Potter site MuggleNet, is a case in point. Spartz now runs his own online media company, SpartzInc, which monetises the viral sharing of memes. Spartz dismisses concerns that he and his ilk are responsible for dumbing down how information is shared and consumed. Popularity is the only thing that determines quality, and the important thing is spreading the information, right or wrong, to as many people as possible: If Mary Mallon had been a housewife, Spartz pointed out, she would have infected only her family. It was because she worked as a cook that she is remembered by history as Typhoid Mary … although I was hardly a marketing expert, it seemed unwise to associate one’s AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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business model with fever, exhaustion, delirium, and death. Still, his point was well taken.
This approach profoundly impacts how and what information is transmitted online. As researchers have found, fake news with clickbait titles and sensationalist content is more likely to be clicked on than real news, something Spartz takes great delight in pointing out to Marantz as he suggests ways The New Yorker could be reformatted. Marantz also talks to the extremists. While some figures on the alt-right were reluctant to engage, Marantz held extended conversations with people like Mike Cernovich, who provides key insights into the movement, both through the example he sets (toxic misogyny, homophobia, and racism), and his explanations of how establishment politicians and the media have failed to check their advance. Hillary Clinton’s comments in 2016 about how half of Trump’s supporters were a ‘basket of deplorables’ was, according to Cernovich, ‘the stupidest thing she could have done’.
On the eve of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Marantz attended the ‘Deploraball’ for various far- and alt-right figures. How to handle the trolling of the alt-right in this sense is difficult: ‘they set an ingenious trap. By responding to their provocations, you amplify their message. And yet, if no one ever rebuked the trolls, they would run the internet, and perhaps the world.’ There has never been a more important time for this work to be published. ASIO has recently warned of the dangers of the far right in Australia, dangers that are coordinated and exacerbated by online extremism. Shootings at synagogues and mosques in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Antipodes are becoming more common. Even prior to Trump’s election in 2016, these ideas were shifting from online forums into mainstream conservative rhetoric. Going Dark and Antisocial are important contributions to a debate that will grow significantly in years to come. g Andrew Broertjes teaches at the University of Western Australia.
Letters
A bit of a bore
Prosaic missives from a captivator Paul Kildea
The Letters of Cole Porter
edited by Cliff Eisen and Dominic McHugh
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Yale University Press (Footprint) $69.99 hb, 675 pp
ometime in the early 1970s – his health poor, his country’s no better – the English composer Benjamin Britten asked his good friend and publisher Donald Mitchell to write his biography, imploring him to tell the truth about his long-term relationship with the tenor Peter Pears. In the ten years that followed Britten’s death in 1976, Mitchell amassed thoughts and notes, all the while deflecting the common query among friends and those outside the hallowed circle, ‘How’s the biography going?’ Ultimately, Mitchell shied away from writing the book. Perhaps he found the task daunting, though it was more likely that this prolific writer did not feel he could deal honestly with the less savoury aspects of his friend’s life and character – the dark moods, the thin skin, the lifelong interest in pre-pubescent boys – certainly while Pears still lived. In the years following Pears’s death in 1986, Mitchell turned toward the more neutral territory of a collection of letters, which, in the twentyodd years separating the first volume from the sixth, encompassed thousands of pages of notes and explanations, newspaper crits and photos, diary entries, and foreign visas. You could quibble 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
with the selection of letters and documents but never the scholarly apparatus supporting them. This was a serious intellectual endeavour, though a disguise as well. Cole Porter (1891–64) – a generation older than Britten – shared a number of qualities with his fellow composer. Both were gay, both ultimately extremely wealthy, and each was architect of his respective art form in his respective country. ‘At boarding school I was always taught,’ Porter wrote in one lyric, ‘not to reveal what I really thought, / Nor ever once let my eyes betray / The dreadful things I longed to say.’ (This could also have been Britten.) Porter was the more carefree of the two; both music and character displayed a cheerfulness that Britten rarely exhibited. He fast traded in his Midwestern upbringing and drawl for a glib East Coast, martini-at-six, Whiffenpoofs and Yale frat-boy sophistication that, combined with the European modernism he soaked up in the 1920s and 1930s, served him and his audiences on both sides of the Atlantic extremely well. Seemingly unfazed by his own sexuality (unlike Britten), Porter in 1919 nonetheless married the remarkable divorcée Linda Lee Thomas a year after meeting her while he was on active service. The couple thereafter lived their lives together and apart with seemingly great gallantry, wealth, and mutual respect: roses and engraved hipflasks on opening nights (there were many); country houses and city pieds-à-terre; extensive and luxurious travel together; and much looking elsewhere when faced with the other’s liaisons and intimate friendships. Porter’s carefully managed façade slipped when he was bored, horny, or in pain (the consequence of a terrible horse-riding accident in 1937), at which point Thomas would either fight her corner or retreat hurt to the country. Such emotional details are missing from this collection of Cole Porter’s letters. Cliff Eisen (a distinguished Mozart scholar) and Dominic McHugh say upfront that their intention was not to write a biography, which puts an awful lot of weight on the content of the letters. Perhaps it was not an unreasonable assumption
that the letters would be up to the task, except it turns out that one of the great stage wits of the twentieth century – the man able to rhyme Strauss and Mickey Mouse, the Tower of Pisa and the Mona Lisa – is a bit of a bore.
As a correspondent, he never had anything terribly interesting to say It’s not simply that Porter was method-acting his way through what he thought was needed for a successful Broadway career, and thus careful in what he said; this same career took some time to ignite, and the gay relationships before then were hardly discreet. It’s more that as a correspondent he never had anything terribly interesting to say. Letters to Linda are solicitous and chatty, as are those to his various lovers, who deflect his light-hearted neediness without terribly much care or sophistication. Letters to Sam Stark are usually more forthright (though it is not made explicit in these pages whether or not he was a lover), though even to Stark the best line – concerning Wallis Simpson – belongs to Linda: ‘She says Jimmie Donahue’s valet is quoted as having said “Mr. Jimmie’s relationship with the Duchess, I realize now, is more than a friendship. After he has been out with her, I always find lip-stick on his shorts.”’ And though a cast of some of the century’s greatest artists passes through these pages – Diaghilev and Dalí, Stravinsky and Berlin – they do so with little comment. (A rare exception: ‘Arthur Rubinstein who, as always, played well enough before supper + marvelously afterwards’ – a tacit acknowledgment of Rubinstein’s prodigious love of good food and wine.) Even correspondence with his various collaborators is unrevealing. Porter writes of lyrics he is forwarding them – though rarely how he came up with them – and of facile alterations to various infamous lines to satisfy the censor, but mostly the art of collaboration happens off camera. The origin stories of some of his most famous lyrics shift over time and in any case sound pretty apocryphal in the first place. Was he a better songwriter than a judge of collaborator? Probably. The real hits – Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Can-Can (1953), and perhaps Silk Stockings (1955) – featured fights and fallings out. Not even the phenomenal success of Kiss Me, Kate on Broadway, film, and in the West End ensured a follow-up collaboration for playwrights Bella and Samuel Spewack. (Britten’s librettist for Peter Grimes, Montagu Slater, was treated similarly.) Instead, an excessively formal relationship between them is played out in the correspondence, Bella suggesting one idea after another, only for Porter to wave it away with a weary hand. Yet still that weary hand produced some of the great songs of the century. Perhaps ultimately his métier was the small scale, the perfect worlds he created in songs lasting no more than four minutes – with their (barely concealed) risqué lyrics and superb harmonic frameworks – which he more or less handed over to his collaborators to link together as they saw fit. If so, that’s no mean achievement. A good critical biography would do him justice. g Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten: A life in the twentieth century (2013) and Chopin’s Piano: A journey through Romanticism (2018). He is artistic director of Musica Viva. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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United States
‘A kind of Jeremiah’
The tortured state of the American soul Samuel Watts
The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the debate over race in America by Nicholas Buccola
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Princeton University Press (Footprint) $79.99 hb, 482 pp
ising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate. Speaking for the motion that the ‘American dream is at the expense of the American Negro’, Baldwin offered his jeremiad not just on the state of American race relations but, as he saw it, the tortured state of the American soul. According to Baldwin, the United States needed saving from itself and only a complete moral reckoning would prevent the country from being engulfed in the hatred and violence so recently on display in Birmingham. Baldwin’s opponent that day was William F. Buckley Jr. One might have supposed that Buckley would prevail in such a debate. Not only was Buckley an established and ruthless debater, but by February 1965 he was the most prominent American conservative intellectual and perhaps the most famous representative of the nascent modern conservative movement, second only to Barry Goldwater. Buckley – a Yale graduate who was raised on a sprawling Connecticut estate, educated by countless private tutors, and spoke with a distinctive if idiosyncratic transatlantic accent – should have swayed the similarly privileged Cambridge undergraduates. Yet, Buckley’s attacks on Baldwin and his attempts to defend not only the idea of the American dream but, more broadly, a conception of Western and Christian civilisation under threat, fell utterly flat in the Union hall. Baldwin easily won the debate. Buckley would see this defeat as proof of both British anti-Americanism and the intellectual hypocrisy of secular liberal élites. The Fire Is Upon Us represents the most comprehensive account of this debate and its significance, both in the intellectual development and careers of Baldwin and Buckley, and in the ongoing struggle to deal with the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, and violence in America. Buccola has crafted a dual intellectual biography that engages critically with the writers’ starkly oppositional political philosophies. This book should attract anyone with an interest in the history of African-American literature, civil rights, or modern American con20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
servatism. Working back from this decisive moment in American political history, Buccola delves into the archives to highlight how both men came to view the problem of race in America so differently, and to put this debate in the brutal context of the era. Structuring and achieving the right balance with a joint biography is a difficult task. Shifting rapidly between two separate narratives makes the first half of this study seem a little disjointed, as if the author were overly concerned about constructing tension too early on. This is more than made up for in the second half, which is at times fascinating, enraging, and deeply moving. Buccola’s commitment to engage with the ideas and arguments of both Baldwin and Buckley (and not just their distinctive public personas) is what makes this book so commendable. Buccola’s approach represents a genuine attempt to understand what both men really believed and why they felt motivated to fight for their competing visions of the country. In adopting this approach, Buccola lets Buckley’s ideas stand on their own. Like his arguments in the Union hall, they fall completely flat. Buckley’s analysis (in print and in public forums) was frequently illogical, reactive, and personal. It was his quick wit, charm, and uncanny ability to identify and exploit opportunities in the media and in politics that allowed him to occupy such a prominent role in American society. Debating Baldwin at Cambridge, Buckley vigorously attacked him on lines cherry-picked from both Baldwin’s essays and his novels, and yet it is not at all clear that Buckley understood or had even read the works in question. In the age of Donald Trump, it is all too easy to view the icons of twentieth-century conservatism with rose-tinted glasses, yet The Fire Is Upon Us warns against such an approach. Buckley’s public and private thoughts on race and white supremacy are sure to unsettle most readers. Although much has been written elsewhere on Baldwin’s civil-rights activism and on his writing, Buccola’s analysis is highly insightful and well written. Baldwin’s cultural presence is greater now than it has ever been since his death in 1987, with new audiences engaging with his novels and plays, with the recent film adaptation of If Beale Street Could Talk (2018), and with Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2018). In a crowded field of Baldwin analysis, Buccola delivers, highlighting the relevance of Baldwin’s writing and of his debate with Buckley for the present. Buccola skilfully underscores the urgency felt by both Baldwin and Buckley to either advance or reverse the gains of the civil-rights movement, yet for Baldwin it was about much more. For Baldwin, any denial of the humanity of others meant a denial or destruction of one’s own. That Baldwin’s cultural popularity has surged since 2016 is far from coincidental; it is proof that Baldwin’s warnings about the destructive power of hatred and inequality remain as critically urgent now as then. g Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History and a teaching assistant in both History and Politics at the University of Melbourne. He researches and writes about the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Wyselaskie Scholarship in History. He is the managing editor of ANZASA Online.
Comment
News deserts
A worrying portent for our democracy
by Johanna Leggatt
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uring my first month as a trainee journalist at The Sun-Herald newspaper in Sydney, I went on strike. It was the year 2000, and the newspaper enjoyed a full roster of reporters and photographers dedicated solely to one edition each Sunday, yet even during this well-resourced period there were inklings of the headwinds to come. The Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment) chief executive officer at the time, Fred Hilmer, had alienated many reporters with plans to modernise the old mastheads in a manner that staff worried would put profits before quality. Word spread quickly that Hilmer had called reporters ‘content providers’ and referred to the newspapers as ‘advertising platforms’. Aggrieved journalists downed tools and my fellow trainees and I dutifully joined the striking workers on the picket line. Afterwards, we bought some cheap bottles of wine and drank them in the Royal Botanic Gardens, privately hoping that the strike would end soon so that our meagre trainee wages would be reinstated, thereby sparing us the indignity of moving into the gardens more permanently. Two decades on, the protestations of my journalism colleagues appear like the minor gripes of an industry that has lost a much larger fight. The terminology hardly matters anymore, nor would the phrase ‘content provider’ be viewed nowadays as a slight against the media’s overarching mission to challenge and inform. After all, it matters little what the chief executive calls the profession if there is no one left to perform the work, or worse, if the media outlet ceases to exist. From the end of June, Australia will no longer have a newswire service, abruptly ending the eighty-five-year history of Australian Associated Press (AAP), further narrowing an already concentrated media landscape, dominated, in print at least, by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Veteran reporters who thought they were inured to the upheavals of their industry – who have witnessed decades of cutbacks, sacked co-workers, closed international bureaux, and a revolving door of executives – were shocked by the dissolution of this largely invisible but vital service. I was among the crestfallen, having spent four instructive years as a court reporter for AAP a decade ago, but my shock no doubt paled in comparison to the grief felt by the 200 or so current reporters who have lost their jobs. Predictably, a public brouhaha has commenced over who is to blame, with AAP’s major shareholders, News Corp and Nine,
pointing the finger at the proliferation of free news on social media and digital-content aggregators, while the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), has suggested that the closure was designed to thwart Nine and News Corp’s rivals, who also subscribe to AAP. There is talk of trying to patch together some weak substitute: News Corp and Nine are considering developing their own in-house breaking news services, while discussions are reportedly being held to establish a cooperative among the remaining small subscribers to pool news and photography resources. Whatever limp iteration replaces AAP, it is abundantly clear that the loss will have widespread ramifications for the media’s ability to fulfil its charter to inform the citizenry and to keep a vital check on power. The major mastheads all subscribe to AAP, as do smaller and newer players, including Verizon Media, regional papers, radio, and, to some extent, The Guardian. Newsrooms across the country have shrunk at an alarming rate over the past two decades, with data showing the number of journalists in traditional print businesses fell by twenty per cent from 2014 to 2018 alone, as outlined in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) ‘Digital Platforms Inquiry’ report. Yet AAP journalists, burdened by their own staff cutbacks, have continued to turn up to court cases, royal commissions, council meetings, and coronial inquests, informing Australians on what is happening in their communities, judicial system, and tiers of government. It is the kind of methodical, serious, deeply important work that buttresses a free press. Wire journalists do not need to fill blank pages like their colleagues on a news masthead, which means that there is very little pressure to cook up a specific angle. AAP is owned by four media outlets, with rivals Nine and News Corp holding the largest stake, and the wire service’s need to cater to a range of subscribers ensures that it has never taken a distinct editorial line. News wires, furthermore, are immune from the commercial need to attract advertisers. This liberates journalists from the weak will of nervous editors who cannot hold the line against commercial pressure to kill or limit a damaging story. AAP also plays a fundamental role in its indirect support of long-form investigative work. A number of fine wire reporters have broken exclusives, but it’s been AAP’s broader role in helping to free up subscribers’ newsrooms for deeper fact-findAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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ing that has made it such an asset. This deep investigative work is invaluable, especially in light of the federal government’s hostility towards media probing and accountability, which has only increased in recent years. In the past year alone, Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers have raided the home of a News Corp journalist and the ABC Sydney office in relation to exclusive and damaging stories, while the Australian Signals Directorate Director-General, Rachel Noble, recently admitted to a Senate estimates committee that the ASD had spied on Australians, claiming they were ‘rare circumstances’. In 2016, journalist Paul Farrell, formerly of Guardian Australia, discovered the AFP had attempted to identify and prosecute his confidential sources by seeking to access his metadata without a warrant. Meanwhile, journalists are continually frustrated in their efforts to access information through the obstructive and clunky Freedom of Information (FOI) apparatus, the prime minister, Scott Morrison,
check the accuracy of a story and we use fewer sources to access news. This trend was visible during the recent Black Summer bushfires, when an analysis by BuzzFeed found that some social media accounts were spreading information and images of the fire that were false, misleading, or unverified, including the widely circulated lie that Greens MPs oppose hazard-reduction burns.
This investigative work is invaluable, especially in light of the federal government’s hostility towards media probing and accountability
While many commentators agree on the need for reliable news sources, few can agree on how to fund it, with the socialjustice principles of journalism seemingly out of step with the commercial imperative of modern business. MEAA Chief Executive Officer Paul Murphy has argued that the government must intervene to protect public-interest journalism through a levy on a percentage of the digital revenue that the likes of Google and Facebook make from their use of news content. Chair of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI) Allan Fels has similarly called on the government to step in with potential tax rebates that he says could inject up to $380 million into publicinterest journalism. The editor-in-chief of AAP, Tony Gillies, told ABR that he doesn’t believe it is the role of the government to support news, but thinks more needs to be done to rein in Google and Facebook. ‘I can see the case for a short-term [government] funding boost to a new entrant, but long-term I think it’s the government’s role to act primarily to ensure a level playing field,’ said Gillies, referring to the advertising revenue Google and Facebook make from mainstream media content. ‘To be honest, this problem began when we in the media started Labor MPs hold up signs in support of Australian Associated Press (AAP) giving our content away for free online, and now it is during House of Representatives Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, 3 March 2020. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube.’ On the day AAP’s closure was announced, Morrefuses to answer questions over the sport grants affair, and we still rison and Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese stood lack a robust federal anti-corruption body, with the government up in Parliament to express their sympathies for sacked staff. proposing a toothless Commonwealth integrity commission in- Albanese listed the names of the AAP Canberra bureau staff one stead. These are but a handful of worrying examples of creeping by one, solemnly paying his respects to journalism’s most recent government intrusion, obfuscation, and overreach, and it is not casualties. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, but there difficult to imagine how an impoverished reporting climate and is no clearer sign of the Fourth Estate’s growing impotence than the loss of a major news player will further hobble the media’s the sight of MPs offering their pity and condolences up to its ability to hold the powerful to account. charges. Our democracy will be weakened when AAP closes its The crisis becomes even more acute when you consider that doors, creating news deserts in our communities and entrenching many Australians receive their news through a limited range of social media’s panicky echo chamber of likes, shares, and viral sources, including unverified stories on social media. According outrage in its place. Meanwhile, the nation’s most pressing stories to the findings of the 2019 ‘Digital News Report’, coordinated will be left untold. g by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, Australians are less engaged with news than Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist, who has citizens of other countries. The report found that, compared to worked on-staff for Fairfax (now Nine), News Corp, and Austhe citizens of thirty-seven other countries, we are less likely to tralian Associated Press (AAP). 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Essays
The qualities of surprise Lydia Davis’s engaging essays Shannon Burns
Essays One
by Lydia Davis
E
Hamish Hamilton $45 hb, 521 pp
ssays One is the first of two volumes of collected non-fiction drawn from all periods of Lydia Davis’s long career. While the second collection will, according to the author, ‘concentrate more single-mindedly on translation and the experience of reading foreign languages’, this volume has an alternating focus on writing and reading practices, translation, commentary, reviews, and personal essays. It is loosely structured, non-chronological, and doesn’t shy away from repetition or reiteration – particularly throughout the several pieces that share the subtitle ‘Forms and Influences’. The collection of these essays into a single volume serves readerly convenience more than a desire for purposeful proximity. It makes it easier to read Davis’s non-fiction side by side, to identify any shifts in thought or sensibility, and to locate those repetitions. A few pieces appear to be without obvious purpose – except, perhaps, for what they reveal about Davis’s interests – but most are more than worthy of republication. In her essays on other writers, Davis moves deftly between considerations of form, language, and affect. She exhibits a fascination for ‘the beauty of awkward prose’ and repeatedly celebrates the qualities of surprise. She writes admiringly of Lucia Berlin: ‘It’s that we never know quite what is going to come next. Nothing is predictable. And yet everything is also natural, true to life, true to our expectations of psychology and emotion.’ Of the poet Rae Armantrout, she says: ‘Her comedy depends in part on surprise, the unexpected. But then everything in her verse, comic or not, is fresh, surprising, unpredictable. Not only is her humor often a humor of incongruity: incongruity is a recurring characteristic of the poems generally.’ In an essay on writing, she advises: ‘Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader.’ Davis reveals interesting biographical details along the way: ‘Both my parents had been writers of short stories,and my mother still was,’ she writes. ‘Both of them had had stories in The New Yorker ...’ We discover that her family settled in the United States a long time ago, and that she has a strong interest in the King James Bible. We also learn that several of Davis’s stories draw from found material in emails, and we begin to understand the interest her fiction takes in maids. Many of the essays have an implicit personal significance. Writing about Berlin’s use of autobiographical material, Davis proclaims: ‘A person could not think he knew her just because he had read her stories.’ The same can presumably be said of Davis,
whose stories are occasionally indistinguishable from autobiographical essays or reports. In one of her essays on writing, Davis asks: ‘How much does a reader have to know beforehand, in order to receive the full impact of a piece of writing, and is it all right for a reader not to receive that full impact?’ This question is particularly relevant to her own fiction. By way of example, ‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’, from Varieties of Disturbance (2007), offers much to readers familiar with Kafka’s writing, but I find it hard to guess what the story provokes for those with only a glancing knowledge of him. From the same collection, ‘Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho’ is wildly Beckettian, and the pleasure of reading it owes much to our immediate recognition of its stylistic debt. Is this a problem? Not according to Davis, who argues: ‘Any piece of writing ... has only a particular, and limited, audience or readership. It is not necessary to try to appeal to everyone, or even to explain oneself.’
Davis moves deftly between considerations of form, language, and affect Essays also features close readings of Davis’s own fiction, including accounts of the process of writing and revising. She gives us a sense of what she strives for and her methods for creative discovery, and offers insights into her relationship with language in serious and mundane ways: ‘I like the word ottoman,’ she writes, ‘which reminds me of the Ottoman Empire and sounds so very elevated for a piece of furniture.’ Some of these pieces are drawn from writing masterclasses she has conducted and for that reason dwell on lengthy explanations or illustrative examples. They address us as wannabe writers in search of practical instruction, which can be jarring. ‘Read closely, and learn to analyze texts,’ she advises, ‘develop your mind and character.’ Some advice almost seems to come from another era: ‘Read the best writers. Maybe it would help to set a goal of one classic per year at least. Classics have stood the test of time, as we say. Keep trying them; if you don’t like them at first, come back to them.’ At other times the instruction is more focused: ‘Do work hard on the very last words – they can sometimes make all the difference as to whether or not a story or poem seems finished.’ There is a kind of Davis story that I struggle to appreciate: longer fictions that employ simple reportage, often separated into small, titled sections. She uses a similar form in some of these essays, to better effect. On the few occasions where she appears to be rolling through the motions, Davis eventually shifts gear, and a dull and unpromising beginning finds its pleasing shape and resolution. There is much to admire in this collection. ‘In Search of Difficult Edward Dahlberg’ is fascinating and even-handed. A short commentary on Thomas Pynchon’s early stories is surprisingly rich, and essays on Armantrout, Berlin, Flaubert, and Stendhal are superb. Among the more exploratory essays, ‘As I Was Reading’ is a playful delight. g Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and a member of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. He has published short fiction, poetry, and academic articles. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Essays
The spliced ‘I’
Ellena Savage’s many selves Caitlin McGregor
Blueberries
by Ellena Savage
T
Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 256 pp
he writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page. In 2017, Ellena Savage wrote an essay titled ‘Antimemoir, as in Fuck You (as in Fuck Me)’. It was published as part of her books column in The Lifted Brow. Savage has lost her writerly ‘I’, she claims in this essay, following three events: an anti-memoir workshop run by writer Bhanu Kapil; reading James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes (1998) and Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017); and uprooting her life (‘again’). ‘When in the past I wrote,’ Savage writes, ‘there was a point from which “I” could pivot. A time and a place and a self, located at the centre of those dimensions.’ But now? ‘Can’t write memoir now. How ’bout antimemoir?’ What follows in ‘Antimemoir’ is not a clear-cut delineation of what ‘antimemoir’ might entail as a literary genre or practice – that would not be Savage’s style. ( Joan Retallack writes that the best essays ‘maintain an irritating presence, pleasurable or not, as radically unfinished thought’, and Savage’s essayistic writing falls into this camp.) Three years later, though, we have Savage’s début essay collection, Blueberries. The essays in Blueberries are written and peopled by many of Savage’s selves. Of Kapil’s Ban en Banlieue (2015), Savage writes: ‘Kapil splices the lyric ‘I’, multiplies it, buries key fragments, and then undermines the very composition of the book in its own pages.’ The ‘I’ of the essays in Blueberries operates in the same way. In the opening essay, ‘Yellow City’, Savage returns to Lisbon eleven years after she was the victim of an ‘almost rape’ there. Ostensibly, she is looking for court documents that pertain to the sexual assault case, but the essay quickly introduces voices that question the primary narrator’s intentions, her memories, her honesty. ‘You don’t want to read the police report,’ one accuses; another bluntly tells us, undermining the narrator’s previous paragraph: ‘She’s lying.’ This complicated approach to ‘the lyric I’ calls into question the reliability of memory and the stability of the self, particularly when these things are unsettled by trauma and the passage of time. 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Through the shifting subjectivities of Savage’s lyric ‘I’, Blueberries asks piercing questions about power, desire, and violence. The essays explore what it means to be an artist, a body, a woman, a friend, a lover, a daughter – and how these roles intersect with systems of oppression. Each essay has its own form and process, but in each one Savage focuses her sharply analytic eye on the world she moves through – as well as on herself. In a review (not included in Blueberries) of Leslie Jamison’s memoir The Recovering, Savage writes of Jamison’s ‘form-perfect self-critique’. She suggests that at times Jamison’s writing is ‘perhaps, even, performatively self-flagellating’ and that this tendency ‘leave[s] little room for mistakes or surprises or even those nourishing little indulgences: rage, self-pity, contempt’. This review sits interestingly alongside Blueberries; occasionally, Savage’s own essays are self-critical to the point of being uncomfortable to read. When Savage’s writerly ‘I’ splits across lines of time or perspective, this self-interrogation is especially visceral. For example, having shared – exposed? – the transcript of an email that eighteen-year-old Ellena Savage had sent her older brother after being assaulted in Lisbon, another, more recent self cuts in to mock it: ‘I mean. Who speaks like that?’
The essays in Blueberries are written and peopled by many of Savage’s selves All writing is performative, to some extent. Savage’s selfcritique, though, is different from the ‘self-flagellating’ she identifies as self-protectively performative in Jamison’s prose. Jamison’s writing is tightly controlled, foreseeing and circumventing potential criticism; Savage, by contrast, tends to write into the dark. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes that the most useful work ‘is likeliest to occur near the boundary of what a writer can’t figure out how to say readily’. When Savage is at her best, this borderline space is where her writing goes to work. The essays in Blueberries set out to interrogate the unknown and to express the inexpressible much more often than they set out to argue or convince, and Savage’s relentless self-critique is no exception to this rule. The collection’s closing essay is a revised version of ‘Antimemoir’. In a way that feels appropriate to the ever-evolving ‘I’ of Blueberries. It is markedly different from the 2017 version: the ‘I’ has shifted. The Blueberries version of ‘Antimemoir’ states: ‘Writing in first person is writing that admits that experience is always truncated. That perspective is necessarily incomplete. That it is not possible, not honest, to pretend otherwise.’ This recalls a reason for writing that Savage offers in the Blueberries essay ‘Notes to Unlived Time’: writing is worth doing because it ‘can’t help but demonstrate how dubiously, how erroneously and how enchantingly knowledge is produced, remembered, transmitted’. Perhaps one of her finest achievements in Blueberries is that, through her version of anti-memoir, Ellena Savage turns the fraught subjectivity of the writerly ‘I’ into a formidable tool for reckoning with the self and the world. g Caitlin McGregor is an essayist based in Maldon, Victoria. ❖
Travel
‘Wicked, wonderful old city’ An engaging selection of writers on travelling Nicole Abadee
Great Cities Through Travellers’ Eyes by Peter Furtado
‘T
Thames & Hudson $39.99 hb, 368 pp
he tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.’ Thus, in 1928, British writer Freya Stark, an intrepid traveller, described the distinction between a traveller and a tourist. British historian Peter Furtado’s new anthology, Great Cities Through Travellers’ Eyes, is squarely aimed at the former. In it he collects the writings of a diverse group of writers about thirty-eight different cities, over a period dating from ancient times to the 1980s (more on that later). Some writers, such as Marco Polo, Hans Christian Anderson, and Simone de Beauvoir, are well known, others less so. Some like what they see, others do not. As Furtado observes, ‘the reactions of the writers … reveal as much about their own characters and interests as about the cities themselves’. For example, Anthony Trollope, who visited Sydney in 1871, reveals, perhaps unwittingly, his snobbery in his praise of Sydney’s Botanic Gardens: ‘For loveliness, and that beauty which can be appreciated by the ignorant as well as by the learned, the Sydney Gardens are unrivalled.’ Furtado introduces each city with a brief outline of its history, then includes four or five extracts from different writers about that city, and explains why the writer was there. Many of the writers sing the praises of their host city. Charles Dickens, in Rome in 1844, was deeply moved by the sight of the Colosseum: ‘To see it crumbling there … is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city … It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable.’ Botanist and birth-control advocate Marie Stopes, who in 1907 spent time in Tokyo, found the Imperial Palace ‘one of the most impressive views I have ever seen in a city – a sight that brought tears to one’s eyes.’ The famous medieval traveller Ibn Battuta, who travelled 112,000 kilometres over thirty years, found Cairo in 1326 ‘mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour’, and British writer Ian Fleming in 1959 described Hong Kong as ‘the most vivid and exciting city I have ever seen’. No doubt in the interests of balance, Furtado also includes extracts from travellers who are unimpressed with what they see, and who do not hesitate to say so. In 395 ce, Synesius of Cyrene said of Athens, ‘May the sailor who brought me here die miserably.’
Rudyard Kipling, seeing Chicago in 1889, said, ‘having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again’. French literary critic Hippolyte Taine did not find London to his liking in 1885: ‘After an hour’s walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the City … one meditates suicide.’ Queen Victoria, who, with Prince Albert, visited Paris in 1855 as a guest of the Emperor Napoleon III, was underwhelmed by Notre Dame: ‘Except the beautiful carving of the Choir there is nothing particularly to admire in the interior’. She did, however, enjoy the view from her rooms of the Arc de Triomphe (‘rising so majestically and beautifully’), so much so that she sat on her balcony and sketched it. Other writers display their own prejudices (often those of their age) when they venture beyond their home shores and use language that is offensive to today’s reader. British Catholic clergyman James Laird Patterson in 1849 visited Alexandria, where he found the sight of Muslims praying to Mecca ‘a frightful and diabolical parody of Christian practices’ and the supplicants ‘held in the bonds of the devil’. British soldier and explorer Harry de Windt in 1887 wrote of the people of Beijing (then Peking), ‘There is no more insolent, arrogant thief than the lower order of Pekinese’, who, in his view, ‘conspired to fulfil Western clichés of themselves: inscrutable and all alike’.
Synesius of Cyrene said of Athens, ‘May the sailor who brought me here die miserably.’ Rudyard Kipling, seeing Chicago in 1889, said, ‘having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again’ Perhaps the last word on (gratuitous) insults to a country or its culture belongs to Mark Twain, who visited Paris in 1869. There, he and his companions ‘put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack … in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed we impaled them … with their own vile verbs and participles’. Some writers discovered things that surprised them. In 1788, Dr John White, en route to Australia with the First Fleet, stopped in Rio de Janeiro where he was struck by how long the women grew their hair; he saw one woman whose hair dragged along the ground. Others saw signs of trouble to come. When writer Thomas Wolfe visited Berlin in 1936 and witnessed the ‘sheer pageantry’ of Hitler’s Olympic Games and the ‘organising genius’ of the German people, he notes that, ‘it was as if the Games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might’. Great Cities Through Travellers’ Eyes is a highly engaging selection of writing from a diverse group of travellers through the ages. My only quibble is with Furtado’s decision to exclude travel writing after the 1980s on the basis that cheaper flights and social media have changed the travel experience too much. That aside, it is a marvellous resource for both the seasoned traveller and the armchair traveller. g Nicole Abadee is the books writer for The Australian Financial Review Magazine. Before she moved into the world of books, Nicole was a lawyer for almost ten years. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Language
Power and slang
A fascinating look at women and slang Amanda Laugesen
Sounds and Furies: The love–hate relationship between women and slang by Jonathon Green
K
Robinson $29.99 pb, 564 pp
ate Lister (historian and curator of the website Whores of Yore) writes in her foreword to Sounds and Furies that language ‘is a powerful agent of social control, and dictates the acceptable, the feminine, and the well behaved’. Slang lexicons have long served to objectify women in all sorts of ways. It is not surprising, she argues, that Green’s Online Dictionary of Slang records only twenty-seven slang terms for the clitoris but 1,122 for the vulva. Female sexual pleasure does not find much expression in the slang lexicon. Women and their relationship to and with slang has been a neglected topic in the otherwise copious literature on slang. Jonathon Green, today’s foremost slang lexicographer, has finally tackled this topic in his fascinating and hefty new book. He takes us on a journey through some seven hundred years of the slang lexicon in an effort to show how women have always had a stake in slang. Green himself acknowledges the problem – well, a couple of problems. First, there is the issue of evidence. We have limited examples of slang as created by women, except in the last century or so. Even when women have been writers and authors, they are constrained by a stereotype that slang is ‘unfeminine’ and the domain of men, and thus often refrain from using much slang in their writing. Especially before the twentieth century, works that purport to be by women and that contain lots of slang are of questionable provenance; a number of works supposedly by women were more likely written by men (Green calls these ‘ventriloquised’). Second, the slang lexicon all too often objectifies women: they are typically seen only as sexual objects or hags. We risk struggling to find any kind of authentic voice that reflects women’s experiences of the world. Reading this book, with its copious and dispiriting lists of words to describe women, threatens to illustrate this: cat, chick, stunner, doll, sheila, cookie, dog, skank, pig, skeezer, slag, floozie, bimbo, chippie … The list goes on. So where do we find the authentic voices of women in the world of slang? Green offers us a few ways into this. Domains that can be seen as belonging to women give us some slang: for example, the vocabulary of pregnancy (up the spout, have a joey in the pouch), menstruation (Rita red pants, Auntie Flo), and abortion (bring it away, crack an egg). Women sex workers generate and have generated across time a large slang vocabulary (about them, if not by them): intercourse is fancy work, the brothel the banging shop, and the customer is a trick. 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
We also meet some colourful characters along the way. The notorious Moll King, immortalised in a posthumous biography published in 1747, made much use of the flash language of the criminal underworld of eighteenth-century London. Here is a taste of her dialogue: ‘There’s a Grunter’s Gig, is a Si-Buxom; two Cat’s Heads, a Win; a Double Gage of Rum Slobber, is Thrums; and a Quartern of Max, is three Megs.’ Moll is in conversation with a customer who is asking how much he should pay for his dinner: si-buxoms, wins, thrums, and megs are all slang terms for various denominations of coin. Nell Kimball’s account of her life as an ‘American madam’ was published in 1970 but was written in 1930. Her book contains some 260 slang terms, with graphic sexual slang as befitting her occupation. The vagina is the quiff, muff, snatch, split, crack, and cunt; the ultra-virile man is known as a stud or a cocksman, and the masturbator a duff flogger. The 1920s ‘flapper’ (preceded by the ‘fast girl’) was well known for her distinctive vocabulary, compiled into ‘The Flapper Dictionary’ that first appeared in 1922. Anyone aged over thirty was a green apple or old fop, an older woman was a covered wagon, and a lover’s tiff was described as a flat shoe. Teenage girls through the twentieth and twenty-first century have continued to cultivate a unique slang as well as to demonstrate that young girls make use of slang as much as anyone. Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues (1979) captures the slang of young girls in the late 1970s and contributes to our record of Australian English: packing shit, pash, and slack-arsed are the kinds of terms immortalised in its pages. The internet has also served to make women’s slang more visible. Green makes much use of the online forum Mumsnet to track various slang terms. This forum is particularly fond of the acronym, so we have PITA ‘pain in the arse’, NAK ‘nursing at keyboard’, and the initialism AIBU ‘am I being unreasonable?’ among many others. And while lesbian slang has historically proven difficult to trace, there does appear to be vocabulary that circulates to some extent within online communities, such as celebudyke for a lesbian famous for doing nothing, hetty for heterosexual, and luppies for lesbian yuppies. Like all collections of slang, it is difficult to know how widely used many of the words really are. There is also something depressing about the way in which women’s relationship to slang has been overwhelmingly defined by women’s biology and especially their status as sexual objects. While women’s agency in all this is certainly discernible in Green’s study, the connection to the larger structures of power that have historically circumscribed women’s lives, and sought to define their identity, could perhaps have been further explored. Where do we go from here in studying the story of women and their troubled relationship with slang? Green calls for more people to take up the challenge of uncovering other aspects of this story. It would be interesting to see in particular what a woman’s eye might bring to it. g Amanda Laugesen is a historian, lexicographer, and Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre. She is the author of several books and many articles on aspects of Australian and US History. Her book on Australian soldier slang of World War I is due out from Oxford University Press later this year.
Category
F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
27
Fiction
The wounds of love Sage student of the human heart Alice Nelson
Desire Lines
by Felicity Volk
T
Hachette $32.99 pb, 435 pp
he poet Anne Michaels once wrote that when love finds us, our pasts suddenly become obsolete science. All the secret places left fallow by loneliness are flooded with light and the immanence of the longed-for one draws us into the clearing, stains us with radiance. Yeats’s wing-footed wanderer arrives at last and the miraculous restorations of love and the imperatives of desire render our separate pasts ‘old maps, disproved theories, a diorama’. Felicity Volk, sublime prose-poet and sage student of the human heart, knows this not to be true. Our histories mark us indelibly, coursing through us like underground rivers, every wound part of the invisible arterial system of our souls. We cannot slip past some damage done to us; it coalesces and echoes though the lives that we carve out for ourselves, disfigures our future outline in the world. Volk has already staked out this particular terrain with striking lyrical talent in her previous novel Lightning (2013), which is also preoccupied with the long shadows of the past and the dislocations of harrowing histories. Desire Lines extends the territory of her earlier meditations on loss and redemption in a luminous and heart-wrenching novel of chiaroscuro in which the world is a perilous place that even unforeseen bestowals of grace cannot redeem; a treacherous minefield where people’s troubled pasts threaten to detonate at any moment. In Desire Lines, the central character, Paddy O’Connor, is a literary version of Wagner’s earnest knight and guardian of the Holy Grail Amfortas, perpetually divided, possessed by a never-healing wound and yet longing for transcendent wholeness. Born into strife and penury in 1950s London, the young Paddy is placed in an orphanage and then sent to Australia by his tragically beleaguered mother to save him from the horrors she knows await him at the hands of his violent father. ‘She must really love you to let you go like this,’ a kindly chaperone on the ship to Australia says to the inconsolable, seasick seven year old early in the novel. It is the first intimation that love and sacrifice, protection and pain, are intricately interwoven; that sometimes it becomes impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. Paddy, growing up at one of the infamous Fairbridge Farm schools, is subjected to chilling varieties of deprivation and debasement, until he finds a way to climb free into a different life, winning a scholarship to a prestigious college in the Blue Mountains. Edward Said once wrote that it was unsurprising that exiles often 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
become novelists, intellectuals, chess players; that the refugee tries to compensate for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule. Paddy forges this kind of consoling order through his career as an architect, finding comfort in: ‘The calm anticipation before he detonated a lonely nothing to fashion a something: matter, stars, galaxies; breathing life into the cosmic dust and growing from it company for himself, love, fervour, devotion.’ Those who have been damaged can become dangerous to others, and there is something awry within Paddy, a Faustian split that allows him to inflict unintended but deep harm upon the woman he loves. Paddy meets Evie Waddell as a teenager, and the arc of the novel follows the interlacing of their fates over the years, the fraught latticework of their shared lives, and the questing narratives of each individual as they grapple with the wounds of love and their gravitational pull towards each other.
Desire Lines extends Volk’s earlier meditations on loss and redemption One of Volk’s greatest achievements in the novel is that each of her characters is granted their own complex wisdom. It is not just Paddy who leaps to life on the page; Evie herself is vividly and compellingly rendered. It was Virginia Woolf who said that to create a fully realised female character the writer must think poetically and prosaically, that she must embrace both the quotidian nature of any life and the fact that every woman is ‘a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually’. Volk’s extraordinary ability to inhabit her characters’ lives in the round is achieved not so much with an abundance of detail or accretion of backstory, but with something far more rare and intangible – a sustained attention to the selfhood of others. Even the minor characters feel luxuriantly realised and richly human; Volk grants her fictional creations all the contradictions, stumbling hesitations, and mysteriousness of real people. There is a lovely spaciousness to Desire Lines; Volk has seamlessly fashioned her form around her content, and her prose is full of beauty and precision. She has serious lessons to impart but she is never sententious. From the outset, the novel captures the attention of the eye and the mind with its exquisite sensory observation, its breathtakingly exact expressions of feelings and sensations. Perhaps Volk’s finest accomplishment is that her novel leads us to excavate our own buried and half-forgotten histories, our vows kept and those broken, the lies we tell to ourselves and one another, the compromises we make to remain intact. The novel takes its title from Bachelard’s notion of chemins de desir; the errant, unmapped paths that walkers trace through the landscape. Desire lines are about resistance and agency; about the ways that we remake the world and the ways that we find to exist within it. It is not always possible to love each other into safety. It is not always possible to make things right. But like Paddy, like Evie, we never give up hope that we too might be remade, that we might be rescued. g Alice Nelson’s most recent novel is The Children’s House (Penguin Random House, 2018).
Fiction
Plorn’s progress
Charles Dickens’s youngest child in Australia Geordie Williamson
The Dickens Boy by Tom Keneally
‘W
Vintage $32.99 pb, 400 pp
hen a writer is born into a family,the family is finished.’ That gunshot of a quotation comes from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. I suspect he means writers are traitors to biology – they have higher allegiances than blood ties. Art is their true spouse; their works are the favoured first-born. Catherine Dickens had ten children by her husband, Charles. Each was named after a famous author or a literary creation of the author – a heavy nominal burden assumed at birth – and was given the best education money could buy. Aside from a daughter, Dora, who died at eight months of age, eternally immunising herself against parental disappointment, and Henry Fielding Dickens, who had a solid if not stellar legal career, the rest represent a generational catalogue of failure and mediocrity. Thomas Keneally’s latest novel – miraculously, his thirty-fourth work of full-length fiction – concerns the unlucky last of Dickens’s brood. Born in 1852, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens lacked the divine spark that made his father the most famous and beloved author of the nineteenth century. He showed little scholarly aptitude. Nor did he possess, in his father’s mind at least, application in general. Dickens père pulled Edward from his boarding school early and sent him to Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College: then, as now, a gentle educational off-ramp for the well-born and dim. Aged sixteen, Edward suffered definitive exile from the family hearth at Gads Hill. He was sent to Australia, on the heels of his older brother Alfred, to work on a large pastoral concern as a sort of proto-jackeroo: the idea being that he would learn the ropes and eventually become a colonial man of means. Keneally’s aim in attending to a youth so unprepossessing is both generous – he wants to recuperate Edward to some degree by telling his (imagined) side of the story – and a subtle rebuke to Charles Dickens, a charming autocrat whose endlessly fertile inventiveness is shown to have significant gaps. That personal critique shades into the political. Tender and wry as the novel is, The Dickens Boy has a tough-minded postcolonial core. By taking Edward’s side against his famous parent, Keneally also makes the case for nineteenth-century Australia as more than a dumping ground for those who either couldn’t hack it at the heart of empire or had rendered themselves morally unsuitable to remain within it – a patronising and diminishing idea of antipodean experience that Dickens, more than any author, helped entrench. The narrative opens at Keneally’s traditional canter, joining Edward – or ‘Plorn’ as his father indelibly nicknamed his youngest
– on his voyage from Britain to Melbourne. After a brief, unfortunate posting to a property where the manager makes vicious sport of his parents’ very public separation, the boy’s second attempt at employment is more successful. This time he is sent to a remote station called Momba, near Wilcannia in the north-west of New South Wales, where two brothers named Bonney have established a considerable pastoral lease. (The Bonneys existed in reality and did host Edward Dickens for several years in the late 1860s and early 1870s.) A property so large and so distant from colonial centres, positioned close to both the South Australian and Queensland borders, had to practise self-government out of necessity. Luckily for the local Paakantji people, whose land this was, Frederick Bonney cut a liberal-minded if paternalistic figure, fascinated by and respectful of Indigenous culture, so much so that he became an enthusiastic amateur ethnographer. Much of the pleasure of the novel arises from the shock of strangeness we encounter alongside Edward. He is a modest, earnest young man, but one gentle and attentive to the oddities around him. What he discovers is a world at once alien but weirdly familiar, in which flora and fauna have no correspondence with the world from which he has come and yet which remains filled with men (and it is mostly men) who know his father’s works well enough to quote them adoringly and at length. For contemporary readers, there is a further frisson in seeing black and white worlds operating in relative peace and comity; and surprise, too, that the old idea of a colonial monoculture we were raised on was in fact cosmopolitan. Irish ex-convicts and heirs to English peerages share boundary-riding jobs. French women who love Victor Hugo travel the same bush tracks as Afghan cameleers. Roman Catholic monks wander with bands of desert people. Keneally’s other life as a historian informs every page of the novel; his is an antique footnote swelled up to life-size, complete with gentlemen bushrangers, early Australian cricketing obsessions, absconding lovers, and cruelly racist mounted police. Yet the plot feels knocked together – a plywood stage on which the travelling melodrama runs – while the real action takes place elsewhere.This is where The Dickens Boy shades from jolly Bildungsroman into something closer to tragedy. We know that Edward died penniless at the age of forty-nine, and though this sad end stands outside the novel’s frame, the reasons for his fall from determined, hard-working youth to broken man are clearly signposted. What Keneally aims to do here – in the spirit of fictions such as Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting – is to locate and fill in those failures of the imagination under which a novelist such as Dickens laboured. For a Victorian culture inculcated with the inevitable rightness of empire, which regarded a few pious acts of charity as sufficient corrective to naked economic exploitation and systemic racism, British colonies were empty spaces onto which the imperial imaginary might send its landfill and project its certitudes. What Keneally’s novel reveals is a very different place, one where a unique local culture and society – more egalitarian, more accepting of difference – was checked and overlaid by old systems, inherited hierarchies, and the inevitable atrocities of the frontier. g Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library (2011). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Fiction
Me no dob, you no dob Aravind Adiga’s new novel Alison Broinowski
Amnesty
by Aravind Adiga
M
Picador $29.99 pb, 259 pp
uch political mileage has been made in Australia from the turning back of ‘boat people’. Travel by boat is the cheapest means of getting to this island continent, and the most dangerous. Boat travellers are the poorest and the most likely to be caught and deported or sent to an offshore camp. But their number is less than half of those who arrive by air as tourists and apply for refugee protection: some 100,000 have done so during the seven years of this Coalition government. In January 2020 alone, 1,931 air travellers sought asylum; more than twenty of them were deported. The rest wait for their cases to be decided. Among those who applied, 255 came from India, 309 from China, and 546 from Malaysia. The work of assessing these claims is tedious and slow, and Australians at the Refugee Review Tribunal say privately that most of them are false. Some ninety per cent of applications for protection visas are rejected, the highest rate being for Chinese, of whose claims only 3.3 per cent succeed. Malaysian Chinese are a special case. In Malaysia, tourists can get a travel authority for Australia electronically from a travel agent, and many of those wanting to emigrate are well-educated Chinese Malaysians seeking better economic and career opportunities. Malaysia, whose official policies favour Malays and Muslims, is ‘full of illegals’, as one of them tells Danny, the Sri Lankan protagonist of Aravind Adiga’s latest – and perhaps best – novel, Asylum. Danny is amazed that Chinese are the underclass anywhere, having watched Chinese drinking champagne on party boats on the Parramatta River. Adiga’s silence since his last novel, Selection Day (2016), is due to the five years he spent in Sydney, Batticaloa, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Chennai researching the asylum-seeker industry. He introduces two new ways of seeing Australia: through the eyes of legal and illegal residents. Danny can distinguish one from the other in the street, and so can the other illegals. He also detects sub-categories of migrants: junk-food eaters from poor suburbs have broad behinds; slim Indian schoolboys are the sons of Balmain doctors, and they look straight through him. Adiga is always at his best writing about wealthy Indians and those aspiring to wealth. Two classics of the latter sort are Danny the Legendary Cleaner’s clients. Rhada has defrauded her employer, Medicare, and is out of work. She lets her lover, Prakash, a chronic gambler who sports the tie of a private school he briefly attended, live rent-free in House 6, unbeknown to her 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Australian husband, Mark, in House 5. Danny was exploited for a year in Dubai, and on his return was tortured by Sinhalese interrogators who mistook him for another Tamil with the same name, Dhananjaya Rajaratnam. The result, a swollen scar on his arm, should be proof enough that his fear of persecution is justified and thus enable him to get him a protection visa in Australia, but after being ripped off at a Wollongong tertiary college, he applies for an extension of his student status and is rejected. Danny’s interview with Immigration is based on a real-life transcript in which an officer states that Australia has ‘zero tolerance for illegal activity of any kind’. Danny learns that he will be caught, billed for his unpaid tax and costs of detention, and deported. All Danny wants is to live in Australia, where he won’t be like everyone else but will be a ‘wanted minority’. Nothing in Australia is hard to understand, Danny the non-drinker, non-smoker decides, ‘once you know that all the young people have glassy blue eyes because they’re on drugs’. To sound Australian, you put a loud ‘Look’ at the beginning of a sentence, and ‘ridiculous!’ at the end.
Adiga is always at his best writing about wealthy Indians and those aspiring to wealth For four years, Danny has survived as an illegal, keeping his Vietnamese girlfriend ignorant of his status while he lives in dread. The novel tracks Danny through one entire day in Sydney, from Glebe where he lives in a tiny room above a shop, to Erskineville, Newtown, Potts Point, Darlinghurst, Pyrmont, and Hyde Park. Tommo, his Greek landlord, tyrannises him just as his father did. Prakash, the big, tough gambler, threatens him on his battered mobile every few minutes from morning till evening, and stalks him through the Kings Cross dives. At last, Danny defies Tommo, turns on Prakash, and attacks him ‘as a lion attacks its trainer’. This solves nothing. If Danny goes to the police, either Prakash or Tommo will report him as an illegal. Me no dob, you no dob, is the law of the immigration jungle. Prakash used to make Danny wait under the Coca-Cola sign while he and Rhada made love. The sign pulsates all day and night; throughout the book it looms over Danny’s peregrinations like the spectacles advertisement in The Great Gatsby. Wandering into a courtroom, Danny listens as justice is calmly done for someone he doesn’t know. He’s impressed by Australian fairness. In his refuge, the Glebe Public Library, Danny learns that Malcolm Fraser in 1976 declared an amnesty for illegals. He survives in the hope that fairness may happen again. Ridiculous. g Alison Broinowski has been an ABR reviewer since 1961. Shehas lived, worked, and frequently travelled in Japan. She was Australia’s cultural attaché in Tokyo in the mid-1980s and has recently contributed a chapter, with Rachel Miller, on the history of the Australian Embassy, to a book on Australia–Japan relations edited at Deakin University. She is currently writing about terrorism.
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Fiction
High wire acts
Four auspicious début collections Susan Midalia
T
he American writer Jack Matthews had no time for what he called ‘a discontent’ with the brevity of the short story. ‘Ask a coral snake,’ he declared, ‘which is as deadly as it is small.’ The claim for ‘deadliness’ certainly applies to four recent début collections; in the tight spaces of the short story, each one presents confronting ideas about contemporary Australia. Mandy Beaumont’s Wild Fearless Chests (Hachette, $28.99 pb, 212 pp), shortlisted for the 2019 UWAP Dorothy Hewett Award and the 2018 Hachette Richell Prize, is the most harrowing of the four collections. Its stories of gritty realism reveal the horror of rape, domestic violence, paedophilia, and repulsively squalid surroundings. The typically matter-of-fact tone of the narration paradoxically intensifies the darkness of the content and enacts the helpless passivity of the predominantly female victims. There are also examples of the gothic and the parable, including the grim ‘Kafka’s Apple Sitting in Between Her Shoulder Blades as Infection’, in which the desire for gender transformation descends into a nightmare of familial cruelty and condemnation. Other stories are hopeful, even redemptive. The title story, ‘On Their Wild and Fearless Chests’, prophetically insists that a young girl is ‘more than what surrounds you. You, my love, are fearless.’ Another optimistic story, ‘All the Edges of the Alphabet’, is a tender imagining of the life of Janet Frame, from her years of wrongful institutionalisation to the blessed satisfactions of her writerly life. The collection also includes autonomous women, benevolent mothers, the gift of reading, and bracing sisterhood. Not that its feminist perspective offers a simplistic model of male oppressor/female victim. There are stories of monstrously neglectful or abusive mothers, and stories of women and girls who, seduced by the desire to be ‘noticed’ or ‘loved’ by men, become abject self-victimisers. What also distinguishes this collection is the absence of morally self-righteous judgement; instead, the stories create empathy for wounded or invisible women, what the narrator of ‘Drowning in Thick Air’ describes as ‘the unwashed, the unkempt, the large and the sullen … the women ignored and raped in the dark’. A haunting, uncompromising collection, Wild Fearless Chests – stylistically polished, often visceral in effect – offers a bold new voice in the Australian literary culture.
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n contrast to Beaumont’s female-centred collection, Dominic Carew’s No Neat Endings (MidnightSun, $27.99 pb, 219 pp) explores the complexities of masculine psychology and
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embodiment. Its deadliness emerges from keen observations of masculinity under siege. The opening story, ‘Nineteen’, uses mordant humour to reveal a young man’s sexual shame in an increasingly performative masculine culture. Other stories deal with the anxieties for men of competitive or deadening work, like the lawyer in ‘Farewelling Time’ who feels his days becoming ‘untethered, a thread of cotton shivering on the sleeve of a jumper’. There are men who fear death, and men who fail their partners or their own best versions of themselves. There are also daggy dads, egotistical wankers, and men who self-destruct. This impressive range of character types is complemented by the collection’s tonal range, from the farcical to the melancholy. Sometimes the tone shifts within a single story. ‘A Problem’, which deals with the gender politics of online dating, begins in comic mode, then becomes a sinister tale of sexist bonds between men. By contrast, ‘The Episode’ is a deeply affecting story of a man’s inability to communicate with his wife. Returning from hospital, his action of ‘running his fingers across the surface of things’ serves as a telling metaphor for his avoidance of intimacy. Indeed, the collection as a whole excels in its use of ‘the unsaid’ – one of the characteristics of the short story’s aesthetic – as a sign of masculine inexpressiveness. The cost of such isolation is revealed in the story ‘Exit Ghost’, in which a man’s inability to ‘tell … a secret he’d been holding onto’ leads to a shocking conclusion. The conclusions to these nineteen realist stories are often inconclusive, open-ended, or ambivalent; as the title No Neat Endings suggests, the collection offers no easy resolutions to the desires and disappointments of the contemporary Australian male.
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ayne Marshall’s collection Shirl (Affirm Press, $26.99 pb, 277 pp),shortlisted for theVictorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, uses deadly humour as social criticism. Blending conventional realism with magic realism, satire, allegory, or faux biography, the stories mock self-entitled masculinity, the cultural myths of mateship and egalitarianism, and the escapism of booze and sport. The first story, ‘Cod Opening’, which begins as a blokey yarn about a regular fishing trip, uses the sudden appearance of a brutally wounded mermaid to contest the will to power of traditional masculinity. Other fantastical visitations abound: a shark appears in a public swimming pool; armed intergalactic aliens enforce a year-long ban on watching football; interplanetary colonisation allows a man to exploit an exotic, blue-trunked wife. Echoing, Frankenstein, ‘The Yowie’s Visit’ reveals Australia’s indifference to the cultural outsider’s tales of suffering: ‘Shit, sorry, mate. Didn’t catch any of that. Was checking the results in the fifth at Fulton Park.’ In its concern for a range of social problems, the collection’s use of humour, whether acerbic, whimsical, or absurd, reminds us that seriousness is not the same as solemnity. A number of stories deal with the issue of cancer, no doubt influenced by Marshall’s publicly acknowledged experience of the disease. ‘Levitation’ begins with the details of a cancer patient’s misery, but changes to a more hopeful tone with the arrival of a new medical discovery called ‘inter-retinal therapy’. While this fabrication is easily read as a dig at claims for a ‘miracle’ cure, the story’s conclusion shifts into something much more surprising
Fiction and interesting. The introduction of ‘inter-retinal therapy’ is only one of many nods and winks to the reader in this inventive début collection. Whether poignant, unsettling, or laugh-out-loud hilarious, the conceptually striking stories in Shirl are politically incisive and a great pleasure to read.
Hard-won wisdom A well-realised début Naama Grey-Smith
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ean O’Beirne’s A Couple of Things Before the End (Black Inc., $27.99 pb, 208 pp) also uses humour to deadly effect. His targets include bullying upholders of the Anzac legend, racists, reality television, and populist politicians, and his chief strategy is the creation of distinctive and convincing voices. O’Beirne has a keen ear for the vernacular, self-serving clichés, academic discourse, and the language of officialdom. One of his many amusing voices is the monarchist whose newsletter warns that Charles’s environmental concerns make him ‘THE threat’ to the future of the institution, while promoting Kate – ‘Very Fit. Very Good Posture’ – as a distraction from William’s unappealing baldness. Another amusing example is the befuddled MC of the End of Year Night with the Fellas, struggling to express a more confessional version of masculinity. In the futuristic story ‘Missy’, there is the voice of a smugly privileged woman who, over the course of many emails, becomes increasingly desperate for rescue from the ravages of climate change.
Poignant, unsettling, or laugh-out-loud hilarious, the stories in Shirl are politically incisive and a pleasure to read Every voice, spoken or written, in the collection is addressed to an audience and reveals the ways in which human communication can be miscommunication, self-delusion, rationalisation, or coercion. The most disturbing story, ‘Curry’, written in the form of a lawyer’s letter, voices a morally inexcusable defence of the real and appallingly racist acts committed in 1930 by Robert Curry, Superintendent of Palm Island Aboriginal Reserve, the subject of Thea Astley’s novel The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996). ‘Nauru,’ written as a heavily redacted bureaucrat’s report, uses an ingenious conceit – the detention of former Australian prime ministers on Nauru – to expose the inhumanity of Australia’s Border Protection policies. The use of humour in this story, as throughout the collection, is both hugely entertaining and ethically instructive. The collection as a whole offers the gift of story – modestly described in its title as a ‘couple of things’ – as consolation before ‘the end’ of civility and of civilisation itself. The arrival of these four short story collections shows the increasing willingness of Australian publishers to take a commercial risk on a genre sometimes dismissed by readers as superficial, ephemeral, and easy to write. Each collection is clearly the product of hard thinking about a writer’s creative choices. They also give readers the pleasures of audacity, intensity, and unexpected outcomes: what the writer Richard Ford famously called – to conclude with a different metaphor – the ‘high-wire act of literature’. g Susan Midalia’s novel The Art of Persuasion was published in 2018.
The Loudness of Unsaid Things by Hilde Hinton
H
Hachette $29.99 pb, 320 pp
ilde Hinton’s début novel is character-driven storytelling at its best. Its narrator, Susie, is a perpetual outsider whose world comprises ‘her dad, her crazy sometimesthere mum and a house that didn’t look like the others’. Susie faces life’s brutal realities earlier than most: by Year Seven she has moved from the country to the city, taken up selling newspapers in Melbourne’s streets, where adventure lurks but so do illmotivated men, and seen her mother drifting ‘in and out of the mind hospitals’. Hinton’s style is direct, conversational, and often funny, despite the subject matter: ‘Admitting defeat is like being able to laugh at yourself. A must.’ Susie’s sensitive intelligence, her fall-down-seven-times-get-up-eight determination, and her vulnerability make the reader protective of this young girl, who can be impulsive and obsessive but also generous and imaginative. Her friendship with other outsiders (‘Two differents make a same; two outcasts makes no outcasts’) is a lifeline in her teens as she seeks belonging in Sydney’s counterculture of the 1980s. Interspersed through this narrative are chapters about Miss Kaye (though to a lesser extent than the marketing blurb suggests). Miss Kaye works at The Institute, where employees have different strategies to deal with ‘the damaged, the dangerous, the not-quite-rights’. For Miss Kaye, ‘simply being herself was mostly effective’. These chapters, though few, establish Miss Kaye’s quick wits and hard-won wisdom. With much of Hinton’s family story shared publicly through the charity Love Your Sister – Hinton is the sister of Connie Johnson, who died from cancer in 2017 after raising millions for cancer research, and of actor Samuel Johnson – it’s hard not to draw parallels between narrator and author. Like Susie, Hinton, who works as a prison officer, grew up in Daylesford with a mother battling mental illness. With Hinton cheekily inserting real-life references – like ‘that nice man riding a unicycle around the country for cancer research’ – it seems an unstated premise that the novel contains some autobiographical content. Hinton has an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, but her work’s greatest asset is its heart. Her moving, well-realised début introduces a promising Australian writer. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia. She was among the initiators of creative journal dotdotdash. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Grey areas
Dervla McTiernan’s new novel Kirsten Tranter
The Good Turn
by Dervla McTiernan
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HarperCollins $32.99 pb, 400 pp
ervla McTiernan’s third novel consolidates her standing as a star of Irish detective fiction, following her breakout début, The Rúin (2018), and its follow-up, The Scholar (2019), all featuring Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly. Dublin dominates the imagination of Irish crime writing, but McTiernan’s stories centre around the western city of Galway and the small towns that surround it, places with pretty, smiling exteriors that mask darker moral and economic realities. For every cheerful local pub and beautiful seaside terrace there is a building lot abandoned in the wake of economic crisis and a cheaply constructed block of units with no heating and a rentgouging landlord. The opening of The Good Turn seems to promise a familiar script when Sergeant Peter Fisher’s first weekend off in a long time is interrupted by a call to investigate a report of a child abduction. Fisher is the only one on duty at the understaffed station. He’s hungover, slow, and reluctant: no one takes the report seriously, because it was made by a boy who said he saw Slender Man, a fictional internet villain, kidnap a girl. When Fisher shows up, the situation turns out to be different: there really has been a violent abduction, and the police have wasted precious time that could have terrible consequences. You have seen this episode of gritty police drama, or something like it; you steel yourself for a grisly outcome and a protracted search for the culprit replete with twists and multiple murders. But what happens next, as they say, will surprise you. Soon the abduction narrative becomes something else altogether, central to a gradually unfolding story of police corruption. McTiernan’s writing has the polish and pace of top-shelf crime fiction, but her work is made exceptional by the way she veers from the scripts that define the genre, along with her thoughtful attention to quotidian details of character and place. She is equally interested in the stories told by everyday failures and inadequacies of the justice system and in the people who administer it as she is in the dramatic successes or cover-ups. Her police are not divided strictly into good cops and bad cops. The heroes have their faults and there are grey areas: the cops who are demoralised, inexperienced, lazy, exhausted, or who take justice into their own violent hands in despair at the limits of the system. Her police – ‘Gardai’, as they are called here – are complicated people. Reilly is a good guy who tries to do things by the book, but he seems prone to making bad decisions, and he is now
isolated and unmoored. His girlfriend has decamped to Brussels, reasonably upset about being regarded as a prime suspect in Reilly’s most recent murder case; he left his good job in Dublin to be with her in Galway years earlier, and now he doesn’t know where he belongs except in the police force that seems determined to push him out. Many of his colleagues don’t trust him, and the few that do are tired of his relentless air of superiority. ‘You think you’re better than everyone else’ is a line uttered by one of his enemies and also by Fisher, Reilly’s protégé, infuriated by the realisation that his victimisation by superiors is a direct retaliation for his closeness to Reilly. ‘Nobody likes that and you can’t blame them for it,’ Fisher says. ‘Stop pissing people off,’ Reilly is told bluntly by another colleague, but that turns out to be impossible. Reilly’s task in the novel is not only to clear his own name but also to save Fisher’s reputation, and his unconcern for pissing people off is a necessary strength.
McTiernan’s stories centre around places with pretty, smiling exteriors that mask darker moral and economic realities Fisher emerges as an equally compelling character whose story here has equal weight. In disgrace, he is exiled to his home town of Roundstone and forced to work under his estranged father. Des, the town’s only full-time police officer, an alcoholic and womaniser whose agenda is unclear. Even though his emulation of Reilly has cost him so much, Fisher here applies the assiduous, principled attention to detail he has learned from the older detective and uncovers dark secrets beneath the town’s picturesque surface. The two narratives are bound together by the story of Anna, a young woman with her daughter: on the run from some mysterious threat, they find refuge with Fisher’s grandmother Maggie in Roundstone. Anna and Maggie’s friendship, a quiet illustration of female support and solidarity, provides a welcome counterpoint in this world where so many people in positions of power are able to abuse it with seeming impunity. Slick crime dramas often show police investigations of vast scale with access to an astounding range of technology, from rapid DNA testing to detailed CCTV footage of seemingly every street corner. McTiernan’s police, on the other hand, struggle with systemic incompetence, a crippling lack of resources, and huge-scale corruption that makes it virtually impossible to do their jobs. Reilly’s boss tells him sneeringly to ‘innovate’ and ‘adapt’ to the ‘constrained environment of modern policing’. How, McTiernan asks, does a good cop manage to be a good cop in this world, this environment constrained by pinched resources, the constant shadow of corruption, the drag of indifference, the limits of the system even when it works as it is intended? Events force both Fisher and Reilly to interrogate what it means to be police, to question their calling, to find out what forms of moral compromise they are able to handle, and to learn how they are defined by their answers to those questions. g Kirsten Tranter grew up in Sydney and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of three novels, including Hold (2016), which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Fiction
Fiction
Sonny and Vince
Matryoshka stories
Sonia Nair
Cassandra Atherton
An assured début
A tale of circular time
The Coconut Children
The Hypermarket
Vintage $32.99 pb, 340 pp
LCG Media US$10.95 pb, 217 pp
by Gabriel García Ochoa
by Vivian Pham
T
he Coconut Children is an assured début from nineteen-yearold novelist Vivian Pham,who has drawn upon the richness of Sydney’s south-western suburbs to construct a deeply affecting coming-of-age story revolving around teenager Sonny. Pham’s language is melodramatic at times. With bold flourishes she expertly captures the internal monologue of a teenage girl navigating the everyday travails of being a young woman – schoolyard crushes and the ‘violent ammunition of her love thoughts’, an ever-changing body, and a burgeoning sexual awakening – alongside the darker undercurrents present within Sonny’s family and her wider community: sexual abuse, domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, addiction, and poverty. Pham adroitly evokes the emblems of suburban living, specifically Cabramatta, through the smell of day-old frying oil, the sprinklings of charcoal chicken shops, and bus-stop graffiti. There is a meticulous level of detail in every sentence, elevating the ordinary into the sublime and imbuing the narrative with a magical quality: Pham has a gift for sketching the minutiae of her characters’ lives, from the faded purple of Sonny’s mother’s tattooed eyeliner to the sulphuric sweetness of the durian cake that Sonny’s love interest, Vince, abhors. In a book signposted by the shifting seasons, Pham uses the language of deciduous trees and dwindling sunlight to describe the temperament of abuse in Sonny’s household and the households around her to foreboding effect: ‘Unable to escape fate’s clutches, the siblings dressed to swelter.’ The story is a universal migrant Bildungsroman in many ways, yet it has a specificity directly linked to Pham’s own experience of growing up as a child of Vietnamese refugees. Vietnamese terms of endearment, salutations, and food are peppered throughout the text in italics, as Sonny straddles two languages in an attempt to straddle two different worlds. Pham expertly captures the weight of trauma, present in Sonny’s father who ‘had taught his sufferings to chisel him free’ and the inextricable burden of descending from people who have made such enormous sacrifices, so much so that Sonny wonders at one point if ‘she loved her mother for who she was, or what she had done for her’. The Coconut Children is a book about what it’s like to navigate a world that’s not made for you, but it retains levity and a crucial sense of hope throughout. It refuses to be defined by trauma, even as it delves into it with a fine-tooth comb. g Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
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he Hypermarket, an enigmatic and deeply uncanny novel, explores ‘mistranslation’ against the backdrop of Nietzsche’s philosophy of Eternal Return. Gabriel García Ochoa’s début novel transforms the Houghton Library at Harvard University into a Borgesian space. As the narrator is undertaking his research, he comes across an excerpt from a letter copied into an old diary. It details the lives of people living in a supernatural Hypermarket, ‘where the linoleum floor gives way to moss and a young, tender turf ’. In a highly significant moment, the narrator rips out the pages and stores them in volume six of The Arabian Nights. García Ochoa’s The Hypermarket revels in its matryoshka structure of stories inside stories, demonstrating that ‘stories are infinite ... they contain everything and nothing’. In this way, the book is both fragmentary and cohesive, simultaneously a series of short stories and a novel. The use of self-reflexive moments and repetition expertly problematises the relationship between fiction and reality, while obsessive questioning of the narrators’ reliability foregrounds an appeal to the plurality of truth. These fascinating narrators are wonderfully eccentric and include Gasparian Nebula, who lives only in the present; Eddie W, a three-quarters bull; and an unnamed narrator who relates the stories of characters such as painter, Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen; Ganeshiya, an elephant; and Dr Edith Crossman, ‘Head of Khrono-Translation, Specialisation: Future into Present’. The most memorable narrative is a brilliant reworking of the ‘Apollo and Daphne’ myth. As the bull charges, Laurel transforms into a tree, her Nikes ‘burst[ing] open like ripe pomegranates’ and ‘roots burrow[ing] into the ground out of toes and fingers’. Less effective is ‘Da Train’, with its awkward use of language: ‘U only get 1 chance 2 c ur loved 1s again.’ Also, the use of double spacing throughout the book is uninviting. It reads more like a thesis or draft rather than a published novel. It also makes the book appear double its length. The Hypermarket explores the story of circular time and its relationship to ‘Meaning, as ... an elusive bird that not only nests in words but is made from them too.’ In its best moments, García Ochoa’s use of magical realism is part-Murakami, part-García Márquez. g Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar who teaches at Deakin University.
Science
Cloud cartographers Two centuries of climate science Michael Adams
Waters of the World: The story of the scientists who unraveled the mysteries of our oceans, atmosphere, and ice sheets and made the planet whole by Sarah Dry
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Scribe $35 pb, 332 pp
he publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) is widely regarded as one of the key moments in the development of the global environment movement. In the wake of Silent Spring, science fiction writer Frank Herbert published the first of the Dune series in 1965. Herbert presented complex descriptions of alternate planetary ecologies, with influential characters known as ‘planetologists’ (a new film version is due out this year). In 1972, the image of the ‘Blue Marble’ was released, a photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew on their way to the moon, also widely considered to be critical in influencing public understandings of our finite planet. Each of these developments extended a long history of exploratory research, experimentation and imagination about the deep and complex connections of Earth systems. Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World investigates six critical figures in this history. The book’s title is slightly confusing (I thought at first it was a history of the world’s oceans), but water is the foundational and liminal element on the blue planet, as liquid, as ice, as water vapour. Its circulation and transformation through those states on the surface of the Earth and the atmosphere are what fundamentally drive the global climate, and consequently almost everything else. As ice sheets, as oceans, as clouds, as rain, as rivers – ‘constantly transmuted by the energy of the sun, water provides the mechanism by which energy flows through the landscape’. As excellent historians do, Dry takes us intimately into the lives and passions of her six key characters: John Tyndall, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Gilbert Walker, Joanne Simpson, Henry Stommel, and Willi Dansgaard. Her meticulous research sets them in their political and social contexts, and in relation to others whose names might be more familiar to most of us. In my view, she does this most successfully with Simpson, whose personal archive was explicitly intended to enable this: ‘she hoped that a time would come when the so-called work/life balance was no longer seen to be a problem only for women, but for all working people’. Dry also uncovers the paradoxes of shifting politics, economics, and beliefs that enabled and complicated, deliberately or accidentally, the insights of her characters. From mountain climber and loner Tyndall (investigating the movement of European ice sheets) to Walker (tasked with predicting the Indian monsoon), the needs of the British Empire financed geological and meteorological exploration – how can the Indian harvest be secured; how can British ships be kept safe at sea; does the Northwest Passage
exist? (Ironically, it increasingly does now, due to thinning ice.) Dansgaard’s access to the mile-long, 100,000-year-old ice core drilled in great secrecy in Greenland in 1964 is an outcome of Cold War paranoia – only the US military could afford such an extraordinary enterprise. Simpson’s remarkable career was enabled partly because, at the age of twenty-one, she was recruited to teach meteorology to World War II US air force cadets, an opportunity that outside wartime would not have been offered to a woman. One of the lessons for me was the significance of the outsider vision. Many of these people suffered disappointment in their lives: Smyth was eventually completely alienated from the scientific establishment; his contemporary Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who had captained Darwin’s ship the HMS Beagle and became the first head of the first British Meteorological Department, committed suicide; Walker had a nervous breakdown; Simpson faced sexism and bigotry. But each of these people, sometimes because of their outsider status, uniquely imagined and researched critical insights that contributed to both the poetry and science of our contemporary understandings of the planet. In a number of places, Dry also reminds us of the relationship between the veracity of ‘vernacular’ knowledges built over epic timeframes and the new predictive knowledges of modern science. The deep-weather knowledge of experienced sailors, the multi-generational knowledge of Indian farmers, the observations of shepherds on European glaciers, all fed into the new science (one absence here is any reference to Indigenous knowledges). I am reasonably conversant in the broad history of science for these issues, but Waters of the World opened a whole other landscape. Connections embrace Kurt Vonnegut (his brother discovered the use of silver iodide for cloud seeding, and inspired events in Cat’s Cradle); the iconic 1970s publication Whole Earth Catalog (its founder Stewart Brand lobbied to make the Blue Marble image public); and Jorge Luis Borges and the dream of the perfect map (now digitally reimagined with a one-to-one correspondence in the ‘General Circulation Model’ of the dynamics of the Earth system). Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic, and very quotable: ‘the distance between visionary dreams and inadvertent consequences was shorter than most imagined’; ‘to use the past not as a cheat sheet for future events but as an exercise in imaginative stretching’; ‘there was in the end, nothing to do but wonder, and keep looking’. The narrative structure is effective and highly readable; there is an extensive index and a useful bibliographic essay that explains and significantly expands the references. As Dry points out, since the late nineteenth century most scientists have stopped writing for a general public; they now overwhelmingly publish in hard-to-access and alienating scientific journals. At a time of political ecological brinksmanship, Dry’s project is to make at least some of this accessible. These ‘stories of water’ lay out an impressive picture of both what is left out, and what is brought in, to our modern understandings of climate science. g Michael Adams won the Calibre Essay Prize in 2017 for his essay ‘Salt Blood’, which concerns free diving. His recording of the essay now appears on the ABR Podcast. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Poetry
Word lover
Felicity Plunkett’s second collection Philip Mead
A Kinder Sea
by Felicity Plunkett
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University of Queensland Press $24.99 pb, 112 pp
elicity Plunkett has being doing good works in the poetry sphere for some time now. She has edited for UQP a recent series of new and established poets; she reviews a wide variety of poetry in newspapers and magazines, as well as writing evocatively, in this journal, about influential figures in popular Australian poetics like Nick Cave and Gurrumul Yunupingu. Valuably, she has also made practical contributions to poetry teaching in the secondary English curriculum. Now she has published a second volume of her own poetry, a varied collection of highly accomplished poems. Plunkett’s world is a densely lexical one, intricately formed at every turn. Like two of her favourite poets from the sorority she draws strength from, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, Plunkett is a word lover, in every sense. As those two poets teach you, words just by themselves can be intimate, awesome, weird. Often Plunkett’s poems are generated by arcane or specialist words: the barely contained pain of ‘On Carrying: Seven Cledons’, for example, is a sequence of lyrics in response to chance linguistic encounters that mean very different things to the poet from what they mean to the people around her: ‘In meetings academics say / I’ll take carriage of this’; a page of W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland opens randomly at the line about hearts’ desires: ‘Better never to be born.’ A cledon was a form of ancient divination involving ‘chance findings of words overheard or stumbled upon,’ unwitting messages and occasions. ‘Syzygy’ is a conceit, spun out of the double reference of the title, to words and plants: ‘you’re all / verb: pressed to you, wilfully / irresistibly, like ivy’. The poem is full of exotics, linguistic and botanical, introduced from outside the everyday and native, like Hedera rhombea, ‘plamately’, and ‘quixotry’. The poem also consists of two fourteen-line verse paragraphs – so sonnets actually – another syzygy of arithmetic and poetics, but all one sentence. This syzygy of form and theme is also apparent in poems like ‘Blood Days: Monochords’, a poem of numbered single lines (like the string instrument) printed sideways on the page. Plunkett is a poet who likes to give words like ‘xanthic’ (rather than yellowish) a go, or label a poem ‘Anomiidae’ (about saltwater clams). ‘Carpus Diem’, like ‘Syzygy’ one of several conceit love poems in this collection, and subtitled ‘wrist mnemonics’ (wrist the day, get it?), is about remembering one physical attribute of the beloved. Built around the mnemonics used by medical students to learn the bones of the hand, it is full of words like scaphoid, 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
capitate, hamate, perhaps the lexophiliac extreme of these poems. Fo shizzle, some readers of poetry might find this trait off-putting, even superior, but it should be read the other way, as reassuring: every word in these poems has been chosen carefully. Plunkett is unafraid of talking about love, which she does frequently in these poems. The first poem in the collection, ‘Sound Bridge’, is as unabashed about its high cultural setting – a Mozart performance in Moravia – as it is about the poet’s love for her son, singing in the concert. The poem is a multi-levelled meditation on love and joy, and their antitheses occasioned by Mozart’s ‘Lacrimosa dies illa,’ but with the metaphorics of piano construction at its imaginative core. The bridge links the source of the sound (strings, emotion) and its amplifier (music, singing, poetry). That’s what the poems are – sound bridges – although the poet is also aware of another element in the instrument’s workings, and the need to dampen her anxieties. You might think that Plunkett’s poems sound a bit highly strung then, but they are so well and often densely crafted the reader isn’t short-changed. The last poem in the collection, ‘Inclined’, is also about love, this time in the shape of a conceit about climbing a mountain. This extended metaphor of the experience of love might sound naff, but as the title implies it’s the angle the poet takes that makes it work, plus the linguistic energy, sometimes shifting into wit: ‘you can’t / wait, think of love as losing wait, court waitlessness’. Once again, the self-conscious diversion into poetics and the real: on the climb up the mountain, ‘keep in mind the rhyme / (rain on face) (warm embrace) the rhyme / of it, the pulse, climbing in iambics’, steadily. Somehow Plunkett manages to keep it light and fun, ‘the climb takes heart / and breath from you’, a climb that ends in the puzzle of not-knowing and knowing at the same time. Another poem in this collection deserves special mention for the arrestingly original thinking it represents about rhythm. ‘Bridge Physics’, yet another love conceit, ends with the revisionary statement that it is ‘a song’. The set-up of the title is glossed in the epigraph from a University of Colorado engineering textbook. It’s about the two major forces of compression and tension, like the ones that act on a bridge. Plunkett translates this discourse of mechanical engineering, which of course is about how to avoid breakage or failure, into the scene of the lovers. The poem alternates between the assertions of love by the poet – ‘you do me / good’ – to the idea that poetry, like the relationship, also exists by opposing forces (song and silence). There’s much more to this poem, but it is the tensions that the lines (and their spaces) enact, moving one way then another, that are so deftly crafted. For all its energy and brilliance, this is poetry that relies on some fairly traditional foundations, and this is part of its appeal. The metaphors and conceits, the intricate exploration of poetic form, even the exuberance of printing a verse upside down, or a whole poem, sideways, doesn’t disturb the always straightforward and careful syntax, even when it is fragmentary. Which is an interesting and distinctive signature for a contemporary poet. Plunkett is not tempted by the varieties of contemporary derangement in poetic language, she is absolutely certain about that, something she has learnt, I suspect, especially from Plath. She knows exactly what she’s doing. g Philip Mead’s latest poetry collection is Zanzibar Light (2019).
Poetry
Fire after fire
the Hebrew Prayer for New Year and the Day of Atonement is an especially powerful example of the last of these poetic strategies. Boyle, a noted translator, is also interested in multilingual puns and the homophones that can be found in other languages (such as l’amour and la mort in French). In this respect, Boyle works with both the inherent doubleness of things, and also with the limits of language as a proxy for the limits of our being. Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is a work of immense power. It does nothing less than find new ways to express the deepest challenges and mysteries of human existence.
Three new poetry collections David McCooey
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eter Boyle’s Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness (Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 82 pp) is a book-length elegiac poem dedicated to his partner, the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018). Unlike other works lamenting the illness and loss of a spouse, Boyle’s collection largely avoids representing the day-to-day demands of suffering from (or caring for someone suffering from) an incurable disease. Instead, Boyle’s poetry sequence offers a more metaphysical approach to the uncertainty and grief that he and his partner faced. There is a decidedly ‘nocturnal poetics’ at work in these stunning poems (which were written before Rose’s death). The poems work as a single sequence partly through their use of imagery and motif. These motifs evoke the traditional dyads of light and dark, selfhood and oblivion, but they do so with extraordinary originality. Sometimes the imagery has a trace of the surreal, as in these lines: an apocalypse of stunted proportions your past comes towards you as a matchbox of ashes handed you by a stranger on a vanishing street corner one long rainy night.
Other moments employ natural imagery to great effect: ‘The fire in your head / leaps ahead of you / and is soon / fire after fire / along the midnight road.’ What is perhaps most notable about Boyle’s project is the extraordinary way in which it brings together poetic invention (one is inclined to say ‘play’) with a profoundly elegiac mood. This is seen in Boyle’s use of puns, riddling, and rhetorical techniques such as anaphora. Boyle’s evocation of the repetition in
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s the title of Brendan Ryan’s latest collection suggests, The Lowlands of Moyne (Walleah Press, $20 pb, 68 pp) occupies a more recognisably material milieu than Boyle’s book. Nevertheless, Ryan’s evocations of the Australian pastoral are often elegiac and traumatic. As in Ryan’s other collections, the evocation of the rural is not simply an occasion for complaint and critique. Ryan knows this pastoral milieu from within; indeed, the tension between intimacy and distance is a recurring feature of his poems. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this tension is most clearly played out in the familial setting. Ryan, who grew up on a Victorian dairy farm, addresses this theme most explicitly in ‘A Father’s Silences’,in which the eponymous silences are ‘paddocks that hadn’t been ploughed before / paddocks it’s taken me years to relax in / paddocks I’ve kept returning to again and again’. As ‘She Was a Mugavin’ shows, Ryan has an insider’s ear for the language and storying of the world to which he keeps imaginatively returning, though such evocations are balanced by graphic descriptions of the violence of farm life, as seen in ‘Dehorning’. The collection’s numerous ‘road’ poems represent the act of driving as a way of moving both through space and memory, producing a double vision in which the bucolic scene is brought into being even as its loss is experienced. As ‘Driving to Debating’ – with its references to George Pell – also shows, the poetry-inducing act of driving does not solely engage Ryan’s counter-pastoral poetics. The Lowlands of Moyne includes a number of more explicitly political meditations on contemporary life, while poems such as ‘Incident on South Valley Road’ show that shocking events can also be found on suburban roads. As this poem illustrates, The Lowlands of Moyne is an important addition to Ryan’s remarkable growing body of work.
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arte Blanche (Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 70 pp) – Thom Sullivan’s full-length début – also occupies the Australian pastoral domain. Sullivan neither glamorises nor sentimentalises bucolic locales but invests them with his own form of imagistic force. As seen in the opening poem, ‘Threshold’, the
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paddocks of Carte Blanche exist as enigmatic, liminal spaces that are both cultural and natural, ordinary and epic, graced by wind and a ‘fine grain of stars’. The imagistic power of Carte Blanche is matched by an intense linguistic playfulness, as seen in the opening lines of ‘Kangaroos’ – ‘Grazing kangaroos / undo the hem of our bottom paddock’ – and the opening lines of ‘Hay Cutting’: ‘Brown hills shave back to corduroy / in the final hour of light’. Given Sullivan’s imagistic skill, it is no surprise that he is the master of the miniature, as seen in ‘Lamb Chops’ (quoted here in full): ‘Two chops in a pan: / an unnerving yin and yang – / wizened, almost foetal.’ This poem is not explicitly political, but the delight produced by the pan/an/yin/yang vowel music is undermined by the ‘unnerving’ imagery of the final line, a reminder that those of us who eat lamb eat baby animals. While Sullivan attends to the moodful effects of visual imagery, a number of his poems are intense studies in the sonic possibilities of language. ‘Eden En Effet’ (French for ‘Eden in Effect’) cannily plays with the Edenic myth via classical pastoral
tropes in the form of a lipogram that uses only one vowel: e. The poem is a tremendous mix of sound poem, conceptual writing, and literary revisionism. Such playfulness is also seen in ‘Plain Loco’, the first draft of which (the poet tells us) was produced ‘by populating an online poetry generator with cowboy clichés’. But this is not proceduralism for its own sake; the poem is utterly captivating. Thom Sullivan’s range can be seen in ‘Memorial: Great Ocean Road, 2004’, a sequence that shows his skill in balancing euphony with narrative impetus. Sound and sight come together in a road trip that is part personal account and part regional history. In earlier decades, the poetic evocation of rural Australia was, for some, almost in itself aesthetically and politically suspect. Sullivan shows how far we have come from this simplistic attitude. Like his South Australian colleague, Aidan Coleman, Sullivan cannot be easily pigeonholed. Carte Blanche is an arresting calling-card, and – for me – it is one of this year’s most exciting poetic débuts. g David McCooey’s latest collection of poems is Star Struck, published by UWA Publishing (2016).
We Play and Hope
‘ They fly forgotten, as a dream Dies at the opening day.’ Isaac Watts, ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’
We play because we kow-tow and are free; a set of guidelines activating choice or so we hope. The mineral poet wrote, ‘By loss of memory we are reborn’, but memory’s the root of active power: we grab the minute and we grasp the hour hoping that such engagements prove us free. Let’s fancy a parrot-coloured, balmy world muralled with insatiable spring where cluey despots hold the twisted strings of power, suppose they could breed vice clean out of us morphing us into a Sunday school, would we accept that kind of rule? Can genetic philosophers change the world? The trouble is, we can’t imagine it; like centaur, flying saucer, basilisk it’s made from fancy’s molecules and glue: purely synthetic thought. And yet it has
a charm, like building cottages from blocks – the looming castle-wall your children’s toy box. You’re free to fancy folk to put in it. Where lies the bridge between pure fate and thinking? One answer might be found in William James, a magical stylist, like his portly brother. (I wonder how those two got on so well.) But on a looming larger scale, or stricture, how does our transience occupy that picture smudged by the Fall – and thinking? Ah, that’s the canny rub, I see: keeping the long and short of things elastic, when set in motion, folk engender fate, hoping that we are free…
or might be free.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe Chris Wallace-Crabbe first wrote for ABR in 1962. His latest collection is Rondo (Carcanet, 2018). 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
Poetry
Deeper concerns
Barry Hill’s new poetry collection Geoff Page
Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980–2018 by Barry Hill
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Shearsman Books $25 pb, 193 pp
here is probably no book in a poet’s career more important than his or her first Selected Poems. It is here that poets have the opportunity to display the best of their work in all its variety over several decades. Individual collections are a mere step on the way. Collecteds tend to be posthumous and of interest mainly to scholars, reference libraries, and a cluster of devotees. Barry Hill’s Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980–2018 is a fine example of the format: not too long at 193 pages, but sufficiently comprehensive and indicative of his changing and developing concerns. Hill has chosen to arrange his samples in reverse chronological order. This reviewer, perversely perhaps, decided to consider them in the order of their first appearance. Such a reading reveals that Hill’s techniques have remained fairly consistent over thirty years and that his deeper concerns often reappear in different forms over long intervals. In this regard, Hill is drawn, as are the best political poets (for example Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda), to the tension between poetry as a vehicle for personal lyrical expression and poetry’s potential contribution to objective political progress. Successive books by Hill have embodied one or the other of these tendencies. His first collection, Raft: Poems 1983–1990 (1990), is mainly lyrical love poetry. His second, the well-received Ghosting William Buckley (1993), explores the experiences of the eponymous escaped convict who lived for thirty-two years among the Wathaurung people around Port Phillip Bay. The excerpts here capture Buckley’s initial bewilderment, his gradual absorption by his Aboriginal hosts, and something of their culture – as in their song cycles, of which Hill essays a version in his poem ‘Koim’. Hill’s preoccupation with Aboriginal cultures is continued in The Inland Sea (2001), set mainly around Alice Springs. As with its predecessor, this book attempts to understand Indigenous beliefs and mores from a close but respectful distance. One of its most affecting poems is ‘Riverbed Song’, short enough to be fully reproduced here: In moonlight I saw them. Two in a swag under the bridge. His royal sleep. Her hair flowing
over his happy arm. A good cattle dog guarding their marriage.
Hill’s progressive politics, solidly based in the trade union movement of his father, emerge more clearly in his fourth collection, Necessity: Poems 1996–2006 (2007). This focus, which is rare for Australian poetry in these quietist postmodern/conservative times, lends a distinction to Eagerly We Burn as a whole. It may also partly explain why the book has been published in England rather than in Australia. Something of the tone and complexity of Hill’s political sensibilities can be gleaned from ‘I Know a Poet with a Gun’: ‘What does the poet want? / Love, and money. // When does he want it? / Now. For his power / has gone without saying.’ The poem then ends, enigmatically, with: ‘The poet knows that / in the beginning was the deed. / He must combat this, / and remain useless.’ It seems that Hill considers the role of the political poet to be a committed, attentive witness rather than to prophesy or proselytise. Another dimension to Hill’s work is that of the empathetic traveller, the poet or scholar who does his or her homework and wants to enter, at least to some extent, cultures very different from his or her own. Four Lines East (2009) and Grass Hut Work (2016) show this in relation to India and Japan respectively. In a telling poem from Four Lines East, Hill observes a rickshaw man washing at a pump on the street and talking casually to another beside him. ‘The listener had a small towel over his shoulder. / He seemed to have all the time in the world ... / A song must have linked the rickshaw men. / But then I had to turn away – / Neither knowing their poem / Nor the wars they might be in.’ In the samples from Grass Hut Work, Hill, with his considerable knowledge of Japanese poetry, seems able to draw closer to his subject. The selections here begin with a notable influence from Bashō. There’s an attempt to break through to the ‘old’ Japan, to understand its continuities with the present version. As Hill confesses in ‘Bashō’s Sin’: ‘In the grass hut / I strive to be nobody / a hungry artist // albeit walking in / my old man’s / peace-mongering steps ...’ It’s another reference to Hill’s influential father who, as a trade unionist, participated in a peace conference in Tokyo in 1972. Not unrelated to this are the poems in Grass Hut Work dealing with the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945. In a series of poems, Hill manages to evoke again the horror of that particular explosion. The last lines of ‘Crazy Iris’ are among his most forceful: ‘A wild thought at 8.15: / Consider each cicada as a sentient being // In the same instant birds ignited in mid-air. / Mosquitoes and flies, squirrels / family pets crackled / and were gone.’ Eagerly We Burn (not the most appropriate title perhaps in Australia at the moment) also features three impressive sections based on, or around, the art of Lucian Freud, John Wolseley, and Michelangelo. Many of these poems are fine examples of ekphrasis, but there is not enough space to discuss them here. g Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-three collections of poetry. His most recent book is Elegy for Emily: A verse biography of Emily Remler (1957–1990). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Interview
(Photograph supplied)
Poet of the Month with Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh’s books include a new collection of poems, Towards the End (Giramondo, 2020), a scholarly monograph on Karl Marx’s philosophy, Marx and Art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and the novel The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (Giramondo, 2017). He lives in Melbourne and is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University.
Which poets have most influenced you?
A great many performance poets in Brisbane and the Gold Coast in the 1990s. I liked the more poetic singers too. One band whose lyrics I really loved was the Irish grunge band Therapy? – vulgar, emotive, memorable. Dorothy Porter was probably the first published Australian poet I actually enjoyed reading. That led me in the direction of the long poem, Charles Olson, H.D., etc.
Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?
What a question! If I have to pick one, I would say inspired, if only because inspiration seems more necessary. Without it – an initiation, a beginning, no matter how clumsy or hesitant – there would be nothing there to craft.
What prompts a new poem?
Confusion, sadness, despair. All those feelings one may wish to overcome. Writing poetry is, in an important way, the act of overcoming these things via language. Luckily for this Marxist, capitalism never fails to provide stimuli for new poems.
What have you learned from your book reviews?
psychosomatic state for writing a poem.
Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?
Depends on the poem. Some of my more anthologised poems were written rather quickly. I would have changed only a few words of the first drafts of ‘Marco Polo’, ‘Rumi’, and ‘Listening to Michael Jackson’ prior to sending them off to be published. Not so with the poems that I’m most fond of. I genuinely think – and I understand such thinking to be quite unfashionable – that the amount of time one spends on producing a poem, or any work of art, contributes to that work’s real worth or, as we Marxists like to say, its use-value. A recent poem of mine that was in ABR, ‘I ♥ (this) Life?’, was definitely, properly – and in a very good sense of the word – laboured.
Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why? Some of my heroes wrote poems (albeit not very good ones). Robespierre and Marx come to mind. Some of Joan of Arc’s strange statements were also poetic, in a weird way.
In the first review of my poetry, I discovered that my writing was ‘headache-inducing’ and ‘best avoided’. I was pleased that my book had at least caused a headache for that sinister reviewer! Over the years, though, even hysterically negative reviews – and, boy, do I attract them! – don’t excite or bother me too much. The best thing I’ve got from a review is knowing that there are readers who pay attention to a book’s composition, to the labour that I’ve put into producing the thing.
Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?
What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?
Debout, les damnés de la terre / Debout, les forçats de la faim – ‘L’Internationale’ by Eugène Pottier.
A few hours of hunger and dehydration, in combination with a solitary walk – not through sunlit rural pastures redolent with chirping birds, but through an unsightly urban wasteland of concrete, alienation, and dog turds – put me in the perfect
I would’ve picked an early book of Lionel Fogarty’s, but with the recent publication of Lionel Fogarty: Selected poems 1980– 2017 (re:press), I’d probably pick that instead.
What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? Solitude, solitude, solitude.
What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)? Is poetry appreciated by the reading public? No. (And that’s perfectly fine by me.)
The Cost of War STEPHEN GARTON
42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
From WWI to Vietnam, how has combat shaped Australian lives, communities, and public life?
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Memoir
The pain of mothers A politician on filial relationships Josh Black
Ten Doors Down: The story of an extraordinary adoption reunion by Robert Tickner
T
Scribe $32.99 pb, 256 pp
wenty years ago, Robert Tickner tried his hand at the nuanced art of political memoir. Taking a Stand (2001) was, he said, ‘an insider’s account of momentous initiatives’ in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs portfolio in the 1990s. A portrait of the politician as a young man, son, father, and husband was not in the offing. Cabinet diarist Neal Blewett, a man not renowned for political flamboyance, described Tickner’s narrative as ‘remorselessly impersonal’. Privately, it seems, Tickner also protested that ‘the public me is not the real me!’ Now, in Ten Doors Down, Tickner peels back the ministerial veil to reveal that his years in public life coincided with a remarkable journey of self-discovery, and that often ‘the personal overlapped with the political’. The authorial dedication testifies to the scale of that journey; it celebrates two adoptive parents, two birth parents, two step-parents, and two children. Of these relations, it is Maida, Tickner’s birth mother, who very nearly monopolises the reader’s attention. This highly personal political memoir tells a heart-wrenching story of genealogical discovery and relationship formation. It is propelled by two powerful questions: ‘What was her story? Was I made in her image?’ In response, Ten Doors Down raises further questions about Tickner, politics, relationships, adoption, and, above all, childhood itself. Maternal relationships form the book’s centre of gravity. Maida records her emotional trauma on learning that, for many years, her lost son had regularly visited a home ten doors down from her own. In her handwritten words, trauma meant ‘NOT KNOWING, NOT DREAMING’ about the coincidences that occasionally brought young Robert so close to her, but never close enough. Tickner, though acknowledging his fortunate upbringing in the semi-idyllic environment of 1950s Forster on the New South Wales coast, comes to understand that for Maida the act of separation imparted a ‘grief and distress that permeated her life’. Tickner reciprocates by allowing Maida to determine the pace of their newfound relationship, as well as that of his paternal self-discovery. Similarly, the maternal relationship with Tickner’s adopted mother, Gwen, figures heavily. He describes Gwen as central to his life, claiming that ‘her way of relating to people was very special’. For Tickner, this relationship, too, was one of deep mutual commitment and obligation. Having received from Gwen an upbringing full of love and warmth, Tickner commits to standing by his adopted mother through the toughest of moments. When
dementia renders Gwen unable to live alone, it is Tickner who manages her move into an aged-care facility, summoning the love required to endure the pained cries of ‘Please don’t leave me, Rob’. For Tickner, maternal relationships are about emotional availability and reciprocity. Though Tickner’s quest was to understand Maida’s ‘story’, the memoir is clearly an attempt to bring coherence to his own self-narrative about his political life. In Taking a Stand, we saw a political agent acting on the world with clear social-justice values but no transparency about the sources of those values. In Ten Doors Down, Tickner reveals the personal experiences and emotions that underwrote his policy decisions. For one thing, his time working for the Aboriginal Legal Service in New South Wales awakened him to ‘the way Aboriginal people have been treated in this country’. For another, his decision to conduct an inquiry into the Stolen Generations is partly explained with reference to his own forced adoption, for the two stories share a common thread in ‘the pain of mothers’. The author recognises, of course, that Aboriginal experiences of child separation were a world apart from his own. Nevertheless, these personal narratives help explain Tickner’s unwavering commitment to Indigenous causes in the 1990s, at a time when other senior members of the Labor government wanted to spend their electoral capital elsewhere. The memoir also forces readers to consider the emotional sacrifices required in a ministerial life. Notwithstanding the contempt that many Australians currently feel toward their federal MPs, Katharine Murphy was arguably right to remind us that the ‘demands of parliamentary life are unrelenting’. In Tickner we see a man who was, quite literally, trapped in the House of Representatives as his adopted father died, and who was discharging his duties as a local member of parliament when his adoptive mother died. We see a marriage ripped asunder by the huge strain of political life. Further, Tickner’s emotionally demanding quest to meet his birth parents occurs against the turbulent backdrop of bitter debates about Mabo, native title, and the Hindmarsh Island affair. One is left wondering how best to measure and evaluate the public good against the private cost, and the political achievements against the personal trauma. At its core, Ten Doors Down is concerned above all with the nature of childhood itself. Reflecting on the reprehensible history of forced adoption in Australia, Tickner confronts many problematic historical assumptions about the nature and rights of a newborn child. For psychologists, babies were a blank slate to be acted upon by their environment. For policymakers, babies were verging on a supply-and-demand problem, with too many couples wishing to adopt and not enough mothers wishing to relinquish their child. Although he ultimately abstains from passing judgement, Tickner’s questions indicate that, for him, motherhood and childhood are, at their most basic level, phenomena of the heart. After all, Tickner’s book is propelled by the question that all children must eventually ask: was I made in her image? g Josh Black is a doctoral candidate with the National Centre for Biography, ANU. His thesis, entitled ‘The Political Memoir Phenomenon: Federal political life writing, 1994–2020’, investigates the relatively unexplored field of political memoirs. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Memoir
Life at the glimmering edge Five years in Silicon Valley Jack Callil
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
I
Farrar, Straus and Giroux $27.99 pb, 304 pp
f our technology-infused world were a great beast, the engorged heart of it would be Silicon Valley. A region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Valley is the birthplace of the modern start-up, a mecca for tech pilgrims and venture capitalists. A typical start-up has simple ambitions: become a big, rich company – and do it fast. Think Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Tinder, Snapchat. Like moths to light, budding computer engineers and software programmers are drawn to the Valley, hoping to pioneer the next technological innovation, the next viral app. If they’re lucky, they become some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of their generation. Enter Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley: a chronicle of five years working in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s. Before moving to San Francisco, Wiener lives a ‘fragile but agreeable life’ in New York, subsisting on a meagre salary as an assistant at a Manhattan literary agency. Disillusionment gnaws: upward mobility is near impossible, and ‘nobody [her] age was excited about what came next’. One morning Weiner reads an article about an e-reader start-up endowed with $3 million in venture capital – chump change, she later learns – and is lured by the ‘optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas’. She applies for a customer-support role at the company; to her surprise she is hired. In the Valley, Wiener is employed in several positions at three different companies: the e-reader start-up, a data-analytics company, and an open-source software company. Initially, Wiener relishes her work; she enjoys contributing to an industry of relentless momentum, a tight-knit community hurtling towards ‘the glimmering edge of a brand-new world’. However, she soon struggles to ignore certain unsettling truths: women are rare (she feels like a ‘concubine’), young white men are deified, and abounding throughout the workplace is a dark triad of ‘capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity’. Weiner’s tenure in the Valley spans a key period of societal awakening regarding technology. These are the halcyon days when Facebook’s initial public offering clocked in at $104 billion and a certain NRA whistleblower hadn’t yet taught the world the necessity of data privacy. Weiner’s foray into analytics occurs at a time when harvestable personal information – ‘age, gender, political affiliation, hair color, dietary restrictions, body weight, income bracket, favorite movies, education, kinks, proclivities’ – is newly in vogue. Via Wiener, we see how easy it was for the unprecedented, unregulated accrual of personal information 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
to get out of hand. This bird’s-eye view of data – referred to as ‘God Mode’ – piques Weiner’s conscience, yet she can’t deny the ‘genuine thrill of watching a cross-section of society flow through a system’. Wiener writes vividly, her sentences journalistic in their clarity and exposition. She has a knack for turns of phrase – a party’s bustling hot tub is ‘a sous vide bath of genitalia’ – and her depiction of the Valley is as engrossing as it is unnerving. She is not the first to bring to life the tech industry’s lurid underbelly – see Daniel Lyons’s Disrupted (2016), Emily Chang’s Brotopia (2018), and John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood (2018), among others. Weiner excels though with hawk-eyed observations of the endless quotidian oddities of the tech milieu. Portmanteaus flourish, such as ‘blitzscaling’ and ‘designpreneurs’, and company rhetoric resembles ‘a mash-up of business-speak with athletic and wartime metaphors’. Body-optimisation culture is so normalised it’s almost a requirement of the workplace: her co-workers pop Vitamin D pills, inject testosterone, and ingest cognitiveenhancement drugs called Nootropics. The Valley’s surreal hybrid culture of immense affluence and stark poverty also attracts Wiener’s focus. The rapid gentrification of San Francisco, fuelled by venture capital and an influx of wealthy entrepreneurs, has resulted in a garish mishmash of ritz and squalor. Streets are littered with ‘minimalist tea kettles’ and ‘champagne bars serving caviar on shrimp chips’, while not far away ‘people were sleeping over steaming grates’. Wiener remarks that every three months or so, some engineer or entrepreneur suggests monetising homeless people by ‘turning them into Wi-Fi spots’. Such inclusions are deftly woven into the backdrop of Uncanny Valley, and Wiener’s writing never feels preachy. It builds slowly, creating an impression of a society disconnected from the world around it. Foremost, Uncanny Valley is a fly-on-the-wall exposé of Silicon Valley, but beneath it runs an exploration of Wiener’s own identity crisis. Throughout the course of the book, she dithers between her tech-savvy and more ‘analogue’ self, pulled apart by different anchors. Here her writing plateaus. She leaves unanswered certain questions regarding the impact of the Valley – such a heavily optimised, hybridised, digitised space – on personhood, ethics, societal norms. Perhaps these questions aren’t meant to be tackled here, but Wiener’s lamentations about who she was/ is/might be feel unanalysed, her observational style ineffective when turned on herself. As blazoned on the cover, Rebecca Solnit praises Wiener as ‘Joan Didion at a start-up’. The latter would have delved further into the grey areas, been more intent on parsing meaning from the Valley’s endemic meaninglessness. The book’s title, the term ‘uncanny valley’, refers to the innate sense of eeriness one feels when faced with an anthropomorphic representation of a human face – a face that isn’t quite right. In replicating this premise, Wiener succeeds: Silicon Valley’s gleaming façade is stripped back, and we are privy to gears shifting below. It is an absorbing read; though hopefully Wiener’s next book will dig deeper and further probe the unnerving implications of our ever-burgeoning digital reality. g Jack Callil is a writer and editor living in Melbourne. He is Assistant Editor of ABR.
Memoir
The belly of the beast A unique Holocaust memoir Elisabeth Holdsworth
Last Stop Auschwitz: My story of survival from within the camp by Eddy de Wind, translated by David Colmer
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Doubleday $29.99 pb, 260 pp
esterbork is the name of a transit camp located in the Netherlands. You transitioned from Westerbork to your final destination by means of the Nationale Spoorwegen (the national railways). Eddy de Wind, a Dutch Jewish psychiatrist, met his future wife, Friedel, in Westerbork. Both were sent to Auschwitz in 1943. Eddy was sent to Block 9 as part of the medical staff, Friedel to Block 10 to work as a Pfleger (nurse). Block 10 was administered by the Lagerartz (senior camp doctor), Josef Mengele. When the Nazis left Auschwitz ahead of the Soviet forces in the autumn of 1944, they took many Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners, and others who might have borne witness against them. This journey became known as the Death March. Friedel was among those on that infamous march. Eddy hid in the camp, treating the sick and abandoned, writing a testimony about his experiences, terrified that his beloved Friedel would not survive. She did. The couple eventually reunited, but in the end the marriage failed. For Eddy and Friedel, there was before Auschwitz, Auschwitz, and after Auschwitz. Both were profoundly damaged. Neither ever truly recovered. De Wind wrote his account in pencil in a thick notebook. So traumatised that he was unable to write in the first person, he invented an alternative identity called Hans Van Dam – an ordinary Dutch name for an extraordinary survivor. The writing cannot be considered perfectly crafted. Its value lies in the raw, visceral effect, the attention to detail so powerful that no fictional account can possibly come close. As far as anyone knows, this is the only book to have been written from inside the belly of the beast. One vignette in this remarkable book is unforgettable. The Nazis have departed, it is a glorious sunny day, and for the first time de Wind is free to roam about the camp. He climbs a tower and surveys the complex. ‘A little to the left lay Birkenau … It had been run according to an extermination system of incomparable perfection.’ Elsewhere were the Krupp and IG Farben factories; efficient industrialists paid the SS six marks for every worker able to be utilised until they became too ill to work, whereupon they were dispatched to the killing chambers. De Wind was all too aware that the Jews were the playthings of the Nazis, but they were unaware that this young, highly intelligent psychiatrist was studying them, storing evidence for an eventual reckoning. One of his vital sources was Friedel, who
looked after girls who had been subjected to experimental sterilisation procedures resulting in horrific injuries. One month later the girls had their ovaries removed, ‘to see what kind of condition they were in’. In another experiment, a cement-like liquid was injected into women’s uteruses while they were X-rayed. Many of these ‘experiments’ were funded by Farben on the pretext of finding a suitable mass-sterilisation method.
As far as anyone knows, this is the only book to have been written from inside the belly of the beast Josef Mengele has achieved a notoriety second only to that of Adolf Hitler or Adolf Eichmann. His presence pervades this book, yet he is never mentioned by name. It is possible that de Wind didn’t know it. For the inmates of concentration camps, it was levels of authority that mattered not names. The staff in Block 10 lived in fear of being experimented on. They were useful as long as they could work. When Friedel becomes ill, de Wind approaches the Lagerartz and begs for her life. Mengele agrees. De Wind does not think better of the Nazis for their occasional acts of kindness: The youngsters have been raised in the spirit of blood and soil. They don’t know any better. But those older ones like the Lagerartz show through those minor acts that they still harbour a remnant of their upbringing. They didn’t learn this inhumanity from an early age and had no need to embrace it.
After the liberation of Auschwitz, at the request of the Russians, de Wind stayed on to tend to the Dutch patients until they could be transferred to Russia. He followed the Red Army and ‘did all kinds of difficult medical things … that were actually far beyond my capabilities’. After the war, Eddy resisted any efforts to refashion the work as a traditional memoir. He was adamant that the work should stand as is. For various reasons, publication efforts failed. De Wind became famous for his landmark psychoanalytic studies of survivor guilt; he died in 1987 without seeing this work published by a major house. There are few Dutch Holocaust survivor accounts. Fewer than 25,000 Jews survived from a pre-war estimate of more than 200,000. As a child in the Netherlands, the name ‘Anne Frank’ was everywhere effectively silencing other stories. Eddy de Wind’s account is a counterbalance. There was a purpose to his survival. I commend David Colmer’s excellent translation. Colmer has resisted the temptation to polish and has succeeded in rendering the urgency, the rawness, and the lyricism of the original work. g Elisabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize in 2007 for her essay ‘An Die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’. She was born in the Netherlands and migrated to Australia with her parents in 1959. Her ABR Raft Fellowship essay ‘If This Is a Jew’ was published in 2017 and her novel, Those Who Come After, was published by Picador in 2011. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Biography
Facing, accepting, floating Claire Weekes’s pioneering approach to ‘nerves’ Carol Middleton
The Woman Who Cracked the Anxiety Code: The extraordinary life of Dr Claire Weekes by Judith Hoare
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Scribe $39.99 pb, 416 pp
n Boxing Day 1962, The Australian Women’s Weekly opened with a two-page spread on a new publication, Self Help for Your Nerves, by Sydney physician Dr Claire Weekes. Her four precepts for people suffering from ‘nerves’ appeared in huge, bold type: facing, accepting, floating, and letting time pass. Positive reviews followed, including one by Max Harris in ABR’s December 1962 issue. Wary of the ‘help yourself psychiatry’ genre, Harris was quickly persuaded by its ‘particular excellence’. The book went on to become a bestseller in the US and UK markets, and Weekes followed it up with four more. It is clear from the response to Weekes’s books that anxiety, in its various manifestations, was already a common complaint in the 1960s. The key word was ‘nerves’: people had a nervous disorder, or a nervous breakdown. Most of the terms we use for types of anxiety – post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder – were not in common use then, or not yet coined. Treatments offered by psychiatrists ranged from Freudian psychoanalysis to exposure therapy, with an increasing reliance on drugs. Weekes advocated a different, biological approach, which anticipated by decades the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) developed by Professor Steven C. Hayes from the University of Nevada. The patient was encouraged to take charge of her own body, fully experiencing the panic and passing through to the other side. In her biography of Weekes, veteran journalist Judith Hoare has rescued the Australian doctor from obscurity and placed her squarely in the history of the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders. Hoare had her own encounter with anxiety in her twenties, as a reporter in the press gallery in Canberra, when she became ill and run-down and developed heart palpitations. Her mother lent her a copy of Self Help for Your Nerves. Hoare was struck by the ‘sheer power of an intelligent, yet simple explanation of the mind-body connection’. She has now returned to that experience to produce a scholarly, absorbing account of Weekes’s life and work. Hoare’s experience of anxiety parallels Weekes’s own. As a young research scientist on her way to becoming the first woman to gain a science doctorate at the University of Sydney, Weekes’s career was blindsided by illness, a misdiagnosis of tuberculosis, and six months’ isolation in a sanatorium. This left her low in mood and confidence, with frightening palpitations. Eventually, a friend’s remark helped restore her equilibrium. The friend had 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
suffered PTSD (shell shock, as it was then called) during World War I and recognised that a racing heart could be programmed by fear, which could then fire up the ‘fight or flight’ response when it was no longer needed. This insight relieved Weekes’s symptoms and set her on course for investigating the mind–body connection. She was already showing promise as a scientist, and had taken part in a field trip on the Great Dividing Range by Professor Launcelot Harrison to investigate lizard reproduction and its place in evolutionary patterns. The reptilian brain, with its primal survival mechanism, provided a fitting start to her work on anxiety. Soon she was on a Rockefeller Fellowship at University College, London. It would be years later, after a couple of surprising career moves, as a singer and later a travel agent, that she decided to study medicine. In the late 1940s she opened her own general practice in Bondi. She was to spend years treating patients with anxiety disorders in her surgery before penning her books and giving lecture tours in the United States and the United Kingdom. She continued to work with individuals, mostly over the telephone, until her death at the age of eighty-seven.
The patient was encouraged to take charge of her own body, fully experiencing the panic and passing through to the other side Weekes never trained as a psychiatrist and had no interest in writing scientific papers to cement her standing in the psychiatric fraternity, which remained somewhat sceptical of her populist approach, both in her writing and in her lectures. In her books, Weekes cut paragraphs and sentences to the bone, used layman’s terms, and focused on key concepts, providing simple advice, practical tools, hope, and encouragement. She had found her vocation. Hoare, a consummate writer, shows admiration for Weekes’s powers of communication and her ability to use them to ‘change lives, save lives, and change history’. Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud play prominent parts in the story, as do several distinguished scholars and mentors. Weekes’s understanding of the mind–body connection harked back to Darwin and the nineteenth century, and connected with Walter Bradford Cannon’s work on fear and its source, the autonomic nervous system. In her earlier field trip to the Great Dividing Range, Weekes had been following in the footsteps of the young Darwin, who was captivated by Australian reptiles. Ironically, it transpires that Darwin, that intrepid scientist, suffered from palpitations and was convinced he had heart disease. He spent much of the five-year voyage on HMS Beagle as a semi-invalid. This is just one of the gems unearthed in Hoare’s extensive research and woven seamlessly into the complex narrative of Weekes’s professional and personal journey through the twentieth century. Judith Hoare left her position at the Australian Financial Review to spend the last five years writing this, her first book. Displaying the hallmarks of an accomplished journalist, this is a fascinating biography of a free-spirited and innovative woman, an insight into the history of evolutionary and psychiatric theories, and an introduction to Weekes’s methods and her books. g Carol Middleton is a Melbourne arts critic, and author.
Cultural Studies
Panic and doom Examining attitudes to fear Adrian Walsh
How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century by Frank Furedi
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Bloomsbury $39.99 hb, 306 pp
ear has always been a dominant element of human existence, across all human societies, but has our attitude to it changed? It might be argued that our concern with threats has become more pronounced. Is the twenty-first century an especially fearful period in human history? At the heart of Frank Furedi’s book is the striking assertion that the concept of ‘fear’ is key to understanding our current socio-historical condition: his claim is that we are caught in a ‘culture of fear’. According to Furedi, the idea of a culture of fear provides genuine insight into our current predicament, that is, what is to be regretted about the present. In recent times, allegations that the general population is being deliberately manipulated by misplaced fears have become commonplace in political life. Such allegations are typically raised with the aim of debunking the arguments of one’s opponents, casting them as forms of ‘moral panic’. An obvious case in point here would be the debates held in the United Kingdom in 2016 over whether Britain should leave the European Union, in which both sides attacked their respective opponents for engaging in scare campaigns. Such debunking is a major theme of the book. The central socio-historical claim in the book is that we live in a world in which the ‘black arts’ of the politics of fear have undue influence upon our public policymakers. Ours is a world where fearmongers are more rampant than ever before. Furedi’s prime examples of fearmongering are concerns with what are often regarded as key issues of the environmental left, such as climate change, skin cancer, Frankenfoods, and the stigmatisation of those who feed their infants formula (though, interestingly, not the berating in the developing world of those who breastfeed). He argues that in all cases we are inflating the nature and range of threats faced by society; at one point he even suggests that ‘[n]ot since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity’. Furedi argues that we spend an unprecedented degree of emotional and rhetorical resources talking about fear; this rhetoric of fear is fuelled by a coterie of ‘professional fear entrepreneurs’ who spread what he refers to as the ‘teleology of doom’. Their rhetoric encourages the growth of a negative attitude towards future uncertainty and is underpinned by both excessively fatalistic views about human agency and exaggerated views of human fragility. It is worth noting here that Furedi is also opposed to drawing distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of
fearmongering – he regards it all as part of the ‘teleology of doom’. According to Furedi, the most distinctive feature of this culture of fear is the obsession with safety and with the minimisation of risk. He refers to this as the ‘safety imperative’ and claims that over the past forty years we have witnessed the transformation of safety into a fundamental social value as well as the emergence of fear as a mental health issue. What might be the ultimate cause of Western society’s alleged ‘cultural script of fear’? Furedi suggests it is the loss of faith in science and of Enlightenment values. We need to return to an Enlightenment perspective that is confident of humanity’s ‘ability to know, understand and ultimately control the future’. The aim of the book, then, is to explain how the culture of fear works and, more significantly, how our culture might be transformed into one in which the general public is motivated by what humankind might achieve, and in this way avoid the fatalistic influence of the culture of fear. However, his arguments, in general, are not at all convincing. In particular, it not clear that our age is unique with respect to the fear of potential threats. Indeed, much of his own discussion – of, for instance, moral panics in the 1930s or witch-hunts in the fifteenth century – undermines his thesis that fear is a distinctive feature of the twenty-first century and thus key to understanding who we are. To be sure, we fear different things from our predecessors, but it is hard to see that we are noticeably more fearful than they were. If this is the case, then it seems unlikely that the concept of fear furnishes us with a genuinely insightful category for understanding our social world. Secondly, his unwillingness to distinguish explicitly between well-founded and baseless fears is odd. Surely there are potential threats, such as climate change, about which we should be seriously concerned. It is also odd – especially given his praise for the Enlightenment and scientific reasoning – that Furedi should be sceptical about the findings of climate scientists. Admittedly, there are those in the environmental movement who are prone to anti-science romanticism, but that charge can hardly be levelled at the majority of scientists studying climate. What does ring true in the book is his claim that our public institutions appear to be overly obsessed with safety. Why might this be so? While human beings have always been prone to misplaced fears, why has that anxiety expressed itself in the particular way that it has? This is the interesting socio-historical question. Unfortunately, on this subject, Furedi’s book leaves us none the wiser. g Adrian Walsh is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England.
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www.australianbookreview.com.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
47
Memoir
Something clanging into place A companionable book about animals Ben Brooker
The Grass Library by David Brooks
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Brandl & Schlesinger $26.95 pb, 224 pp
all, in an attitude of ambivalence or contempt rather than reverence, making lavish exceptions for the pets whose company we could scarcely do without. David Brooks’s The Grass Library is, in part, a response to our culture’s failure to grapple with these complexities, its genesis the author’s conversation with ‘a vegan friend in Western Australia’ (fellow poet John Kinsella, not named in the book) about the poor rap given to animals in Australian literature. In a later conversation with Kinsella, Brooks lists some of the things he wants to write about: the animal in philosophy; the problems inherent in writing about animals at all; and, notwithstanding Virginia Woolf ’s ill-fated attempt at a biography of a dog (Flush, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel), his adopted ten-year-old fox terrier cross, Charlie. Unsurprisingly, the resulting book – the second, after Derrida’s Breakfast (2016), of a proposed sestet or septet on the lives of animals – is not easy to classify, spanning modes biographical, epistolary, polemical, and literary-critical. Happily, like the non-human animals who are its subjects, the book is also deeply companionable. Brooks’s prose, even where it has the feel of a barely edited diary or thrumming animal-rights treatise, is warmly lyrical. Early in The Grass Library, Brooks describes our contradictory standards when it comes to non-human species as ‘doubling’, a term he borrows from Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical killing and the psychology of genocide (1988):
rom the Man’s horse ‘blood[ied] from hip to shoulder’ in Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890) to the kangaroos drunkenly slaughtered in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), non-human animals have not fared well in Australian literature. Even when, as in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), the author’s imagination is fully brought to bear on the inner lives of animals, their fate tends towards the Hobbesian – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – reflecting back to us our own often unexamined cruelty. The rare exceptions, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), incorporating a fictionalised series of animal-rights lectures, serve only to point up the rule. It’s no surprise that our literature, like the brutal and brutalising settler-colonial culture from which much of it emerges, should have historically regarded animals as objects rather than subjects. That they do not feel pain as we do – that, after Heidegger, they do not even die but merely ‘perish’ – is one of many convenient fictions that, despite potentially game-changing advances in the study of animal sentience, continue to legitimise their silencing and instrumentalisation at our hands (per capita, more meat is consumed in Australia than in any other country except the United States). Unlike in indigenous societies, we hold animals, when we deign to think of them at Orpheus Pumpkin in the writing-room doorway (photograph by David Brooks) 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
barbarity itself begins with the thought that we are so different from the creatures we live amongst that we cannot know or even hazard how they feel. This is not only a lie to ourselves, for in many cases in the experience of almost all of us, we do know how some animal or other feels (at home the scientist knows how his/her dog feels. And yet ‘officially’, in the laboratory – this phenomenon is known as doubling – has no idea …
In a sense, The Grass Library is a record of Brooks’s own laboratory for the study of human–animal relations, a small farm in the Blue Mountains he shares with his partner, whom he calls ‘T.’, and a colourful menagerie of animals to which the book is dedicated: the neurotic but good-natured Charlie, and the idiosyncratic sheep
Fiction Henry, Jonathan, Jason, and Orpheus Pumpkin (T. disapproves of Brooks’s preference for more literary-minded names). There are also chapter-length discursions on rats and snakes (‘“humane” traps this time,’ Brooks writes), and wild ducks, five of whose ducklings drown in the couple’s swimming pool in one of the book’s more harrowing passages.
It’s no surprise that our literature, like the brutal settler-colonial culture from which much of it emerges, should have historically regarded animals as objects rather than subjects Rather than Brooks, though, it is T. – an academic writing a thesis on animal grief, or, in her language, ‘the sudden disappearance of a proximal subject’ – who begins to enact a reconsidered relationship to animals first. Tearily unable to finish a meat curry, she converts to vegetarianism, an epiphanic moment for both of them. ‘Something clanged into place,’ Brooks writes, ‘like a great door shutting, or opening. I felt cruel suddenly, exposed, deeply wrong.’ Novelistically thinking himself into T.’s consciousness, much as he will do for the animals we will be introduced to in the following pages, he concludes: ‘I suppose that’s what had just happened to her.’ The problem of how to apprehend the inner life of another being – when, as Nietzsche had it, we see everything through the human head and cannot remove it – is one that preoccupies Brooks. How to make sense of Charlie’s curious tremble, of his habit of pushing certain books under the author’s bed (he especially dislikes Rilke)? How to make sense of the seeming indifference of the duck and drake to their offspring’s plight in the pool? Our very languages and discourses, thick with expressions and ideas that reinforce our subjugation of animals – to say nothing of our deeply ingrained suspicion of anthropomorphism – limit our ability to imagine, much less articulate, possible answers to such questions. For Brooks, words are themselves a kind of violence, scarring and erasing the non-human animals we live among as surely as the physical traumas – docking, castration, euthanasia – we inflict on them as a matter of course. Observing the unshed shell of a dead nymph (the name cicada itself means ‘scar’ or ‘wound’), Brooks writes: ‘I’ve come to think of language as a kind of carapace of dangerous notions, something that will restrict us, hold us back if we don’t learn to use it with greater care and respect.’ Like Agamben and Derrida before him, Brooks chips away at the self-serving denials and falsehoods with which we think and write animals out of, rather than into, being, in the process revealing the frailness of our humanity that supposedly separates us from them. Whereas Derrida, famously, stood naked before his cat in a state of embarrassment, I found myself missing Charlie, Henry, Jonathan, Jason, and Orpheus Pumpkin almost as soon as I put The Grass Library down, my sense of being above them, to use a Derridean word, trembling. g Ben Brooker is a writer, editor, critic, playwright, essayist, and bookseller.
Oli’s world
An impressive first novel Astrid Edwards
Below Deck
by Sophie Hardcastle
B
Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 296 pp
elow Deck is a stunning literary novel. This is a poetic work that can be read aloud just as easily as it can be read in silence. Sophie Hardcastle wrote Below Deck in 2018 when she was a Provost’s Scholar in English Literature at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. As she reveals in the acknowledgments, she read a draft aloud to her professor, an experience that no doubt consolidated the flow of her prose. Oli, the protagonist, is a sailor and an artist. Her synaesthesia means that she hears sounds and feels emotions in colour. Hardcastle’s lyrical command of language enables the reader to experience Oli’s world in vivid colour too. Oli is a twenty-something woman whose world is damaged by men – her father, her boyfriend, the all-male crew. The sense of maleness is omnipresent in the novel – how they behave, what they assume, the way they judge others. Their presence leeches the very colour from Oli’s world. But Below Deck is more nuanced than simply pitting maleness against femaleness. There are compassionate men, including the irrepressible Mac and the everyman Hugo. At its heart – and there is heart to this novel, indeed more than most – Below Deck explores what it is to be female. This is a work for anyone who has felt the sting of misogyny or the consequences of assault. Oli lives those experiences, questions them, crumbles under their weight, and rebuilds herself. All the while, Hardcastle’s lightness of touch means that none of this is didactic. Oli simply is. The novel is replete with symbolism but can also be brutally frank at times. This is, after all, a work that opens with ‘at sea, no one can hear you scream’. Oli travels to the Southern Ocean, an experience that allows her to begin to recover. This healing is accompanied by a burst of creativity; she begins to see the world in colours she has never experienced before. (Hardcastle was an artist-in-residence in Antarctica in 2017, an experience that doubtless informed the novel.) This is Hardcastle’s first novel, although she has previously published her memoir of mental illness, Running Like China (2015), and the Young Adult novel Breathing Under Water (2016). g Astrid Edwards is the host of The Garret: Writers on Writing. She teaches writing at RMIT University and serves on the Board of the Melbourne Writers Festival. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
49
Cultural Studies
The virtue of dissent Exploring group dynamics Russell Blackford
Conformity: The power of social influences by Cass R. Sunstein
I
New York University Press $39.99 hb, 197 pp
n Conformity: The power of social influences, the renowned constitutional scholar Cass R. Sunstein acknowledges that social conformity can provide the glue to bind a society together. As he makes clear, there are many particular norms – legal or moral – that we would do well to follow for the sake of the common good. At the same time, he argues, conformity can facilitate atrocities, destroy creativity, drive out nuance, conceal valuable information, and crush free-thinking individuals. On such an account, conformity often leads to mistakes. Within a process of discussion and deliberation, a propensity to conform to majority thinking is more a vice than a virtue. If we hide our beliefs and preferences when they vary from the mainstream, we keep our critical insights and positive ideas out of consideration. Conformists accrue standing in the group, or at least escape criticism, but they weaken the group’s deliberations. Conversely, honest dissenters may be punished for their trouble, but they offer information that may assist a good outcome. Thus, it is not necessarily conformists who are socially concerned and responsible, and it is not necessarily dissenters who are antisocial and selfish. In many situations, the exact opposite is true. As Sunstein elaborates, we need disclosers, people who dissent when they have something relevant to contribute, not contrarians, who dissent for a reward (financial, psychological, or otherwise). Disclosers should be especially prized if they offer important information that would otherwise not be available for discussion. However, it is not only missing facts that ought to be disclosed when groups deliberate, but also missing arguments and viewpoints, and missing signals of what the group’s members really want. Throughout Conformity, Sunstein emphasises the dynamics of group polarisation and informational cascades. Group polarisation occurs when a group of people deliberating about an issue moves towards an extreme conclusion (while a different group might veer to the opposite extreme). Unfortunately, a group that begins by leaning in one direction will probably end up, after its deliberations, leaning even more strongly in that direction. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the group is likely to reach a position more extreme than the one with which it began. Varied factors play into this, among them an obvious rhetorical advantage in arguing for a hyperbolic version of the group’s original tendency (and a converse disadvantage for anyone who counsels moderation). Often, therefore, group members will egg each other on 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
towards increasingly extreme positions. At the same time, they will devalue arguments and viewpoints from distrusted sources, even if those arguments and viewpoints have some objective merit. Informational cascades take place when people cease to give weight to their own independent information, relying, instead, on a sequence of judgements by others who have already considered the issue (which might be anything from what music to buy today, to who should be offered a job, to the wisest response to a political crisis). As a variant, reputational cascades occur when dissent from judgements earlier in a sequence appears to be dangerous: it is likely to damage the reputations of people who dissent later in the sequence. Related to this are availability cascades, when an emotionally compelling example of a problem – perhaps a shark attack – grips imaginations and information about it then spreads rapidly, irrespective of the actual size of the problem. For example, sharks cause only a minuscule proportion of deaths in Western societies. Pointing this out, however, is likely to seem callous when there is social panic about a recent shark attack.
Well-designed institutions not only protect dissenters but also advance the interests of others who might benefit if dissent is heard It can be difficult to tell what is motivating individuals in any particular situation: their own knowledge, reliance on others’ judgements, or fear for their reputations if they express dissent. It is healthiest for a group if its members are honest about their own information, experience, reasoning processes, preferences, and values, but this is risky and requires courage. Thus, the message from Conformity is not so much that we should all be braver and more outspoken – though perhaps we should be – as that our deliberative institutions work better when they build in rewards for honest dissent. Well-designed institutions not only protect dissenters but also advance the interests of others who might benefit if dissent is heard. As a constitutional scholar, Sunstein is especially interested in the development of public policy, and in how courts interpret and apply the law. Accordingly, he studies the effect of conformity mechanisms when juries or panels of judges consider difficult cases, or when judges look to one another’s decisions as possible precedents. Some of the material in Conformity relates specifically to the American legal system, but the book as a whole has much wider implications – beyond the US and beyond courtroom settings. It helps explain the current levels of polarisation and incivility in public debate, not only in the United States but in contemporary democracies more generally. Useful though they are in many respects, social media and the internet intensify group polarisation and encourage decision-making via cascades. Sunstein brings detailed, up-to-date knowledge of the social mechanisms that produce self-censorship, outward compliance, and sometimes an inner acceptance of extreme views. The result is a reliable book-length analysis of the pressures to conform and why they are a problem. g Russell Blackford’s most recent book is The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of Liberalism (2019).
Music
Ohne Musik?
An engaging volume of essays Peter Tregear
British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought 1850–1950 edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton
W
Boydell Press $119 hb, 390 pp
hen the German social commentator Oscar A.H. Schmitz described England as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ [The Country without Music], the insult stuck. Its veracity arose not because the English lacked a vibrant musical culture, or a lively intellectual class prepared to engage with what they were hearing. Rather, it was because Schmitz believed the English simply did not consider music to be an art form that could, or should, play a significant role in the nation’s cultural consciousness. This generous and engaging volume of scholarly essays examines the work of music critics that stands to counter Schmitz’s censure. Its focus, the title notwithstanding, is on English journalists, authors, and, more latterly, broadcasters, and it covers a period of time almost exactly parallel with the lifespan of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Not surprisingly Shaw’s music criticism features prominently alongside studies of other wellknown critics; we are also introduced to many others unlikely to be known today. Their combined legacy is worth reconsidering, for, as Julian Horton’s especially fine chapter on Donald Tovey’s reception of Schumann and Bruckner reminds us, one risk we run of ignoring their views is that we may be unaware of how we might still be beholden to them. When our own capacity to think critically is also threatened by the decline in rigorous music education in school and a loss of faith in expert opinion more broadly in social media, it becomes all too easy ‘to mobilise received opinion’ than to consider more deeply ‘music’s processual, affective and cultural-historical complexities’. Good criticism should always be grounded in the latter. A common interest shared by all the critics examined here is a concern to convey their value judgements about music not just in terms of entertainment value but also in terms of its capacity to instruct. Just what sort of instruction music could provide remains, however, heavily contested. The advocacy of a ‘common sense’ approach to music aesthetics is one peculiarity that shaped the writings and music of composer–critics like Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells. Peter Horton’s opening chapter demonstrates, similarly, how an attraction towards the ‘rule-based’ music of Felix Mendelssohn established a long-standing opposition in British music between those who favoured Mendelssohn and Brahms and those inclined towards the so-called ‘New German School’ of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.
By the mid-1850s, Wagner himself was appearing as a conductor in London, and by the 1870s a serious pro-Wagner lobby had emerged. Harry White’s chapter on Shaw discusses The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), among his other writings and how he believed that music could, and indeed should, act both ‘as an agent of social reform, and as a vital amplification of speech’. White is not afraid to criticise the critic; at one point he remarks that Shaw’s music criticism conveys the ‘unfortunate … impression of a sententious and strident bore’. Bennett Zon’s chapter on ‘Spencer, Sympathy and the School of Music Criticism’ reveals another broader intellectual and social context that lay behind much music criticism at this time by focusing on the influence of evolutionary theory. For critic Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the ‘fittest pieces’ of music were ‘the most emotionally refined and ultimately poetical’. These works were thus best suited for arousing our sympathetic imagination, which served in turn to strengthen our species’ capacity for ‘co-operation and mutual helpfulness’. Philip Ross Bullock’s chapter on ‘Russia and Eastern Europe’ is a particularly welcome inclusion for showing how ‘geopolitical concerns’ impinged upon discussions of culture and the arts of this time, and for drawing attention to the prominent role women played in shaping some of these discussions. Grounded in her long-standing interest in the music of Eastern Europe (among other achievements, she published the first biography of Tchaikovsky in any language), the music criticism of Rosa Newmarch (1857–1940) ‘came to exercise a social function that far exceeded its original cultural aspirations’, especially when Britain found itself allied to Russia at the onset of World War I. That war, however, also served to heighten a commonly held scepticism of musical radicalism, especially that which was emanating from Austria and Germany. Howells (best-known today perhaps for his Anglican liturgical music) emerges in Jonathan Clinch’s essay as polemicist for an English modernism grounded not so much in reason as in reasonableness: ‘music lives in its sounds, not its theories’, he declared. It was only after World War II that British musical life, like so much else, became open to a more profound transformation from both Europe and America. In the case of music criticism, this was enhanced by the arrival of émigré musicians who had fled Nazi Germany. This volume ends with a chapter by Patrick Zuk on perhaps the best-known music critic among them, Hans Keller (1919–85). The chronological boundary of 1950 restricts Zuk’s examination of Keller to an exposition only; it also excludes any engagement with the impact on such critics of the rise of rock and pop music. In any case, as Christopher Mark suggests in his examination of Constant Lambert’s colourful and acerbic Music Ho! A study of music in decline (1934), we now live in an age where ‘description is preferred to critical engagement’. Yet music criticism can still be, he asserts, ‘a form of knowledge – in the sense of comprehension, grasp, grip, command, mastery, apprehension – that might be pursed with profit’. If he’s right, this volume proffers a welcome insight into, if not inspiration for, what such criticism at its best can be, and do. g Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
51
Art
Beyond Bauhaus
Examining the movement’s international influence Christopher Menz
Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming education through art, design and architecture by Philip Goad et al.
A
The Miegunyah Press $64.99 pb, 288 pp
mid all the hoopla surrounding the centenary in 2019 of the Bauhaus – naturally more pronounced in Germany – it is gratifying to see such a fine Australian publication dealing with the international influence of this short-lived, revolutionary art and design teaching institute. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond – written mainly by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist, and Isabel Wünsche – explores the Bauhaus and its influence in Australia. Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925 (Mies van der Rohe became director in 1930), and thence to Berlin in 1932. A year later the Nazis shut it down. It had lasted for just fourteen years, and some of the instantly recognisable designs – notably the Bauhaus building itself, the flat-topped residential architecture by Gropius, and the tubular steel furniture by Marcel Breuer – were designed over an even shorter period (1925–28). In addition to those already mentioned, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy are just some of famous artists connected with the Bauhaus. The book’s subtitle, Transforming education through art, design and architecture, is significant, for it is in the educational realm that the authors convincingly argue that the Bauhaus strongly influenced Australian art and design from the 1940s. Unlike the United States, where Breuer, Gropius, and Van der Rohe lived and worked from the 1930s, and where they designed buildings, and taught, Australia has no buildings designed by Bauhaus architects. Still, as Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond amply documents, the Bauhaus connections to Australia were strong. Gropius visited Australia in May 1954. He attended the fourth Annual Convention of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in Sydney, and then he visited Melbourne. In the visual and graphic arts, the most prominent Bauhäusler to live, work, and teach in Australia was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack. Though not well known outside art and art-teaching circles, Hirschfeld Mack trained and taught at the Weimar Bauhaus. His 1963 Melbourne-published The Bauhaus: An introductory story was one of the first Englishlanguage postwar accounts of the Bauhaus. The diaspora occurred because of the rise of German fascism and the Nazis’ hatred of modernism, Jews, political radicals, and anyone else who did not toe the party line or conform to their repulsive ideology. Many of the artists covered in the book left Germany and elsewhere in Europe during the 1930s, often going 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
first to England, only to be declared enemy aliens when war broke out. Australia does not appear to have been their first choice of asylum, and who can blame them? Hirschfeld Mack and more than two thousand others, who sailed as internees on the Dunera in 1940, were initially sent to barbed-wire confines near Hay in south-western New South Wales. Hirschfeld Mack resumed his art activities, even making a successful xylophone out of Australian hardwood. Two more internment camps followed: one in Orange, New South Wales, the other in Tatura, Victoria. Hirschfeld Mack was one of the fortunate ones. His work in the camps was noticed, and in 1942, through its headmaster, James Darling, he gained a teaching position at Geelong Grammar School. Interestingly, in 1947 Hirschfeld Mack declined a lucrative offer to teach in Chicago. Gropius considered him to be one of the few capable of carrying out the Bauhaus educational mission. This fascinating book introduces many lesser-known figures and contextualises the postwar art scene in Australia. It is divided into three sections: Origins; Diaspora; And Beyond. The early chapter ‘Reform Education and Bauhaus Pedagogy’, by Isabel Wünsche and Wiebke Gronemeyer, forms an excellent introduction to the Bauhaus, the complexity of its changing teaching program, and its genesis and closure. And Beyond, the longest section, covers the Bauhaus influence in Australia through teaching methods and production. These methods influenced many educators and art schools and shaped the production of metalwork, jewellery, textiles, sculpture, printmaking, and architecture. This was particularly evident in Melbourne and Sydney, where most of the Bauhäusler settled and taught and where their work was exhibited. Ann Stephen gives a detailed and fascinating account in her forensic reconstruction of the 1961 Gallery A landmark exhibition in Melbourne: The Bauhaus: Aspects and Influence. As Fiona MacCarthy reminds us in her enthralling biography Walter Gropius: Visionary founder of the Bauhaus (Faber & Faber, 2019), the seventy-year-old architect visited Australia in 1954 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sydney. He met young architects like Harry Seidler and Robin Boyd. At the Sydney ceremony, Gropius delivered his address ‘Is There a Science of Design?’ to an audience of nearly one thousand people. The Age described Gropius as ‘the world’s most famous living architect’. While there are numerous good accounts of the Bauhaus available in English, as a biographer MacCarthy focuses on the personalities and interrelationships, bringing intensity and richness to otherwise familiar territory. (One wonders what insights MacCarthy’s own marriage to David Mellor, one of the most successful British designers of his generation, gave her in tackling Gropius.) The nuanced year-by-year account of Gropius’s life with the Bauhaus and afterwards in the United Kingdom and the United States is gripping. His energy and drive were phenomenal, and he was clearly a charismatic man. Gropius was at the centre of European modernism; he interacted with many of the leading figures both professionally and socially: Klee and Kandinsky were witnesses at his wedding to Ilse Frank in 1923, following his divorce from Alma Mahler. MacCarthy draws on her skills as a distinguished biographer and design historian to create a rounded portrait of this pioneer of modern design. g Christopher Menz is a former Director of AGSA.
Art
The art of acquiring
The first forty years of Australian Galleries Sheridan Palmer
Australian Galleries: The Purves family business: The first four decades 1956–1999 by Caroline Field
A
Australian Galleries $89.95 hb, 320 pp
ustralian Galleries opened in Melbourne in June 1956. One year later, Andy Warhol established Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. Warhol’s art of making money became an art form in itself, with the artist elaborating that ‘good business is the best art’. Gallerists Anne and Tam Purves would have agreed. This husband-and-wife team took selling art seriously and introduced a professionalism unlike anything that had existed in Melbourne. Their new modern enterprise occupied a converted front section of their Derby Street paper-pattern factory in the working-class suburb of Collingwood. While the couple had no experience in art dealership or gallery management, they were confident that the arts were ready for something different. Anne, accomplished in commercial design, had considerable artistic aspirations, while Tam merely transferred his well-established business acumen across the factory threshold into their smart new premises. As with any business venture, timing was important, and they capitalised on the leverage that the 1956 Olympic Games brought to Melbourne. John Brack’s portrait of Tam Purves graces the cover of this elegantly produced book, capturing a poised businessman, his sleek, Brylcreemed hair, steady stare, and cigarette in hand redolent of 1950s debonair masculinity. Arthur Boyd’s expressionist portraits of Anne, all four, adorn the back cover. A sophisticated woman with a scrutinising eye for assessing the cultural landscape, Anne emerges in this history of Australian Galleries as the real mover. Tam may have been the financial rudder who negotiated loans for artists and deals with clients, but it was Anne who cajoled temperamental artists while successfully propelling modern Australian art into a conspicuous and profitable position, a role that absorbed her for the rest of her life. The postwar Melbourne art scene, according to Inge King, resembled a glass of flat beer, but by the mid-1950s a more optimistic mood prevailed. Art and culture, the new director of the National Gallery of Victoria Eric Westbrook proclaimed, were for everyone. The Herald Outdoor Art Show in the Treasury Gardens and Westbrook’s modernising agenda confirmed this. The architect Robin Boyd promoted functional domestic planning with his Small Homes Service, and the Purveses adopted his modern concept of architectural aesthetics by commissioning him to design their home. Promoting art and lifestyle as a desirable combination, Anne claimed, suited ‘a general broadening’ and ‘awareness of a richer cultural and more stimulating life’.
Art-world rivalry kept the Purveses on their toes. The Gallery of Contemporary Art, which opened four days before Australian Galleries, Violet Dulieu’s gallery, Kym Bonython’s galleries, and Joseph Brown’s dealership all helped maintain a competitive edge. Shortly after Australian Galleries began operating, the Peter Bray Gallery at 435 Bourke Street closed. Run by Helen Ogilvie from 1949 until 1956, it represented established and emerging artists – John Brack’s iconic The bar was purchased for ninety guineas in 1955, and Inge and Grahame King held their first exhibition there. With news of Ogilvie’s departure for London, the Purveses quickly secured the best, adding John Brack, Charles Bush, Daryl Lindsay, Ian Fairweather, Inge King, and Sidney Nolan to their distinguished stable. As Caroline Field notes, ‘the art of acquiring was also developing, and the pool of buyers had increased considerably’. The boom decade of the 1950s saw big industrialists and multinationals enter the art market. When art and business intersect, art becomes a financial instrument. An enviable blue-chip modern collection was a banner of success, and the Purveses tapped into this pool, aiming for the higher ends of the market. Society connections, name-dropping, and art transactions lend a note of snobbery to this book, but such disclosures were commonplace in the postwar decades. This changed when prosperity pushed art prices up and art-crime increased, particularly as a burgeoning secondary art market and auction sector developed. Fortunately, Australian Galleries kept good records and photographic archives of all works that passed through its premises, setting a sound practice for monitoring provenance, authenticity, and fakes. Apart from brief biographical accounts of Anne’s and Tam’s respective family backgrounds and periodic snippets on their children, including Stuart’s maturing from an energetic schoolboy to an ebullient partner in the gallery, Field deftly weaves a substantial chronicle of personalities, exhibitions, and, besides a few banal quotes, illuminating opinions by artists, collectors, and critics. Certain issues might have been better contextualised by consulting recently published accounts of historical events in Australian art. Bernard Smith, for example, did not overlook Fred Williams for his Antipodean group; Smith’s selection was calculated and politically complex. Even Noel Counihan, one of the finest figurative artists, was not invited because of his hard-line communism. Given the climate of the day when red-baiting was at its most virulent, it is to the Purveses’ credit that they permitted the odd Communist Party meeting on their premises. Margaret Carnegie’s private collection was more than a ‘hobby’; it was a serious passion. Operating independently of dealers may have been a thorn in the Purveses’ side, but Carnegie was also gathering information on artists for Smith’s survey Australian Painting (1962). The value of this book lies in its extensive use of Australian Galleries’ magnificent archive and Anne Purves’s ‘Art Notes’. As a woman in the art world, she knew that a degree of toughness was necessary, and her perceptive insights and astute comments – ‘one had to feel it through the pores of your skin’, as she told me in a 1998 interview – are further enriched by Stuart Purves’s frank reflections on the struggles, tragedies, and victories of this family business. g Sheridan Palmer is a Melbourne author and critic. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
53
Interview
Open Page with Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus is an independent scholar and the author of twelve books of non-fiction, published in Australia, the United States, Canada, and Britain. Her most recent book, Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse (Allen & Unwin), is reviewed on page 11.
Where are you happiest?
Which book influenced you most in your youth?
What’s your idea of hell?
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
Walking through the bush behind my house in Lower Snug provides me with self-transcendence that is true joy. Steadily putting one foot in front of the other empties my mind of agitated, ego-driven narrative and fills it with an entirely different sense of purpose. Walking made me a writer. In an academic conference listening to panels of papers that always run over time.
What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Aristotle considered ambition to be a virtue, and that I think is specious. Ambition is a curse.
I am somewhat embarrassed to remember how my youthful self was swept away by the pure solipsism of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945). The truly great book and lasting influence from my youth was William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
I hugely admired Paul Auster until I met him at a dinner party in New York and felt the sting of his lofty disdain.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Some Like it Hot (1959), with that immortal line ‘I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop’, closely followed by Casablanca (1942), with that other immortal line ‘such much’.
One impediment is anxiety that my work will be subject to sustained hostility in the public domain – nowadays especially on social media – which has been quite traumatic for me in the past. Another impediment is the huge cost in both time and money of the exhaustive research necessary to get the story straight.
And your favourite book?
What do you think of the state of criticism?
What is your favourite film?
A toss-up between Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Halldór Laxness’s Independent People (1934–35), and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971).
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. I don’t place much value on dinner-party conversation, but I’d love to have the chance to chat to Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage? I don’t have strong opinions about words.
Who is your favourite author?
Probably Alice Munro, but I also love Nadine Gordimer, Jim Crace, and Halldór Laxness.
And your favourite literary hero or heroine?
Rosa from Burger’s Daughter (1979) by Nadine Gordimer.
Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Unflinching commitment to a moral principle. 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
After working and publishing in the United States, it seems to me that criticism in Australia is both cautious and perfunctory.
And writers’ festivals?
When I was younger and could tolerate copious amounts of alcohol, I really enjoyed writers’ festivals, especially in Canada, where they are often in stupendous landscapes. I made some lifelong friendships with marvellous writers and enjoyed memorable late-night conversations in the lobbies and bars of swish hotels.
Do you read reviews of your own books? Of course. Doesn’t everyone?
Are artists valued in our society?
Australia is the envy of my literary friends in the US and the UK for the Australia Council grants, as well as for a raft of literary prizes, not to mention all those writers’ festivals.
What are you working on now?
I am researching a book about stealing Aboriginal remains as scientific trophies, to be the third in a trilogy on colonial genocide. It is a tough assignment, but a moral imperative for me. g
A R T S
Opera
‘A live volcano’ An enthralling new Salome Michael Shmith
F
Vida Miknevičiūtė and Daniel Sumegi in Salome (photograph by Craig Fuller)
or all its intense brevity, Salome is notoriously difficult to stage and perform. Richard Strauss might have adroitly described his opera (first performed in 1905) as ‘a scherzo with a fatal conclusion’, but his great admirer Gustav Mahler was closer to the mark when he said ‘deeply at work in it … is a live volcano, a subterranean fire’. Both points of view were more than justified by Victorian Opera’s generally fine performance of Salome. The eminent Strauss biographer Michael Kennedy had it right when he said that the huge orchestra acts almost as a stream of consciousness, telling us ‘what is in the characters’ hearts and minds before they know it themselves’. This was certainly evident from the practically faultless playing of Orchestra Victoria under Victorian Opera’s artistic director, Richard Mills. He conducted with dignity and purpose, allowing the music to speak for itself. In fact, many details of the score emerged with extra clarity, especially since some players, including percussion and horns, were positioned in the aisles at either side of the pit. Only in the climactic moments did things threaten to become a little overwhelming. Interestingly, this only heightened the sense of drama. The evening belonged to the musical performances. I wish I could say the same for Cameron Menzies’ curiously dislocated and confusing production. In his program note, he says the production ‘has tried to simultaneously look forward and backwards’ to biblical times, the era of Oscar Wilde’s original play (1891), and into this century. All this chronological head-turning proved, in reality, a mishmash of styles, periods, and mannerisms that never quite coalesced into anything really meaningful. Only occasionally – for example, during Salome’s monologue – did undue fussiness and distraction yield to something more compelling. One vital element went missing. Was Namaan, Herod’s Executioner, on a day off ? Instead of this silent and ominous character’s terrifying moment, bearing the head of Jochanaan on a silver platter, the gruesome object was merely shoved through
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a curtain into Salome’s waiting hands, as if she had ordered a pizza (a pizza on an aluminium tray, judging from the clatter it made as Salome hurled it into the wings). Christina Smith’s rundown, proscenium-within-a-proscenium set echoed the Palais itself but was of little practical use, providing a limited, narrow corridor for the main action, with occasional forays into the set’s stage boxes. Anna Cordingley’s peculiar, suit-all-epoch costumes didn’t help, especially the ridiculous clown suits for Herod and Herodias, which really belonged in Luna Park next door. And why was Salome in a suit, then a half-suit-half-gown? Gavan Swift’s lighting design veered from the gloomy to the high-beam; the latter, deployed during Jochanaan’s entrance and exit, succeeded only in blinding the audience. The singing was, for the most part, strong and persuasive. The Lithuanian soprano Vida Miknevičiūtė was heroic in the name part. This may have been her début as Salome, but it was clear from this, the second of three performances, that the role was already well under her skin. Miknevičiūtė sang with formidable accuracy, supple and piercing (though never strident) tone, and a febrile, dramatic presence. She did her own dance (quirkily choreographed by Elizabeth Hill-Cooper) – but then it’s hard to think of any Salome in recent memory who hasn’t. All of this places Miknevičiūtė in my personal pantheon of Salomes of lighter voice: even the composer insisted that not all of them have to be Isoldes or Brünnhildes. Ian Storey was a tremendous Herod, singing with subtle power, as well as with flawless diction. Liane Keegan’s Herodias was a true dramatic match, if a little forced at the top. Daniel Sumegi’s zealous Jochanaan made the most of his on- and offstage proclamations. In smaller roles, James Egglestone as the ill-fated Narraboth and Dimity Shepherd as Herodias’s Page were exemplary – even given the latter’s odd stage business with her mistress, complete with identical gestures and matching long cigarette holders. The Jews – Paul Biencourt, Daniel Todd, Timothy Reynolds, Carlos E. Bárcenas, and Raphael Wong – were suitably argumentative and musically precise. Simon Meadows and Douglas Kelly were good as the Nazarenes, and Kiran Rajasingam was a notable Cappadocian (surely a Baptist-in-waiting). Alex Pokryshevsky and Jerzy Kozlowski were sterling Soldiers, and Kathryn Radcliffe a nimble Slave. It takes courage and fortitude to stage Salome, and, for the most part, Victorian Opera is to be credited. The audience loved it, and it’s always worth remembering that the work still has the capacity to enthral and shock. The pity is that it received only three performances. For all the production’s dramatic inconsistencies, the commitment to musicianship and performance carried everything else before it. g Salome was performed by Victorian Opera at the Palais, St Kilda, in February 2020. Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer, editor, and arts critic. His latest book is Cranlana: The first 100 years (Hardie Grant Books, 2019).
Theatre
‘A thousand doors’
The human condition in The Curtain Fiona Gruber
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Milijana Čančar in The Curtain (photograph by Theresa Harrison)
boarding house, late evening. Two elderly men pace fretfully, unable to settle. They are, we learn, waiting for their landlady to return home. She goes out rarely; tonight she is later than usual. Should they play cards? No, says one, I always lose. I’ll let you win, says the other. Then there’d be no point in playing, rejoins the first. Daniel Keene’s play The Curtain is about loneliness and co-dependence. As with many of his works, it takes the absurd and commonplace in life to illuminate the human condition in all its pathos, courage, and bleak humour. Leon (Gil Tucker) and Francis (Paul Weingott) are very different, as the pugnacious and well-read Leon is eager to point out. ‘We can’t have a conversation, because we have nothing in common,’ he says during a one-sided bicker with his querulous, confused housemate. This is Francis’s fault, he opines: Francis lacks confidence, eats too much, is aimless, has no inner life. Leon is a cruel bully, reminiscent of someone in a toxic marriage rather than of a friendship of equal power and agency. Just like Francis, he is trapped by circumstance. Fond of quoting poetry – Yevgeny Yevtushenko and W.H. Auden are in his repertoire – Leon enjoys pointing out his own and Francis’s loneliness and lack of belonging in a society that is indifferent to those on the margins. Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors: Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.
Auden’s poem ‘Refugee Blues’ was written in 1939 from the perspective of a homeless Jewish couple denied asylum. Is Leon Jewish? We don’t know. Is he comparing the couple’s plight to that of two men who have never had families or who have become uncoupled from them? We are never sure. In one sense, it might seem tasteless to suggest parallels between the lives of the quietly desperate in a dull provincial
town and the frightened flight of millions, but Leon, as with Keene, is fond of casting the specific in the context of a general, more dramatic condition. Life is rushing over us like a river, he suggests at one point. Yet both men are seeking refuge from that current, before life sweeps them towards the final curtain. To continue the fluvial metaphor, they both have a nostalgia for the oxygen and the sense of meaning that once came from being in a fast-moving flow, part of the purposeful mainstream. Life is not so much rushing over them as rushing by as they bob along, forgotten, at the scummy edge. The arrival of their landlady, Ada (Milijana Čančar) introduces a character with greater agency, but whose insouciance masks a profound despondency. Her arrival threatens to drive them back into the current, and a game she initiates, where they imagine their best selves, underscores the disappointment and sense of failure at the heart of theirs and many people’s lives. For those familiar with Keene’s work, this is well-explored territory; many of his plays, monologues, and film scripts concern loss and longing and are about the marginalised. How societies treat the fragile and dispossessed, how individuals negotiate a place in societies that reject them, have been constant themes over forty years of writing for the stage. The Curtain is at fortyfivedownstairs, an independent theatre space in the centre of Melbourne where several of Keene’s works have been staged before. Beng Oh directs The Curtain with a sense of pathos and a pace necessary in a play with many words and little action. In doing so he is ably assisted by a trio of actors who give performances of great emotional insight. Oh was instrumental in getting this play before an audience after directing Keene’s play Wild Cherries at La Mama Theatre in 2019. The latter is another small independent theatre famous for launching careers. While there is a welcome sense of connection between actors and audience when seeing intimate works of this nature in small venues, it is depressing that a playwright of Keene’s stature should have been overlooked by the state companies for most of his career. The Curtain was commissioned by the MTC alongside another play, Life Without Me. Unlike the latter, which was staged in 2010, The Curtain was never performed, though it was given a reading in 2012. Part of the problem is that Keene doesn’t seem to write plays that are deemed appealing to mainstream Australian audiences. In Europe, especially France, where he was created a Chevalier de l’ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2016, it’s a different story. His works are regularly studied in schools and universities. Since 2000 there have been eighty main-stage productions of his plays and many more small-scale stagings. Keene’s work has frequently been compared to that of Samuel Beckett, another Anglophone playwright who found a home for his work in France. Like Beckett’s, Keene’s dialogue is pared back and lyrical. He has an acute ear for the absurd and a preoccupation with the existential condition. As with Beckett, you don’t go to a Keene play for a nifty plot but for poetic strength and acute psychological observations. The Curtain has both in spades. g Fiona Gruber is a commentator, profile writer, and reviewer. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Theatre
BBQ-stoppers The return of Emerald City Diane Stubbings
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Jason Klarwein and Marg Downey in Emerald City (photograph by Jeff Busby)
n the past decade there has been a welcome shift in our theatre ecology, with more main-stage companies keen to revisit classic Australian plays. Where once a new work by a local writer would have its run and then, no matter how acclaimed, disappear, we are now being given another chance to experience some of these seminal plays. While Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, Michael Gow’s Away, and anything by Patrick White have tended to be the go-to plays for companies looking to revive Australian works, recent years have seen new productions of vital Australian plays such as John Romeril’s The Floating World (Griffin, 2013) and Katherine Thomson’s Diving for Pearls (Griffin, 2017). To this suite we can now add David Williamson’s 1987 play Emerald City (first revived by Griffin Theatre in 2014 under the direction of Lee Lewis). This spirited MTC/Queensland Theatre co-production, directed by Sam Strong, marks Williamson’s retirement from playwriting. It’s a welcome celebration of his long contribution to the Australian theatre landscape. At the acme of his influence – a period that arguably began with The Perfectionist (STC, 1981) and ran until at least The Heretic (STC, 1996) – the prospect of a new Williamson play was highly anticipated. His plays not only distilled some of the formative debates we were undergoing as a nation – political corruption, financial recession, gender politics, sexual harassment – they also carved out a space on Australian stages for Australian stories. In Emerald City, Williamson has a number of targets in his sights: artistic integrity, left-wing sanctimony, cultural appropriation, and the age-old rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. At the centre of the play are Colin and Kate, a married couple who have moved from Melbourne to Sydney and who are slowly adjusting to life in ‘the pulsing, garish city to the north’. Bristly, no-nonsense Kate (Nadine Garner) works in publishing: she’s discovered an Indigenous writer whose book, Black Rage, she longs to publish, but her boss is having none of it. Colin ( Jason Klarwein) is a screenwriter. His last movie, Days of Wine 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW A P RI L 2020
and Whitlam, was a critical success, though it failed at the box office. He’s on shaky ground with his producer, Elaine (Marg Downey at her imperious best). She wants him to write the story of a father fighting criminal property developers; he wants to develop a screenplay about coastwatchers during World War II. Things go fully off the rails for Colin when he meets Mike McCord (Rhys Muldoon), a film writer/producer wannabe, who plays to Colin’s ‘monumental insecurity’, tempting him with fame, riches, and the ultimate Sydney dream: a harbour view. Where Williamson excels as a writer is in the way he ruthlessly but comically exposes the hypocrisies of his characters. If the way Williamson gets all sides of a competing debate into a room together sometimes seems contrived, he still has an unparalleled knack of focusing the BBQ-stopper conversations of the day. There are plenty of laughs, although some of the jokes have lost their edge. Strong directs at a cracking pace. The actors and the revolving set are in almost constant motion, a brisk choreography that sustains the play’s momentum even through some of its blander passages. (Had the play been written now, the unconvincing infidelity subplots are unlikely to have made the final cut.) It is all enlivened by subtle, yet stylish costume designs – with a cute nod to Kylie’s infamous ‘noughts-and-crosses’ dress – and an abstract, translucent set that sparkles and glistens like Sydney harbour on a perfect day. The performances are almost uniformly strong. Nadine Garner is proving herself to be one of Australia’s most versatile and engaging stage actors. Her Kate is whip-smart and intense, and the shifts in her attitudes – towards Sydney and its pretensions – come across as perfectly credible. Jason Klarwein’s Colin is suitably pliable and pathetic, his fragile ego easy prey to Mike’s ambitions. There’s something ‘ScoMo’-like about Rhys Muldoon’s pinpoint portrayal of Mike, the man endlessly working the room, promising the world but never delivering. In the minor role of Mike’s financier, Malcolm, Ray Chong Nee is appropriately | supercilious (although he’s too good an actor to have so little to do). The only weakness is Megan Hind in the thankless role of Helen. It’s a measure of how far we have progressed as a society that a subplot in which a young woman’s only function is to lead our hero sexually astray elicits noticeable unease and impatience in an audience. Few actors would be able to overcome such a handicap. Emerald City is a play that spoke emphatically to its time and still has much to say. While certain aspects feel dated – the denigration of television in the age of Netflix and HBO seems quaint; and, harbour views aside, the differences between Melbourne and Sydney possibly aren’t as sharp as they once were – others continue to resonate. We’re still sacrificing our ideals and our integrity in the name of fame, fortune, and real estate. Revisiting Emerald City demonstrates how much we’ve changed as a country and, crucially, how much we’ve stayed the same. What no one might have expected is the degree to which, over the past thirty years, the Mike McCords of the world – the blustering, vacant showmen – have not merely survived, but flourished. g Diane Stubbings is a Melbourne critic. A longer version of this review appears online.
Art
Deeps of the imagination The art of Robert Klippel Patrick McCaughey
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Robert Klippel in his Potts Point workshop, 1957 (photograph via TarraWarra Museum of Art)
arraWarra Museum of Art’s (TWMA) summer exhibition Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel can only reinforce his reputation as Australia’s foremost modern sculptor. Yet he lacks the public reputation of his contemporary painters – John Olsen, Fred Williams, John Brack, and so on. This exhibition may right that historic injustice. Thoughtfully curated by Kirsty Grant, it brought the three basic streams of his art – the drawings, the metal sculpture, and the monumental wood works of his final phase – into a crisp and clear narrative. From the outset, Klippel was an abstract artist. ‘Sculpture must be revolutionized without the figure,’ he declared in 1948. ‘A feeling for form’ (his phrase) remained a paramount concern throughout his career. He developed that passion in an intense campaign of drawing in Paris and London between 1947 and 1950. The drawings were exceptionally well chosen in Assembled. It’s easy to ‘over-egg the pudding’ with them, for they abound. In Paris, Klippel met André Breton, the Pope of Surrealism. Perhaps more importantly, he saw Joan Miró’s major postwar exhibition at Galerie Maeght. Miro had just completed his Constellations, in which drawing played a major role. They combined substance with a lingering sense of automatism, the hand playing at will across the sheet. Klippel seized on them as a way forward. The early drawings frequently have a sculptural frame on which free-floating shapes accrete. Collage became second nature to him as a draughtsman. When Klippel returned to Sydney in 1950, he was arguably the best informed and most accomplished abstract artist in the country. He knew leading artists in London and Paris. Furthermore, he had exhibited successfully in both cities. Sydney in the early 1950s was a backwater. Klippel exhibited with Ralph Balson, then the most widely admired abstract painter in Australia, without eliciting a single sale. The desultory art scene took its toll: he made just eighteen sculptures in 1950–57. Klippel, presciently, broadened his sculptural technique during this fallow period. He returned to the East Sydney Tech and
learned welding and other metal-making skills. In the volume accompanying Assembled, Grant notes that during this period Klippel shifted his interest from Europe to America. When he left Australia again in 1957, it was for New York; eventually he found a teaching job in Minneapolis. He saw David Smith’s retrospective at MoMA and, crucially, met the American sculptor Richard Stankiewicz, the pioneer of using junk metal as sculptural material. Klippel, whose earlier work had largely been carved in stone or wood (and very accomplished it is), now became exclusively a sculptor in metal. He transformed discarded, industrial metalwork into a fluent and expressive sculptural form. Klippel supersedes others in the field of junk sculpture by disguising so completely the origins of his materials. The driving rhythms of his metal work eliminate any past associations his material may have. The sculptures have a strangely organic quality to them – the opposite of their actual nature. In 1965 he made a sculpture from cogwheels so densely accreted (rather than assembled) that they have the effect of a coral strand, ironic and beautiful. The welded metal sculptures continue unabated throughout the 1960s and 1970s. They were products of ‘cog and bud’, as Klippel liked to describe them. They show an ease and spontaneity, clear indication of his mastery over his materials. And then, circa 1980, came the great change to his art. Klippel switched from metal to wood. Like the metal sculptures, it was discarded junk. Sometimes painted, the new material had a clumsy quality and effect, sometimes comic, sometimes mysterious. The origins of this astonishing volte-face go back to 1964, according to Grant, when his friend and fellow artist Colin Lanceley discovered in the abandoned Balmain office of an old engineering firm a basement packed with ‘thousands of obsolete dusty, spider webbed wooden patterns’. Lanceley and Klippel carried away truckloads of the material. Klippel set the new materials aside for sixteen years until the NGA ‘commissioned him for a series of bronze sculptures for outside display’. Klippel cast some of the new forms but quickly realised that the wooden patterns were an invaluable sculptural material in their own right. When he began to work directly with the wood patterns, he found that their arrangement was somehow predestined: ‘before I knew what was happening things would just gravitate … an incredible magnetism would happen … your mind would know where everything was … it was an incredible phenomenon’. To my mind, they are the pinnacle of Robert Klippel’s achievement as a sculptor. They have a playful monumentality quite different from the metal work. They create their own environment. They embrace the virtues of the old and the used, the rubbed and the scarified – wabi and sabi. They speak of a history of endurance, of work and the wornout. When the AGNSW exhibited one of the most monumental wood pieces in that long gallery that rushes towards the Harbour, its wharves and shipping, its cranes and gantries, Klippel’s sculpture seemed a participant in that world, to vie with its strength and resilience. At TarraWarra, the wood sculptures were placed in the final gallery, bathed in natural light. More than ever, the sculptures looked like the playthings of giants. It stirred the deeps of the imagination. g Patrick McCaughey is currently editing Fred Williams’s diaries for MUP. A longer version of this review appears online. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AP RI L 2020
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Fiction
From the Archive
The Plains (first published by Norstrilia Press in 1982) was Gerald Murnane’s third novel. Gerard Windsor reviewed it in the February–March 1983 issue of ABR. This review is one of myriad features from the print edition being added to our digital archive, all accessible by subscribers.
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he Plains is a book for the critic, not the mere reviewer. It is a strange creature, to be approached with care. Several omens made me cautious. My review copy reached me three months after the date of posting. It was not in mint condition. In fact, the advanced state of spinal curvature is but a bagatelle to the numerous textual annotations and underlinings. There are apparently some gremlins in Australia Post determined to regulate the vagaries of our national reviewing. Most assiduously, during my trek, I closed my eyes to their signposts. Then I found myself dallying with the novel in an eating-house. A gentleman opposite asked if what I was reading had come from Israel. I took his point. Upside down, as well as right side up, the blue cover lettering might well pass for Hebrew. The cover is an abomination. Other people may have thought so too, for the book (first edition, first printing) is also sold in a different, brown dust jacket. A friend acquired a copy and was delighted to find he had scored two dust jackets, the brown and the blue. I was warned. I suspect not many other reviewers had the same good fortune. I would hate to sound frivolous about the book, but I’m not sure we don’t have a case of the emperor’s new clothes. The solemnity of tone with which many reviewers have treated The Plains makes me doubly suspicious. I would suggest, in brief, that Gerald Murnane has written a first-rate, latter-day Gulliver’s Travels (Books Three and Four). The plains are the mind all right, but the plainsmen intellectuals. Murnane has no time for them. His plainsmen are distinguished by a solipsism that makes Bishop Berkeley sound the paragon of
convivial gregariousness. ‘How might a man re-order his conduct,’ the plainsmen dream, ‘if he could be assured that the worth of a perception, a memory, a supposition, was enhanced rather than diminished by its being inexplicable to others.’ Et passim. The paralytic sterility of so much intellectual activity is the main target of Murnane’s satire. His concoctions of nonsense are consummately done. They hang in, just this side of unreadable. The two most earnest pieces on The Plains have been by Paul Carter in The Monthly Review and John Tittensor in Meanjin. I have an uneasy feeling that Carter himself, with his interest in images of exploration, is an object of Murnane’s shafts: ‘Long treatises investigating the choice of images used by the authors of those provoking essays known as remembrances of the misremembered.’ Carter does not share my nervousness, but confidence in his judgement is more than jolted when he talks about ‘the beguiling simplicity of this prose’. In contradiction, I evidence the following (mere part of a) sentence: ‘Each behaved as though there was yet time to hear from the other a form of words acknowledging some of those possibilities that had never been realised for as long as each had despaired of arranging such things in a form of words.’ As Murnane’s stodgy, humourless, and quintessentially stupid narrator says, ‘What I could not remember was the theory arrived at in the dense final paragraphs of the article’. Et passim. Pity help the reader who tries to make sense of all the nonsense in The Plains. That way lies true citizenship of Murnane’s fantasy world. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry with the author at all the solemn microscopy. Ern lives. g
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