Australian Book Review, November 2020 issue, no. 426 by Australian Book Review

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Alan Atkinson Grace Karskens’s long-awaited new history Beejay Silcox Elena Ferrante after the Neapolitan quartet James Ley A rising scream from Richard Flanagan Brenda Niall Carmen Callil revisits the past Gideon Haigh Political journalism in the age of Trump

Failures of imagination A journey from Tehran’s prisons to Australia’s immigration detention centres By HESSOM RAZAVI

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Advances Calibre Essay Prize

For the fifteenth time, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished nonfiction essay. The Prize is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner will receive $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. We welcome all kinds of essays – from the literary and the political to the experimental and the highly personal. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries close on 15 January 2021. The two winning essays will appear in successive issues of the magazine in the first half of 2020. The judges on this occasion are Sheila Fitzpatrick, Billy Griffiths, and Peter Rose. We thank Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for enabling us to present Calibre in this lucrative form.

boggles at authors’ mawkish effusions), but Geoff Raby, ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011 and author of the new book China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order (Melbourne University Press), is admirably direct. He dedicates his book to Covid-19, ‘without which it would not have been finished’. Raby does, however, remember to thank his mother, who, we learn, has reached her centenary, and ‘little Alana, who is the light’. Hugh White reviews China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order on page 14.

Sydney bounty

The University of Sydney got seriously lucky last month with two remarkable donations from philanthropists. The first was a copy of Ben Jonson’s Folio, donated by Charles Littrell and Kimberley Cartwright and described as ‘one of the most important books published in English’ by Dr Huw Griffiths, Chair of the Department of English. Porter profusions Dr Harry Melkonian, from the When the Peter Porter Poetry Prize University’s United States Studies closed on October 1, we had received a Centre, has gifted several novels and total of 1,330 entries, twenty per cent collections of short stories by William more than last year, and the biggest Faulkner, along with seventy volumes field in the competition’s seventeen-year of literary criticism relating to the history. American writer. What a trove for Judging is now underway. We look William Faulkner, 1954 (Carl van Vechten, future scholars and students. forward to publishing the five shortLibrary of Congress/Wikimedia Commons) As it happens, Paul Giles (our listed poems in the January–February Critic of the Month in the December 2021 issue. issue) is reviewing Michael Gorra’s new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (Liveright), for the same Covid and the light issue. Gorra, an English professor at Smith College, considers The seemingly endless lockdown has been good for one thing at least: literacy, with the odd libation. What else has there been Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the twentieth century, and he’s not alone. In The Saddest Words – part biograto do – especially in cloistered Victoria – but to read and write phy, part literary history – he re-evaluates Faulkner’s life and (and replenish one’s cellar)? Book dedications can be wonderfully saccharine (Advances [Advances continues on page 6]

The ABR Podcast On the page, ABR hosts one of the country’s most lively and thoughtful cultural conversations; the new podcast is a warm-hearted invitation to join in. Beejay Silcox AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Australian Book Review November 2020, no. 426

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., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital 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 Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020) Monash University Interns Vivian Lai-Tran, Elizabeth Streeter

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $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 Cover Image The Razavi family aboard a naval vessel in Karachi Harbour, Pakistan, 1979 Cover design Jack Callil

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Volunteers Clancy Balen, Alan Haig, John Scully Image credits and information Page 27: The burnt remains of trees and vegetation two months after the January 2019 Bushfires on Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia. (CB_Walks/Alamy Stock Photo) 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

ABR November 2020 LETTERS

Peter McPhee, Johanna Leggatt, Kate Hegarty

HISTORY

7 18

Alan Atkinson Brenda Niall

People of the River by Grace Karskens Oh Happy Day by Carmen Callil

UNITED STATES

Gideon Haigh

Rage by Bob Woodward

COMMENTARY

12 24 39 50 54

Martin Munz Tony Hughes-d’Aeth Hessom Razavi Joshua Black David Holmes

Slurring a good name Thinking in a regional accent Failures of imagination A tribute to a pioneering Labor feminist Listening to the science

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

13 47 48 52 53 58

Iva Glisic The Other Side of Absence by Betty O’Neill David Trigger The Power Broker by Michael Gawenda John Tang The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter Kate Crowcroft Show Me Where It Hurts by Kylie Maslen Margaret Robson Kett Lioness by Sue Brierley Robert Dessaix The SS Officer’s Armchair by Daniel Lee

CHINA

Hugh White

Nicholas Jose

China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order by Geoff Raby The China Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper

INDONESIA

Ken Ward

Man of Contradictions by Ben Bland

ENVIRONMENT

Saskia Beudel Andrew Fuhrmann

Wild Nature by John Blay English Pastoral by James Rebanks

POEMS

22 46 56

Judith Bishop Sarah Day Toby Fitch

‘Portraits of the Future’ ‘To Hassan’ ‘New Work Metaphorics’

FICTION

28 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

James Ley Beejay Silcox Georgia White Declan Fry Sonia Nair Nicole Abadee Rose Lucas Anna MacDonald Susan Wyndham

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante Flyaway by Kathleen Jennings Inside Story by Martin Amis Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna Dreams They Forgot by Emma Ashmere Honeybee by Craig Silvey All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton

INTERVIEW

38 57

Craig Silvey Judith Bishop

Open Page Poet of the Month

POETRY

James Antoniou

Three new poetry collections

POLITICS

Nadia David

How to Win an Election by Chris Wallace

POPULAR SCIENCE

Danielle Clode

A Letter to Layla by Ramona Koval

ARTS

61 62 63

Ian Dickson Dennis Altman Tim Byrne

Wonnangatta The Boys in the Band Ratched

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Jill Kitson

The World of Charmian Clift by Charmian Clift AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

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legacy and re-examines the junctures of race and literature in works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! Jamesians will recall Professor Gorra’s previous book, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece, a masterly study (so to speak) of James’s great novel The Portrait of a Lady.

ABR Arts returns

Warily, distantly, with masks and perspex aplenty, theatre is beginning to emerge again after these plague times. How good it is to be able to run Ian Dickson’s review of the new production of Angus Cerini’s play Wonnangatta (Sydney Theatre Company). While nothing is possible as yet in Melbourne, elsewhere we hear of tentative plans for stagings with restricted capacities. We’ll get used to the new protocols, the distancing – anything for some live theatre and music. Opera returns to Adelaide this month with a welcome revival of Richard Mills’s opera Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, with a libretto by Peter Goldsworthy and a new production by Joseph Mitchell. Advances fondly remembers the Victoria State Opera production back in 1996. The cast includes Dim-

Gotcha moments

Thanks for your comment. I certainly agree that not all journalists are of the same calibre, but, of course, we could say that of any profession. Let me be absolutely clear that my central argument was about the impact of the specific nature of Twitter on working writers and journalists. For the purposes of the argument, it was important to assume a certain level of professionalism in the broader industry sense. The questions of whether the lockdown has resulted in a positive outcome for Victoria (few would argue it hasn’t) or whether journalism has become routinely shoddy are, indeed, interesting ideas, but they belong in separate comment pieces. Surely, it is possible to disagree with what some reporters 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Ania Walwicz (1951–2020)

Vale to the highly individual poet, writer, and teacher Ania Walwicz, who died recently on 29 September, aged sixty-nine. Walwicz published seven books, including Boat, which won the 1990 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Born in Poland, she emigrated to Australia in 1963, where she would go on to inspire a generation of writers through her writing, performances, and the thirty years she spent teaching students at RMIT.

Letters

Dear Editor, Yes, much of the twittering is the unpleasant expression of rage from all sides, especially when emotions are running as high as during the ‘lockdown’ in Melbourne. The shortcoming of Johanna Leggatt’s excellent but needlessly defensive article is that she assumes ‘journalists’ to be equally responsible and diligent professionals (‘The Problem of Belonging: The Twitter Mob Is a Threat to Writers and Journalists’, ABR, October 2020). They aren’t. Much of the reporting on the lockdown has been lopsided opinion (rather than reporting) and selfindulgent searching for ‘gotcha’ moments. If the Andrews government had followed the advice of most journalists, rather than that of epidemiologists, we would now be in a UK-style situation, with soaring rates of infection. Peter McPhee (online comment)

Johanna Leggatt replies:

ity Shepherd, Antoinette Halloran, and Elizabeth Campbell. Richard Mills will conduct the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Half the seats in the brand-spanking-new Her Majesty’s Theatre will be filled – an audience of five hundred. Ben Brooker will review Summer of the Seventeenth Doll for ABR. Meanwhile, the plethora of television drama is unchecked. In our back pages, Dennis Altman reviews the tense-making new Netflix adaptation of Mart Crowley’s lacerating play The Boys in the Band, while Tim Byrne revisits Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and appraises the gory new miniseries Ratched.

extract from press conferences and churn into commentary, but believe more broadly in the journalist’s right to do her work without death threats or trolling on Twitter.

Parsing Donald Trump

Dear Editor, I have been searching for some incisive analysis of the contemporary moment in the age of Donald Trump and I have finally happened upon it in Gideon Haigh’s review of Bob Woodward’s book Rage (ABR, Book of the Week, October 2020). Haigh nails phenomena that I have been unable to parse. Woodward, he states, ‘keeps straining to interpret Trump by the light of previous presidents’. That’s what it is, and it’s not limited to commentary on the Trump ‘administration’. The same could be said about the UK Tories and Brexit. This is why so much analysis seems to function as obfuscation. ‘[F]inding that facts here have no purchase,’ says Haigh, ‘Woodward is reduced to pointless imprecations.’ This practice is what I have repeatedly witnessed in political commentary and it is very helpful to have it named and explained so well. We haven’t been here before, certainly not in my lifetime. We need to name and explain things in order to develop a fitting response. Kate Hegarty (online comment)

Correction

In Timothy J. Lynch’s review in the October issue, we nominated John Mueller as one of Donald Trump’s opponents. We meant Robert Mueller.

History

Patterns of movement A profound and risky history Alan Atkinson

People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia by Grace Karskens

Allen & Unwin $39.99 pb, 686 pp

said, the nation’s moral community ‘must be re-created in speech, writing and action’, a process involving ‘both moral and practical reasoning about the coexistence of settler and indigenous cultures’. These things take time, but in 2017 the Uluru Statement from the Heart offered another vital clue, with its sketch of the ‘ancient sovereignty’ of the First Nations ‘[shining] through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’. That declaration seemed to match and balance Mabo. ‘Sovereignty’ is a word rich enough to feed a century of history writing. Altogether then, the Uluru Statement is an invitation to Australian historians to move beyond the increasingly impoverished nationalism characteristic of much historical writing, left or right, since the 1960s. Collective sovereignty grows from individual sovereignty; the two are best explored together. On top of that, Indigenous sovereignty is hard to reconcile in any thoroughgoing way with older history-writing. Such ancient sovereignty, as I understand it, is really timeless sovereignty, and history-writing, as practised so far, is all about time. This is where Karskens does so well. She explores sovereignty within circumstance – intimate, tangible, and spiritual – combined so as to draw together

race Karskens’s previous book, The Colony (2009), which dealt with Sydney and the Cumberland Plain during the first years of invasion, was one of the great books about the early colonial period in Australia. People of the River is just as important but more profound and risky. In both, Karskens has found ways, brilliantly original ways, of taking in entire populations, and she is particularly good with webs of human connection and patterns of movement. Her focus on multi-centred relationship belongs to the twenty-first century, an age which is beginning to rethink the human individual as an interlinked being, a creature shaped by circumstance and by connection. The river of the title is the Hawkesbury and its tributary, the Nepean, which together cut a crescent around Sydney on a roughly sixty-kilometre radius. The people of this new book are those who lived within easy reach of that noble watercourse from the 1790s into the first half of the nineteenth century. To quote the subtitle, these people, black and white, represent for us lost worlds. So many generations stand between us and them. We cannot escape the ebb and flow of generational time. As generations multiply between the present and some significant point in the past, its people become almost figments of imagination. We can hardly believe in any palpable connection with our grandparents’ grandparents as agents in their own right. They are figures in a dream. Boating party showing a steam launch docked on the shoreline on the Nepean River That loss has profound moral implications (NSW State Archives Collection 4481_a026_000808/Wikimedia Commons) for understanding the invasion experience. Any kind of travel to those worlds calls for a particular effort of moral imagination. However, the journey, at least time and timelessness. In short, People of the River is a marvellous for the non-Indigenous, has begun to be mapped over the past pioneering effort. thirty years. First, there was the High Court’s 1993 judgment on the question of native land title in Australia, which brought ince the 1990s, frontiers of invasion have been reimagined traditional Indigenous possession within the reach of the Comas contact zones, spaces of coexistence, in Rowse’s words, mon Law. In Mabo’s aftermath, Tim Rowse offered in Meanjin characterised by violence but also by other interactions, (1994, volume 52) an important argument about its implications complex and contradictory, between invaders and Indigenous beyond land rights and for Australian ‘moral community’ as a people. This was the line taken by the High Court judgment in whole. This he defined as ‘a dimension of the imagined commu- Wik (1996), which gave legal basis to the shared use of land, pasnity that is nationhood’s cultural basis’. In the wake of Mabo, he toral and Indigenous, in certain places. It is also in line with the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

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Among the settler population, such separation was common. dwindling of moral absolutism, the stark and sweeping moral assessments that have hitherto characterised many accounts of the Governor King and his wife left children in England, and John invasion process. People of the River is a highly detailed attempt and Elizabeth Macarthur sent all their sons off at about seven to understand the implications for one important contact zone. years old. This was deliberate planning, in which prudence, inIn combating moral absolutism, Karskens also makes a point of cluding the need for education, took priority over feeling, just as it proving the continuous existence of Indigenous life and attach- often did in the choice of marriage partners. Through separation, settler parents retained control of families and culture, but then ment, through invasion and beyond. ‘We can only begin to grasp … the human story of the con- they imposed a radical break on Indigenous parents. If sovereignty tact zone,’ Karskens says, ‘by recognising the interlaced nature is a question affecting all aspects of life, this was another invasion of the events, places, actions and words that were recorded, and of sovereignty, but Indigenous parents might not have seen by interrogating, as best we can, the evasions and silences in the straightaway what they were losing. The overall shape of the records.’ Place is a crucial ingrebook points to its deeper purdient because, as Karskens says, pose. It starts with a detailed by grounding events in place summary of local archaeologiinstead of ‘extracting and abcal research, proving a range of stracting’ them from place, their pre-invasion activity unusually deeper significance emerges. varied for such a small area, Ultimately, too, it is not place with a good deal of adaptation she means but the perception and invention over the long of place and human connecterm. The river was a source of tion with place, including, of abundance, especially yams and course, Indigenous connection fish, and throughout the area as with Country. In this book, a whole there are clear signs of everything keeps coming back ceremonial performance, tool to place. There are several useful manufacturing, and creative maps, but taken as a whole the activity, especially rock art. Karhard-and-fast truth offered by Grace Karskens ( Joy Lai) skens draws this mass of detail maps fades before the slippery into an ethnographic pattern, manifold truths found in daily so that ancient sovereignty shines through clearly. understanding. The same sort of thing happens at the end of the book, but In Karskens’s contact zone, people deal with each other in an infinite variety of ways. Two chapters deal specifically with on a different key. The archaeological material has shown the the details of family life, one for the immigrants and the other landscape as a repository of power and knowledge, and of that for the Indigenous peoples of the river. Among the settlers, the there are constant reminders throughout the book. So far it has generational cycle of marriage and childbirth drew many disparate been mostly determined by the river, but towards the end the individuals – free immigrants, former soldiers, and ex-convicts, reader is drawn into the deep maze of the hills that overshadow and then the locally born – into ‘one people’. Part of the argument the river, the Blue Mountains, whose vast intricacies dumbfoundhere is statistical, making use of church marriage records, so as to ed all comers. Karskens’s story as a whole stresses the shared show how this interweaving happened, but the story as a whole humanity of black and white, and nothing could make the point depends on deft movement backwards and forwards between more strongly than the way that the mountains affected them all. So Karskens moves finally to outline the impact of invasion the general and the particular, between customary behaviour, which can be fairly obvious, and the deeply felt needs and ob- on deeper existential understanding among the First Peoples. We ligations of named individuals, which are usually much harder have been shown, as she says, an ‘astonishing sacred landscape’, to make out. The tracing of individual lives over many years is obvious in ‘repeated patterns of sighting, sightlines, sequences and central to the method. It works so well partly because everything motifs’. She links this landscape to the historical evidence in order to show how belief evolved to deal with the shock of invasion. is small in scale. Karskens’s account of Indigenous family life is very different, It is a remarkable story in itself, wonderfully new. We are left because, on the contrary, it is a story of relationships destroyed and with the awe-inspiring image of the eagle of the mountains, networks broken up. Murder is part of the story, especially in the fixed on rock face and hovering over Country, pinpointing Grace early years. So is the separation of children from their parents, exem- Karskens’s overall portrayal, her method and singular achieveplified by Governor Macquarie’s Native Institution at Parramatta, ment. g where Indigenous children, some from the Hawkesbury, were educated. The emotions of parents whose children were there at the Alan Atkinson is an honorary senior research fellow at the Unibeginning seem mixed, and the reader might wonder how much versity of Western Australia. The third and final volume of his of their grief was due to the initial separation and how much to book, The Europeans in Australia, won the Victorian Prize for Litthe realisation over time that children taken in this way might erature 2015 and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. be lost altogether. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

United States

‘You really drank the Kool-Aid’ What price political journalism? Gideon Haigh

Rage

by Bob Woodward

Simon & Schuster $39.95 hb, 452 pp

om Lehrer famously believed that Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Prize for Peace rendered satire impossible. Has Donald Trump’s presidency made the same true of political journalism? This may sound counterintuitive. After all, Trump has been a boon for news outlets and book publishing, as well as for social media. Bob Woodward’s Rage sold 600,000 copies in its first week. And that the dean of White House scribes herein abandons his trademark disinterest and pronounces authoritatively that ‘Trump is the wrong man for the job’ has been treated as news in itself. Yet so what? In the four years that Trump has acted as America’s id,

journalists have repeatedly demonstrated that he is cruel, mendacious, vain, venal, and colossally ignorant – confirming more or less what anyone could tell after listening to Trump for five minutes. Yet for all that stupendous effort, they have hardly shifted the dial by a degree, any more than seven million cases of Covid-19 and 200,000 deaths have. Rage, sadly, hints why. Woodward’s stock-in-trade is the heavily ‘reported’, privilegedaccess, semi-official version of events, halfway between journalism and history, in which everyone gets their say, usually on a non-attribution ‘deep background’ basis. He departed from that slightly for Fear (2018), his account of the first half of Trump’s term, because Trump would not speak to him. He departs from it here, too, because Trump does.

In the four years that Trump has acted as America’s id, journalists have repeatedly demonstrated that he is cruel, mendacious, vain, venal, and colossally ignorant Rage becomes an uneasy mix of classic Woodward, in which the state’s flawed but noble servants wrestle with events and nobody comes off too badly, and new-formula Woodward, as the journalist sits through seventeen ‘interviews’ in which Trump rambles disconnectedly about obsessions that sometimes do not last the duration of a sentence.

Donald Trump fields questions regarding comments he made to Bob Woodward that downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, 10 September 2020. (Michael Reynolds/Newscom/Alamy Live News) 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

The first half is mainly Jim Mattis (former secretary of de- invokes Antifa: ‘Antifa, an abbreviation for “Anti-fascist”, is a fense), Rex Tillerson (former secretary of state), and Dan Coats decentralised movement. It is not an organisation and does not (former director of national intelligence) experiencing the ‘almost have a leader or membership dues.’ He tries introducing concepts irresistible call to presidential service’ and living to regret it, ground like ‘white privilege’, which simply cause Trump to laugh: ‘You already thoroughly traversed by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you.’ He in A Very Stable Genius (2020). In the second half, Woodward is tries pleading with Trump to pivot, to come up with a vision or a mainly just a dutiful stenographer, occasionally remarking on the plan, even offering the president his own Woodrow Wilsonesque ‘vague, directionless nature of Trump’s comments’, the ‘madden- fourteen-point list of Covid policy objectives, which merely elicits ing, convoluted dodging’, the ‘stream-of-consciousness grievance’, Trump’s condescension: ‘I’m glad you told me.’ the ‘rambling, repetitious, often defensive and angry monologues’. Which, to be sure, they are, but they are nothing we have Trump unplugged sounds the same as Trump not heard before. Yes, prepare to be amazed. Trump unplugged plugged: scatterbrained, grandiose, selfsounds almost exactly the same as Trump plugged: scatterbrained, pitying, a fashioner of sentences that collapse grandiose, self-pitying, a fashioner of sentences that collapse under the weight of their incoherence if they extend beyond five under the weight of their incoherence words, two of which will usually be ‘tremendous’ or ‘unbelievable’. In listening so attentively, however, Woodward fails to hear Rage comes with a citation from the venerable Robert Caro something integral to Trump’s appeal. calling Woodward a ‘great reporter’ who has ‘never stopped Not for Trump the self-protecting cloak of ‘deep back- seeking out facts’. But finding that facts here have no purchase, ground’. He rings Woodward at all hours of the day and night, Woodward is reduced to pointless imprecations: ‘It’s a matter of and either brags (‘Here’s the the heart and the spirit.’ Trump thing: I’m never wrong’; ‘You comes back, quite rightly, with: know they talk about the élite. ‘You don’t understand me.’ Really, the élite. Ah, they have At last, Woodward sags: ‘We nice houses. No. I have much were speaking past each other, better than them. I have better almost from different unieverything than them, inverses.’ cluding education’) or bitches It is incidental comments (‘I have done a tremendous in Rage that are most incisive. amount for the Black comOf Trump’s relationship with munity. And, honestly, I’m not truth, Coats says: ‘To him a feeling any love’; ‘I have oppolie is not a lie. It’s just what he sition like nobody has. And thinks.’ Of Trump’s objectives, that’s okay. I’ve had that all Covid guru Anthony Fauci my life’). Sure, Trump’s brain observes: ‘His sole purpose is is a garbage fire. But even a to get re-elected.’ Of Trump’s garbage fire supplies warmth. party, his creepily cynical sonTrump is a phony all right: in-law Jared Kushner observes: the heir to a fortune who ‘The Republican Party was a might as well have invested collection of tribes.’ Trump, Bob Woodward (Lisa Berg/Simon & Schuster) it in government bonds for argues Kushner, has galvanised all his commercial acumen, them: ‘I don’t think it’s even but who nonetheless poses as a business genius; the self-styled about the issues. I think it’s about the attitude.’ In which case, strongman who prevaricates and postures rather than makes what price political journalism, except as just another alternative actual decisions; the self-professed drainer of the swamp who in the market of attitudes? has simply merged it with his own swamp of overt and covert Emerson spoke of democracy as being ‘a government of bullies self-dealing. But the act is defiantly real, which to many makes tempered by editors’. But the message of Rage is that we are well him a refreshing antidote to decades of manipulation by machine past that stage, and that after penning twenty books Woodward is politics and dirty dynasties (Bush, Clinton et al.). Every now just another voice persuasive to no one not already persuaded, and and again, there’s some cluster-fiasco – a bald-faced lie, a crude that a president widely acknowledged to be an incompetent and betrayal, a blown whistle, a legal snafu. Yet it blows over, or is dis- ill-informed monomaniac who has subverted every democratic lodged by the next scandal du jour. Trump carries on like nothing and institutional norm he has touched stands every chance of has changed, and the impression is: he’s indestructible, he’s our re-election in November. In which case, what would become guy. impossible is dystopian fiction. g This never seems to dawn on Woodward, who keeps straining to interpret Trump by the light of previous presidents. He Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for thirty-four years, and tries fact checking, such as his earnest annotation when Trump now works mainly for The Australian and The Times. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Comment

Slurring a good name The pitfalls of careless scholarship Martin Munz

Hirsch Munz (courtesy of Martin Munz)

ecently a large cockroach appeared on the reputation and memory of my late father, Hirsch Munz (HM), suggesting that he was the mastermind of a second Soviet spy ring, not exposed in the Petrov Affair, from the time he was placed in Australia by Soviet military intelligence in the late 1920s to the 1950s. Despite this slur, he was a good man: his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry outlines his contributions to Australian agricultural science and to English and Yiddish letters. My father having died in 1978, there is no legal recourse to counter this untrue, gratuitous, and defamatory speculation about him. Fortunately, a historian friend alerted me to these allegations in John Fahey’s book Traitors and Spies: Espionage and corruption in high places in Australia, 1901–50 (Allen & Unwin, 2020) before they were publicised in an illustrated article in the Melbourne Herald Sun, its companion podcast, and an interview on ABC Radio. I was therefore able to promptly deny the allegations in the next day’s edition of that paper. The publicity hook for Traitors and Spies is a conspiracy theory that supposes a cell of Melbourne Jewish businessmen allegedly led by HM. Notwithstanding that the book details the remarkable career of David John Morris, an Australian army officer and non-Jewish member of the supposed cell, and his subsequent life in Moscow, it is the Jewish character of the cell that has featured in media publicity. From these events, a few lessons might be gleaned about the pitfalls of careless historical scholarship compounded by media spin. When he arrived in Melbourne in 1927, HM was a scholarly young man who had been educated in a Jewish high school in the recently reconstituted Poland. He was a product of the Yiddish language cultural movement and Labour Zionism, and his interests were literary and scientific. He rapidly gained Australian university qualifications and tutoring appointments, along with wool-classing studies and employment in research with CSIRO. From the 1930s to the 1960s, he was involved in both English and Yiddish literary projects, including little magazines (notably Meanjin and Manuscripts). He reviewed in newspapers including the Bulletin, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald, as well as co-founding the Australian Jewish Historical Society and publishing original research, with his CSIRO colleagues, on wool. HM’s knowledge of other European languages informed his literary work. He was a significant contributor to the Australian

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expression of the two major cultural movements in twentiethcentury Jewish life. One was the modern Yiddish language movement, the other the developing modern secular Hebrew language that was bound into Zionism. Zionism, notwithstanding its many socialist factions, rejected the universalist theory and practice of communism. Instead it prioritised a political theory and practice of Jewish emancipation. HM’s intellectual and cultural formation precluded him from communism. The thought of him being an illegal deep-cover GRU (Soviet military) operative is illogical. Unfortunately, these distinctions about Jewish people were lost on the Australian security organisations of the early and mid-twentieth century, reflecting the anti-Semitic prejudices and stereotyping commonly held at that time. For them Jew=Zionism=Communism. John Fahey – misreading and mis-citing the documentary record of Australian security organisations in the National Archives of Australia, yet taking them at face value and seemingly not noticing pervasive anti-Semitic stereotyping – comes to the speculative conclusion that what Melbourne needed was a second spy ring made up of mainly Jewish businessmen, and that HM was the man who had led it. Of the many facts contradicting this conspiracy theory, a definitive one is that HM was not resident in Melbourne for the key period that this scenario requires. He and his Melbourne ring could not have been the source of the Ultra (highly sensitive intelligence derived from breaking high-level German codes generated by Enigma machines) decrypts leaking to the Soviets. By the author’s own account, the Melbourne ring only used human couriers (indicative of HM’s superior ‘tradecraft’). But human couriers could not have moved the intelligence that HM (living and working in Brisbane) was supposedly stealing from his top-secret naval intelligence unit in Brisbane out of Melbourne in a timely fashion for the Soviets to leak it to the Japanese. Historians who have reviewed Fahey’s book have expressed reservations about the precipitate historical imagination that leads to conclusions that can’t be substantiated. The use of terms like ‘intelligence perspective’ and ‘credible raw intelligence’ serves to justify improbable assertions in which the absence of information is supposedly evidence of an offence – in this case tantamount to treason, a capital offence at the time. Records from a notably flawed, byzantine arrangement of security organisations often engaged in internecine bureaucratic warfare, which the author has criticised freely in two recent books, are taken as prima-facie evidence of the facts – this in the face of the well-accepted practice in the historical profession that records, and the information therein, require contextualisation and nuanced treatment. One can only do so much when faced with a historical misrepresentation of a loved and respected parent, colleague, or friend that bears little resemblance to the character and conduct of that person. Defamation only protects the reputations of the living. There is no legal recourse for the heirs or estate of the deceased to protect his or her reputation, name, or image from defamation or unlicensed commercial exploitation. Australian law should recognise such a right. Until that time, historians and their publishers need to meet a higher standard than was demonstrated in Traitors and Spies. g Martin Munz is an artist and a former lawyer. Sheila Fitzpatrick reviewed Traitors and Spies in our October issue ❖

Memoir

The histories that shape us In search of the author’s father Iva Glisic

The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets by Betty O’Neill

Ventura Press $32.99 pb, 324 pp

he realisation that our parents are not exactly who we understood them to be can be a profound rite of passage. For some it comes with no forewarning: a random event leads to an accidental disclosure, or substantiates an old rumour. For others this realisation takes shape in a less acute though no less transformative manner. With The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets, Betty O’Neill pieces together her family history in an effort to learn more about her father, a stranger she briefly encountered when she was nineteen. What began as an innocuous exercise at a writers’ retreat would evolve into a three-year research project through which the author uncovers the riveting story of Antoni Jagielski – resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, unsettled postwar migrant, and absent father. Structured around three main sections, The Other Side of Absence is at once a family history, a fieldwork diary, and a personal journal. O’Neill opens with an account of her own formative years, foregrounding the challenges her mother, Nora, faced as a single parent in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s, before turning to the story of her father. A member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II, Antoni was captured by the Germans in 1941 but miraculously survived four years in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Mauthausen–Gusen. After the war ended, he joined the remains of the Polish army under British command in Italy and eventually transferred to England as a political refugee. In London in 1953, he would meet Nora, who had travelled from Australia for a working holiday. The couple soon married and moved to Australia with their newborn daughter. Their life as an Australian family would, however, prove short-lived: almost as soon as they arrived, Antoni disappeared. O’Neill would reconnect with her father as an adult briefly and sporadically in the months leading up to his final return to Poland in 1974, with these awkward encounters reinforcing a sense that he would forever remain a stranger to her. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so too does the human mind. Lingering on the margins of her consciousness for decades, O’Neill’s urge to fill in the missing details of her father’s story became all-consuming in the spring of 2011 with Nora’s death. The book’s second section is anchored in her desire to reconstruct Antoni’s life, a process that begins with just a pair of old photographs, complemented by a few identification documents found among her mother’s possessions. Fortunately, this modest body of evidence proves sufficient, and in this sense the book owes a

great deal to the intellectual infrastructure upon which it rests. This includes Polish organisations that safeguard the history of what was the largest national group of migrants to Australia after World War II, Jewish archives and museums across the country, local historical societies, and, ultimately, Australia’s strong tradition of academic research into the history of migration. Certainly, The Other Side of Absence demonstrates the vital role that these knowledge networks play whenever we seek to uncover and understand our past. O’Neill’s investigation culminates in a research trip to Poland, which takes place predominantly in the eastern city of Lublin, where Antoni had been raised. Here the author seeks to untangle the story of her father’s wartime life, along with that of his other family – a wife and daughter he had been forced to leave behind. In joining a resistance movement loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London, Antoni became a target of both the Germans and the Soviets. After the war ended, his military past made it dangerous for him to return to communist Poland. Yet, as O’Neill discovers, her father managed to remain in contact with his Lublin family throughout his years in Britain and Australia, and ultimately reunited with them after thirty-three years in exile. This dramatic account of two antipodal families – one in Poland, the other in Australia – connected by the figure of an absent father is, however, somewhat burdened by descriptions of the research process itself. Indeed, the rigmarole that frequently underpins historical research, from locating sources and interpreters to dealing with uncooperative archivists, too often interrupts an otherwise intriguing central narrative. Elsewhere, broad descriptions of what is an immensely complex and still contested history undermine the effort to contextualise Antoni’s story. This leaves critical points in the narrative unresolved, including the question of how political circumstances permitted Antoni to return to (still-communist) Poland in the mid-1970s, a time when members of the Polish resistance movement were still treated with suspicion. In also omitting any critical engagement with the politics of memory, O’Neill’s account misses the opportunity to explore how attitudes towards personal and official memories of World War II have shifted over time. In the book’s final section, the focus returns to Australia and the author’s mental, moral, and emotional effort to make sense of what she had learned in Poland, and her own position within this intricate web of familial ties.The figure of the father O’Neill discovers is someone who remains difficult for her to connect with: a wartime hero, a survivor of unimaginable atrocities, but also a master of disguise and obfuscation, whose allegiances often remain ambiguous. The desire to discover her father does, however, ultimately forge a new sense of belonging and historical grounding: both through her discovery of an extensive Polish family (her father had five siblings) and her participation in the communities established by families of Holocaust survivors. An honest and emotional account of how families shape us even in their absence, O’Neill’s story will be a treat for those partial to family histories, and provides a timely reminder of how our personal circumstances are so profoundly shaped by global events. g Iva Glisic is the author of The Futurist Files: Avant-garde, politics, and ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

China

Evasive manoeuvres

Fudging the complexities of our relations with China Hugh White

China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order by Geoff Raby

Melbourne University Press $34.99 pb, 240 pp

cott Morrison does not like to explain the decisions he makes on our behalf. Sometimes he just refuses to discuss them, as he did when, as immigration minister, he simply rejected any questions about how his boat-turnback policy was being implemented at sea. At other times he is a little subtler, as he has been this year while presiding over what will probably prove to be the most consequential shift in Australia’s foreign relations in decades. The collapse in relations with our most powerful Asian neighbour and most important trading partner is not just Canberra’s doing, of course; it has resulted from decisions made in Beijing too. But Australia’s recent and current choices have certainly contributed to the chill, and our future choices will do much to determine where things go from here. Our prime minister evades any serious discussion of these choices with a simple but powerful rhetorical manoeuvre. He denies that he is making any choices, because the issues at stake mean that he, and we, have no real alternatives to the policy he is adopting. He justifies this by claiming that those issues engage our interests, our values, and our sovereignty, and as such are nonnegotiable. Any course of action other than the one he has chosen would fatally compromise this inviolable trinity, and would be an unthinkable betrayal of our country. Thus, he implies, there really is no choice for any decent patriotic Australian but to accept what he has done. Like many invocations of patriotism, this approach appeals to our mental laziness by falsely simplifying issues that are inescapably complex. When Morrison says that he has been defying Beijing to defend our national interests, he pretends that all our interests lie on the same side of the argument. This is, of course, false. While some of our interests might be served by defying Beijing’s ambitions at the cost of harmonious relations, others push in the opposite direction. Likewise with our values. Our support for democracy and human rights is an important part of who we are, but so is our support for peace and stability. Our challenge, in judging how to respond to the extraordinary transformation of our international environment caused by China’s rise, is to find the best balance between these competing interests and values. That involves tough choices which are immensely significant for Australia’s future, because they have huge consequences for our security and prosperity. Morrison plays down these consequences. When he invokes Australia’s sovereignty to justify his decisions, he implies that being sovereign means we have the right to do as 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

we choose without repercussions. That is not true. As a sovereign nation we can certainly do as we wish, but we have to live with the outcomes of our choices, including those imposed on us by more powerful states. How to deal with the rise of China is one of the biggest questions Australia has ever faced. When such big questions loom, real political leaders explain the choices we face, the options we have, the results of different decisions, and what they think the best course will be. Weak political leaders refuse to do any of this, and often, like Scott Morrison, they dress up their weakness as doughty patriotism.

Scott Morrison does not like to explain the decisions he makes on our behalf When that happens, others must step forward to nurture a serious national debate about what we should do. Geoff Raby is unusually well qualified to contribute to this vital work. He knows a lot about China, having worked there both as a diplomat, including a distinguished stint as ambassador to Beijing, and as a businessman. This is a rare combination; while plenty of our senior diplomats retire to cushy seats on major company boards, few dive into the rough and tumble of entrepreneurship the way Raby has done. Raby approaches the challenges of Australia’s relations with China with deep knowledge of Australia and its foreign policy, and a hands-on feel for the complexities and subtleties of China today. Few participants in our fractious and often ill-informed China debate can match this. Moreover, in government Raby worked mostly on trade policy, and trade specialists like him are a breed apart from other diplomats. They still show something of the spirit of Robert Menzies’ formidable trade minister John McEwen, and the remarkable cohort of public servants who under ‘Black Jack’ McEwen’s leadership did so much to make Australia the great trading nation it is today. That spirit is marked by a practical and ruthlessly unsentimental approach to getting results that has little in common with the more fastidious and evasive preoccupations of mainstream diplomacy. It is the kind of approach we need to get our China policy right in the years ahead. Raby’s central argument, bluntly and often pungently expressed, is that China is here to stay as the strongest power in our region and the primary market for our exports, so we must learn to live and work with it. He says that Canberra’s willingness to gratuitously offend Beijing is based on a mistaken belief that the old US-led world order will persist despite China’s rise and that China will have to accept this and work within the constraints this order imposes on it. That is wrong, Raby claims, because there is already a new global order, which China is playing a leading part in designing and creating. Canberra is deluded to think that Australia can help restore the status quo by lining up to support the United States in its escalating efforts to contain China. It must instead learn to position itself to prosper within this new order. This requires a new posture, both more independent of the United States and more closely integrated with our regional neighbours, especially in Southeast Asia. Above all, Australia must find a way to manage the major differences we have with

China in order to work constructively with it on the things that against Taiwan or to sustain a significant strategic presence in matter to us. the Western Pacific. This makes China’s position stronger, and All this is plainly true, as far as it goes, but what gives Raby’s Australia’s predicament more perilous, than Raby suggests. book its interest and importance are the ideas he offers about the kind of China we will be dealing with. He has no time for How to deal with the rise of those who blithely assume that China will stumble and fail, but China is one of the biggest questions he is equally concerned to rebut those who regard China as an Australia has ever faced all-powerful juggernaut destined to dominate the world. He draws on his experience in China to focus at length on the many limits to China’s power, including internal fragilities, hostile Likewise, although Raby refers to China as our region’s funeighbours, lack of allies, dependence on resource imports, and ture dominant power, he argues that Japan’s strength means that the way its authoritarian system alienates potential friends. He China will not be able to impose the kind of hegemony in East sees China’s grand strategy as essentially defensive, and, though Asia that the United States exercises in the Western Hemisphere he admires Beijing’s success in building new institutions and under the Monroe Doctrine. While this may once have been true, frameworks for influence, like the Asian Infrastructure Invest- credible forecasts suggest that within a decade China’s economy ment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative, he argues that the will be five times the size of Japan’s, so we cannot be sure it will new international order it seeks to construct is clearly bounded remain true in future. by its inherent weaknesses. These points do not detract from the validity of Raby’s basic These are important points. Much of the support in both Washington and Canberra for a new Cold War with China is based on ill-founded assumptions that China today, like the Soviet Union of the 1950s, is fixated on world domination. That is a serious misunderstanding both of the emerging global distribution of wealth and power, and of China’s ambitions. In correcting these misperceptions, there is a temptation to lean too far the other way and to underestimate how powerful and ambitious China might prove to be in the years to come. At times Raby succumbs to this temptation. For example, he is confident that America, though clearly weaker than it was, will remain militarily strong enough to retain a key strategic role in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and to deter China from trying to seize Taiwan by force. But this is far from clear. America’s old military strategy in Scott Morrison at the 2019 Australian Open (Cal Sport Media/Alamy Stock Photo) Asia, based on projecting power by sea with aircraft carriers and marines, has been made unworkable by China’s formidable new air and naval forces. So far there is analysis, nor from the value of his proposals for how Australia no sign of a credible new US strategy to replace the old one, or should respond. They do mean, however, that the tasks ahead of the new forces needed to implement it. Nor is it credible for of us in adapting to China’s rise will be even harder and more the United States to cover this deficiency by threatening to use important than he suggests, and that the failure of our national nuclear weapons, when China has the capacity to retaliate in leadership to address them seriously is even more reprehensible. g kind against US cities. The reality is that in a few short decades the military balance in Asia has shifted to the point that the Hugh White is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU. United States can no longer expect to win a war against China His most recent book, How to Defend Australia, was published in Asia. That means it is less able to deter Chinese aggression in 2019 by Black Inc. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

China

Tit for tat

skewers. Almost as many pages of his China journals are given to poisonous pen portraits of his compatriots as to his fumbling encounters with the world he has come to see. The book is a Missing the pattern of centuries fascinating document of frustration. Included are journals that Nicholas Jose Trevor-Roper wrote after he got home, when he and Bolt vowed that ‘nothing, nothing, nothing would ever lead us back to China’. He was determined to get even by exposing SACU as a Chinese Communist Party front. Part of his revenge was a long article for The China Journals: Ideology and Encounter, the Cold War magazine that the CIA partly funded, intrigue in the 1960s intended to expose SACU’s smoke-and-mirrors financing and by Hugh Trevor-Roper, management. ‘It is just like China itself,’ Trevor-Roper claimed. edited by Richard Davenport-Hines On legal advice, the essay was never published. It appears here along with later travel diaries from Taiwan and Cambodia and Bloomsbury relevant appendices about the dramatis personae in the farce. The $50 hb, 292 pp editor, Richard Davenport-Hines, adds a helpful introduction hen the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding and much droll annotation. Bear in mind that Trevor-Roper (SACU) invited Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Profes- was very grand and knew everyone. Here, as an example, is the sor of History at the University of Oxford, to visit editor’s note on a mention of ‘a young friend from Scotland’ China in 1965, he jumped at the chance. It was a decision that in the Encounter essay: ‘John Baillie-Hamilton, Lord Binning, all parties concerned came to regret. The eminent historian had a afterwards 13th Earl of Haddington (1941–2016), Patron of the terrible time in China, ‘that land of bigots and parrots’. He didn’t Centre for Crop Circle Studies, student of the paranormal and meet the right people. He found no intellectual equals. The in- editor-publisher of a periodical, Bird Talk, dedicated to preserving terpreters and guides assigned to the group weren’t up to the job. small songbirds from cats.’ He nicknamed them Cement-head, Duckbottom, Smooth-face, Davenport-Hines does well on the Chinese material, though and the Presbyterian. he fails to identify the ‘sensible, intelligent and civilised’ young For too much of the time, Trevor-Roper was stuck with his woman from Bristol whom Trevor-Roper meets in Xian. She fellow travellers. He bonded with playwright Robert Bolt, author told him that ‘the Chinese only want the English language of A Man for All Seasons, who and it must be entirely dihad joined at the last minute vorced from English ideas, when Vanessa Redgrave English history, English cancelled. The delegation life’. She lives in Adelaide leader, Mary Adams, BBC now. broadcaster and feminist, he Trevor-Roper joined found insufferable: ‘She has SACU out of admiration absolutely no function, no for its president, Joseph purpose here: she might just Needham, the Cambridge as well be in Surbiton.’ Her biochemist and historideputy, union activist Ernie an whose multi-volume Roberts (later a Labour MP), Science and Civilisation in was worse: ‘a narrow, comChina remains a monuplacent know-all … invulment of interdisciplinary nerable in the solid armour scholarship. Despite the of hypocrisy, philistinism ideological gulf between and double-think’. The pair them, Needham and Treannoyed Trevor-Roper by vor-Roper shared a comtheir compliance with what mitment to greater untheir Chinese hosts wanted derstanding of China. ‘Of of the group. His journals non-European civilisations Hugh Trevor-Roper signs a book for a bellman while the were his secret weapon and it was the Chinese that philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer looks on, 1950s would provide material for interested [Trevor-Roper] (Hannes Betzler/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo) the article he wrote for the most,’ Davenport-Hines Sunday Times on his return, explains. But the People’s headlined (not by him) ‘The Sick Mind of China’. So much for Republic of China (PRC) that Trevor-Roper experienced in enhanced Anglo-Chinese understanding. 1965, then in its sixteenth year and heading into the Cultural As a diarist, Trevor-Roper is naughty, nasty, smart, and Revolution, defeated his powers of analysis. He diagnoses a ‘tenfunny. In person he could be charming and he could be a boor. sion between China – historic China, Chinese society – and the In the end, he becomes as much a comic figure as the people he communist party’, but looks in vain for ‘the pattern of centuries’ to

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provide a historical key: ‘Between Czarism and Bolsheviks there is the continuity of despotism. Between Frederick the Great and Hitler there is the continuity of militarism. But between imperial China and communist China I see no continuity, only a … total, emphatic reversal.’

The eminent historian had a terrible time in China, ‘that land of bigots and parrots’ He misses how history is written in China, with each dynasty marking a new beginning. The communist era is no different. Had he lived to experience Xi Jinping’s China Dream, he would see how the history that the PRC has constructed for itself becomes a narrative from which there is no escape. It starts with the victimisation of the Opium Wars and ends with the reclamation of lost territory, from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. As I watch aghast the dismantling of Australia’s relationship with China, after five decades of careful management in our national interest, I am struck by how some things don’t change. In 1965, China was as assertive as it is today. Yet when Trevor-Roper hears the ‘hymns of hate against U.S. imperialism’ at the National Day celebrations in Beijing, he doesn’t take it too seriously. He dislikes the ‘panic fear of communism’ that he finds in Americans. He wryly notes Zhou Enlai’s use of ‘tit for tat’ as a description of the Chinese approach to diplomacy. ‘Tit for tat’ is a translation of a tougher phrase in Chinese and is a favourite of China’s Foreign Ministry to this day, as we’ve heard often of

late in relation to China and Australia. Whose tit for whose tat? When relations broke down between Needham and TrevorRoper over the SACU affair, Needham wrote sagely to his colleague: To start with an openly unfriendly, unsympathetic, provocative or merely destructively critical attitude is to be sure of not getting anywhere. I speak from long personal experience. Understanding … implies a certain friendliness, and this in turn implies a measure of humility, that quality without which intellectuals like ourselves can never get to apprehend …

Trevor-Roper had made his name with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), a work of archival detection that followed on from his wartime work with British intelligence. He was part sleuth, part spy. Four decades later, he would be wrong-footed when he declared the amateurishly forged Hitler diaries to be the real thing. In between, he produced another brilliant piece of forensic exposé, this time on an Anglo-Chinese subject. Hermit of Peking: The hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (1976) is an account of the forger and fantasist who provided the Bodleian Library with a significant part of its China collection. The historian had a feel for fakery, sometimes. g Nicholas Jose was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing, 1987–90. He recently co-edited, with Xianlin Song, Everything Changes: Australian writers and China – A transcultural anthology (UWAP 2019).

Great Australian storytellers

The diary of a woman in love and a great writer of work. ‘In some ways, the diaries are the apotheosis of her entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published.’ Literary Hub

Small-town secrets come bubbling to the surface in Garry Disher’s chilling new rural crime novel, Consolation. ‘Disher is the gold standard for rural noir.’ Chris Hammer

How might the origins of our species inform the way we think about our planet? Ramona Koval searches the globe for answers. ‘Remarkable zeal… [An] urgent book.’ Saturday Paper

New boo ks fro m Tex t Pu bli shi ng

An action plan for our future from one of Australia’s most respected climate scientists. ‘This man is a national treasure, and we should heed his every word.’ Sunday Telegraph

A weaving, beguiling new novel from Gail Jones, winner of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. ‘Beautifully written.’ Weekly Times

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19/10/20 10:25 am A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020 17

History

Sary and George

A feminist publisher revisits the past Brenda Niall

Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times by Carmen Callil

Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 348 pp

canning my bookshelves, I see a dozen or more of the distinctive green spines of Virago Press. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Virago imprint was a guarantee of good reading by women writers whose works were rediscovered and sent out to find a new public. I had read Margaret Atwood, Rosamond Lehmann, and Elizabeth Taylor for the first time in hardcovers; Virago made them new. Kate O’ Brien’s The Land of Spices, banned in Ireland, had been hard to get. Here it was in Virago green, with a perceptive introduction to put it in context. The Virago imprint dates from 1972. Its founder, Carmen Callil, is one of Australia’s most influential expatriates. Born in Melbourne in 1938, she is almost the same age as Germaine Greer. Like Greer, she started her education at Star of the Sea convent in one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Later she was taught by the Loreto nuns at Mandeville Hall in Toorak. She has described her education as intellectually good but the nuns as ‘cold, hard creatures’. Like Greer, she went on to the University of Melbourne. Before creating their public personae in a wider world, Germaine Greer and Clive James enrolled as postgraduates at Cambridge and appeared in student theatre. By contrast, Callil’s career was an impromptu solo effort, and all the more impressive for that reason. She was twenty-two when, newly arrived in London in 1960, she advertised for a job in publishing. She had only a BA from Melbourne and no credentials in the publishing industry. Her advertisement brought her a menial job with Hutchinson’s. It was only a few years later that she became a major force in British publishing. As well as playing the key part in Virago, she became founder and chair of Chatto & Windus; she was later managing director of Random House. A summary of Callil’s career might make her sound like a high-achieving establishment figure. That would leave out other qualities. She is outspoken, often a contrarian, passionately committed to ideas. A strong feminist but not easily categorised, she says that she ‘never bothered with wars about makeup or bras or “chairmen”’. She just thought, ‘get on with it’. Callil didn’t shirk literary controversy. In 1997 she publicly derided the Booker Prize-winner, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. In 2011, as a judge for the Man Booker International award, she resigned over the choice of Philip Roth. Moving away from the publishing world, Callil has taken to historical research with formidable energy. In 2006 she published Bad Faith, a passionate exposure of French anti-Semitism and 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation in World War II. This book stemmed from Callil’s witnessing of a personal tragedy: the suicide of her therapist whose father had been one of the betrayers of the French Jews. Her new book takes Callil into family history. She began by considering the intertwined stories of her forebears: English, Irish, and Lebanese who were sent or emigrated to Australia in the nineteenth century. As she worked through her material, she decided to concentrate on her mother’s family and in particular the story of her own great-great-grandmother Sary. Born out of wedlock in 1808, Sary was taken into the new family of her mother’s marriage to a journeyman framework knitter, Thomas Allen. Her story, painstakingly constructed from the minutiae of public records, shows the desperate plight of England’s labouring poor.

Callil is outspoken, often a contrarian, passionately committed to ideas Callil has read widely in place and period to expose the drudgery of the knitters in Allen’s home territory in Leicestershire. Children aged between three and seven could begin winding and sewing; at twelve they could work the frame as well as an adult. Following Sary’s story, Callil details the further cruelties of the Industrial Revolution. New machines were easier and cheaper to operate; the cottage industry was wiped out and many fell into abysmal poverty. When she was nineteen, Sary had a child with canal worker George Conquest, who was twenty-one. Probably in order to pay the ‘bastardy indictment’ which would save the parish the expense of supporting Sary and her daughter, George stole some hemp to sell. This led to a brutal period in the hulks, followed by his transportation to New South Wales under conditions of appalling cruelty. Yet George was a survivor. The story brightens when, after serving his seven years, George became a man of property; eventually he returned to England, found Sary, and was able to bring her to Australia. She was then fifty years old with a son, Alfred, who accompanied her. Although her book is a searing history of deprivation and injustice, Callil gives it the title Oh Happy Day. Bad as it was for George Conquest, he was spared the misery of England in the ‘Hungry Forties’. He and Sary settled in Melbourne in the gold rush period. On his death, Sary was left a house of her own in Prahran and some rental properties to maintain her. That might sound like a happy ending. Yet it is qualified by the likenesses that Callil finds between imperial Britain and the present-day scene, in which ‘the rich still prey on the poor’. Sary and George were the paupers, asylum seekers, and refugees of their day. Callil deplores the wilful forgetting of the past, the dismantling of the postwar social welfare system, and ‘the Brexit malady’. Australia, Callil believes, still has time to make another history – and she adds, perhaps doubtfully, ‘the English do too’. Oh Happy Day gives a voice to the voiceless and adds another major work to Carmen Callil’s formidable achievements. g Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Friends and Rivals: Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer, published by Text.

Indonesia

Indonesia’s ‘poor custodian’

is not a ‘small town’, and Jokowi was not a ‘small-town politician’. Six out of Indonesia’s seven presidents have been Javanese. The search for the real Joko Widodo The Javanese have thus had a virtual monopoly on the presidency. Jokowi was socio-economically underprivileged but not ethnically Ken Ward so. The only non-Javanese president was B.J. Habibie who, as vice-president, succeeded Suharto automatically on the latter’s resignation in 1998. Bland’s claim that Habibie was ‘appointed as an interim president’ shows some ignorance of Indonesia’s Man of Contradictions: Joko constitution. Habibie’s presidency was short-lived (1998–99), Widodo and the struggle to remake not interim, and it was Suharto alone who made Habibie’s Indonesia political career. by Ben Bland Bland stresses Jokowi’s ‘obscure’ roots, but he adds to the Penguin obscurity by not hunting down a lot of relevant data. Jokowi was $12.95 pb, 175 pp born in 1961 as the son of a ‘petty bamboo hawker’, Notomiharjo, who managed to set up a furniture workshop. We are given en Bland, a Financial Times correspondent in Indonesia Jokowi’s father’s name but not his mother’s. Bland is incurious in 2012–15 and currently director of the Southeast and uninformative about all the women around Jokowi, saying Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, had a ringside seat nothing about his three sisters and only mentioning his wife, to watch the rise of Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo (also Iriana, when she is already pregnant. We do not learn about her known as Jokowi). By his own account, Bland has met him more background, nor when they could afford to marry. than a dozen times. Jokowi was a furniture-maker and -exporter, As it happens, Solonese women are widely seen in Indonemayor of Solo, and governor of sia as capable, even feisty, and are Jakarta before being elected presreputed to be especially gifted at ident in 2014. Bland has written handling money. Tien, the wife a good introduction to the Jokowi of Indonesia’s second president, era that will appeal to the general Suharto, notoriously earned the reader but may leave the serious nickname ‘Madam Ten Percent’ student of Indonesia unsatisfied. from the commissions paid to One of Bland’s strengths is her. Iriana makes only two cameo his gift for capturing Jokowi’s appearances in the book. Wherestance at various stages. It would as her predecessor as First Lady, be hard to better Bland’s pithy Yudhoyono’s wife, Ani, played a depiction of the recent disilluleading, if background, role in his sioning years of Jokowi’s rule: presidency, we get no glimpse of ‘Jokowi has lurched back towards Iriana in the presidential palace. Indonesia’s authoritarian roots, Any purported biography of an eroding free speech and the rights Indonesian president should inof minorities [and] undermining clude at least a paragraph on his the all-important fight against or her spouse. corruption’; or, even more sucAlthough Bland visited Jokocinctly, ‘he proved a poor custowi’s furniture factory in Solo, he dian of democratic principles and did not search for any former practice’. Bland also gives the residence of his subject and fails reader a good feel for the election to mention any school that Jokowi campaigns Jokowi has waged, and attended. On leaving high school, he has useful sections or chapters Jokowi surprisingly enrolled at on foreign policy, Islamic politics, Mayor of Surakarta Joko Widodo and Vice Mayor of Surakarta Hadi one of Indonesia’s three top uniRudyatmo in wayang costumes, 2011 (Budi Santoso/Widarmoko the response to Covid-19, the versities, Gadjah Mada, to study (Government of Surakarta)/ Wikimedia Commons) economy, and infrastructure. forestry. This was a good outcome Bland offers his short book as for a former bamboo-hawker’s son. ‘the first English-language political biography’ of Jokowi. As such, Drawing uncritically upon Jokowi’s ghost-written autobioghowever, it is marred by errors and omissions. Bland, from the raphy, Bland stresses Jokowi’s economically deprived ‘backstory’. outset, refers to Jokowi as a ‘small-town politician’ or ‘small-town Yet, ten years after setting up a furniture company in 1989 and businessman’, presumably to stress his outsider status in Indone- then beginning to attend international furniture expositions, sian politics. Only on page thirty-one does he correctly describe Jokowi was wealthy enough to have his three children educated in Solo, Jokowi’s birthplace in Central Java, as a city of 500,000. Singapore. This was, in effect, Jokowi’s down payment on his entry Solo is in fact one of the most prestigious cities in Indonesia. It into Indonesia’s national élite. Bland never seems to have asked

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Jokowi why he, a nationalist, chose to send them abroad. This was, as Bland notes, ‘a luxury beyond the dreams of most Indonesians’. Jokowi made a further down payment in 2007 when an old school friend introduced him to his boss, Luhut Pandjaitan, a retired army general, former ambassador to Singapore, and minister for trade, who had extensive lumber assets. They became business partners and Luhut turned eventually into Jokowi’s right-hand man. He was probably Jokowi’s first contact who was well acquainted with national politics. As Bland almost never quotes his sources by name, we cannot say whether he interviewed Luhut. Yet Luhut’s views on Jokowi would be invaluable.

Bland stresses Jokowi’s ‘obscure’ roots, but he adds to the obscurity by not hunting down a lot of relevant data Once Jokowi was president, at some point an unnamed minister described him to Bland as ‘a bundle of contradictions’. This seems to have inspired Bland’s choice of title. Readers are likely to differ in how helpful they find this. Does this label usefully distinguish Jokowi from other national leaders, let alone human beings in general? Richard Nixon, for example, discussed diplomatic grand strategy with Mao but also oversaw a sordid burglary cover-up in Washington. Moreover, by looking only cursorily at Jokowi’s childhood and youth, Bland cannot tell us whether his alleged contradictions emerged at an early age. Here, some of Jokowi’s former fellow students at Gadjah Mada, or indeed some of his childhood acquaintances, might have shed some light. Did any of them see him as a young man of contradictions? Without such data, it is reasonable to conclude that Jokowi’s ‘contradictions’ only showed themselves when he became president. For Bland, ‘by tapping into the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of Indonesians Jokowi embodies the contradictions of these people and this nation’. But they are also ‘an embodiment of the contradictions inherent in modern Indonesia’s 75 years of history’. Did Jokowi’s six predecessors also embody these contradictions? If so, did anybody ever notice this? To this reviewer at least, it seems more plausible that much of Jokowi’s behaviour in office has shown up his inexperience in national politics and government, his lack of a stable political philosophy, and his instinctive, not reflective, approach to decision-making. In his chapter on ‘Why we keep getting Indonesia wrong’, Bland warns against the adoption of ‘mono-causal’ theories to explain Indonesia. He claims that we need to ‘embrace the contradictions at Indonesia’s heart’. But seeing Jokowi as a man of contradictions and his country as a nation of contradictions seems like another mono-causal theory that will not prevent us from occasionally getting Indonesia wrong. g Ken Ward worked for twenty-nine years in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and in the Office of National Assessments, where he was Senior Indonesia Analyst. He was commissioned by the Lowy Institute to write a Penguin Special on the Australia–Indonesia relationship, which appeared as Condemned to Crisis? in 2015. ❖

Environment

Chequerboard forests Walking with intent Saskia Beudel

line plummet down precipitous gorges and gullies in torrential rain and semi-darkness), passages of rare acacia species, through misty forests, and waratahs in bloom, and something as banal as a ‘rat trail’ gnawed into their food supplies.

Wild Nature belongs to a long tradition of walking with intent Wild Nature: Walking Australia’s south east forests by John Blay

NewSouth $39.99 pb, 349 pp

n her paean to walking, Rebecca Solnit notes that any history of walking is by nature provisional. As a subject it trespasses almost infinite fields: ‘anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies’. Despite such ungainly dimensions, her book Wanderlust (2000) maps rich connections between walking, thinking, and creativity. These stretch from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the Romantic poets; from Walter Benjamin on Parisian streets to political protesters crossing no-go zones. John Blay’s Wild Nature belongs to a long if amorphous tradition of walking with intent. It completes his trekking trilogy, following Back Country (1987) and On Track (2015). ‘Suddenly it comes clear,’ he writes. ‘We can map whatever we find and tell the story of the great escarpment forests.’ Walking is meshed with narrative production, used to report back on intimate encounters with place. Others have deployed this strategy: Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney (2017), Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) are a few. What is intriguing about Wild Nature is its encounter with an under-celebrated landscape stretching from Bermagui in New South Wales to Lakes Entrance in Victoria. Escarpment country becomes a liminal zone ‘where the divide between tablelands and the coast is braided into wild gorges and cliffs’, difficult, sometimes fearful, lyrical, housing botanical treasures, also obsession-forming. A few paths exist east to west, but none runs north to south. Blay decides to forge his own ‘trails’. Accompanying him is Jacqueline, fervent about the landscape but less than enamoured, she discovers, of bushwalking. The trails assume many forms: animal tracks, geological formations, GPS routes, ‘deep trails’ of Aboriginal custodians (mapped assiduously in On Track), waterways ( John and Jacque-

At the heart of Wild Nature is a puzzle: ‘the question of how places are reserved for nature and protected’. People are compelled by something: an animal, a plant, or an entire landscape. ‘Where one person sees the value, others are likely to agree, and where officialdom also recognises the value, that locality is likely to be protected. That “value” or magical ingredient must be one of the great mysteries of nature.’ Above all, the terrain Blay walks is timber-felling country. He brings to life numerous local battles fought to protect the south-eastern forests through a range of national and state parks and reserves. Amid the book’s descriptive natural history passages come voices of dissent against a timber industry that is speaking ‘as one’ with regulatory and management bodies including the NSW Forestry Commission. Other works have tackled vexed woodchipping histories in the region, among them an informative chapter in Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002). As a long-term resident, Blay draws on local knowledge to provide more personal glimpses into the ‘forest wars’. We meet longhaul protestors who have sacrificed their health to the cause, and individuals of various political persuasions stirred by their principles to fight. A ground-breaking, Aboriginal-led petition in the 1970s against the destruction of sacred stones on Mumbulla Mountain north of Bega is memorable. Earlier, other sacred stones had been blasted to erect a telecommunications tower on the mountain, a grim reminder of the litany of precursors to Rio Tinto’s recent desecrations in Juukan Gorge. One of the real strengths of Wild Nature is its determination to bear witness and pay tribute to these troubled lands. Blay walks a chequerboard of forests – some exemplify the ‘wild nature’ he craves, beyond the most destructive marks of human activity. Some resemble memorials where enormous tree stumps stand ‘like gravestones’ amid scrubby, post-logging regrowth, ghosts of the old forest. Others are freshly bulldozed grounds that bring to mind Benjamin’s World War I battlefields lying mangled ‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds’. Wild Nature is bookended by fire – not the controlled, mosaic-like burning of old practised by Aboriginal people and

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

early farmers – but the conflagrations of last summer fed, climate scientists say, by global warming. As Blay pens his preface, the view through his Eden window glows crimson. A cluster of conventional nature photographs – close-ups of flowers, vistas from mountain tops, native animals – is disrupted by one image in the close tonal range of a smoke-muted landscape. On the horizon, the infamous chipmill on Eden’s harbour is consumed by flames. Blay’s afterword is a journal of fire so immense that by midday ‘lights are necessary to see anything inside the house’, and in an uprush of superheated air pyrocumulus clouds form overhead. Rain born of fire dampens his lawn. Many despaired at the mass destruction of forests and fauna last summer. Meanwhile, in the fires’ aftermath, logging in New South Wales and Victoria has continued apace in both remnant unburnt habitat and fire-damaged forests. Why one form of destruction is so lamentable, while the other raises barely a collective murmur, is a quandary implicit in Blay’s walking tales.

Other threads in the braided narrative add levity to such questions. Even the two central figures cannot quite agree. French-Australian Jacqueline decides she cannot, will ‘NEVAIRRR’ become a bushwalker, preferring to appreciate the forest on her own terms. Blay continues on foot; she meets him at intervals with supplies. They miss appointments, experience frustrations and mishaps. Nevertheless, they find a mutual way, a provisional accord punctuated by moments of nature-inspired ‘ecstasies’. Wild Nature’s larger questions – how not only to ascribe value to but also to protect Australia’s diminishing forests – may have been stalled by the Covid-19 crisis. They are bound to resurface, though, when temperatures begin to warm and we head into a new summer. g Saskia Beudel is the author of A Country in Mind (2013) and Curating Sydney (with Jill Bennett [2014]), and the novel Borrowed Eyes (2002). ❖

Portraits of the Future i. Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello! A black photo where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be. Never in all history was such a portent visible without a guiding star. ii. Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life. One tells me what I need to know. One tells me what I want. No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death. I sense that they are holding back. Turn around, slowly: I want to see your hands. iii. Once I slept in a caravan and heard the breathing ocean. Dreams were the province of a dandelion curtain. Now come the frail parasols, drifting on a screen; now come the waves, rolling my hearing into guttural caves. I have opened the case for convenient sleep. The child I was listens, laughs and weeps.

Judith Bishop Judith Bishop’s most recent collection is Interval (UQP, 2018). 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Environment

The only game in town Rejecting the cult of intensive farming Andrew Fuhrmann

English Pastoral: An inheritance by James Rebanks

Allen Lane $35 pb, 304 pp

odern mega-farms are like nothing on earth. Imagine a vast black field stretching from horizon to horizon. A driverless tractor glides across the skyline spreading synthetic fertiliser. A cluster of grain towers looms over an empty asphalt parking lot. A row of pig sheds gleams in the distance. The square blot of the manure lagoon simmers in the hot sun. There are no trees. No birds. No mess. Everything is orderly, unpeopled, and entirely alien. Such a venture has little in common with the kind of farm that English writer James Rebanks grew up on. By comparison, his grandfather’s ‘fell farm’ in Matterdale, in the English Lake District, ‘was crooked and patched and narrow. It wasn’t falling apart, but it was a bit scruffy at the edges. And it supported a rich diversity of plant and animal life. Even though the land had been farmed for many centuries, there was still some wildness in it.’ The farm was run according to a traditional pastoral system that mimicked what worked in nature. His grandfather thought, like thousands of shepherds and cowherds before him, that cattle and sheep were healthiest when they were either moved around a range of habitats or left to roam across open landscapes. The modern preference, of course, is to keep the animals permanently indoors, dosing them with antibiotics to keep them healthy. English Pastoral is the second book by Rebanks. In his first, The Shepherd’s Life (2015), he offered a collage of beautifully observed vignettes of the life of a Cumbrian sheep farmer. He also celebrated his family’s long connection to the region, where they have worked for more than six generations, and he railed against the romanticisation of the Lake District. In particular, he lamented the impact of tourists and tree-change blow-ins on traditional ways of life. This new book is, like The Shepherd’s Life, a seductive mix of passionate argument and lyrical description. Here his target is the modern cult of intensive farming. Rebanks admits that, like many farmers of his generation, he was initially enthusiastic about the potential benefits of the new way. Under his grandfather’s influence, he eventually fell in love with the old farming world and turned his back on the gospel of productivity. His grandfather took the idea of environmental stewardship seriously. He was attentive to what lived on the margins, along the hedges and lanes, around the barns and byres. He knew that even the pests were important for measuring the health of the land. The rats and the rabbits and the dog fox among the turnips

were all signs of vitality. They needed to be kept down, but if they disappeared completely then it would mean that something was amiss. Rebanks eventually inherited his grandfather’s farm and knows all too well that the old ways, while ecologically more sustainable, are not financially sustainable. Intensive farming is now the only game in town. Since the 1960s, supermarket conglomerates across the world have driven down the prices. Consumers now demand not just a sufficient supply of food but a sufficient supply of cheap food. Families today spend less of their average income on food than ever before. And so, Rebanks says, we get business-school thinking applied to the land. Ethical and environmental issues are sidelined and traditional farming cultures are allowed to wither. Farmers now resemble middle managers and experience few of the bucolic satisfactions of their forebears. Indeed, with the rise and rise of large corporate agricultural companies, it seems clear that the farms of the future will not need farmers, only flexible employees with no essential connection to the land. Rebanks had his first glimpse of this future in his early twenties when he worked on a large farm in Australia. There he found vast, perfect fields. The bush had been cleared a century ago and a neat grid had been laid down by surveyors. ‘There was no history to slow anything down. Or none that was spoken of. It was a blank slate on which these modern farmers were writing the future. No old walls. No old farmsteads. No people. No bones of older things poking out through the new. Just flat fields, perfect for huge machines.’ Eventually, the progressivist big-farm culture Rebanks had seen in Australia came to the Lakes District. He watched as machines re-engineered the landscape and enabled incredible efficiencies of scale. Crooked little fields were expanded and drained and levelled. Trees and hedges disappeared. Stone walls and bogs had to go. There was little room for sentimentality, because the farmers were under immense financial strain. After all, in a globalised economy, they were now competing with Australian and American mega-farms. In the long run, however, despite their willingness to expand and modernise, many farmers were still pushed out or swallowed by debt. Indeed, according to Rebanks, all commercial farming – even the intensive kind – may soon be unviable in England. He invites us to consider what a world without farms will look like. Who will care for the land in the way farmers once did? Who understands better than farming families that land is something to be cared for and handed on to the next generation? Like his first book, English Pastoral is an elegantly written and carefully observed account of life among the high limestone fells of Cumbria. It’s a spirited apologia for traditional farming practices and a heartfelt tribute to the knowledge and work of James Rebank’s grandfather. And, above all, it’s an ode to the way farms used to be, before the age of autonomous farm vehicles, to a time when curlews still nested in the fields and ‘goldfinches flitted among the thistles’. g Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. He was an ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow and his Fellowship essay ‘Patrick White: A theatre of his own’ appeared in the November 2013 issue. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Comment

Thinking in a regional accent New ways of contemplating Australian writers

by Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

ho would have guessed that a rejuvenation of regional difference might be triggered by a plague? Cosmopolitan Melbourne became the epicentre of what Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called the ‘Victorian wave’. Borders, the leitmotif of Australian politics since Tampa, suddenly became internal. My own state of Western Australia was sued for breach of the Australian Constitution for maintaining its ‘hard’ internal borders. Wonted barbs flowing between states now felt just a little personal. Interstate rivalry in Australia is not uncommon, with familiar stoushes over GST share, the Murray– Darling Basin, the location of naval shipbuilding, and the hosting of sporting events. But the idea that Australia has internal borders, not just to check fruit but to stop the movement of people, Australian people, is something that has only emerged with Covid-19. I have been thinking about such things since I was appointed Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia in July of this year. With the decision not to renew the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney following Robert Dixon’s retirement in 2019, the position at UWA took on an additional significance within the AustLit community. Within the national conversations in which I participate, I have always been conscious of my position as a Western Australian, but also quite unconscious of it as well. Like all unconscious things, we can only see them in certain deviations and hesitations, or in the bees in our bonnets. For me, when I speak about Australian literature I find myself wanting, in one way or another, to preface my remarks by noting the fact that I am speaking as a Western Australian. Look, I’ve just done it again.

It reminds me of those occasions when I become conscious of my accent. Like most people, I tend to imagine I have no accent. But my wife, who is Malaysian, sometimes teases me by repeating words I say, like ‘DVD’, which apparently I say as ‘doy-voy-doy’ à la Kath & Kim. One of the notable features of Australian English is that it is not strongly marked by regional accents. Still, people do, as it were, think in regional accents. I say this even though it remains an open question whether settler Australia should be properly understood as being inflected by regional vectors. Yes, we are divided into states and territories, but are these anything other than lines on a map, drawn with a ruler and a set square, and the occasional river? The contrast between the political map of Australia and the now iconic AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia graphically exposes the poverty of the Australian regional imagination and the essential irreality of our territorial demarcations. More particularly, for someone like me, is it right to conceive of Australia in terms of literary regions? My book Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017) wagered that there was a value in conceptualising Australian literature regionally. As much as possible I tried to emphasise the material factors at work in the agricultural colonisation of the south-western corner of the Australian continent, rather than invoking some genius loci that magically flowed into the veins of the writers that lived there. I remained sceptical about confected regional identities serving as euphemisms for white belonging. But still, something did happen to writers who lived their lives, often not their whole lives but some crucial part, in the wheatbelt. Apprehending what that was

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From the Archive

proved to be a major task in the book, but in the end I believe it does make sense and there is a value to speaking of these people – Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Barbara York Main, John Kinsella, and the others I studied – as ‘wheatbelt writers’. They became, one might say, part of the wheatbelt complex.

ut what is regional difference? Certainly, one feels that regional difference is at most a weak factor when compared to the forms of difference that most occupy us today: race, gender, class, ethnicity, and, increasingly, sectarian political affiliations. The existence of regional difference as a literary concept was explored some decades ago in a remarkable conference that took place in Fremantle in 1978. The Fremantle Arts Centre, founded just two years earlier in 1976, hosted a roundtable discussion on ‘Regionalism in Contemporary Australian Literature’. The topic was the subject of lively debate, with presentations from Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Jim Davidson, Thomas Shapcott, and others. The two main issues that emerged were whether regionalism could even be said to be present in Australian literature; and then, if it could, how regionalism was anything other than a glorified parochialism. I was only six years old when this conference took place, and living with my family in Munich at the time, so I am grateful that the presentations were later published. Shapcott confessed in his postscript to the conference that he had initially thought the conference was ‘aimed at reassuring Westralians that they were OF US’, but came round to the applicability of the regionalist approach in more general terms. Davidson, as ever, was especially acute. He grasped something that has stuck with me since I first encountered it, because it provides a kind of litmus test for literary regionalism, at least as it was conventionally conceived: ‘The one ingredient most apparent in regionalism as a world-wide phenomenon is essentially lacking in Australia: grievance.’ Davidson gave the examples of Wales, Scotland, and the American South – vanquished peoples forced to live next to and among their wealthier conquerors. In the most direct terms, what Davidson was suggesting was that to be regional was to be a loser. That was not his judgement but rather him giving voice to a judgement hidden inside the fabric of regionalism. In that sense, more positive expressions of regionalism, including those I subscribe to, are also, at bottom, a means of compensation. The great Marxist critic Raymond Williams drew a similar conclusion in relation to regions, although following a different line of reasoning from Davidson. For Williams, what emerged under the name of ‘regions’ in nineteenth-century Britain was essentially a geographical spatialisation of class. Regions were economically subservient peripheries of production. This meant that, for Williams, regional consciousness was a form of class consciousness. With this in mind, it is interesting to go back to how accents work in Australia, where they follow class rather than regional lines. No doubt, contemporary Australia is well seeded with the politics of grievance. But Davidson is largely correct to suggest that this has not typically found its expression in regional particularity, at least not in such a way that it then gave expression to what might be called an imaginary. Davidson did proffer one possible

exception: the case of Tasmania. Indeed, his later, highly influential 1989 Meanjin essay ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ was a seminal attempt to delineate a regional Tasmanian literary sensibility, one that was indeed founded in grievance. The papers at the Fremantle Arts Centre were published in Westerly’s December 1978 issue. The magazine was at that time edited by Bruce Bennett and Peter Cowan, who were strong advocates of literary regionalism. I only have faint memories of Cowan, but I was taught by Bennett at UWA as an undergraduate and remember his particular interest in regionalism in Australia and America, but also, presciently, in the Southeast Asian ‘region’ and the Indian Ocean rim. Cowan was one of my case studies for Like Nothing on this Earth. Going through boxes of his papers and personal effects held by the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre, I came across a letter he had written to his wife, Edith Howard. The letter was undated but probably written in 1941. In it he defended his desire to write a ‘regional novel’ based on his experience of working as a rural labourer in the wheatbelt through the Depression years: I can see what you don’t want me to do. You don’t like the idea of a regional novel, and I am quite determined to write only regional novels until I have a quite different type of experience. I will probably never have this, but that will also probably not stop me trying regional novels. Look at the American regionalists – definitely successful. I think that regionalism is something the Australian novel needs.

In the history of Australian literary regionalism, this letter will be an important document, for it is one of the earliest explicit announcements of this literary goal. There was clearly regional writing before 1941, but I haven’t come across it being described as such. Cowan’s main influences at this point were Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, but what one notices when reading Cowan’s often exquisite short stories is something quite different from these writers. Instead of the swirl of broken histories that eddy through his American and British exemplars, in Cowan’s writing there is a poetics of isolation that is coupled with a profound historical amnesia. Why? For the simple reason that Cowan’s sketches take place in the midst of colonisation – the agricultural colonisation of the south-west of the Australian continent – rather than in its wake. In his later writing life, Cowan would become an important historian of the Swan River colony, but at that point in his career he was trying to capture something different, some particularity of sensibility that was already ingrained in the raw wheatbelt farms he had laboured on, and which had so recently been carved out of their ancient human and ecological systems. These farms proceeded in violent disregard of what went before, and when Cowan came to express this he found himself, I can’t put it more precisely, at a loss. All his characters are like this – they are at the end of things. Arguing for a relationship of literature to place in Australia is not in itself new. The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia (1987), edited by the late Peter Pierce, was a pioneering work of literary place-making. Philip Mead, my predecessor in the UWA Chair, has written eloquently on literary regionalism. Cheryl Taylor, with her work on North Queensland, was one of the first academic AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Wheatbelt of Western Australia ( Jana Schoenknecht/Alamy Stock Photo)

literary scholars (along with Bruce Bennett) to take literary regionalism seriously. In the 1990s, the rise of ecocriticism gave particular attention to the concept of a bioregion, opening up the possibility that literary regionalism might be reimagined as literary bioregionalism. One can see this emerging in some of the fine literary scholarship on the Mallee districts of Victoria by Paul Carter, Brigid Magner, and Emily Potter. Like Carter, Stephen Muecke has also been adept at utilising the post-structuralist resources of European literary theory (de Certeau, Latour) to unstitch the people and places of the Australian continent from the weave of colonial predeterminations. Cutting back across the emergence of bio-regionalist sensibilities in literature and criticism has been the advent of second-wave Indigenous authors like Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, and Tony Birch and of the powerful insinuation of the concept of ‘Country’ into wider Australian discourse. The fact that Country does not coincide exactly with bioregion – though they often speak to each other – opens up deeper epistemological differences that remain to be negotiated. No one is necessarily clamouring for a rebooted Jindyworobak syncretism, but there might yet be some value in a genuine dialogue about the spiritual (or in the current parlance, more-than-human) value of environment. For me, literary regionalism is a critical stance that I find myself adopting, whether I want to or not. I think it is just something that happens when I read, and I would feel uncomfortable advocating for reified regional schools of expression. It does produce interesting results. In my book, I found that major 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

writers like Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, and Elizabeth Jolley took on different complexions when they were viewed through the prism of region. In similar ways, I find myself relating to Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Judith Wright, Richard Flanagan, Thea Astley, Colin Thiele, Charmaine Papertalk Green, and Trent Dalton as regional writers. It is not a label they would necessarily accept or welcome, and they would have different reasons for being wary of such designations. If this group are all regional writers, we must wonder if they are not then somehow differently regional. In my neck of the woods, it has been inspiring to watch the Wirlomin Noongar grouping (Kim Scott, Clint Bracknell, Claire G. Coleman, and others), who trace their belonging to the south coast of Western Australia, become a nodal point of Noongar cultural and language renaissance, and seriously influence the national imaginary. I realise that this might be of a different order to a regionalism we might ascribe to Judith Wright or Thea Astley, but I think just entering into the world of regional difference opens us to the possibility not just of different regions, but of being differently regional. g Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Category

F I C T I O N

Fiction

A rising scream

An essay on the metaphysics of love James Ley

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

Knopf $32.99 hb, 304 pp

he Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins, self-consciously, at the limits of language. Its opening pages are rendered in a prose style that is fragmented and contorted. Sentences break down, run into each other. Syntax is twisted into odd shapes that call into question the very possibility of meaning. Words seem to arrive pre-estranged by semantic satiation in a way that evokes Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett at their most opaque: ‘As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you and if that then. Them us were we you?’ Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel is a rough beast. It has clearly been written to the moment, in anger and sorrow. Its prose radiates the heat of its composition. It is what one character calls a ‘growing scream’, prompted by the wilful ignorance and general imbecility of the present. The novel buzzes with anxiety that the centre will not hold, that language may prove inadequate to the task of addressing all the chaos and fragmentation, that maybe the false determinations of words themselves are part of the problem. The narrative is shrouded in toxic smoke from the unprecedented bushfires that reduced much of the country to ashes earlier this year. More broadly, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams expresses horror and frustration at the ongoing destruction of the natural world and at the maddening tendency of people to carry on as normal while ecosystems are collapsing and mass extinctions are taking place all around them. At the centre of the novel is a Tasmanian family marked by its own experiences of loss. Francie, the redoubtable matriarch, is well into her eighties. Her husband, Horrie, is dead, having succumbed to early-onset dementia in his fifties. One of her sons, Robbie, is also long gone: he came home from Catholic boarding school at the age of fourteen and hanged himself in the garage. Francie’s three surviving children, now well into middle age, have pursued different paths in life. Anna, the oldest, moved to Sydney and joined the professional class, becoming a partner in an architecture firm. Terzo, the youngest and bossiest, decamped to Queensland and became an archetypal finance-sector spiv. The stuttering Tommy, who bears his own psychological scars from whatever went on at that boarding school, remained in Tasmania to become a ne’er-do-well artist. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is the story of Francie’s death. As her health begins to fail, her children are forced to make all the difficult decisions that the situation demands. Around this 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

inexorably linear narrative, which can arrive at only one possible ending, Flanagan weaves a wide-ranging series of reflections and observations, with Anna as the novel’s centre of consciousness. Flanagan’s widely admired novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) was a tribute to his late father and the fortitude of those ordinary Australian men who fought, suffered, and died in World War II. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams offers a maternal counterpoint. Its most tender and reverential passages exalt Francie as the embodiment of a certain kind of indomitable, stoic, working-class Catholic woman who accepts her humble domestic role with equanimity, sacrifices her life to the task of nurturing her family, and conducts herself with a mixture of toughness and open-hearted kindness.

Flanagan’s eighth novel has clearly been written in anger and sorrow There is a current crop of Australian novelists, all men of roughly the same generation, whose work combines leftist politics with a distinct element of social conservatism, the latter arising from a complicated sense of loyalty to some combination of working-class tradition, religion, and family. This is true of Tim Winton, Christos Tsiolkas, and Tony Birch, despite their very different backgrounds, and it is true of Flanagan. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams characterises Francie’s deprived upbringing as ‘materially poor but spiritually rich’. It strikes a delicate balance between an elegiac sense that admirable notions of decency and sacrifice are vanishing from the world and nostalgia for a regressive ‘cult of women’ that can quite frankly get in the bin. The novel is certainly aware of this delicacy and negotiates it adroitly by focusing on the cultural rupture that Francie’s demise represents. The tensions that arise between her children reflect their altered social positions. Anna becomes conscious that she and Terzo tend to gang up on Tommy, whom they regard with a mixture of condescension and pity. But she also understands on a deeper level that they patronise him because they are shamed by his selflessness and indifference to their materialism. One of the notable features of the moralism in Flanagan’s recent novels is the attempt to hold on to a pre-established sense of value and meaning. They are concerned with the status of concepts like honour and decency and sacrifice and truth, and whether such concepts can survive onslaughts of nihilism. The prisoners of war in The Narrow Road to the Deep North face the problem of how to maintain their humanity in dehumanising conditions. In First Person (2017), Kif Kehlmann’s attempts to grapple with the brazen dishonesty of the conman Siegfried Heidl induce a kind of epistemological vertigo that starts to scramble his moral instincts. In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, the destabilising context is cultural. The novel’s jagged riffs on the wretchedness of contemporary life, which extend from the geopolitical (‘brexitrump climatecoal’) to the institutional (Terzo’s dodgy mates in finance) to the trivial (pretentious restaurants get a bit of a serve), are part of an encompassing view that society has been overtaken and remade by a terminal superficiality. It suggests that we are distracting ourselves to death. The chief culprit is, of course,

the internet. Anna tries to escape the stress of her situation by it is less effective in a dramatic sense. On the level of narrative, compulsively reaching for her phone and doomscrolling through nothing especially consequential follows from these inexplicable horrific images of burning landscapes and dead animals, which physical disappearances. They rise to no heights of pathos or only makes her feel even more stressed. Later in the novel she comedy. As such, they don’t generate the Kafkan disquiet that looks up from her phone, sees a tram full of people all fixated on is perhaps intended. They come to seem neither grotesque nor uncanny, just a bit weird. their screens, and thinks: ‘sensation by This is a minor flaw in a novel that sensation, emotion by emotion, thought certainly does not lack for pathos or by thought, fear on fear, untruth on intelligence. The creative energy of Flauntruth, feeling by feeling – they were nagan’s writing is evident throughout. themselves being slowly rewritten into a The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is one wholly new kind of human being’. of those books that returns obsessively This is not exactly an original obserto certain words, considers them from vation, though it is true enough. What different angles and in different contexts, concerns Flanagan is not simply the exposes their depths and complexities, cultural diagnosis but the alienated state the way that Shakespeare dismantles of being that this new reality is apt to the concepts of ‘honour’ in Julius Caesar generate. Running through The Living and ‘honesty’ in Othello, or the way he Sea of Waking Dreams is a preoccupation repeats that despairing word ‘nothing’ in with the way that the apparent need to King Lear. Flanagan has a fair crack at escape from an essential reality into an bludgeoning the nihilism out of ‘nothing’, inessential realm generates a cycle of and he genuflects before ‘beauty’, but the isolation, passivity, and disempowerment. word he repeats most often is ‘love’. The This is filtered through Anna’s midLiving Sea of Waking Dreams is an essay dle-aged, middle-class anxieties about on the metaphysics of love, which it the state of her personal relationships depicts not in any platitudinous sense as and her own inability to communicate Richard Flanagan some kind of hippie panacea but as a harin direct and meaningful ways. At one (Colin Macdougall/Penguin Random House) rowing and elusive concept. It is a novel point in the novel, she discovers that her adult son is stealing from her. She can’t bring herself to talk alert to the acute difficulty of expressing love in word and deed. to him about it. Yet the real fear at the heart of the novel is not It considers the ways in which love can be perverted and inverted. that people are unable to see the problems they face, or that they It seeks to affirm the reality of love, even as it is disturbed by the lack the ability to confront them. It is that, as Anna realises with possibility that the conditions of contemporary life have become so estranging and degrading that we don’t know really what it horror, ‘they did not want to see’. means anymore. In The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Flanagan writes, somehe most peculiar aspect of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is a fanciful conceit, pitched somewhere between Gogol and what sententiously, that a ‘great book compels you to reread your Dr Seuss’s Wacky Wednesday. As the novel unfolds, Anna own soul’. The Living Sea of Waking Dreams asks in a more hesitant realises that parts of her body are disappearing. She loses a finger, and winning spirit: ‘Shouldn’t stories work towards something a knee, her left breast, her whole hand. There is no pain, no that we can’t get anywhere else?’ The novel is true to its word. wound; they simply vanish. She becomes aware of other losses. It works towards an elusive ‘something’ that resists naming, but Her doctor’s ear is missing. Her uncommunicative son Gus, who that finds its symbolic expression near the end of the novel in spends most of his time in his bedroom disappearing into the the form of the endangered orange-bellied parrot. Flanagan has infinitude of cyberspace, loses his nose and an eye. No one else always been part didact, part sentimentalist. In The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, these two sides of his writing are integrated as efseems to notice these absences. This surreal twist functions as a unifying metaphor for many fectively as they have ever been. Francie’s death, when it comes, is of the novel’s themes. It is analogous to the environmental dev- a moving scene. The novel’s fury and frustration at our wanton deastation that contextualises the narrative. It literalises Anna’s struction of the natural world is more than warranted. The urgency uneasy sense that the world around her is falling apart, reinforcing of the issue cannot be overstated. In a recent interview, Flanagan the idea that there is something deeply perverse about the way echoed or perhaps misquoted Tommy, the book’s moral anchor, people will often refuse to acknowledge the most obvious and when he referred to The Living Sea of Waking Dreams as a ‘rising important things. The concept draws a parallel between Anna’s scream’. The novel, he stated, emerged from the struggle between anxieties and the wasting away of Francie’s octogenarian body. despair and hope that our present moment has forced upon us. Perhaps most importantly, it links the daughter’s increasing sense He gives the last word to hope. I hope he’s right. g of disorientation to the virtual reality of the online world and the vivid ‘waking dreams’ her mother experiences as she declines, James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melsuggesting that there is an unreality about what we take for reality. bourne. A former Editor of Sydney Review of Books, he has been But if this excursion into magic realism makes thematic sense, a regular contributor to ABR since 2003.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Fiction

Giovanna’s heart

Elena Ferrante’s brilliant new novel Beejay Silcox

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante

Allen & Unwin $32.95 pb, 336 pp

pening a review with a book’s first line allows a critic to thieve the author’s momentum for themselves. I am in a thieving mood. For the first line of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, carries an enviable wallop: ‘Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.’ It’s the kind of line – charged, discomforting, and vicious – that makes Ferrante so electrifying to read. Ferrante’s novels are whetstones; her narrators are knives. When we meet twelve-year-old Giovanna Trada in this novel, she is a meek and dutiful creature – clever but incurious; a dewy-eyed admirer of her affluent parents and their hermetic life. Four years later, when Ferrante is finished with her, Giovanna’s heart is a shiv. Here is womanhood, Ferrante shows us once again: a relentless abrasion, a sharpening. It is difficult to write about Ferrante’s work without becoming distracted by its glittering literary mythology: the tantalising mystery of the pseudonymous Italian writer’s identity and the invasive cruelty of the quest to unmask her; the genre-detonating splendour of her Neapolitan novels (the four-part series that began with My Brilliant Friend in 2012); and the debate this quartet has sparked about how we (de)value the fiction of women’s lives. And – of course – the ever-ratcheting hyperbole. As Ferrante has

been consecrated into the modern literary canon, she has been compared to everyone from Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton, and Charles Dickens, to Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Mario Puzo. The Lying Life of Adults is Ferrante’s first novel since the Neapolitan quartet ended in 2015 with The Story of the Lost Child. It is perhaps no accident that this new book is a tale of a young woman grappling with the suffocating weight of expectations. ‘We perform acts that seem like acts but in fact they’re symbols,’ Giovanna tells us. Can she free herself ? Can the woman who wrote her? Eavesdropping on her parents after a fraught parent–teacher conference, young Giovanna overhears the father she adores liken her to his estranged sister, Vittoria. It is the ultimate slur. ‘She was a childhood bogeyman,’ Giovanna explains, ‘a lean demonic silhouette.’ Vittoria is detested ‘the way you detest a lizard that runs up your bare leg’; less a person than a family shorthand for soul-deep ugliness. In family photos her face is blacked out, lest she defile innocent eyes. Anguished by the comparison, Giovanna sees no alternative than to seek out Vittoria and see the she-devil for herself. And so she descends into the blue-collar fray of Naples (‘we lived in the highest part of Naples, and to go anywhere inevitably had to descend’), a class tourist clad in head-to-toe pink. The woman she finds has a beauty so ferocious ‘that to consider her ugly became a necessity’. As her father warned, the minute Giovanna arrives, Vittoria launches into a tirade against him (‘he thinks he’s smart, but he’s never been smart: I am smart, he’s only clever’). But rather than straight-backed loyalty, Giovanna feels a fizz of pleasure in hearing tales of his failings. There are other pleasures, too. In dialect slang, Vittoria entertains her young niece with tales of adulterous fucking. ‘Oh to learn to speak like that,’ says the captivated Giovanna, ‘outside of every convention of my house.’ What exhilarating, guileless vulgarity. When Giovanna leaves, Vittoria instructs her to pay attention. ‘She said I had blinders like a horse, I looked but didn’t see the things that could disturb me. Look, look, look, she hammered into me.’ The problem with looking is that you start to see things:

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the wrong pair of feet, for instance, entwined under the table at a dinner party, or the onanistic tedium of the ‘self-important babble of the cultivated’. You see hypocrisy and cruelty, desire and fear. You see lies. And then you learn how to tell them. The Lying Life of Adults is a novel of adolescent unmaking – of how wrenching it can be to cut ourselves adrift. Parental disappointments, first infatuations, sexual experimentation, awkward bodies, social peacocking, and humiliation: this is standard coming-of-age fare. What Ferrante does is scrub the candy-floss stink of nostalgia off it. Ferrante’s heroines are raw and raw-toothed: they make Holden Caulfield’s ironic laddish grumblings seem twee. Ann Goldstein’s translations – emotionally literate but sharp-edged – are the perfect foil for Ferrante’s narrative brutality.

Ferrante shows us womanhood once again: a relentless abrasion, a sharpening

Violent hearts An Australian fairy tale Georgia White

Flyaway

by Kathleen Jennings

Picador $24.99 pb, 188 pp

Giovanna’s ‘terrible Italy’ is the Naples of the mid-1990s, two generations along from the brilliant friends of the Neapolitan novels. Sexual mores may have shifted, but while Giovanna’s progressive parents teach her the slogans of second-wave feminism, she still exists in a miasma of gendered violence. ‘If I find out you’ve wasted it,’ Vittoria remarks to Giovanna of her virginity, ‘I’ll tell your father, and we’ll beat you to death.’ Riding shotgun with a friend of a friend, she is struck by how his desire for her is laced with hatred: ‘For a second I saw him as a very bright demon that would grab my head in both hands and first forcibly kiss me, then beat me against the window until I was dead.’ Is there any wonder that Giovanna finds herself despising her newly adult body and all its implications? ‘A very violent need for degradation was growing inside me,’ she confides, ‘a fearless degradation, a yearning to feel heroically vile.’ If ruin is inevitable, far better to be the architect of your own. As in the Neapolitan novels, The Lying Life of Adults is a series of psychologically ornate set pieces – scenes alert to quiet shifts in faces, bodies, and power: sexual power, class power, intellectual power, discursive power. Readers familiar with that tremendous literary project will find Ferrante trademarks here: cloying friendships, garrulous Marxists, a feckless love interest with a big brain and an even bigger ego, and a talismanic object: a jewelled bracelet passed from wrist to wrist like some kind of emotional handcuff. But the loudest resonance is the slippery question of authorship – of what it means to tell the story of ourselves. Reflecting on her disillusioning adolescence, adult Giovanna, now a writer, searches for a narrative thread to tether her past and future selves, but finds only a ‘tangled knot’ of memories. It will be up to us to unravel this ‘snarled confusion of suffering’, to trace out an arc and anoint a villain (or two). There is a mighty power here, but are we wielding it, or is she? The sly brilliance of The Lying Life of Adults is that we can never be sure if we’re being entrusted or manipulated. Ferrante’s ninth novel could easily have been called ‘The Lying Life of Writers’. So could most great books. g

t the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and men into beasts. In Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings has woven the conventions of a fairy tale into something new, transforming the Australian bush into a haunted forest. The novel begins in the dwindling town of Runagate, where nineteen-year-old Bettina Scott is living a half-life since the disappearance of her father and brothers. She spends her days minding the house and tending the garden, trapped under the gaze of her reclusive, fey mother – until a cryptic accusation is splashed across their front fence, startling Bettina into both action and remembrance. The search for her brothers takes Bettina across the borders of Runagate and into the silent outback beyond. Here, a complex web of stories unfolds. A strange woman recalls what happened in the neighbouring town of Woodwild, where children were spirited away in the night. A farmer looks through a window to see himself sitting there with his wife, this other-self grinning ‘with sharp, gleaming teeth’. Bit by bit, the real monsters are unveiled: familial abuse and intergenerational rivalry, laced with the residual violence of colonialism (‘not stained by massacres, no, nor cursed, whatever people whispered about how the Spicer family first established Runagate Station’). Jennings has a real gift for prose, her sentences pleasurably thickened with images of glitter and decay: ‘Trees bled resin like rubies, sprouted goitrous nests, suspended cat’s cradles of spiderwebs, spinning disks of silk.’ Here and there, we encounter aphorisms of startling beauty: ‘A civilised, bone-china soul knows, as a bird does, that a heavy-footed, shouting man is a thing to be fled.’ And yet, as with all fairy tales, the novel hints that something savage and depressingly familiar lurks beneath its magical trappings. Flyaway is a novel that knows any story is only as truthful as the person who tells it; that the tale itself survives as a parasite does, jumping from person to person and host to host. g

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer, literary critic, and cultural commentator.

Georgia White is a writer and PhD student at Monash University in Melbourne. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Fiction

Amis unbound

In truth, Amis has tried autofiction before: in the ‘flagrantly autobiographical’ The Pregnant Widow (2010) and in a 1997 New Yorker story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’. (Cusk Approximations and autofiction herself, in a 1998 review of Night Train, noted an ‘ambiguous Declan Fry authorial closeness’ in Amis’s work.) ‘It was clearly long premeditated,’ remarks Amis of another Larkin line. Much the same could be said of Inside Story. Here, the autobiographical aspect is told primarily through Amis’s reflections on Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, and Larkin. The ‘palpable occlusion’ of Bellow’s dementia, his death at the age of eighty-nine, informs some of the novel’s most affectInside Story ing passages (‘his eyes weren’t right ‒ busy, flickering, over-alert by Martin Amis [...] as if he was staring into his own brain and wondering what Jonathan Cape it would do to him next’). These internal betrayals ‒ Bellow’s $35 pb, 522 pp dementia, Hitchens’s and Larkin’s cancer ‒ give Amis pause. If uring a 1995 television interview on Charlie Rose soon the mind goes, then the writing, the reading, the inner life, go after the publication of Martin Amis’s The Information, with it. The prospect, for Amis, is quietly terrifying: akin to the another long novel, there is a moment when, as Rose universe shutting down, curtaining itself off from authorial access. begins to read the opening passage, Amis’s mouth visibly slackRecollections of women are realised less gracefully. Those who ens. Silently he intones the first lines. His hand (often tentatively populate Amis’s work ‒ carers, redeemers, conduits, temptresses raised toward his chin in interviews) searches out his forehead. ‒ wearily resign themselves to their fate, as must the reader. They There is a spectral waver in his gaze, a registering (as if accom- are there, mainly, to connect the men with the men; to put the modating, or incorporating, new information). He looks adrift, ‘probationary intimates’ ‒ all those Roths, Hitchenses, Amises ‒ in unmoored. Free-floating. One has the sense of a man assimilat- touch with the tutelary spirits, the daddies: Vladimir Nabokov, ing his own self as it is spoken back to him. For a moment, he Bellow, Larkin. In a kind of variant failure of the Bechdel test, seems precarious. whenever a woman talks (although not with another woman ‒ Amis once wrote that a writthat rarely, if ever, happens here), er’s life ‘is all in the novels, at one all she wants to talk about is the remove or another, for the notmen in Martin Amis’s life. Not for so-idly curious’. The viewer feels nothing is the most specific aspect as though here, in close-up, the of Germaine Greer’s depiction truth of that sentiment was being (‘my host and my nurse’) the fact comprehensively proven. that she administers a blowjob to The cover of Inside Story dubs the young Amis; or that Gloria the 500-page work ‘a novel’. Amis Steinem, ‘the world’s second calls the enterprise a ‘novelised most glamorous feminist’ (guess autobiography’. Of Philip Larkin’s who comes first), is memorialised ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’, mainly for her proselytising abilhe notes: ‘The “friend” of the title ity: ‘the joy of turning me into a is only approximately Kingsley true believer devolved upon [her]’. [Amis], just as the narrator of the Much of the novel is devoted poem is only approximately Philto one paramour in particular: ip; but approximation can come ‘Phoebe Phelps’, a businesswoman very close.’ and former escort whom Amis Here, approximation comes encounters inside a phone booth, very close, very often. ‘safely encaged in glass’. Like Martin Amis Is Amis trying his hand at Nicola Six in London Fields (Tom Craig at Bill Charles Agency/Penguin Random House) the ‘rather dubious genre’ of life (1989), Phelps, a self-described writing or autofiction? Is he giving us his Rachel Cusk impres- ‘misogynist’ (Amis, chivalrously, tries to talk her round), constision ‒ his Chris Kraus, his Kate Zambreno, his Ben Lerner? (Or, tutes an audibly whirring plot machination; a galley slave enlisted perhaps more appropriate to the higher autobiography of the to draw Bellow, Larkin, and Hitchens into the novelistic arc. 1980s, during which his most acclaimed work was published, She suggests to Amis that his real father may be Larkin. If true, his Philip Roth as Nathan Zuckerman ‒ his Marguerite Duras this would make Larkin’s father, Sydney, a bullying bureaucrat via L’Amant?) Are we in for a Transit to Exit Ghost? Kudos to enamoured of fascism, Amis’s grandfather. For Amis, incisive The Anatomy Lesson of writing advice? (Amis Unbound suggests anatomist of Bellow’s work and author of several fictions about itself as a probable title.) Is this, at last (and with a due nod to the Third Reich, this is something of a problem: it certainly Karl Ove Knausgaard), Martin Amis: My struggle? complicates all of the shout-outs to Jewish friends, family, and

32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

authors in the acknowledgments of Time’s Arrow (1991) and The Zone of Interest (2014). Nonetheless, Amis’s house style – ‘a beguiling mixture of confidence and courtesy’ (Clancy Sigal’s enviably accurate formulation) – has a way of drawing the reader in, making you an initiate. It carries the proceedings along even when you feel as if you might wish to get off. The hard bop, the brag and jive, the crotchety pugilism (always ducking and weaving): this is the joy and energy of Martin Amis, his loyal solicitude towards the reader. Between F.R. Leavis and Northrop Frye, he has always chosen Frye, the Romantic: Charles Dickens over Gustave Flaubert, E.M. Forster rather than Virginia Woolf (at one point, he compares the stylistic differences between Nabokov and James Joyce to dinner party savoir faire: while Nabokov would serve you his best meal, Finnegans Wake-era Joyce offers ‘a jam jar of brown whey and a bowlful of turnips and eels’). Early on in the novel, Amis recounts a crisis of confidence: Inside Story, as a story, was failing to cohere. As Amis furtively grapples with the writing process, a visitation from his younger self offers a Damascene epiphany: ‘Something became undammed. It was me at eighteen, when I used to say to myself, I don’t want to be a writer (or not yet). I want to be a reader. I just want to be a part of it. Humbly resolved [...] Devotional.’ Devotional: this was how the author appeared on Charlie Rose in 1995. Whatever troubles may have attended its birth, there can be no doubt that Amis has been silently repeating Inside Story’s contents (its literary life lessons) to himself for some time. Twenty-five books in, late-period Amis (this, he writes, is ‘almost certainly my last long novel’) bears witness to the end of that gestation, the story of how he became a part of it: the reader, the writer, (the dear, the gentle); one of the humbly resolved. g Declan Fry is an essayist, critic, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta.

Stay in the loop.

Cavalcade of coincidences Andrew Pippos’s début novel Sonia Nair

Lucky’s

by Andrew Pippos

Picador $32.99 pb, 357 pp

n Andrew Pippos’s immersive and multi-layered début novel, Lucky’s, a tragic shooting that occurs in the last bastion of a Greek-Australian restaurant franchise becomes the fulcrum around which mental health, heartbreak, displacement, and toxic masculinity are explored. Spanning the years between 1913 and 2002 and taking place across multiple continents (though Sydney is its primary backdrop), Lucky’s oscillates between the perspectives of Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, Achilles Asproyerakas, Emily Main, and Ian Asquith – each of them bound to one another through happenstance, family ties, and, in perhaps the main theme of the book, deception. Through a cavalcade of coincidences, the vast world these characters inhabit shrinks into a finely interwoven web, where each character’s actions reverberate to affect the others in unforeseen and pernicious ways. Pippos’s characters dance around the fine line between fate and self-determination, often grappling with the weight of intergenerational trauma and structural barriers. Emily wonders ‘if all she could ever be was the person she’d already become’, while Lucky ponders if failure and success ‘aren’t always determined by other people’. The intermittent absurdity of the book – particularly in the highly visceral nature of Ian’s troubles and a dreamlike scene where a malnourished horse walks into Achilles’s café to disastrous consequences – coupled with the narrative’s serendipitous quality, only serves to underline its fantastical nature. Pippos writes towards myth while grounding his book in deeply human themes. Lucky’s central conceits lie in how we respond to failure, how we live in the shadow of other people’s decisions, and how we elevate ourselves while staying true to our own ideas about who we are. Each character grapples with a sense of impostor syndrome – Lucky and Ian dabble with being fraudsters, while Emily grapples with a persistent sense of inferiority in her line of work, her marriage, and her life. Reminiscent of works such as Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (2013) that interrogate the pursuit of specialness, Lucky’s is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves and the chasm between fact and fiction, the space where happiness may lie. One lasting preoccupation of the book, and its characters, is how extraordinariness may reside in ‘the glory of a lie that was as meaningful as the truth’. g

Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Fiction

Places within

Confronting the legacy of abuse Nicole Abadee

Infinite Splendours by Sofie Laguna

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 436 pp

ofie Laguna does not shy away from confronting subject matter. Her first adult novel, One Foot Wrong (2009), is about a young girl forced by her troubled parents into a reclusive existence. Her second, The Eye of the Sheep (2014), which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2015, tells the story of a young boy on the autism spectrum born into a family riven by poverty and violence. Her third, The Choke (2017), concerns a motherless child in danger because of her father’s criminal connections. Infinite Splendours is also about the betrayal of a child by the adults in his life, but here Laguna ventures into new territory, exploring the lasting impact of trauma on a child as he becomes a man, and whether the abused may become the abuser. Infinite Splendours, set in a small town near the Southern Grampians in Victoria, concerns a ten-year-old boy called Lawrence Loman who lives with his mother, Louise, and his younger brother Paul. The boys’ father, Charlie, an air force pilot, was killed during the war, when Louise was pregnant with Paul. All that the boys know of their father is his ghostly presence in the spare room, where a photo of him sits next to his posthumous Atlantic Star Medal. ‘It was as if father was a medal,’ thinks Lawrence. When the book opens, in 1953, Lawrence is a bright little boy who does well at school, has a passion for art, and is the apple of his mother’s eye. Despite the absence of a father, theirs is a happy family. Lawrence is protective of his sporty little brother. Louise works hard at the local dairy to support them and is a loving mother, if a little distant – ‘even if Mother was close … she kept a part back, and that was the part we wanted’. The boys are aware of some darkness in her past which she hints at but does not explain. One day a man from Louise’s past turns up and inveigles his way into the lives of the family. Worldly and charismatic, he shows an interest in the boys, playing sport with them and giving them gifts. Lawrence is very taken by him, realising for the first time that there had been an absence in their lives – ‘we had been missing a man’. That man betrays Lawrence’s trust in the worst way imaginable, destroying his ‘careless boyhood’ and shattering his life. The rest of the book is about the catastrophic impact on Lawrence of that violation. Laguna is unsparing in her depiction of the disintegration of Lawrence’s identity: ‘I was nothing,’ he says in the immediate aftermath. ‘I felt myself dividing; there were two selves to choose from. One inside, one outside.’ Lawrence 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

develops a bad stammer and is unable to concentrate at school, limping through the remainder of his school years, taunted by the other students. ‘I was separate; from school and from learning … and from myself.’ Haunted by guilt and shame, Lawrence suffers debilitating physical symptoms as well as this psychic pain. For the rest of his life, he grapples with abdominal problems. Lawrence’s relationship with Paul is irreparably damaged. When Paul, who has his suspicions, asks Lawrence what happened, Lawrence turns on him viciously. In a role reversal, Paul becomes his older brother’s protector, defending him against the school bullies. Lawrence’s relationship with his mother is shattered as well. Performing poorly at school and barely able to speak, he is no longer her pride and joy, and she infantilises him; when he leaves school she gets him a job in the dairy, speaking for him at the interview. ‘It was as if she thought I was ten years old and could do nothing for myself.’ As an adult, Lawrence retreats into a life of solitude. After a loss, he lives alone in the family home. Paul, who brings him monthly supplies, becomes his sole contact with the outside world. The only things that bring him solace are painting, which he returns to with a vengeance, walking in nature and listening to his beloved Madama Butterfly. ‘I too had places within me … Painting took me to those places; and Butterfly, and beer. Walking up the mountain.’ Lawrence has no friends – with two significant exceptions. Here the story becomes especially confronting, and Laguna’s psychological acuity is displayed to full effect. On two occasions the adult Lawrence attempts to befriend a ten-year-old boy. The first of them, Colin, whom Lawrence meets at twenty-four, is the son of a dairy worker. Lawrence meets James, the second, when he is fifty-one and James’s family moves in next door. Lawrence’s attempts to befriend each boy are pathetically similar: he starts by conversing (haltingly), then proffers gifts, then becomes consumed by a longing which he expresses by painting the boy. Laguna (deliberately) ventures into dangerous territory here. While the reader feels sympathetic towards lonely Lawrence’s awkward attempts at friendship – ‘I have been alone and I am no longer alone’– at the same time she feels apprehensive about Lawrence’s feelings, which veer towards the obsessive. Will the child victim turn into the adult predator? Whose fault would it be if he did? I suspect that Infinite Splendours will invite comparisons with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, published in 2015. Like that extraordinary book, it looks unflinchingly at the lived experience of child sexual abuse, in particular its enduring legacy. As Laguna demonstrates so powerfully, the abuse often destroys not just a child’s past and present but also his or her future. g Nicole Abadee has a books podcast, Books, Books, Books.

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Fiction

Ripple Effects

Pinpoints of life experience Rose Lucas

Dreams They Forgot by Emma Ashmere

Wakefield Press $24.95 pb, 240 pp

short story collection can have much in common with a collection of poetry, where each story pivots on attention to something particular and arresting – an image, a memory, the encounters with strangeness or beauty that can occur in a life. Individual stories build delicately towards such a moment, then fall away quickly, willing a reader to engage with feeling and suggestion rather than the comprehensiveness of narrative. Emma Ashmere’s short story collection Dreams They Forgot is subtle and evocative in this way; her stories move both on internal trajectories of revelation and in relation to each other, incrementally building a richly nuanced fabric of story, character, and pinpoints of life experience. The leitmotif of Ashmere’s collection (her first, following her début novel, The Floating Garden [2016]) is the point of view of the outsider, the character who often feels both inside and outside of a conventional social frame. This can be seen in a number of ways across the stories. For instance, in ‘The Ends of the Earth’, the speaker is increasingly fractured by an encroaching dementia as she tries to make sense of her own ancestor’s dislocation in colonial Australia. The narrator of ‘Trick of the Eye’ looks back as an adult at her difficult and traumatic childhood as a way of understanding her sense of struggle; in ‘A Thousand Eyes’, a child raised in an environment of loss, paranoia, and isolation must come to some reconciliation with a new sense of herself in a previously unrecognised world. The unnamed speaker in the first story, ‘The Winter Months’, is alienated by her intense social anxiety, her seeming inability to cut through a haze of confusion to find a path in life, and her attraction to the beautiful but troubled Aveline. The longing for another woman, often unarticulated and complicated by the uncertainties of youth, is a recurring theme across the collection. Ashmere celebrates the possibilities of love and tenderness between women while also giving us a sense of the historical difficulty facing such couples, especially in the context of familial and social expectations. She shows us a number of perspectives onto this. ‘The Second Wave’ combines personal narrative with politics as the two women characters, who have been on the edge of the narrative, leave the family environment and make their way in Adelaide to support Don Dunstan’s decriminalising of homosexuality. From the point of view of the sister who narrates this story, we see how the elements of uneasiness

and straining at expectations are finally made sense of when the two women leave together. ‘Silent Partner’ traces the obscuring of same-sex partnerships across time and family history, as present-day family members reinstate the love hidden behind the term ‘great friend’ to ‘life partner’ on the family tree. Similarly, ‘Standing Up Lying Down’ is in many ways the story of the emergence of love as Laurie meets Romaine and their relationship travels from a chance meeting in the Carlton Gardens to domestic commitment in a tender and understated narrative of romance. However, as Laurie becomes increasingly disabled, this is also a powerful story of a changing relationship to one’s body – to what it can and can’t do and how that might impact on an understanding of self and the world. This shift in relation to a previously held sense of identity is also traced across a series of stories that deal with the ongoing dislocations of trauma. In ‘Warhead’, the battlefields of France have psychologically scarred a schoolteacher, and the ramifications of his unresolved suffering in turn affect his young and impressionable student. In ‘Seaworthiness’, Arthur Morris attempts to shake off his own wartime pain by leaving his fiancée and working a ship to London; however, the trauma of the rigging and the storms of open sea only entrench his emotional distress and isolation. In the final story, ‘Fallout’, the narrator speaks from both child and adult perspectives to trace her father’s PTSD and physical illness as a result of involvement in the Maralinga nuclear tests. Not dissimilar to the erasure of Great Aunt Harriet’s ‘dearly loved’ in ‘Silent Partner’, Cyril’s experiences in the outback have been elided, not allowed to be spoken of or recognised in the powerful interests of political and colonial expediency. As the narrator recalls her father’s tortured efforts to speak and to name what had occurred before he succumbs to illness, she herself comes to see the shocking reality of these events, the cavalier ‘Turn around chaps. Shut your eyes. Cover your face.’ It is her rendition of their story that finally does the work of bringing the unspoken and unrecognised into the shape of viscerally felt life events, the sphere of a publicly shared discourse and experience. Ashmere’s stories offer moments of insight into love and alienation, the attempt to integrate the fragmentary nature of childhood into the construction of the adult ‘self ’, and the struggle to find ways to manage the ripple effects of trauma; they are also crucially concerned with the development of the voice to tell it. In a Grace Cossington Smith moment, two young women challenge convention and drive to Sydney to paint the almost-completed Harbour Bridge in ‘The Sketchers’; ‘Portrait or Landscape’ traces the development of a young woman from unfocused youth to a poet; ‘A House Divided’ gives us a historical narrative of a child’s transition from grief, via the kindness and mentoring of a neighbour, to the possibilities of finding her own expressions in art. In their different ways, all stories in this collection signal the importance of finding the individual experience that cries out to be articulated and acknowledged while also refining the craft required to make it sing. g Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic at Victoria University. Her most recent collection is Unexpected Clearing (UWAP, 2016). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Fiction

A bumpy road Craig Silvey’s new novel Anna MacDonald

Honeybee

by Craig Silvey

Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 432 pp

oneybee, Craig Silvey’s highly anticipated new novel, his first since Jasper Jones (2009), chronicles the coming of age of fourteen-year-old transgender narrator Sam Watson, who was assigned male at birth. This is a story of desperate loneliness and fear, of neglect, family violence, betrayal, and self-disgust. But it is also one of love and solidarity, a celebration of the kindness of strangers who become family and friends. Honeybee takes its place among other recent writing (from Charlotte Wood’s novel The Natural Way of the Things [2015] to Jess Hill’s investigation of family violence in See What You Made Me Do [2019]) that confronts deep-seated and deeply problematic aspects of Australian masculinity. Silvey adds to these representations a consideration of the link between the strict policing of a male/female binary and the physical brutality that – according to Sam’s stepfather, Steve – defines what it means to ‘be a fuckin’ man’. The novel opens late one night on the outskirts of Perth where Sam has come to end her short, turbulent life. Vic, an elderly widower, is smoking what he thinks will be his last cigarette. He is tired and in pain, but he steps back from the edge to save Sam’s life. The encounter changes everything – for Vic, for Sam – and their meeting sets in motion a string of events that will ultimately allow Sam to embody without shame ‘who I really am’. For as long as she can remember, Sam has dressed up in her mother, Sarah’s, clothes and mimicked the gestures she makes. School is difficult: there are bullies, bruises, burns, and, before long, self-harm. There are no friends:

that nobody else could understand, but I couldn’t talk any other way. So I stopped speaking, and I learned how to be invisible.’ Others do speak Sam’s language. Even before the encounter with Vic, a community of voices has begun to suggest to her new ways of imagining a self, though they still seem well out of reach. On a stolen iPad, Sam obsessively watches episodes of Julia Child’s The French Chef and learns how to cook. It is also via the internet that Sam discovers drag and dresses up to perform one version of a possible self via live webcam. Role play is crucial for Sam both as a way of trying to become invisible and as a means of experimenting with her own identity. In the same way that Sam mimicked her mother, in an attempt to ‘disguise myself as a boy’ and to avoid further victimisation, Sam imitates the way Steve and his friends do their hair, how they dress and walk. But this disguise is unsustainable. It is after a particularly brutal confrontation with Steve that Sam runs away and, eventually, meets Vic. Vic offers Sam a place to stay. It is during this period of respite that Sam begins to test the rigidity of those boy/girl categories outlined by the school counsellor. In Aggie, Vic’s teenage neighbour and a D&D diehard, Sam finds a friend who can see through her attempts to play a role that is unnatural to her. It is also while staying with Vic that Sam meets Peter – aka drag queen Fella Bitzgerald – with whose help she finally learns the difference between playing dress-ups and being oneself: When I went to school or I had to go outside, that’s when I was playing dress-ups. That’s when I was pretending to be somebody else. … And I’m not wrong, I’m me. And I don’t want to be invisible any more. I want people to see who I am.

When I was in year three, I was taken out of class by … the school counsellor … She asked questions about my long hair, about why I had no friends … about things I liked and didn’t like. Then she asked if I was a boy or a girl. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just myself.’ She asked me again. It was a question other kids always asked when they were teasing me. I knew that being a girl was something weird and wrong and shameful. I told her I was a boy.

It’s a bumpy road between playing at a self and being one. Silvey’s compassion for Sam is clear, and a lot of the narrative is concerned with the physical and emotional violence done by a culture that insists upon a binary position, on only one way of being ‘a fuckin’ man’ or a woman. By seeking to depict the inner conflict of a transgender teenager, Honeybee struggles to offer a different perspective to the representation of predominantly (but by no means only) male violence. The problem, for me, is that I found many of the characters and situations in the novel unconvincing. Silvey’s interrogation of socially imposed roles and rigidly policed identity positions relies upon the uncritical adoption of oversimplified Australian male archetypes (the repentant Vietnam veteran, the dead-inside soldier returned from Afghanistan, the wholly toxic Call-of-Duty player). And the character of Sam, and her story, reads as similarly oversimplified. Ultimately, Sam’s is a fairy-tale transformation: from poverty and family violence to financial independence, an apprenticeship under a cordon bleu chef, and the right to transition safely, supported by a new family of friends all by the age of almost fifteen. It is too much, too soon, especially in light of the real challenges to trans identity that Silvey depicts in Honeybee. g

The need to categorise – boy/girl – and the apparent rigidity of these categories has left Sam ostracised: ‘I didn’t know how I was supposed to be. It was like I was born speaking a language

Anna MacDonald is a writer and bookseller based in Melbourne. She is the author of a collection of essays, Between the Word and the World (2019), and a novel, A Jealous Tide (2020).

36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Fiction

Crammed with surprises Trent Dalton’s new novel Susan Wyndham

All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 436 pp

he cover of All Our Shimmering Skies is crammed with surprises. Look closely among the Australian wildflowers and you’ll find black hearts, butterflies, lightning bolts, a shovel, a crocodile, a dingo, a fruit bat, a Japanese fighter plane, and a red rising sun. Trent Dalton has adopted a similar method in writing his second novel, which samples almost every genre you can think of, from war story to magic realism and Gothic horror to comedy. There are references to Romeo and Juliet and a nod to The Pilgrim’s Progress. There is the heightened excitement of a Hollywood spectacular, the earthy mysticism of Aboriginal Dreaming, and a brushstroke of Japanese mythology, all sprinkled with the gold dust of Dalton’s originality. Has another contemporary Australian journalist made the leap to fiction with as much imagination and success as Dalton? (I can think of Geraldine Brooks, who did so from her American base.) A feature writer with The Weekend Australian Magazine, Dalton has sold more than 500,000 copies of his award-winning first novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), a semi-autobiographical fantasy about a Brisbane boy growing up in a family of criminals. All Our Shimmering Skies will be recognisable and pleasurable to fans of that novel. This time Dalton adopts a female perspective in his twelve-year-old protagonist, Molly Hook, and sees as much beauty as darkness. The setting is World War II Darwin and the landscapes of the Northern Territory. Molly lives in a cemetery with her family of gravediggers, but her mother, Violet, says that she is going away, up to the sky, to join Molly’s grandfather, Tom Berry. Molly ‘the gravedigger girl’ is left to work with her shovel (‘Bert’) for her father, Horace, and uncle Aubrey, both violent drunks. Aubrey is the real villain, and his menacing shadow looms over the story. In a gruesome scene, he forces Molly to dig up her mother’s bones as proof that she’s dead. But Molly talks to the sky and believes her mother sends down ‘sky gifts’ to help her. Molly is a brave, determined, funny girl who loves reading: books, poems, Shakespeare, even epitaphs. Her grandfather’s gravestone says he ‘died accursed by a sorcerer’ for stealing gold from Aboriginal land. When Japanese bombs pound Darwin in 1942, Horace Hook is killed. Orphaned Molly sets off to find Longcoat Bob, the Aboriginal sorcerer who dresses like a French admiral, and to ask him to lift the curse she believes has caused her family’s sorrows. She is joined by Greta Maze, a small-time actress with her own

reasons for escape. Greta gives Dalton the chance to break into a Hollywood dream sequence in which Molly imagines herself as the glamorous Marlene Sky and her Aboriginal friend Sam Greenway as a matinee hero like Tyrone Power or Gary Cooper. The novel is divided into five parts for each ‘sky gift’. The first is Tom’s gold pan, engraved with poetic riddles that give directions to the gold stash. On their way, Molly and Greta save the life of a Japanese pilot, Yukio Miki. The three make a mythical journey through forests, over rivers, into caves. They have nightmarish end-of-world encounters and action-movie challenges as well as revelations from the natural world and its Aboriginal owners.

All this may sound crazy in summary, but that would overlook Dalton’s flamboyant talent for storytelling All this may sound crazy in summary, but that would overlook Dalton’s flamboyant talent for storytelling and for spinning fine sentences. He never loses control. You think you know what’s going to happen, then you don’t. His characters, though classic stereotypes, breathe and grieve like real people thanks to the author’s clear eye and generous spirit. Molly, in her stolen blue dress, is a memorable figure, carrying her mother’s stone heart, skipping with delight after a buffalo attack. Perhaps Yukio, the knife-maker’s son, learns to speak English too fast, but his sweet exchanges with Molly make the leap worthwhile. Dalton describes the wartime city and the ever-changing deep country with precise detail and metaphorical magic: ‘Darwin dreams in drink and sweat’; ‘banksias with furry yellow flowers that stick out from their branches like hot corncobs spitting butter’, ‘the relentless ear scratch of cicadas’, ‘the vast ancient wetlands and wilderness of Molly Hook’s dreams, the prehistoric stone and vine country’. The narrative has non-stop momentum, driven by physical action, gymnastic sentences, and shifting viewpoints: Molly looks up at the sky; Yukio looks down from his cockpit on the ant-sized people of Darwin. The reader’s eyes take in panoramas and zoom in on a real bull ant or a watchful dingo. Dalton is not only the novel’s author but also its cinematographer, choreographer, and director, drone in one hand and conductor’s baton in the other. All Our Shimmering Skies would make a brilliant Baz Luhrmann movie, except that Luhrmann has already made Australia (2008). Despite the scenes of death and violence, I wondered if this was a novel intended for young readers, given the heroine’s innocent voice and clear moral code. Dalton says he wrote it for his daughters. I think All Our Shimmering Skies is for all ages from teenagers upwards in the same way that Markus Zusak’s bestselling Holocaust novel The Book Thief (2005) softened a tough subject by showing events through a child’s eyes, with charm, hope, and humour. This adult was enchanted by Molly Hook’s adventures. g Susan Wyndham is a journalist and writer. Her books include Life in His Hands: The true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist (2008) and My Mother, My Father: On losing a parent (2013). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Open Page with Craig Silvey

Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle in Western Australia. He is the author of Rhubarb (2004) and Jasper Jones (2009) . His new novel, Honeybee, is reviewed on page 36.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? Buckle up. I’m starting the day at Augusta National Golf Course and playing eighteen holes. Post round, I’ll take a dip in a Mauritian lagoon, after which I’ll stroll around the Natural History Museum in London, and finish up in a Spanish taberna surrounded by tapas and cerveza and amigos.

What’s your idea of hell?

I’m stuck in a queue that won’t move. It’s hot and humid. There are mosquitoes. There’s something perennially lodged between my teeth. My clothing is loose, baggy, and clingy. The pollen count is absurdly high. I need to sneeze, but I can’t. The only food available anywhere is okra or sea urchin. Hear that? The person behind me is chewing with their mouth open. My fingers are sticky. And somewhere, unseen, is a smoke alarm that needs batteries.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Nobility or elevated status. It’s hollow and illusory. Also, regularly washing your car. Just calm down, it’s really not that necessary.

What’s your favourite film?

On any given day: Paper Moon, The Apartment, Casablanca, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, No Country For Old Men, Brokeback Mountain, Rashomon.

And your favourite book?

On any given day: To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit, The Sun Also Rises, Cat’s Cradle, Sula, Lean On Pete.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I adore No Such Thing as a Fish, which is practically narcotic for those of a curious disposition. I love Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin. Bear Brook was utterly compelling and superbly structured. Closer to home, I love Rachael Brown’s Trace series. She’s set the benchmark for Australian investigative podcasts.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Muhammad Ali, Paul Newman, David Attenborough.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

‘Serendipity’. I’d like to consign that word to a Hallmark Card, set it on fire, and fling it over the moon. If I could restore one word to modern parlance, it would be ‘vim’. It’s such a speedy, sprightly, bright little word. I like a person with vim.

Who is your favourite author?

On any given day: John Steinbeck, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

(Allen & Unwin)

Interview

Toni Morrison, Miles Franklin, Mark Twain, Jane Austen.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Hard to go past Atticus Finch, really. Anti-heroes are always more interesting.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Sincerity. Passion. Fearlessness. Humility. Vulnerability. Wit. Economy. In that order.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

This largely depends on how we’re defining ‘youth’, but as a young child I was enamoured with Paul Jennings, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, James Herriot, Ruth Park. But there was one book I borrowed on a whim from the library which always stayed with me: Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian (1981). It introduced me to a range of emotions I’d never experienced. I still remember the way that book made me feel, and it was very influential on the way I approached Honeybee.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. Probably Charles Bukowski. I just don’t have room for that kind of bitterness in my life. We might have to add Norman Mailer to the list too. The Naked and the Dead is a brilliant book, but it’s hard to ignore that Norman really was an insufferable dickhead.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Everything, outside of being seated at my desk in my office, is an impediment to my writing.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading? The answer in both respects is ‘unfettered praise’.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Writing, for me at least, is a protracted, solitary undertaking, so I love any opportunity to connect with readers. Writers’ festivals are a teeming, enthusiastic hub of like-minded people, and it’s always a thrill to be involved.

Are artists valued in our society? Yes.

What are you working on now?

I have a number of film projects in various stages of development: a western, a survival thriller, and a family film. I’m nibbling around the edges of a new novel, and I’m quietly determining how I’m going to adapt Honeybee for the screen.

Essay

Failures of imagination

A journey from Tehran’s prisons to Australia’s immigration detention centres

by Hessom Razavi

n 14 November 2019, Behrouz Boochani arrived in New Zealand, to feature in the WORD Christchurch literary festival. In so doing, Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian writer, detained – or, in his words, exiled – by the Australian government for six years, finally escaped his ‘Manus Prison’. The details of his resettlement remained unclear, but it didn’t matter; he simply wanted to be ‘free for a while’. Around the world, on broadcast and social media, thousands celebrated Boochani’s ‘long flight to freedom’. This followed his award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains (2018), an autobiographical novel typed on his mobile phone using WhatsApp, one passage at a time. Smuggled from Manus in thousands of PDF files, it was translated from Farsi into English by his Iranian-Australian collaborator, Dr Omid Tofighian. For Boochani and those concerned with the plight of asylum seekers and refugees, his escape offered a rare moment of exultation. Three days later, the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged. Some investigations have traced the first confirmed case to 17 November 2019 in Hubei Province, China. At particular risk were those in captive quarters: nursing homes, prisons, detention facilities. In March 2020, with more than 500,000 Covid-19 cases worldwide, Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for detainees held ‘without sufficient legal basis’ to be released. In Australia, the advice was echoed by some 1,200 medical professionals in an open letter to federal ministers Peter Dutton and Alan Tudge; the clinicians called for the release of refugees and asylum seekers into community-supported accommodation. The plea merely elicited a statement from the Department of Home Affairs about cleaning measures in detention centres. In repurposed Australian hotels, hundreds of men formerly detained on Manus Island and Nauru were at heightened risk from the virus. In Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point Central Hotel, which accommodates more than 100 detainees, a security guard tested positive in March. In July, at the Mantra Hotel in Melbourne, which houses around sixty men, another guard tested positive. ‘Everyone is panicking … they don’t want to die,’ said Farhad Bandesh, a detainee at the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation. Meanwhile, the Department of Home Affairs reiterated that protective measures, including the provision of gloves and masks, were in place.

I know this system, its drag and grind. It is five years since I last worked on Manus Island and Nauru. I was there as a visiting ophthalmologist. What led me there was my outreach work as a ‘FIFO eye surgeon’ visiting regional towns in Western Australia. As an Iranian migrant, I felt conflicted about the prospect of working offshore. Would I be serving asylum seekers, or just a lackey for ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, Australia’s militarised response to refugees at sea? By August 2015, with the dilemma unresolved, I was 6,000km from home, on Nauru, a tiny phosphate speck in the Pacific Ocean. At the entrance to the Regional Processing Centre, an Australian security officer checked my credentials. I noticed his greasy hair; we were both dripping in the tropical heat. The place was part military camp, part colonial protectorate; mostly it resembled a prison, with tall inner and outer perimeter fences. It reminded me of jails I’d visited in Western Australia’s Aboriginal communities – and prior to that, in Iran. The sense of déjà vu was like a cracked mirror, a distorted version of my past. Thirty years earlier, when I was a child, I accompanied my parents to Tehran’s Evin Prison to visit my jailed uncles. There, the inmates were arbitrarily detained, many of them to be tortured, some killed. Now, on Nauru and on Manus Island, I saw more jailed Iranians, plus Kurds, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Rohingya, Sudanese, and Tamils. Their situations differed, but these inmates were mainly young and unremarkable, guilty largely of seeking safety and justice – a new era, a different hemisphere, but political prisoners all the same. Here, too, people died. By the time of my arrival in 2015, three had perished. The number has now risen to thirteen, six of them by suicide. Three more deaths have occurred on Australian soil, including that of Diane Parker, a former G4S security guard who witnessed the 2014 Manus Island uprising. ‘I see Manus everywhere, I see asylum seekers everywhere,’ she wrote on 27 June 2019 in a suicide note addressed to Prime Minister Scott Morrison. One death, on 15 October 2019, was that of Sayed Mirwais Rohani, a thirty-two-year-old Afghan doctor who spoke six languages. Having fled the Taliban and been detained by Australian Border Force, he offered to provide medical care for local Manusians. Australia blocked his attempts to reunite with his family. After four years on Manus Island, he committed suicide while in community detention in Brisbane. Afterwards, Australia refused AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

to help repatriate his body. His mother, Hamesha, says, ‘Mirwais own father, and was a nine-year-old worker at his uncle’s caravanwas suffering from depression … the Australian government is serai. Dad was considered gifted at school, with an aptitude for mathematics, enough to earn meals by tutoring other children. On … probably the most cruel government in the world.’ Rohani’s story cuts close to the bone, ‘there but for the grace graduating from high school, he received an air force scholarship of God, go I’ written along the thin blade. A doctor myself, from to study engineering, thus fulfilling the provincial dream: leaving Afghanistan’s neighbouring country Iran, I was fortunate enough the village for a higher education. Dad moved to Shiraz University’s campus and entered to receive Australian citizenship in 1989. I picture Rohani and myself abreast: one doomed, the other thriving. Like the stray student politics as a teenager. Along with a close cousin, bounce of a roulette ball, the sheer arbitrariness of fate contrasts he joined an energetic youth movement, conscious of recent with Australia’s ‘queue jumper’ rhetoric and its various subtexts: uprisings in Egypt, Iraq, Algeria, and Cuba. Activities included ‘we will decide who comes to this country’; ‘boat people choose pamphleteering: distributing critiques of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. This their own risks and consequences’; Zeitgeist of people power was ‘we can’t open the floodgates’; made perilous by the Shah’s SA‘they’re here to take our jobs and VAK secret police, who routinely women’, etc. charged civilians with treason, I want to scrutinise these punishable by imprisonment and voices, their context and validity. even death. Recently married In beginning I need look no furto my mother, Sakineh, with a ther than at my own story, that of frizzy-haired baby – my older a migrant with a professional brother, Soroosh – in tow, Dad career and an Australian wife. accepted these risks. It seems I have taken a job and In 1977, we moved to Karaa woman. Am I the bogeyman chi, Pakistan, so that Dad could of Australia’s parochial anxiety? further his studies at the NED And how does our general acUniversity of Engineering and ceptance of migrants sit alongside Technology. I was nine months our harsh treatment of asylum old. When not in class, Dad seekers? Why are we among the fronted the podium at anti-Shah few countries in the world that rallies. For this, he was arrested, practise mandatory, indefinite beaten, and imprisoned by the detention of all undocumented Sindh Police. (Pakistan under – yet not illegal – non-citizens? President Muhammad Zia-ulWith Australia’s mental health Haq was allied with the Shah’s rattled by six months of Covregime.) Fortunate to be released, id-19’s lockdown, can we begin he graduated with the university’s to imagine the limbo and isolation gold medals in engineering and experienced by asylum seekers, avionics. A pattern of ‘success some of them incarcerated for up as immunity’ had developed, to ten years and still counting? The author and his mother where Dad ’s prof essional In this continuing series of articles on refugees, statelessness, and human rights, I will con- achievements cloaked his activism, a ruse that would later protemplate my own family’s journey from Iran to Australia, as a tect us in crucial ways. Back in Iran, disgruntlement with the Shah intensified. The gateway to addressing the broader issues – ‘in the particular lies the universal’, as the saying goes. In doing so, I’ll doubtless reveal Iranian Revolution was predicated on a number of crises, with my own background and biases. The jumping-off point is Iran in skirmishes culminating in full-blown civil resistance. By January the 1970s, when a precarious atmosphere created the razor’s edge 1979, with the nation reaching its tipping point, the Shah fled that became the 1979 Islamic Revolution, changing – radically Iran, never to return. Shortly afterwards, millions greeted the and forever – the course of my family’s path and that of millions return of Ayatollah Khomeini, the exiled Islamic cleric, and in April 1979 the Islamic Republic was constituted. A pro-Western of other Iranians. monarchy had been replaced by an anti-Western theocracy, with Khomeini its Supreme Leader, soon to be named, incredibly, as Time magazine’s Man of the Year. Dad and my uncles, devout Shia My family hails from Azna, a small town in the foothills of the Muslims, were as susceptible as anyone to the popular rhetoric. We returned to an unsettled Tehran in early 1981. The IsOshtoran Kuh mountain range in Lorestan Province. Our lineage can be traced back 300 years, the family tree leafed with lamic Republican Party had outlawed all other political groups, including its largest opponent, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK; Islamic preachers teaching the Qur’an to local farmers. Fast forward to the 1950s. My father, Hashem, had lost his People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran). Khomeini imprisoned 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Category

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In Christchurch, Boochani cycles around town and the surrounding hills. ‘I feel free on my bike,’ he declares, ‘but, at the same time, I cannot fully celebrate … Australia’s policy still exists.’ g Hessom Razavi – a writer and doctor based in Perth – is the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow. He was born in Iran in 1976 and came to Australia when he was thirteen. He completed his studies as an ophthalmologist in 2015. I am most grateful to the following, who have assisted me in the creation of this article: Dr Liana Joy Christensen, Dr Omid Tofighian, Jon Doust, Dr Megan Neervort, and Peter Rose and his

colleagues at ABR. *The precise financial cost of Australia’s asylum seeker policy is difficult to establish, as it ranges across multiple government programs and portfolios. The figure provided is based on reports from the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales, which can be accessed at: https://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au/publication/ cost-australias-asylum-policy. The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, closely associated with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne, is funded by Peter McMullin, a lawyer, philanthropist, and businessman.

To Hassan

And to the other men from Afghanistan, and Iran and Iraq, who prepared a feast for me one midday, years ago on my way to work, laid the clean sheet smooth on the worn carpet of the furnitureless house, placed dishes of spiced rice and chickpeas, and slid a plate towards me – there were not enough plates to go around – and with upturned palms urged me to eat first, I want to thank you and say I’ll always remember that meal, your hospitality and kindness, the cool of the empty room as I stepped off the busy street and out of the sun to join you for what I thought would be a glass of black tea. I want to say sorry though that I left too soon, that I let my job call me away. I’m sorry, Hassan, that by the time I returned with the paper and pencils and tubes of paint you needed, the house was boarded up, you’d been moved on; I’m sorry to say I’ve forgotten your friends’ names; I’m sorry that my imagination could barely grasp that deep water and fearful waves could look like hope, most of all I’m sorry for my ignorance that statelessness in this country might also look like the view from a small boat on a hostile ocean, except with no coast to train the eye to.

Sarah Day

Sarah Day’s latest book is Towards Light (Puncher & Wattmann, 2018). 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Biography

Matters of identity

An engaging biography of Mark Leibler David Trigger

The Power Broker: Mark Leibler, an Australian Jewish life by Michael Gawenda

Monash University Publishing $39.95 hb, 371 pp

ichael Gawenda’s engaging biography of Melbourne lawyer Mark Leibler traverses matters of Australia’s migration history, Jewish identity, and political influence. What has it meant to live a Jewish life in an Australian city? What have been the intergenerational impacts of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and the establishment of the State of Israel? How, if at all, might the balance depicted between commitment to minority cultural distinctiveness and broad societal participation exhibit a way forward for multicultural futures? Mark Leibler’s life, as a successful Australian lawyer and a publicly committed leader of Jewish organisations, has emerged from the remarkable history of refugees who lost their families in the Holocaust. From small business beginnings, a significant number became upwardly mobile and in Melbourne some achieved great success. Leibler’s parents were young middle-class members of the Jewish community in Antwerp, Belgium, who moved to Australia months before the start of the Nazi horror in September 1939. Leibler’s mother lived to 103 and died in Israel. It was she who had realised the dangers emerging for Jews in Europe. Her parents were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz, having perhaps cheated the Nazis in a small way by hiding some diamonds in the brickwork of their home, a bundle that Mark’s parents managed to recover around 1954 after visiting from what had become their new home in Australia. Gawenda, the skilled writer of this biography, is also a product of a Jewish refugee family that managed to migrate to Melbourne. His own parents fled to the Soviet Union just before the invasion of Poland and arrived in Australia after the war. Unlike the Leiblers, they were working class, Gawenda’s mother labouring in a sock-manufacturing factory and his father weaving carpets. This book is in many ways a dialogue between the two men, who have shared migrant family experiences yet diverged in their versions of living a Jewish life. While Leibler’s family was and has remained both religiously orthodox and Zionist, Gawenda describes his political identity as ‘of the left, socialist and universalist in outlook’. Joining in 1966 what became the well-known law firm of Arnold Bloch Leibler, Mark Leibler developed, over a career of some fifty years, a reputation as a highly successful adviser and advocate especially in tax law. He established working relationships with the Australian Taxation Office and assisted his firm’s

clients, including some major companies. For several decades the clientele included many Jewish businesses, initially smallto medium-sized and then some large and wealthy companies, though in the latter parts of the book Gawenda canvasses how the scope of work and range of clients has now expanded very much beyond the ethnic network. The formal establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was central to Leibler’s Jewish identity, a view that most studies show is shared among the majority of Jewish Australians, despite a host of differences regarding particular Israeli governments and policies including the issue of Palestinian rights. Leibler, over decades, has led several major Zionist organisations and has devoted himself to articulating the case for Israel as having brought ‘light and hope into lives that had been consumed’ by the darkness of anti-Semitism. Among his successes was a significant role in garnering support from Australian politicians and others to overturn the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution that identified Zionism as a form of racism. Gawenda portrays the outrage of most Jews in finding that ‘in just three decades the victims of the most murderous form of racism had been turned into racists’ in a campaign by Arab states with the support of the then Soviet Union. The book brings a welcome sophistication to analysing the meanings of being a Zionist, a label that has over recent decades in countries like Australia assumed negative connotations among many in the progressive left. Such anti-Zionists embrace Palestinian narratives to the exclusion of any recognition of Israel as the product of an often-persecuted Jewish history and of a modern struggle for Jewish national liberation. Gawenda is hardly celebratory about all aspects of Leibler’s Zionist commitment, but the circumstances of his own life disallow any easy one-dimensional dismissal of the entire project of a Jewish State as simply European colonialism that should somehow be disbanded. In recounting Leibler’s work for major Zionist organisations, Gawenda also addresses how Zionism can include those who want a ‘two state solution’ for Israel–Palestine, and who would prefer an Israeli government more progressive than the current one. Leibler’s personal politics confound any simplistic portrayal of him as an unbending conservative. Yes, he has resisted criticism of Israel’s approach to military security, and believes critique from the Jewish diaspora should not be made publicly. Yet his law firm was among the first to support the Yes vote for same-sex marriage. He enjoyed a professionally close relationship with major figures in the Labor Party, among them Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister. One of his major successes, in 2014, was to convince government to announce an amnesty scheme for a range of migrant groups, including Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Jews, and others, enabling them to repatriate to Australia substantial funds they had left behind through uncertainties regarding tax payable. Moreover, Leibler has for some time been committed to assisting achievement of legal justice for Indigenous Australians. The book recounts his strong working relationships with significant Indigenous intellectuals and strategists, Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton among them. Leibler is said to contribute half of his pro-bono hours to Indigenous issues. He committed the law firm to some innovative native title cases from the 1990s onwards, and he has been a strong supporter of initiatives seekAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Biography ing reconciliation and constitutional recognition of Aboriginal interests. With others in the Jewish community, he reportedly feels deep appreciation of the extraordinary action of Aboriginal man William Cooper, who courageously presented a signed petition in 1938 to the German Consulate protesting ‘the cruel persecution of the Jewish people’. From his perspective, Noel Pearson says his close relationship with Leibler, and his observations of parts of the Melbourne Jewish community, have provided a window onto a people who have admirably resisted embracing any debilitating sense of victimhood, despite a long collective history of victimisation. Pearson’s speech in launching Leibler’s biography expressed his deep appreciation and personal friendship over many years. The book’s title presents Mark Leibler’s life as exhibiting success as a ‘power broker’. Gawenda acknowledges that such a portrayal is ‘fraught with risks’, given deeply embedded stereotypes and falsehoods about secret nefarious Jewish influence, racist stereotypes that have been embraced by anti-Semites over centuries. Nevertheless, Leibler’s professional relationships and friendships with prime ministers and a host of significant public figures are clear enough, positioning him as an unusually influential advocate for the causes that have informed his energetic working life. g David Trigger is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Queensland and Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia.

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www.australianbookreview.com.au 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Man and thinker

Who was John Maynard Keynes? John Tang

The Price of Peace: Money, democracy and the life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter

Random House $59.99 hb, 650 pp

ho was John Maynard Keynes? Was he the bookish Cambridge don who penned ambitious theories to overturn the tenets of economics and political liberalism? Or was he Baron Keynes of Tilton, the ardent imperialist who viewed British rule as a benevolent force bringing justice, liberty, and prosperity to the societies it administered? Was he a meticulous Lothario who kept lists of his hookups with anonymous men on notecards? Was he also a political statesman who lambasted the intransigency of his colleagues during fraught negotiations in two world wars? In Zachary D. Carter’s highly sympathetic biography, Keynes (1883–1946) was all of these and more. Besides treading familiar territory on Keynes’s contribution to the discipline of economics, Carter also shows an intimate portrait of Keynes (better known as Maynard to his friends) and how Keynesian ideas transformed the landscape of modern American power. With its seventeen chapters and ample references to both Keynes’s published works and his personal correspondence, this book is ambitious in revising the image of Keynes as a man and thinker. Its inconsistent and hyperbolic writing, however, tends to diminish Keynes’s achievements rather than clarify them. There is little dissent that Keynes, judged by his economic scholarship, had a transformative impact on his profession and on the world through the policies that adopted his ideas. Keynes’s magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) continues to influence theorists and policymakers as a foundational text much like Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) or Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). By shifting the emphasis away from free-market orthodoxy towards social welfare, from scarcity toward redistribution, Keynes provided intellectual ammunition to socially oriented governments against classical and neoclassical liberal adherents. In advocating vigorous public action to counter market failures, he sought to mitigate the damage resulting from uncertainty and human irrationality. Similarly, since financial markets could not accurately price in uncertainty given ever-changing world conditions, it was necessary to regulate them. In times of depression, Keynes argued, governments had a moral obligation to increase spending and decrease suffering. Carter’s contribution is to humanise Keynes the theorist by illustrating his personal contradictions, such as his occasional anti-Semitism, his love of worldly privilege, and his naïveté concerning predictable realpolitik machinations.

Numerous anecdotes demonstrate the complexity and evo- major school of thought named after him, the relentless praise lution of Keynes as a thinker and as an individual. Starting from Carter heaps on Keynes comes across as uncritical and hyperbolic. the position of an unabashed free trader, Keynes renounced that Was Keynes really the most important or powerful intellectual of to embrace tariffs as a response to Britain’s rigid (and doomed) the twentieth century? Is it true that the failures in policy between belief in a gold standard, readopted after World War I. Keynes’s World War I and the onset of the Great Depression were due early scepticism about econometric analysis that reduces the simply to the inability of European policymakers to recognise economy into variables gave way to an approach anticipating an Keynes’s brilliance? Carter gives Keynes credit for reshaping US era of ‘joy through statistics’. In a letter to his fellow Bloomsbury economic policy during the 1930s despite public works programs intimate and lover Duncan Grant, Keynes reveals his disgust like the National Recovery Administration having been initiated at working for a government he despised even as he revelled in before the publication of The General Theory or broader awareness his role as a fêted adviser and public intellectual. His love of art of Keynes’s theories. and beauty motivated him to authorise the purchase of French Post-Impressionist art with public funds, despite a financial crisis Keynes, judged by his economic scholarship, in Great Britain and the escalating costs of fighting World War I. had a transformative impact on his Notwithstanding inherent conflicts of interest that would be profession and on the world considered illegal today, Keynes invested in stocks and commodities whose values were affected by his position as a government Unusual for a biography, the book does not end with Keynes’s official. Besides rubbing shoulders with the likes of British prime ministers Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, Keynes also death but continues for nearly two hundred pages more as a coda that elaborates on Keynesian cultivated relationships with the policies in the United States. clever and the famous throughThe unwieldy substitution of out his life: Albert Einstein, Galbraith as protagonist for Felix Frankfurter, Joan RobinKeynes makes more sense if the son, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and book’s primary objective were an Virginia Woolf, with whom he analysis of Keynesian theories in spent his Christmases until her comparative perspective, but it death in 1941. makes for a jarring contrast to Some of Keynes’s relationsections describing Keynes’s sexships had surprising conseual proclivities and infidelity to quences, such as how his tract his wife or loosely sketched sumThe Economic Consequences of the maries of economic theories. The Peace (1919) was the inspiration loss of coherency is compounded for T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The by the assertive authorial voice Waste Land (1922). (Keynes had Carter inserts in his narrative. also offered the poet a job.) More Do readers care if Carter, as opconsequential would be how posed to Keynes, has satisfying many of the policies that Keynes answers to why democracies had proposed would be eagerly make poor economic choices or adopted in the United States, if he thinks societies organised specifically under the adminisaround profit incentives will have tration of President Franklin Dedirty parks? Are snappy quips or lano Roosevelt. Through regular rhetorical cliffhangers necessary correspondence with Roosevelt, to end chapters, as if this biograKeynes would flatter and cajole phy were a hard-boiled whodunit the president to push ahead with or serialised Bildungsroman? government programs like the These stylistic tics undermine New Deal to help the economy George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes, 1935 Carter’s professed aim to show recover from the Great Depres(Alamy Stock Photo) the transformative implications sion. His acolytes like Robinson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Samuelson continued this of Keynesian ideology, and instead trivialise a man’s life and work. The paradox and fascination of Keynes is that he was both process in university classrooms and government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic, ensuring that his intellectual legacy a man of his time and one who shaped it. While his legacy is remained visible and relevant to the economic problems of the ill served by Carter’s uneven biography, Keynes’s contributions remain as relevant today as they were a century past. g twentieth century. Carter’s enthusiasm for Keynes is evident throughout his book, for better and worse. While Keynes has clearly made an John Tang is Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of outsized impact on policy and his profession, which even has a Melbourne. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Comment

After the waves

A tribute to a pioneering Labor feminist

by Joshua Black

usan Ryan was a formidable storyteller. Her stories communicated her values and her world view, her commitment to the pursuit of a more egalitarian society. Hers was a powerful form of communication, capable of questioning and challenging the inadequacies of the masculinist, class-exclusive ‘fair go’ of postwar Australian society. Two weeks before her death on September 27, I spoke to Ryan via videoconference in what must have been one of her final interviews. As ever, her stories were uplifting and thought-provoking, full of humour but laden with didactic intent. She talked about her childhood and her upbringing, her education and her values, and the political ascent that culminated in her becoming the first female member of a federal Labor Cabinet, in 1983. Ryan’s predisposition towards offering compelling stories led her to write her autobiography, Catching the Waves: My life in and out of politics, which was published in 1999. In it she wrote not just about her own life but about the social and political contexts in which it occurred. She reflected on her working-class upbringing in Maroubra, Sydney, and her Catholic education, which, for all its strictness and rigidity, instilled a deep sense of social justice and the imperative to do good for those less fortunate than herself. Interestingly, Ryan did not consider her work to be an autobiography in the strictest sense. ‘I didn’t want to write a complete account of everything that had happened in my life,’ she recalled. ‘I wanted to focus on what I saw as the determining events in my own childhood and so on and so forth, and the important events 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

from my perspective as a feminist, social democrat.’ Ultimately, the power of her stories mattered more to her than their generic labels, and she encouraged me to make my own judgement about her book’s classification. She found the book ‘demanding emotionally’ to write, and this in itself reflects the extent to which the essence of her selfhood was etched into the pages. Catching the Waves explored two of the more significant sociopolitical tides that shaped and defined her political life. The first, of course, was the rise of second-wave feminism in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. Through that lens, her autobiography was just another highlight in a career full of firsts: ‘I had the sense that I was doing something for the first time.’ The book told the story of her involvement in the Women’s Electoral Lobby, her ascendancy in the newly formed ACT Branch of the ALP, her enthusiastic chasing of the women’s vote under Bill Hayden, and her battles over education policy and women’s reform in the Hawke government. Her message to younger readers, she said, was clear: ‘The gains were so hard to make, and if you don’t watch out, they’re going to disappear.’ In our conversation, Ryan was measured in her stories about life as a female Labor parliamentarian. She was conscious that she had experienced mild sexism. For much of her tenure, her departmental secretary was Helen Williams, the first woman to lead a government department. When Ryan took Williams to Expenditure Review Committee meetings to advocate for higher spending, they were occasionally greeted with: ‘Oh, here come

the women.’ Her unwavering commitment to the women’s policy left politics in 1988. agenda caused some friction with colleagues. Her famous Sex Ultimately, Ryan remained committed to the core values of Discrimination Act (1984), which prohibited workplace discrim- the Labor Party. Despite the ‘high tide’ of economic rationalism, ination on the basis of sex, marital status, or pregnancy, was a case she felt that Labor’s core values had survived the 1980s. Asked in point: ‘It was a hassle to handle,’ she recalled. ‘It took up a lot about her portrayal of Labor in government in Catching the of time.’ This frustrated some male ministerial colleagues. Includ- Waves, Ryan said: ‘Despite all these brawls, all the mistakes … ing Finance Minister Peter Walsh, who complained that ‘this the core belief, which is that every Australian should have equal bloody women’s stuff ’ was slowing the passage of other reforms opportunity, was the core belief of the Labor Party.’ through the Senate. Values of social justice and egalitarianism drove her post-parRyan did not perceive herself – or indeed represent herself in liamentary life as well. After a brief and ‘unhappy’ stint as the her book – as the victim of sexism. She said that ‘day-to-day sexism’ Australian publishing director at Penguin, Ryan served as the was not something she suffered head of the Association of often. Some of her male colSuperannuation Funds of Ausleagues had a ‘crude style about tralia. In 2011, Prime Minister them’, but they were courteous Julia Gillard appointed her as and collegiate with her. ‘I didn’t Australia’s first Age Discrimget any of that personal, insultination Commissioner. Ryan ing behaviour that Julia Gillard used the opportunity to proand other female members of mote ‘good research about age parliament had,’ she said. stereotyping’ and to facilitate Ryan’s fellow feminists training programs for employurged her on in her political ers to prevent age discriminacareer. They also encouraged tion in the workforce. In this her to write the story of that carole, she noticed patterns of reer. Senior feminists implored discrimination that were highher to write an autobiography, ly familiar: ‘All of the reasons the rationale being that it was employers – particularly big their story as much as it was employers – would give me hers. Having avoided the aufor not wanting to have older tobiographical project for some workers were the same that in time, Ryan decided to commit the 1970s they gave me about to it when Edna Ryan, a fierce women.’ champion of equal pay for equal In our conversation, Ryan work, said emphatically, ‘I want revealed that she was considyou to do this book.’ For Susan ering writing another book. Ryan, it was the ‘breakthrough While she had no interest in of feminism into parliamentary reissuing Catching the Waves, politics’ that mattered. ‘I was she had contemplated writconscious that it was an imporing a sequel to discuss issues tant story, without saying I’m a Susan Ryan speaking at the 2015 Human Rights Awards (Australian Human such as sexual harassment in particularly important person.’ the workplace and domestic Rights Commission/Wikimedia Commons) The second major ‘tidal violence. She was undecided wave’ was the rise of economic rationalism in the 1980s. Not- about whether to commit to that project. With an inscrutable withstanding its commitment to social reform, the ALP under smile, she said, ‘I’ll let you know if I do.’ Hawke became the party of deregulation, free markets, and Had it been written, Ryan’s second book would have been restricted government spending. another profound story about the changing place of women in Ryan’s repudiation of this philosophy was at the heart of Australian society. Nonetheless, Australians can be grateful for many of the stories she told about her life in politics, particu- her life, her work, and the stories that she did put down on the larly in Catching the Waves. ‘I was a big spending minister,’ she record for posterity. Susan Ryan was modest. She didn’t simply said, ‘which meant more in education, TAFE courses for mi- catch and ride waves: she helped to shape them. g grant women who had lost their jobs when the factories closed. I wasn’t an economic rationalist, and I couldn’t be in my program.’ Joshua Black is a doctoral student at ANU, his subject being the Politically, Ryan made her last stand on the issue of university Australian political memoir. tuition fees. ‘I certainly created a lot of problems for myself by not agreeing to university fees,’ she recalled later. ‘That was the This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing real breakdown between me and Bob and Walsh.’ Having lost cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright that war and been demoted from the Education portfolio, Ryan Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Memoir

Living the unspeakable Communicating pain Kate Crowcroft

Show Me Where It Hurts: Living with invisible illness by Kylie Maslen

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 286 pp

irginia Woolf wrote that when trying to communicate about pain as a sick woman ‘language at once runs dry’. How does one talk about wounds without fetishising their workings, and how in a society where pain is taboo does one speak of it authentically? In Show Me Where it Hurts, writer and journalist Kylie Maslen balances the difficulty of this equation: telling the story of her disability and having that story remain fundamentally unspeakable. The act of telling remains for Maslen ‘a rejection of language’, and yet the thing on the table for those suffering is ‘the desire to make ourselves known’. This is well-trodden terrain in the echelons of theory. There are shades here of Elaine Scarry’s contention that pain breaks language, but Maslen’s approach is visceral, practical. It has to be. Theory would be a privilege. She navigates the urgent, sublimated world of pain’s inexpressibility in ways that are fresh and inventive. More importantly, they are the authenticities of the life she lives. People ask, ‘How are you?’ What I want to say: I’m running out of words. What I actually say: ‘About the same.’ Doctors: ‘Give that to me as a number from one to ten.’

The abject inadequacy of the medical model’s diagnostic approach to pain management is laid bare. Maslen has been confronting this deadly untranslatability between qualitative and quantitative languages for half her life. She is given diagnoses of polycystic ovary syndrome and endometriosis. A Janus face appears in each aspect of the equation. Maslen writes that having little control over your body means having to surrender to it. Equally, ‘the limitations of my body force me to make stronger decisions … to work toward the life I want rather than one created by compromise’. In this quest, ‘we know that words are not enough’, and neither are numbers. So, what do you do when the scale is unfit for purpose, when nothing adds up? Enter SpongeBob SquarePants: generous, kind-hearted sea sponge and cartoon luminary. If numbers are the spectre of this piece, images enact processes of re-envisaging the invisible. For Maslen and others with chronic illnesses, animation and memes can bridge gaps across the unsayable – humour that is ‘simultaneously distant and close’. Memes, photographs, and tattoos are the 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

etchings on screen and skin that facilitate mutual understandings around illness and assist its daily management. And we are sitting with Maslen, experiencing what it’s like to live in a world not established for your needs. A world in which television shows and tattoo artists offer wisdom and consolation where medical practitioners fail. The visual speaks, and the removal of agency is reclaimed through needle and ink. This goes for pleasure, too, and the sense of touch that recoups losses from surgeries and miscommunications. Maslen feels the inked needle pierce her skin by choice. She touches her scars. She tunes out the voice of her lover to focus on how good her body feels after sex. ‘What I want now isn’t sympathy – I want to be devoured.’

Maslen navigates the sublimated world of pain’s inexpressibility in ways that are fresh and inventive Towards the end of the book, Bipolar II, a later diagnosis for Maslen, offers a sense of the hard-won moments of well-being that may come from right naming. Friends and family rally around her: they shine. One of the many urgencies of this book is its challenge to the ideal of self-sufficiency. The invisibility – the phantom-like quality of pain – moves to the realm of societal sickness. Maslen is at the height of her powers when casting a journalist’s eye over the long-term negative effects of punitive social policies. The unspeakable scale, the one-through-ten of the pain metric, is transposed into the hard numbers of deprivation. One in eight Australians live in poverty, while inflation and unaffordable housing keep the most vulnerable unable to escape the cycle of disadvantage. She addresses race, homelessness among older women, and the reality of earning a wage with a disability. Acknowledged from the book’s outset is how much harder all of these things are for people with disabilities who are trans or intersex. By interrogating the invisible in the personal sphere, these numbers become transparent. The lives of those on society’s margins come to the fore. In the face of federal funding cuts to services utilised by the most vulnerable populations in Australian society, a reciprocity of care and trust might emerge in digital and physical communities that would extend beyond working age into retirement. Maslen talks about how people can ask for help and about the possibility of the general population stepping ‘into the void’ left by government. She offers a reimagining of care networks and the means through which complex and varied needs are met. In a climate that has exposed how interdependent we all are for health and survival, this work feels prescient. Alongside Kate Middleton’s Calibre essay ‘The Dolorimeter’ (ABR, September 2020), you might call this the beginnings of an Empathy Exams for the Australian psyche. Here, Maslen’s words do not run dry. Show Me Where it Hurts is essential reading for those of us with the privilege of having a body that behaves itself, and anyone who seeks to better love and care for others. g Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet. ❖

Memoir

Sue and Saroo A memoir of motherhood Margaret Robson Kett

Lioness: The extraordinary untold story of Sue Brierley, mother of Saroo, the boy known as Lion by Sue Brierley

‘T

Viking $34.99 pb, 271 pp

he vision was of a brown-skinned child standing by her side. She sensed it so keenly that she could even feel the child’s warmth. It was so striking she wondered about her sanity … but as time went by, she became more comfortable with her vision, accepted it as something precious, a visitation of some sort that only she knew about.’ Saroo Brierley related this life-changing vision from his adoptive mother Sue’s childhood in his memoir A Long Way Home (2013). That book told of how, aged five, he became separated from his brother at a railway station in Burhanpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. By accident he was locked in a train compartment, and ended up 1,400 kilometres away in what is now known as Kolkata. He lived on the streets, friendless and unable to make himself understood – his name was even changed through mispronunciation from ‘Sheru’ (Lion). He was taken into an orphanage. Sue and John Brierley later adopted him and gave him a new life in Hobart. Lioness is Sue Brierley’s story, beginning with her birth to migrants recently arrived in Burnie. Josef and Julie Stelnicki, fleeing postwar Europe, believed that the ship they boarded would take them to Canada but ended up in Tasmania. Sue, the middle daughter, describes her early life as one of privation. Her father lurches from one moneymaking scheme to another in a home that increasingly resembles a junkyard; her mother attempts to protect herself from alcohol-fuelled violence. There is little affection and respect shown to the three girls. A child’s growing awareness of the way they live, and her conviction that no one else lives that way, are described vividly. She pays tribute to people met in her young life who showed her what real love and attachment looked like. Sue escapes the hardships of her childhood through marriage, aged seventeen, to her soul mate, John Brierley. With the prospect of becoming their own family and their shared belief in the environmental impact of the world’s over-population, they decide to adopt a child from overseas. After sixteen years of marriage, their adoption of Saroo goes swiftly and smoothly, with the help of Saroj Sood from the Indian Society for Sponsorship and Adoption (ISSA) – the book is dedicated to Mrs Sood. The adoption is expedited by the Brierleys’ lack of preference with respect to age or gender. Saroo is described by Sue as a happy smiling boy on his arrival in Australia. At the age of six, he quickly settles into life with the

Brierleys, in a home furnished with cultural objects, including a large map of India on his bedroom wall. They maintain contact with another family who have also adopted an Indian child. In the way of shared family memories, events in both Sue’s book and A Long Way Home are related almost word for word. In his book, Saroo describes how he consciously kept his memories of his early life alive by telling himself what he could remember as a kind of bedtime story. As a young adult, although not outwardly dissatisfied with his life, he began a search to find his first home by riding the rails virtually via Google Earth. He finds his family and his first mother. This memoir was adapted into the award-winning film Lion in 2016 (reviewed in ABR in 2017).

In the way of shared family memories, events in Brierley’s book and A Long Way Home are related word for word Three years after Saroo’s arrival, the Brierleys adopt another Indian boy, Mantosh: hence the author’s description of herself as ‘the mother of two other mothers’ children’. Mantosh’s transition into the family doesn’t go so well – he has spent longer in care after being given up by his mother. Sue describes the delays in the adoption process as exacerbating the abuse Mantosh suffers there; she believes this results in their second son being unable to connect with them, or to accept their love. Sue has kept a diary throughout her life, and this clearly formed the basis of the book. Her vision of gazing at a ‘dark brown face’ is recounted from an entry made when she was twelve. Much of the text has the tone of a Christmas letter received from an acquaintance – travel details, lists of friends, houses visited – giving the reader more detail at times than we want to know. Once Saroo’s book is published, and then developed into a film, the family find themselves in the glare of publicity, which brings about a televised meeting between Sue and Fatima, who gave birth to Saroo. There is no doubting the emotional power of this reunion, which makes bearable accounts of meeting film stars and attending the Oscars. Since her childhood vision in 1966, Sue has believed there should be minimal impediments to those wishing to offer disadvantaged children love and a home. She rails against the bureaucratic procedures and regulations in a way that can only be read in 2020 as tone deaf to both cultural awareness and the evidence of care survivors worldwide. She implies that a relationship between Mantosh and his birth mother, Asha Rani Das, would be as beneficial to them as it has been to Saroo and Fatima. Remember the rush to adopt Romanian orphans by well-meaning, First World adoptive parents, who were challenged and in many cases defeated in their attempts to restore this damage using only their belief in the restorative power of love? A recent edition of The Atlantic features a story about one such orphan, Izidor Ruckel, now in his thirties. The voices of Asha Rani Das and Fatima are the ones we need to hear next. g Margaret Robson Kett is a Melbourne writer and editor and the founder of Kettlestitch Press. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Comment

Listening to the science Coronavirus and climate change David Holmes

f the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that there has never been a better time to respond to the climate crisis than now. The global nature of Covid-19 has made it clear that global issues need a coordinated response and can easily affect the welfare of every human being on earth. The virus has shown us that it is absolutely crucial to listen to the science. Governments, in responding to epidemiological forecasts, have rapidly spent hundreds of billions of dollars on welfare subsidies, enforcing social distancing, protective equipment, mental health services, and vaccine research. The political will to protect populations based on medical advice has been enormous. But many of the same politicians who have displayed such determination have all but ignored the climate crisis, though its causes and solutions are obvious. This dangerous chasm between knowledge and action is at the centre of a grave contradiction between these two crises. For a fraction of the budget that has been thrown at solving the coronavirus, based on meagre understanding of it, the climate crisis could be substantially mitigated, especially if measures are put in place quickly Whereas the duration of viruses like the coronavirus in human populations has historically been only one or two years, the atmospheric residence time of CO2 is hundreds of years. With the current remaining ‘carbon budget’, we only have ten years to prevent warming of 1.5°C, or twenty-six years for two degrees. Covid-19 is but a fire drill for what we can expect from climate change by 2050. With attribution studies showing that an increase of just 1.2°C above pre-industrial global average temperature made possible the Australian pyrocene of last summer, the third and most widespread mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in February 2020, and the highest recorded temperature in the Arctic Circle of 38°C in June, the scale of the problem becomes apparent. Warnings about an increase of two degrees in global average temperature are often dismissed; some people see it in terms of dayto-day variability in the weather they experience. But two degrees in global climate terms means there is so much more energy in the system available for extreme weather: heatwaves, superstorms, floods, dry forests, and extended and intense fire weather. The additional heat going into the oceans today compared to 1750 is enough to boil Sydney Harbour dry every four hours. For humans, and indeed all species, adapting to a 1.5°C or 2°C world will require far more spending and regulation by governments than we are seeing around Covid-19. This could be avoided by listening to the climate science just as earnestly as politicians are saying we must listen to medical science. Paradoxically, many of the concepts medical scientists have used to explain the virus, usually in a briefing accompanied by a nodding politician, relate directly to public education on climate change. At the beginning of the pandemic, we heard how every hour and minute were important in preventing a runaway 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

pandemic, just as each year is vital in avoiding the committed warming that future generations will have to cope with. ‘Flattening the curve’ of the virus or bending the CO2 or temperature curve downwards follows the same principle. James Hansen and Makiko Sato have pointed out that the concept of a ‘delayed response’ regarding how actions today relate to dire consequences later is central to both crises. They also point to ‘amplifying feedbacks’ that overwhelm human control of these crises. An overrun health system will result in active cases not being treated as well as increased medical staff infections, just as a loss of the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink, or the melting ice sheets’ ability to re-radiate heat, will accelerate the rate at which humans will lose control of temperature increases.

Covid-19 is but a fire drill for what we can expect from climate change by 2050 Clearly, what is needed is a proven vaccine – for both the virus and climate change. This is where the incongruity between the response to Covid-19 and to climate change has become most absurd. Globally, every nation is trying to be the first with a vaccine. Meanwhile, with regard to climate change, there has been insufficient political will to act until other nations step up first. In Australia, we have a vaccine for climate change – renewable energy supported by energy storage – which has been all but ignored by the Australian Government Technology Investment Roadmap, released in September 2020. The roadmap, which may as well have been written by Australia’s fossil-fuel companies, ignores the proven power of solar and wind that already provide twenty-five per cent of the nation’s energy. The delaying tactic of suggesting that more research and development on new technologies are needed, rather than simply accelerating what Australia is already doing with solar and wind, is a concession to Big Coal interests. Since 2003, more than $1.3 billion in government funding has been squandered on ‘carbon capture and storage’, an elaborate ‘coal can be clean’ PR campaign, which has not resulted in a single commercially operating plant capable of sequestering CO2. In 2020, per megawatt, wind and solar are cheaper than the coal and gas for electricity generation even if you don’t price in health. Australia is blessed with so much wind and sun that it could rapidly transition to one hundred per cent carbon neutrality and could be a net exporter of energy to Southeast Asia and create tens of thousands of jobs in the process. Economists can explain this, but they don’t have the expertise to tell you of the societal and environmental risks of not making this transition. Ultimately, it is the physics of climate change that must be respected, long before it becomes irreversible and long before human agency has lost control at personal, national, and global scales. g David Holmes is Founder and Director of the Climate Change Communication Research Hub and he is an Associate Professor in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. This article was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Poetry

Romance, crime, and pets Three poetry collections James Antoniou

world might sound like a hackneyed theme, but Page renders it with admirable dramatic economy. It is no surprise that he has a background in theatre: this work is begging to be staged. If the text shies away from anything, it’s sex. It never quite veers into the erotic, even when it might have enhanced its verisimilitude. Even so, this is a passionate, dignified, and quietly daring work, keenly alive to the sufferings and joys of forbidden love.

I T

ony Page’s Anh and Lucien (UWAP, $22.99 pb, 104 pp) is an intricately plotted verse novel set in French Indochina during World War II. It centres on an unlikely same-sex love affair between Lucien, a colonial bureaucrat, and Anh, a young Vietnamese communist who supports Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement. After being arrested for ‘public indecency’ in Toulon, Lucien is sent to Hanoi to avoid a scandal. While outraged by having been swept aside like ‘dust under the carpet’, he vows to ‘play their game and keep appearances clean’. When we first meet him, Lucien remains an earnest imperialist who believes that the French ‘defend Liberty’. Meanwhile, Anh, whose scholarship in Paris was terminated after he took part in a demonstration, is back in his homeland and immersed in the headiness of revolutionary Marxism. Though on opposite sides, the two men are united by their pariah status and a growing loneliness. They first meet with some intensity at the opera, where Anh thinks: Lucien’s ‘eyes lock onto mine, as though some kind of secret is shared’. The prose poetry might initially seem too spare in style, but as the romance progresses such sparsity prevents sentimental drift and allows for vivid emotional clarity. By keeping a strict focus on their love, Page allows humanity to break through in the most abysmal political circumstances. After all, Marshal Pétain has just capitulated to Hitler, and Lucien finds his political allegiances crumbling in the face of French defeat and his love for Anh. That leads to a growing self-awareness: in one drunken and fragmented episode he thinks of himself as a ‘thirty-seven year old like a child / growth arrested / growth suppressed’, ‘mak[ing] up for lost time’. Anh, for his part, increasingly torn between the Party and his love for one of the oppressors, consoles himself by imagining his life in certain fables. In one flashback he sees himself as ‘Ai Nam Ai Nu’ (meaning ‘half man, half woman’), who cannot join his friends swimming: because when he gazed at the others throwing off their rags and splashing about, a strange event occurred in his body. He dreaded if they ever discovered what it was, he would not be allowed to join them any more as they huddled in the laneways at night, trying to keep each other safe and warm.

A clandestine love that offers shelter from an intolerant

n contrast with Anh and Lucien’s poetic economy, Noëlle Janaczewska’s Scratchland (UWAP, $22.99 pb, 114 pp) looks decidedly baggy. It is described as ‘poetry with a performative tilt’, and indeed the author had a similarly titled piece of ‘polyphonic environmental theatre’ performed at Yale Drama School in 2014. These poems read more like spoken-word pieces. They present, in fragmented form, a non-linear, anti-poetic urban landscape in which miscellaneous items wash up everywhere: ‘A broken arm / a slur of nail varnish / the sparkle of broken glass.’ In one of the stronger pieces, ‘Styrofoam’, Guantánamo Bay prisoners scratch poems ‘into the Styrofoam cups / they got with their meals’. The poem compares the burgeoning creativity of the inmates to the invention of Styrofoam in the 1940s, even if a contrived motif of Isaac Newton and classical physics (‘you understand / the gravity of the situation’) blunts its emotive force. One other poem is supposed to be sung in a ‘sentimental key’, while another is composed entirely of a list of songs, hinting at an audio component that might work well in theatre but is less compelling on the page. It seems odd that the book’s most ambitious section, ‘True Crimers’, comes last. Here, a chorus of voices describes a world in which crime fiction has merged with life: television addicts imagine murder everywhere; bodies are dismembered; there are even paeans to Miss Marple. The idea has been honed by Dorothy Porter in The Monkey’s Mask (1994), which extracts the latent eroticism of the genre with a skilled hand. Janaczewska’s effort contains some mordant lines – these crimes happen ‘in an American nowhere where nothing changes, but when it does, it’s for the worse’, while one potential murderer quips that ‘everybody has a future but some have more than others’ – but overall, the satire consists more of stabs in the dark than decisive blows.

enny Blackford settles on a somewhat gentler topic in The Alpaca Cantos (Pitt Street Poetry, $20 pb, 69 pp), which contributes handsomely to that vast, underappreciated genre of pet poems. More than a few poets have found hidden profundities in their cats or dogs, but in this work Blackford builds herself a veritable Noah’s Ark. In the first ‘canto’, ‘Stranger Homes and Gardens’, the human speaker offers several sweet but not cloying observations of animal life. She is alert to the differences between herself and these animals, while sometimes playfully anthropomorphising them. One speaker senses a frogmouth looking at her while she puts out the bins. That might recall Gwen Harwood’s famous ‘Barn Owl’, in which a child shoots an owl and loses her innocence, but Blackford’s poem is neither as dark nor as symbolically resonant. In fact, this bird is described as ‘neither metaphor nor portent’, which sounds almost like Lorine Niedecker’s ‘A monster owl’ (‘What / is it the sign / of ? The sign of / an owl’). When BlackAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

ford’s frogmouth disappears without warning, a cat ‘at my ankles … stood silent / sniffing at the path / beetles and slugs’. There is something enchanting about this affectionate and wry attention to the animal world, with all its predatory ambiguity. In another more amusing poem, the speaker’s sister adopts a dingo pup, ‘company for the cavoodle’, its ‘eyes / shining with intelligence, huge ears / like radar dishes positioned / to listen to the universe unfolding’. Despite leaning on clichés (including, at a low point, ‘Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt’), Blackford maintains technical control

and touches on a surprisingly wide range of fauna: cats, llamas, marauding rats, and – in what might be the only sustained lyrical piece on the subject – a slug. With its joyful affirmation of animals as friends, the first sequence could even make a memorable children’s picture book. True, there are poems later on that bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s witticism about all bad poetry being sincere, but the animal pieces create a charming paper menagerie that rises far above the usual, err, doggerel. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne-based critic.

New Work Metaphorics Feeling pneumataphoric, I sublate my I’ve got over 73 long working days into more tabs open in my hot spatially, cognitively skull right now, one of which expansive forms, on death-cult capitalism says There i.e. 24/7. are more important things than living and I agree with the whole of my man-o-war and blue. heart still beating its stung drum. Life comes at you Skeletal, diaphanous, I am exponentially, so I binge traversed by grace, on predicted and rewatchable a windowpane, disasters. I want to die for the world slated to die this evening. I am its wan and not just anchorite at work in iso, one of thrown by the light its many tiny shadows of our turned-out black star, acting essential the curve of whose imploding I will at Central, never let flatten me into sleep nor dream.

Toby Fitch

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland. His books include Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond, 2019) and Sydney Spleen (forthcoming, Giramondo, 2021). 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Interview

Poet of the Month with Judith Bishop Judith Bishop’s second collection, Interval (UQP, 2018), won the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. Her poems have inspired many artworks, including music. Most recently, she has contributed a lyric to Andrew Ford’s Red Dirt Hymns project. She has a new poem on page 22.

Which poets have most influenced you?

My teachers, direct and indirect: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Edwin Muir, Carl Phillips, Rainer Maria Rilke. Quite a number are men; but attunement isn’t a conscious choice.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

All the craft I know won’t bring a poem to life if inspiration is lacking. There has to be a moment of perception buried in it like a seed. Growing that seed, and discovering what kind of organism it will be, requires all the skill (craft, in both senses) I can muster.

What prompts a new poem?

A vague feeling of recognition, insight, and excitement. It’s a kind of resonance – dimensions of experience coming together in a kiss.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

A pile of books of, and about, poetry; an otherwise clear desk; blue skies and sunshine; beautiful trees or a garden to look onto; warmth, and the absence of voices or noises other than birds.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection? Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s For Crying Out Loud (1990).

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

I’m with Emily Dickinson: one friend whom I trust to share poems with suffices.

What have you learned from reviews of your work?

So much! I’ve been extraordinarily lucky with reviewers. Oliver Dennis wrote on Event in Antipodes: ‘She views the whole of life – everything that has ever lived – as participants in the largest of conversations across time, the shared “event” of being alive’ – a description that’s as resonant for me personally as a line of poetry. A good reviewer crystallises and makes visible the facets of your work that matter most. This allows you to develop them further than you might otherwise have done.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’. I was introduced to Plath when I was sixteen. She wrote this poem at twenty-four. I told myself that if I could write something nearly as perfect as that by the age of twenty-four, I might yet be a poet. For me, it perfectly expresses our dialogue of love with the world – the real world of rooks and chairs and sunbursts after rain.

Very rarely, a poem comes almost complete. Even then I’ll tinker. That could mean as many as twenty drafts. A typical poem will take fifty to seventy before it rings clear, without a false note, or a word that trips the tongue. Some drafts are minimal – one or two words. I save them all as Word documents and number them sequentially. That way, I can always go back to an earlier draft if I take a wrong turn.

What is your favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?

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

Yes, but I sense its reading public is largely hidden. Some, perhaps many, read poems but don’t admit it. Yet even one reader – one life a poem touches – suffices. g

Robert Frost – we both love intonation and prosody and the myriad ways they work in a poem.

An impossible question! I imagine that most of us have as many favourite lines as we have reasons to love a poem. I don’t love this poem entirely, but what it knows, and its opening line, matter to me: ‘Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!’ (D.H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’).

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Biography

Desk perpetrator A paragon of ordinariness Robert Dessaix

The SS Officer’s Armchair: In search of a hidden life by Daniel Lee

Jonathan Cape $35 pb, 303 pp

he ‘land of smiles’ was what they called Prague under German occupation during World War II – at least the Germans did. Few locals. Fresh vegetables and meat were available (to Germans) in quantities unknown back in Germany. Until close to the end, there were more than a hundred cinemas operating in the city, as well as theatres, concert halls, and numerous other places of entertainment. After all, Goebbels was not only passionate about culture in general, but keen, he said, to initiate a ‘lively cultural exchange’ with Czechoslovakia in particular. A posting to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was what Obersturmführer Robert Griesinger, formerly of the Stuttgart Gestapo but now just the SS, had been dreaming of since the war began. When he finally got there in 1943, he found his work at the Ministry of Economics and Labour, organising the transport of Jews to extermination camps and forced labour in Germany, demanding but a promising springboard for a postwar career. Griesinger was a ‘desk perpetrator’: tens of thousands of Czechs, Roma, and Jews died as a result of the orders he signed, but he didn’t shoot anyone himself. After work he liked to relax (in a tie) listening to classical music – particularly Verdi, according to his daughter – in his villa in one of Prague’s better suburbs, or walking his much-loved dog en famille along nearby streets. In short, there was nothing remarkable about Griesinger: he was a low-ranking SS officer, undistinguished since his school years by any particular talents, the embodiment of the banality of evil. He was the perfect subject for Daniel Lee, a specialist in the history of Jews in the Holocaust. Griesinger’s ordinariness made him irresistible. Until now, historians have paid scant attention to this kind of common or garden SS or Gestapo officer, having much bigger, more spectacularly evil, fish to fry. In the mid-1990s, when Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners came out, there was an explosion of interest in ‘ordinary Germans’ and their anti-Semitism. Goldhagen argued that Germany was rife with ‘eliminationist anti-semitism’ from top to bottom, not just among the Nazi élite, and had been for centuries. From Israel to the United States, the reaction of most historians to Goldhagen’s arguments was hostile, sometimes ferociously so. The eminent British historian in the field, Ian Kershaw, argued, more temperately, that his own research pointed to a widespread ‘dislike’ for Jews among ordinary Germans and to an ‘indifference’ to racial atrocities, rather than to an eagerness to exterminate Jews and 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

other racially inferior populations. Daniel Lee has avoided this often quite vicious academic fracas by focusing on a member of two organisations whose antiSemitism was deeply rooted and beyond argument: the Gestapo and the SS. Robert Griesinger, from a well-connected, völkisch family in Württemburg, was so ordinary he was practically colourless. This is a problem for the biographer: colourless is ipso facto dull. Or is it? Lee’s solution to this problem is to turn his account of Griesinger’s unexceptional life into a detective story – not exactly fast paced but engrossing enough. Chancing upon an intriguing ‘clue’ (swastika-stamped papers belonging to a Robert Griesinger, hidden in the cushion of a chair in Amsterdam), Lee sets out to discover who this Nazi was, recording his search and what he unearths in minute detail. From Griesinger’s slave-owning ancestors in Louisiana in the nineteenth century right down to his grandchildren in Germany today, Lee scours vast numbers of written sources and interviews many of his descendants, even his maid’s daughter, to dig out every skerrick of information about who and what Griesinger was and, more importantly, why he was what he was – a fanatical believer in Germany’s racial superiority. By the end of the book, it’s hard not to feel you know more about Griesinger, who was of no importance, than you do about yourself. His life, it turns out, was hardly uneventful, but in predictable ways. He was a member of a nationalist, anti-Semitic brotherhood at Tübingen University, then a public servant in Stuttgart, sharing an office just above the basement torture chamber with a future leader of a killing unit in the Baltic and a designer of the Final Solution. He went to France, Poland, and Ukraine with the victorious German army and was injured in Kiev on the eve of Babi Yar. Finally, two years before the surrender, he was sent to Prague to confiscate Jewish property and reassign workers to Germany. There was no great transforming love, no fork in any road, no epiphanic moment, not even any act of unspeakable evil, just daily collusion with slaughter. He was murdered in a Prague hospital bed after the war, like thousands of other Germans. From start to finish, Lee’s tone is astonishingly, almost mesmerisingly understanding, practically mild-mannered at times, if unforgiving. How Hitler came to power is known. The root question of why so many Germans hated or disliked or tolerated the extermination of Jews, as well as of Roma, homosexuals, and other populations, remains murky. Goldhagen was partial to the idea that Martin Luther was in some measure to blame, and, while Lee avoids pointing the finger at Luther himself, he does hammer ‘Protestants’. It seems likelier that the culprit is a race-based nationalism with ancient roots. The ‘sacred homeland’ myth, in which Jews and other ‘degenerates’ are treacherous interlopers, still flourishes in Russia and Eastern Europe. Humiliated, Hitler wanted to cleanse the homeland and ‘make Germany great again’, just as Putin has sworn to ‘make Russia great again’ purged of homosexuals (and of as many Jews as possible). In the present circumstances, Daniel Lee’s book is thought-provoking in ways he could not have foreseen when a Dutch upholsterer first cut open that cushion in Amsterdam. g Robert Dessaix’s latest book is The Time of Our Lives (2020).

Politics

No consolation in loss How Labor might win the next election Nadia David

How to Win an Election by Chris Wallace

NewSouth $29.99 pb, 160 pp

hucydides once said, ‘In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.’ Chris Wallace is not inclined to agree with the Greek historian, particularly when dissecting the Labor Party’s shock federal election loss in 2019. In her latest book, How to Win an Election, Wallace nominates the ten things that Labor must get right to succeed at the next federal election, and self-pity is nowhere among them. This approach appears simplistic, even tongue-in-cheek at times, but she has captured the key elements of electoral success and makes a strong case that Australia cannot afford another ALP loss. Wallace’s previous publications have mostly been biographies, including a life of the former Liberal leader John Hewson (1993). This is no ordinary electoral post-mortem; Wallace brings her historian’s eye for detail and an impressive ability to link the past to the present and the future. From the outset, Wallace makes it clear that she is a Labor supporter, so if you are an LNP stalwart seeking schadenfreude, you should look elsewhere. Not a book for the conservative-hearted, How to Win an Election is part rousing call to arms for Labor aficionados and part invocation to Labor not to lose the next election. Using a cute ten-step structure akin to a self-help book, Wallace brings a political historian’s incisive approach coupled with a strong understanding of the context of Labor electoral fortunes since Federation. This is not to say the book is merely a shallow rendering of the key factors in a successful federal election campaign. Wallace, clearly aware how dry and boring the average dissection of an election can be, seeks to use a more narrative and creative form to impart information. While this is at times straightforward (‘Create policy winners, not losers’), it is often brilliantly insightful and draws out issues that played out less publicly in Labor’s unexpected defeat. The discussion of polling and the importance of primary votes is instructive. Wallace argues that, federally, Labor needs a minimum of thirty-eight per cent of the primary vote to have a chance of forming government. Wallace’s attention to detail is impressive; there is a table breaking down the percentage of the primary vote won by the ALP and LNP in every election since Federation. The most incisive chapter is called ‘Negotiate with Opponents on the Same Side of Politics’ and is a must-read for diehard Labo-

rites. The ALP’s broadly professed (and in some individuals profoundly held) hatred of the Greens (and vice versa) is called out for what it is: inherently destructive. When Labor and the Greens work more collaboratively, the result is likely to be positive and to advance public policy and good government. Wallace cautions: ‘Parties and those who lead them can lose sight of the desired needs they share and focus instead on the leader and the party needs and greeds.’ This could not be truer of the Labor–Greens antipathy stemming from the Greens’ decision not to support Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009, an act that will no doubt stoke mutual blame and mistrust from both parties for many years to come.

If you are an LNP stalwart seeking schadenfreude, you should look elsewhere It is clear that Wallace intended her book to speak to readers across the political spectrum, but it is equally clear that she had her Labor comrades in mind as she wrote. The chapter entitled ‘Do Brilliant Cut-through Ads’ is a candid assessment of the lacklustre ALP advertising campaign in the 2019 election. Not only did Labor’s spending on advertising barely compete with the LNP’s in both the 2016 and 2019 elections, but the ads were ‘too dull to remember’. She’s not wrong – can anyone recall a single ALP ad from those campaigns? However, to focus on the minutiae of this book would be to do it a disservice. Wallace’s purpose, despite the book’s title, is not to provide a blueprint to being elected, but to set out the compelling case that every election the ALP loses results in three more years of conservative rule that the country can’t afford. Wallace describes writing the book during the ‘Great Conflagration’ over the summer of 2019–20 when it seemed as though half the country was on fire; and then during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when it became clear the Australian economy was going to endure a second catastrophic event in six months, taking many businesses and jobs with it. Wallace describes the importance of election outcomes in this way: In this context Labor’s unnecessary 2019 election loss assumes its proper proportions. The fact Australia has to wait until at least the next election for a competent, far-sighted government to enact decent climate policies and address the deep social and economic inequities highlighted so starkly in the pandemic, matters absolutely.

Perhaps it’s because we all feel on the brink and yearn for wise, qualified leaders that this book feels so pressing. The electoral process and the success of plainly unqualified candidates on both sides of politics remains a mystery to many voters. Wallace offers clues as to why they flourish; they warrant deeper reflection. Some facets of the book don’t work, including the little narrative that opens each chapter, in which Wallace personalises the lesson for Bill Shorten. Otherwise, How to Win an Election is a page-turner. Full of interesting titbits and digestibly short, this is a nourishing read for the politically inclined. g Nadia David is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University, looking at concepts of consent in the criminal law ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Popular science

Broad questions

Last of the relics of a once great lineage? Danielle Clode

A Letter to Layla: Travels to our deep past and near future by Ramona Koval

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 292 pp

Letter to Layla is very much a book of our times. Its impetus lies in our rapidly changing climate, and it concludes with the unexpected impact of Covid-19. In between, the book explores both our distant past and our future. Well known for her past career as an ABC broadcaster, Ramona Koval turns her talent for in-depth interviews and her training in science into an engaging and illuminating book. Combining interviews with her own research, Koval asks what it means to be human and if our origin sheds light on our capacity to navigate a troubling and problematic future. It’s difficult to know where to start with such a broad question, but Koval begins with our nearest relatives: the chimpanzees. She illustrates the tensions between those who wish to see humans (and therefore primates) as something special and those who see every species as distinctive in its own right, with equal standing. In one interview, Koval suggests that humans might have extra skills that other apes don’t have, prompting a defensive response that the other apes have extra skills that we don’t either. The tendency to see other apes as some kind of primitive version of ourselves is deep-seated: as if they were ancestors rather than fourth cousins many times removed. Other apes offer an insight into our shared family history, but tell us no more about our ancestors than we reveal about theirs. Koval recalls the old Irish joke about someone asking for directions and being told, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.’ Knowing the right question is half the challenge. Koval moves on to the fossil record whose traces tell us much about our own physical evolution but less about our social and behavioural adaptations. It’s easy to forget just how variable behaviour is compared to anatomy. Behaviour is the flexible front line of adaptation, dragging reluctant anatomical change behind it. Human fossils can tell us when our ancestors stood on two legs and when their brains enlarged, but they don’t tell us when they developed language or what they thought. Fossils can only hint at major social developments. Koval describes an eroded and nearly toothless Homo erectus jaw as evidence of emerging human sociality. Without teeth, he must have been cared for by others to survive. The genetic record is similarly erratic, offering tantalising possibilities, like the mysterious Denisovans, whose traces remain in our genetic code but are otherwise known only from one little finger and some teeth. How did we lose all our Homo cousins 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

over just a few hundred thousand years? What happened to the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and the ‘hobbits’? Will we become, like the coelacanth fish or the gingko trees, the last long-lived relic of a once great lineage, or are we just the brief final flash of an unsuccessful evolutionary experiment? Koval turns to art for an insight into the human psyche, illuminating a dark and intriguing corner of our history. Here we can see the stories told by our ancestors in their own images. But stories are given meaning as much by the receiver as by the creator. The ancient cave art of Chauvet Pont-d’Arc, like that of Indonesia or Australia, remains as mysterious as it is beautiful.

Other apes offer an insight into our shared family history, but tell us no more about our ancestors than we reveal about theirs Koval does a fine job of revealing the complexities and conflicts inherent in using such patchy data to reconstruct a plausible prehistory for our species. The divisions between disciplines are as wide as the gulf between a layperson’s quest for concrete answers and a scientist’s unwillingness to give them. While the interview technique allows personal and individual insights, it also feels a little thin at times, like listening to just one part of an orchestral symphony. The collaborative, communal advancement of scientific knowledge is difficult to capture in this form. If Koval was occasionally frustrated by the reluctance of scientists to elaborate on matters outside their sphere of expertise, she must have been startled by the lack of caution about humanity’s future exhibited by some of those she interviewed. I’m not entirely convinced that those overtly pursuing immortality or cryogenesis are the most informative people to ask about the future. I might have preferred more staid sources – like science fiction writers or even futurists. From eugenics and genetic engineering to robotics and artificial intelligence, Koval explores the potential of what it means to create the human or to move beyond it. Mark Sagar’s BabyX avoiding the uncanny by mimicking a baby’s facial cues and interactions is particularly compelling, even if it does flow seamlessly and disturbingly into robotic warfare. Koval uses a similarly engaging device in her own book, by including intermittent interactions with her granddaughter, the titular Layla. Her bond with Layla provides the nexus around which Koval builds her case for the importance of human social connections, as well as humorous light relief and pearls of infant wisdom. In the end, our humanity depends on our ability to empathise with and learn from others. What we will learn from the Covid-19 pandemic is anyone’s guess. But, like Ramona Koval’s book, our current circumstances are compelling us to stare the future in the face, and to reconsider not only who we are as humans but who we need to be to survive. g Danielle Clode is an Adelaide-based biologist and writer. Her books include Voyages to the South Seas, which won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Non-fiction in 2007, and In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World (Picador, 2020).

Theatre

New rites of passage Theatregoing in the Covid era Ian Dickson

Hugo Weaving and Wayne Blair in Wonnangatta (Prudence Upton/STC)

heatre emerged from ritual, and the present circumstances have introduced new rites of passage for those who take part in the ceremony. Donning your mask, you perform the cleansing of hands, stand at attention as your temperature is taken, and enter an eerily under-populated lobby in which other masked figures attempt to keep a prescribed distance as they head for the inner sanctum. Once inside it is easy to find your allotted place, one of the few seats not cordoned off. Looking around at the handful of other attendees seemingly randomly scattered around the auditorium, it feels more like a final dress rehearsal than an actual performance. Welcome to theatregoing in the Covid-19 era. The performance attended by this reviewer, however, was far from a dress rehearsal. It was in fact halfway through the run of the Sydney Theatre Company’s first production since the coronavirus struck. Angus Cerini’s Wonnangatta is based on an unsolved double murder that took place in the Victorian High Country in 1917–18. The decomposing body of James Barclay, station manager at the remote property Wonnangatta, was discovered by his neighbour, Harry Smith. Suspicion fell on Barclay’s station hand, John Bamford, an apparently surly character who was rumoured to have strangled his wife. A search party was sent to capture him, but what they found was his dead body with a bullet hole in his skull. One of the major themes of Cerini’s work is the Australian male’s propensity for violence. His previous play, the award-winning The Bleeding Tree (2015), explored the subject from the point of view of the women who have been victims of this violence. In the new play, Cerini concentrates on the men for whom it is a part of their everyday life. When the play begins, Harry, puzzled by Barclay’s disappearance, has returned to Barclay’s hut with Riggall, a friend, in order to discover the whereabouts of the missing man. Once they have found what remains of Barclay’s corpse, Harry is convinced that Bamford is the perpetrator. The rest of the play follows the pair

as they struggle through the unforgiving bush to Bamford’s shack. Cerini’s rich, lyrical language tempts one to use the adjective ‘poetic’, but his work is a long way from T.S. Eliot’s cerebral dramas or Christopher Fry’s charming, ephemeral pieces. Cerini mixes the settlers’ rough-and-ready vernacular with elevated flights of heightened language which never descend into bathos. His cataloguing of the names that European settlers have imposed on the mountains that lour over the couple, and the extraordinary scene of the snow-blind Riggall’s panic, underline the uneasy relationship between man and nature in this challenging land. In her program notes, Jessica Arthur rightly highlights the importance of language in Cerini’s work and her production gives due prominence to it.

Donning your mask, you perform the cleansing of hands, stand at attention as your temperature is taken, and enter an eerily under-populated lobby Jacob Nash’s minimalist set, a raked platform with a menacing serrated edge, accentuates the ever-present and threatening nature of the wild and those who populate it. Nick Schlieper’s magnificent lighting and Stefan Gregory’s music and sound design are of vital importance to the production. Ultimately, though, Wonnangatta’s success depends on Cerini’s language and the actors who perform it. Wayne Blair as Riggall and Hugo Weaving as Harry make an extraordinary double act. At the beginning, they are almost indistinguishable, a fact accentuated by the way movement director Tom Hodgson has them moving in tandem. But as the play proceeds, differences develop. Harry is the dominant partner, driven by his obsession, an Australian landlocked Captain Ahab determined to track down his version of the great white whale. Hugo Weaving makes him an overpowering, vengeful force of nature. Moving vocally from gruff to almost operatic, he relishes the verbal bounty Cerini has given him. Riggall is the more grounded and realistic of the pair, Starbuck to Harry’s Ahab. He vainly attempts to persuade Harry to take the reasonable path and bring in the police, but cannot deter Harry’s obvious determination to match blood with blood. Wayne Blair’s mixture of bewilderment and vulnerability makes Riggall a sympathetic character, and his anguish when he mistakenly shoots Barclay’s dog is both funny and moving. His disintegration in the previously mentioned scene of snow-blinded panic is a bravura moment. Although the virus has dictated the need for works that are small scale in execution, there is nothing small scale about Cerini’s exploration of man, nature, and vengeance. Sydney Theatre Company has chosen the perfect work to ease back into live performance and has given it an exemplary staging. g Wonnangatta (Sydney Theatre Company) was performed from 21 September to 31 October 2020. Ian Dickson is ABR’s Sydney theatre critic. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Streaming

Affairs of the heart A controversial play fifty years on Dennis Altman

The Boys in the Band (Scott Everett White/Netflix)

t is hard today to recall the full extent of the furore that surrounded the first productions of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band. First produced off-Broadway in April 1968, a year before the riots at the Stonewall Inn that sparked a new militant gay politics, it quickly became a hit and was staged in Sydney later that year, where it ran for seven months. Scott McKinnnon, in his essay ‘The Activist Cinema-goer’ (published in History Australia, 2013: 10:1), wrote: In a series of articles, the Sydney Morning Herald called the play a ‘trailblazer in frankness’, praised its ‘uncompromising candour’ and suggested that its box-office success was a sign that ‘times have changed’. The ‘frankness’ and trailblazing qualities of The Boys in the Band, however, were not based on praise for a newly liberated attitude to gay people but rather on the play’s framing of homosexuality – and homosexuals – as a significant social problem. Thus, the Herald could express admiration for playwright Mart Crowley’s efforts in revealing ‘the homosexual as a suffering human being’. Praise was also given to the play’s promoters for ‘marking on tickets that [attendance] was at the playgoer’s own risk’ and for ‘emphasising that [the play] is a social drama about a sociological problem’.

After the Melbourne Playbox production in 1969, two of the actors, James Krummel and Charles Little, were prosecuted for bad language, namely ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’. The magistrate let them off, the police appealed, and they were convicted and fined. William Friedkin’s film, which also came out in 1970, was banned for a short time in Australia. Twenty years later, the play was revived on Broadway (directed by Joe Mantello), and Netflix has now produced a film version with the 2018 Broadway cast. The Boys in the Band is set in Michael’s Manhattan apartment where a group of homosexuals gather to celebrate Harold’s thirtysecond birthday. It’s less clear what binds the seven together, but rather like an Agatha Christie house party, they fit a set of easily predictable stereotypes: the neurotic Jew, the very campy queen, the former straight man who found men in a washroom, the token African American. Into this ménage comes Michael’s former college roommate, 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

Alan, who was apparently unaware of Michael’s sexuality and whom Michael seems bent on tormenting. As the evening winds on, Michael becomes increasingly determined to expose all his guests to humiliation, demanding that they play a telephone game where they are required to call the one person they have ever truly loved. The Albee-like game is called ‘affairs of the heart’, and the play is replete with Hollywood-sounding allusions. The world depicted in Boys is the world of urban homosexual America in the years when to be publicly out was to face disgrace and possible imprisonment, and when divas such as Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck were part of the campy language of homosexual life. The Stonewall riots, a year later, are often claimed to have been inspired by Judy Garland’s funeral. Crowley, who died this year, was steeped in Hollywood lore. He grew up in Mississippi and at seventeen moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for Natalie Wood. Crowley’s 2002 sequel, The Men from the Boys, which reunites most of the Boys characters, appears to have been a flop. Netflix’s algorithms failed to recommend the film to me, perhaps because I had been very critical of the play in Homosexual: Oppression and liberation (1972), seeing it as unnecessarily stereotypical and self-loathing. After all, the most quoted line is ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a dead corpse.’ At the end, all but one of his guests having fled, Michael reflects: ‘If only we could just not hate ourselves so much.’ (The film ends on a slightly softer note than the original play.) What my criticisms failed to recognise was the ability of audiences to empathise with and even celebrate a room full of damaged men, who in different ways – Harold, the pock-marked Jew; Bernard, the only black man in the group – understand the pressures that have made them so brittle. Boys is in many respects a period piece, symbolised by the clunky landline phone and the answering service staffed by a real person. This version is remarkably close to the original stage and screen production: the few flashbacks, which take us briefly outside Michael’s apartment, don’t change the sense that we are watching a stage performance. The Netflix production is the work of Ryan Murphy (Glee; Hollywood) and director Joe Mantello; like all the cast, they are gay men. Boys might be seen as an ethnic movie, rather like that other Netflix miniseries Unorthodox (2020) in that it grows out of immersion in a particular culture and reveals its secrets and hurts to a wider world. One of the most heartening aspects of the film is that it is reaching a wider audience than Crowley could have imagined. Writing this piece, I came across a laudatory review in The Hindu, one of India’s major newspapers. The play was important in its time for depicting homosexuals on stage, even if they were portrayed as miserable and vicious. Watching it more than forty years later, one wonders whether the enormous talents involved in the remake are wasted. The sheer nastiness of the characters, especially Michael, played forcefully by Jim Parsons, grabs one’s attention, and the one-liners remain sharp. But I am unpersuaded by the hype that the film remains more than a piece of historical nostalgia. g The Boys in the Band (122 minutes) is on Netflix.

Streaming

Repackaging Nurse Ratched A new version of Ken Kesey’s novel Tim Byrne

Sarah Paulson in Ratched (Saeed Adyani/Netflix)

ow, precisely, does a character unmoor itself from its source material? And how concerned should we be to track its progress – or should that be retrace its steps? These questions bugged me as I admittedly devoured Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series, Ratched. Ostensibly a prequel, it recontextualises and repackages the unforgettable villain Nurse Ratched from Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) for entirely different aims, so much so that the original feels hopelessly far away. In fact, there’s little evidence of Kesey at all. It is curious that there isn’t a hint of him in there, given how engorged the show is on other past masters, particularly Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick. Is it that Murphy wants slavish references only if they are universally recognisable? Or is there perhaps a slight anxiety fringing this series, a fear that Kesey’s anti-establishment rage might upset the Netflix overlords and should therefore be kept far beyond the hospital grounds? It’s surely not accidental that Mildred Ratched comes across as a deeply sympathetic battler of past trauma, rather than the manifestation of societal control (what the novel’s narrator Chief Bromden labels ‘the Combine’) that she clearly meant to Kesey. For him, Ratched was the iron fist on the throat of individualism. The answers to these questions probably lie in Murphy’s obsession with revisionism, the idea that shop-worn concepts like the anthology series can be gussied up if you have an impeccable sense of style and terrific production values. Ratched has both in spades; if anything, it looks even better than his last series, Hollywood (Netflix), and that looked stunning. But reinvention is only interesting if you have something interesting to say, and this Mildred Ratched feels ersatz, a kind of cheap knock-off in starched teal. There’s a sense that Murphy was attracted to the character not because he has any interest in her etymology but because ‘evil nurse takes over mental hospital’ sounds like heaps of cheesy fun. In many ways, and for many audiences, it will be. Murphy regular Sarah Paulson takes the reins from the incomparable Louise Fletcher of Miloš Forman’s 1975 film adaptation, and she’s delicious; her wide red mouth and big brown eyes, fetishised by Nelson Cragg’s sumptuous photography, are wildly suggestive and seductive. Her tendency to toggle between extremes of emotional empathy and casual disregard, simultaneously coquettish and

vulpine, is marvellously off-putting. If nothing else, the series is an argument for Paulson as a verifiable movie star. Set in 1947, the story tracks Mildred Ratched as she inveigles her way into, and eventually comes to dominate, a private mental hospital recently set up by the eccentric Dr Hanover ( Jon Jon Briones) and run by head nurse Betsy Bucket (an often hilariously sanguine Judy Davis). Hanover’s techniques and his willingness to extrapolate on current medical best practice make him a target of criticism, but also an attractive beneficiary of a state governor desperate to win an election: George Wilburn (Vincent D’Onofrio). Ratched’s motivation for entering the hospital is to save a patient, her murderously wayward brother Edmund (Finn Wittrock), from the electric chair, a tough ask given that he has just slaughtered four priests in cold blood. It’s a heady mix, especially when Murphy and co-creator Evan Romansky throw in Cynthia Nixon as Wilburn’s campaign manager and Ratched’s tortured love interest; Amanda Plummer as a compulsively nosy hotelier; and Sharon Stone as the vengeful mother of a mutilated, sociopathic son. The most alarming role of the season belongs to Sophie Okonedo, not only for the force and texture of her performance but for the deeply problematic depiction of her character’s pathology. She plays Charlotte Wells, a patient suffering from an extreme case of what was known for decades as Multiple Personality Disorder, but is now most commonly referred to as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Dr Hanover correctly diagnoses her, in what could be seen as a deliberate use of anachronism or an indication of his legitimate, if prescient, talents as a physician. The problem is that, while the characters treat Wells with respect, the drama exploits her condition mercilessly, twisting her ‘multiple personalities’ into increasingly lurid narrative contortions. This is where Murphy’s approach falters, in his gleeful willingness to exploit the social and political issues at the heart of the story for cheap, and intellectually threadbare, dramatic ends. Kesey worked the graveyard shift at Menlo Park Veterans’ Hospital, where he famously participated in a CIA-run experiment in psychoactive drug therapy; he based his writing on the lived experiences of the patients there. His novel is steeped in compassion, powered by the engine of rebellion and resistance. Murphy is strangely uninterested in the patients – most of the story centres on the staff, their machinations and manipulations – and his notions of psychiatry and institutionalism remain undeveloped. It doesn’t matter if Murphy has read his Foucault or his Wouter Kusters; the fact that a series set in a mental institution can have virtually nothing to say about madness and society is an indictment of the viewer as much as of the creative team. But surely it matters that Murphy seems not to have even read his Kesey. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, ‘the ward is a factory for the Combine … something that came in all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold’. Murphy’s Ratched has been crafted by the Combine, and while it may look marvellous it is telling that the opening credits list none of the extraordinary production team – from Judy Becker’s exquisite production design to Lou Eyrich’s impeccable costumes – but has room for fourteen producers. Now that’s a display of corporate control even Ken Kesey would find chilling. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW NOVEMBER 2020

Anthology

From the Archive

Charmian Clift (1923–69) – novelist, memoirist, journalist – is widely regarded as one of Australia’s finest essayists. The World of Charmian Clift contains a selection of essays she contributed to the SMH. Jill Kitson (1939–2013), radio broadcaster and literary journalist, reviewed The World of Charmian Clift in the July 1989 issue of ABR. It is one of thousands of reviews in our digital archive going back to 1978. All these reviews, essays, interviews, commentaries, and letters are accessible by ABR subscribers – an unrivalled critical resource.

he World of Charmian Clift is a selection of the weekly columns she wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald ’s women’s pages. They date from 1964, the year that she, George Johnston, and their children returned from Greece, up to her tragic suicide in 1969. Clift herself selected most of the essays for the book, which was first published posthumously in 1970, not long before George Johnston’s death from tuberculosis. Garry Kinnane’s biography of Johnston (1986) has described how desperate and despairing Clift was in those years, and what stress she underwent to write the weekly column. Yet she loved it and built up an immense following among readers, probably because they appreciated the same qualities in her writing that had led John Douglas Pringle, editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, to give her a free hand, while urging her to maintain a ‘good literary tone’ in the column. Charmian Clift comes across as a writer who believed in talk as a civilised and civilising pursuit; and who believed that, if she put her mind to it, even the most ephemeral topic could be made to yield insights into the scheme of things. True, one does learn a lot about her and her family from the essays, but it is the vivacity of Clift’s intellect and imagination that engages the reader, rather than the autobiographical subtext. ‘Reflections on a Dripping Tap’, for example, moves from the personal to the abstract with sibylline ease. A dripping tap with a saucepan under it ‘to collect the drips for the flowers’ leads, via the British Museum Reading Room, to the great civilisations on the Tigris and Euphrates, and to the reflection that ‘what we call civilisation was only possible when man learned to control water instead of being controlled by it’. Not long after Charmian Clift died, women’s pages disappeared from the metropolitan newspapers, but weekly columnists did not. Most broadsheets employ two or three, each attempting the sort of conversational essay Clift excelled at; none of them is comparable to her. Given half a page instead of a column, the thoughts of Phillip Adams and Max Harris ramble unedited and rarely reach a satisfying conclusion. From others we get a too-predictable weekly blast of righteous indignation or shot of wry, self-deprecating wit. What is missing is the originality, the optimism, and the open-mindedness Clift shared with her readers. Of course, besides her intellectual gifts and her writing skills, Charmian Clift did have a remarkable life to draw upon for her column. The expatriate years, first in London, then in Greece, 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW N OV EM B ER 2020

as well as all her reading, gave her a sense of history and later sharpened her perceptions of Australian society (without making her any less a patriot). Here she is responding to the protest movements of the mid-1960s, marked by dissension and hostility, where ‘vigils, protests, sit-ins, teach-ins and even freedom rides are becoming usual’: One thing is certain. No state of affairs was ever bettered by putting up with it, no wrongs ever righted by passively accepting them. A cause, a purpose, a goal, a creed, an idea, a cherished attachment is the stuff all human evolution is made of. Without some belief most passionately held, we would expire for want of vitality.

Clift’s Depression-era childhood at Kiama on the New South Wales south coast was also crucial, tempering her natural vivacity with an Aussie-battler toughness that owed much to her mother. In a column titled ‘A Portrait of My Mother’, Clift remembered her first day at work, wrestling with washing, weeding, gardening, ‘elaborating our glorious futures’. But then she remembers the other side: her mother’s own quiet rebellion against her housekeeping role: But when she was watching the sea her face was different, calm and ardent, and sometimes at night, very late, I could hear her scribbling away with a scratching pen, writing poetry to be crumpled up and shoved into the fire, and once I saw her (having heard a commotion in the kitchen and poked my head around the door) stamping on a dress she had been making until three in the morning and kicking it around and around the kitchen.

For the introduction to this new edition of The World of Charmian Clift, Rodney Hall has written a warm reminiscence of the volatile and gregarious Clift he and his wife knew in Greece and later in Sydney. Still, it seems a shame that this edition lacks George Johnston’s original introduction, with this fine tribute to Clift’s qualities as a columnist: She wrote with a graceful and highly personal style, but she wrote to no formula … Sometimes she was very funny, sometimes very angry, sometimes very truculent – for she took up causes, often unpopular causes, if she deeply and sincerely believed in them, although she was never a professional ‘crusader’. But, whatever she had to say, she said it with great panache. g

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