ABR, like many writers and media organisations around the country, worries about the future of independent journalism, especially in this trumpacious age, often so hostile to reason and open commentary. We share many Australians’ concerns about the health and viability of the ABC. The threats are myriad and sustained. Funding cuts (by all regimes), political interference, and daily taunts from News Corp have weakened the organisation. Recently, the Liberal Party’s Federal Councilvoted to privatise the organisation. This would surely spell the beginning of the end for the national broadcaster.
Auntie is far from perfect (which media organisation is?). Many of us grimace through those comedic Wednesdays; local drama is scarce; and ABC Classic FM is but a shadow of itself: populist, unedifying, and maddeningly nice. But consider what the ABC has contributed to our culture, our educational system, our democracy since 1928, and try to imagine an Australia without Four Corners, Q&A, Background Briefing, Rear Vision, the 7.30 Report, AM and PM, not to mention Geraldine Doogue, Fran Kelly, and good old Jim Maxwell, to name but a few.
We take things for granted in the Lucky Country, but can we really be sure that the ABC will be around in 2028 to celebrate its centenary –searching, unfettered, well resourced? More and more people think not and have begun to lobby government. Major rallies have taken place around the country. On page 9, Ranald Macdonald (a spokesman for ABC Friends) writes about the present threat. Elsewhere, one hundred writers, artists, commentators, and public
figures have signed ABR’s open letter supporting the ABC (page 23 and online).
Jolley prize
The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, now in its eighth year, is worth a total of $12,500. This year we received about 1,200 entries from thirtyfive countries. The judges – Patrick Allington, Michelle Cahill, and Beejay Silcox – longlisted fourteen stories (all of which are listed on our website) before shortlisting three of them: ‘Vasco’ by Claire Aman (NSW), ‘Between the Mountain and the Sea’ by Sharmini Aphrodite (Singapore); ; and ‘Ruins’ by Madelaine Lucas (NSW/USA). They appear in this issue.
The judges commended three other stories: ‘Joan Mercer’s Fertile Head’ by S.J. Finn (Victoria); ‘Hardflip’ by Mirandi Riwoe (Queensland); and ‘Break Character’ by Chloe Wilson (Victoria). These stories will be published online in coming months.
The judges said this of the overall field: ‘We were privileged to read this teeming, diverse mass of unpublished short fiction from around the world. A number of stories, from the realist to the absurd, captured our attention with their conceptual ambition and original conceits. But the stories that sustained our interest created worlds that felt complete; offered genuine representations of different peoples, places and cultures; celebrated the human spirit, warts and all; were bold and funny, with language that sang; made us think and rethink; and offered endings that shook, surprised or satisfied us.’ (Their remarks on the shortlisted stories will follow in September, with the name of the winner.)
If you are in Melbourne on Monday, 20 August, join us at forty-
fivedownstairs (CBD) for the Jolley Prize ceremony – always enjoyable, if tense-making for the authors (only the judges know the winner until he or she is named on the night). This is a free event and all are welcome, but bookings are essential, as this is a popular occasion: rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au
ConSider thiS
Stephen Spender once said of a certain antipodean upstart who had just appeared in the vaunted Penguin Modern Poets series: ‘Who is Peter Porter?’ This was in 1962. Although the Brisbane-born poet was in his early thirties and already a prolific poet, he was relatively new to London – where he would continue to live until his death in 2010 – and he was still audibly and complicatedly Australian.
No one ever said of Porter’s great influence, ‘Who is W.H. Auden?’ –certainly not Stephen Spender, who remained captivated by his brilliant contemporary for the rest of his life. Auden, born in 1907, seems to have been famous from the outset. Celebrated while still at Oxford, he was cited in his fellow students’ essays. Grudgingly, F.R. Leavis said, ‘the undergraduate notability became a world figure overnight’. Faber published Auden’s first volume of poems when he was twenty-two, soon after T.S. Eliot had published a play of his in Criterion
Auden, one of the great disapprovers, objected to lives of artists (‘I do not believe that knowledge of their private lives sheds any significant light upon their works’), but in his case there have been many biographers, including Humphrey Carpenter, Richard Davenport-Hines, and Peter Porter’s Queensland contemporary Charles
Osborne. We also have Auden’s silly table-talk, his verbal frothings, his inimitable essays and aphorisms. Peter Porter, reviewing the Davenport-Hines, described Auden as ‘the greatest English (as distinct from English-speaking) poet since Tennyson’.
Auden – unwise in love perhaps – was cannier in his executorial choice. Edward Mendelson was in his twenties when Auden tapped him to be his literary executor. Mendelson, now professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has written extensively about Auden ever since. Key works include the six-volume The Compete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose and those indispensable commentaries, Early Auden (1981) and Later Auden (1999). Mendelson is not done yet. Early Auden, Later Auden: A critical biography (Princeton University Press [Footprint], $84.99 hb), his latest study, revises and augments those previous editions. Seumas Perry, a professor of English at Oxford University, reviews it brilliantly in LRB (10 May 2018).
country with a sorry dearth of poets’ biographies, what a book this promises to be.
Admirers of Morag Fraser’s artful journalism should not miss her exceptional review of Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ (recently performed by the MSO), which appears on our website.
porter prize
Perry, who is beginning a life of Auden, is fascinated by his corrugated face, which Auden himself likened to ‘a wedding cake left out in the rain’. (Perry notes that only a poet, only someone ‘rather sad’, would think of leaving a wedding cake out in the rain.)
Auden’s visage – possibly the result of a medical condition called TouraineSolente-Golé syndrome, not to mention a phenomenal addiction to Player’s cigarettes and Benzedrine – attracted the attention of famous sculptors, photographers, and painters. David Hockney, who drew him, quipped, ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like.’
eurekA!
Meanwhile, Morag Fraser – former editor of Eureka Street, where she often published him – is writing the biography of Peter Porter, whose phenomenal archive now rests in the National Library of Australia. In a
Entries are now open for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. This is the fifteenth time we have offered the Porter Prize. Past winners have included Stephen Edgar, Tracy Ryan, Judith Beveridge, and Michael Farrell (who has a poem in this issue).
The Porter Prize is worth a total of $8,500, and here we thank Morag Fraser and all our ABR Patrons for their support. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up, $2,000; the three other shortlisted poets will each receive $500. All five shortlisted poems will appear in the March 2019 issue of ABR.
The judges on this occasion are Judith Bishop (who has won the Prize twice, the only person to do so, yet), Paul Kane, and John Hawke, ABR’s Poetry Editor. Entries close on December 3. For more information about the Porter Prize, including entry guidelines and terms and conditions, please visit our website.
ABR in perth
The WA presence in ABR has increased markedly in recent years, coinciding with welcome funding
from the WA government. Peter Rose – Editor of ABR – will be in Perth in mid-August. He is keen to meet as many reviewers and arts journalists as possible. If you would like to arrange a meeting, contact him at editor@australianbookreview. com.au. Rose will be based at the Centre for Stories on Thursday, 16 August, before ducking off to review WASO’s concert performance of Tristan und Isolde, with Stuart Skelton and Eva-Maria Westbroek.
BirthdAy lArgeSSe
To celebrate our fortieth birthday and to spread the word about the magazine, we’re partnering with some of Australia’s major bookshops and offering free copies of the magazine to customers who purchase books worth $40 or more. This month our partner is the excellent Avenue Bookstore. Staff there have 500 copies to give away in their three outlets: Albert Park, Elsternwick, and Richmond. Buy the book, then read the review. Be quick though.
ABR salutes the work of our fantastic independent bookshops. More promotions of this kind will follow.
ChAngeS At ABR
Dilan Gunawardana left ABR at the end of July. Dilan joined us in 2016 as the ABR Editorial Intern and became Deputy Editor (Digital) in 2017. His stamp is all over our website. A popular contributor to ABR Arts, Dilan will continue to write for the magazine.
Thanks to everyone who recently applied for the 2018–19 ABR Editorial Internship. Jack Callil has now joined the staff as Assistant Editor. Jack is not the only editor in his family. His great-aunt, Carmen Callil, founder of Virago Press and longtime managing director of Chatto & Windus, is one of the most illustrious publishers Australia has produced. Carmen (who was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017) is our Publisher of the Month (page 70).
Peter Porter
August 2018
Marilyn Lake
Alan Atkinson
Beejay Silcox
Kirsten Tranter
Jen Webb
Barnaby Smith
Susan Lever
Brenda Niall
Comment
Ranald Macdonald
Society
David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs
Gideon Haigh
Jolley Prize ‘Vasco’ Claire Aman ‘Between the Mountain and the Sea’ Sharmini Aphrodite ‘Ruins’ Madelaine Lucas
Poems
Michael Farrell
Jordie Albiston
Fiction
Moreno Giovannoni: The Fireflies of Autumn
Michael Brennan
Anthony Uhlmann: Saint Antony in His Desert
Suzie Gibson
Jonathan Green (ed.): Meanjin A–Z
Francesca Sasnaitis
Publishing & Literary Studies
Harold Evans: Do I Make Myself Clear?
Richard Walsh
Vera Tobin:
Tali Lavi
Ben Brooker
Michael Shmith
Jim Davidson
Fields of the past
Conflict in the early colony
The rise and rise of US creative writing degrees
The conclusion of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy
Ryan O’Neill’s new literary satire
Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White
Essays on Richard Flanagan
The memoirs of Rose Tremain
Biography & Memoir
Fiona Sampson: In Search of Mary Shelley Geordie Williamson
Sam Twyford-Moore: The Rapids Shannon Burns
Sisonke Msimang: Always Another Country Dorothy Driver
Meera Atkinson: Traumata Ceridwen Spark
Ross McMullin: Pompey Elliott at War Geoffrey Blainey
David Bradford: Tell Me I’m Okay Robert Reynolds
History and Politics
Michael Brenner: In Search of Israel Mark Baker
David McKnight: Populism Now! Matteo Bonotti
Christina Twomey: The Battle Within Carolyn Holbrook
Luke Beck: Religious Freedom and the Australian Constitution
David Rolph
Science
Peter Atkins: Conjuring the Universe Robyn Williams
Essays
Lorrie Moore: See What Can Be Done Lucas Thompson
Michael Sorkin: What Goes Up Sara Savage
Poetry
Jennifer Maiden: Selected Poems 1967–2018 Gig Ryan
Pam Brown: click here for what we do Tim Wright
Interviews
Publisher of the Month Carmen Callil
Open Page Rose Tremain
Foxtrot
Brothers Wreck
William Tell
Barry Humphries
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Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
New from Chicago
SEVEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT POINTLESS SUFFERING
What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All
Scott Samuelson
“Samuelson’s wry, self-deprecating and confessional style is both serious and playful—and seriously playful. . . . This is an insightful, informative and deeply humane book that is a genuine pleasure to read.”—Times Higher Education, Book of the Week
CANINE CONFIDENTIAL
Why Dogs Do What They Do
Marc Bekoff
“The real fascination of this book lies not so much in what dogs do better than us, but in the virtues they have that we always considered to be ours alone.” Daily Mail
THE ASHTRAY
(Or the Man Who Denied Reality)
Errol Morris
“Anecdotes, cameos, interviews, historical digressions, sly side notes, and striking illustrations hang off a central spine that recounts critical episodes in the history of analytic philosophy.”
Boston Review
SECRETS OF THE SNOUT
The Dog’s Incredible Nose
Frank Rosell
With a Foreword by Marc Bekoff
“Any dog owner who has been, as I have, following their dog’s nose, will be fascinated at this long list of what the nose of the companion by our sides can do.”—Alexandra Horowitz, author of Being a Dog “Fascinating.”—Nature
BEASTS AT BEDTIME
Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature
Liam Heneghan
“Beasts at Bedtime is a book that tells us about who we are; those of us that tell our children these stories as a way of shaping their experience; those of us that were, perhaps, shaped by them as well.”—3 Quarks Daily
PHOENIX ZONES
Where Strength Is Born and Resilience Lives
Hope Ferdowsian, MD
“With clarity and poignancy, Ferdowsian lays out a case that human and animal suffering are closely connected. . . . She has no time for human exceptionalism.”—Times Literary Supplement
Australian Book Review
August 2018, no. 403
Since 1961
First series 1961–74
Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
ISSN 0155-2864
Registered by Australia Post
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Editor and CEO Peter Rose
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The voice of Australia
Defending the principle of an independent and well-funded ABC by Ranald Macdonald
On 15 July 2018, 2,700 citizens converged on the Melbourne Town Hall for the ABC Friends rally. This was chaired by Peter Greste, the courageous journalist. On the panel were Jon Faine from Melbourne Radio 774; Magda Szubanski, comic, actor, and activist; Professor Fiona Stanley, former ABC board member; and ex-Senator Margaret Reynolds, inaugural Chair of ABC Friends National. All were compelling and inspiring. Yet perhaps the two most significant contributors were not present on the day.
Bill Shorten, Leader of the Opposition, in a message to the rally, committed the next ALP government to increased funding for the ABC, to its political independence, and, most importantly, to a restoration of funding for the Australia Network. (Tony Abbott, as prime minister, broke the $233 million ten-year contract for the ABC to provide an Australian voice into Asia and the Pacific, to provide the best for Radio Australia, and to ensure reporting of what happens in the region back to Australia. Abbott therefore abandoned Australia’s outlets and a huge audience in China, North Korea, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, and New Zealand.)
Bill Shorten also pledged full support for the Friends’ resolution, which ‘demanded’ increased funding, political independence, and a restoration of the international reporting role of the ABC. This resolution, which also urged the public broadcaster to aim for the highest broadcasting standards, was worded thus:
This meeting of Friends and supporters of the ABC demands the following:
• a clear commitment from all political parties and individual politicians that the ABC will not be sold off or privatised
• that additional funding will be provided to allow the ABC to meet its Charter requirements to service the needs of all Australians
• that the independence of the ABC Board and Management, as set down in the ABC Act of 1983, be adhered to
• that governance of the ABC in the interests of our democratic principles be clearly independent of any political or external interference
• that the ABC resumes its important role as Australia’s ‘voice’ into Asia and the Pacific with sufficient funding to ensure in-depth reporting into the region, as well as coverage back to Australians, of international news events
• and that ‘our’ ABC aims to set ‘the gold standard for quality, ethical, specialist and diverse broadcasting nationally so as to inform entertain and stimulate our robust Australian democratic way of life’
Another absentee was Robert Manne – emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University and a longtime defender of the ABC, but he sent this message: ‘If the ABC is privatised by one means or another, as the Federal Council of the Liberal Party now desires, it will be destroyed – not all at once, perhaps, but gradually and inexorably. For me and millions of other Australians, the destruction of the ABC would be a tragedy, something akin to the loss of a limb ... There are many battles that liberal-minded Australians need to fight. Almost none is more vital and none more winnable than the fight to save our public broadcaster, the ABC.’
Leonie Millar, vice-president of ABC Friends Victoria, ended the meeting by exhorting those who believe the ABC has in important role in our life – politically, socially and in such areas as emergency services and throughout rural and regional Australia – to actively promote the importance of a well-funded, independent, courageous public broadcaster.
Tom Keneally has stated, ‘When I was growing up, the ABC represented my imagination. It is the voice of Australia, and yet its throat is being cut.’ g
CARMONA orch. Reguagui Sinfonia Flamenca AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE Flamenco tradition meets the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
TRADITIONAL FLAMENCO
David Robertson conductor
Juan Carmona Septet
Juan Carmona guitar ∙ Paco Carmona guitar
El Bachi double bass ∙ Domingo Patricio flute
Kike Terrón percussion ∙ Sergio Aranda dancer
6 SEP, 6.30PM / 7 & 8 SEP, 8PM
Sydney Opera House
REVIEW OF THE MONTH
‘Fields
of the past’
The battle between history and memory
Marilyn Lake
BEST WE FORGET:
THE WAR FOR WHITE AUSTRALIA, 1914–18
by Peter Cochrane
Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 264 pp, 978192018
In pondering the construction of public memory in Ireland, the eminent American historian Richard White insisted on the demythologising work of history as a discipline: ‘History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain. History forges weapons from what memory has forgotten or suppressed.’ In Best We Forget: The war for white Australia, 1914–18, Peter Cochrane wants to jog Australia’s memory by reminding us that the celebrated myth of Anzac obscures a problematic history. But in joining the battle between history and memory, he notes the warning of his friend, the late John Hirst, who wrote: ‘My own view is that history will never beat myth.’ But does this assumed opposition really hold?
Australians rushed to war in 1914, Cochrane argues, not primarily to support the Mother Country in fighting German militarism, but rather to secure the goals of White Australia. To make his case, Cochrane summarises many decades of historical scholarship on the White Australia policy, documenting racial preoccupations that, he asserts, somewhat tendentiously, have been ‘lost to memory’. This is an odd claim in many ways, because perhaps one of the few things most Australians remember from our national
history is that among the first measures passed in 1901 by the new Commonwealth was the race-based Immigration Restriction Act, which established the White Australia policy. But in calling on history to challenge popular memory, Cochrane is making a further claim: that behind Australia’s commitment to World War I was intense strategic concern with the threat posed to Australia by the ‘Asiatic Races’, especially Japan. Drawing on the writings of journalist C.E.W. Bean, and playwright C.J. Dennis, among others, Cochrane documents turn-of-the-century preoccupations with racial virility, national manhood, and the ways in which war journalists – including Bean, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, and Walter Murdoch – eulogised Australians as fighting men. ‘Physically they are the finest men I have ever seen in any part of the world,’ enthused the English correspondent Ashmead-Bartlett. In a private note, Bean recorded his shock at the ‘puny, narrow-chested little men’ who comprised the English armed forces. Clearly they didn’t enjoy the high standard of living enshrined by the White Australia policy, though it was not the institution of a ‘living wage’ that excited upper-class, English-educated Bean. Rather it was the superior type of white manhood he encountered in the outback. The one
theme constantly running through Bean’s work is his devotion to manly character.
Cochrane sketches the historical context for the emergence of the White Australia policy with the arrival in the Australian colonies of thousands of Chinese gold seekers, casting them, in the words of alarmist colonists, as undifferentiated swarms, floods, disease-ridden aliens. Liberal political leaders Charles Pearson and his protégé Alfred Deakin began to argue for the necessity of maintaining Australia as a white man’s country, unspoiled by the ‘admixture’ of other races. When Britain entered into a treaty with the new Asian power of Japan, many Australians, rather than feeling reassured, felt more threatened and distrustful. Japan’s historic defeat of Russia in 1905 – the first time in modern history that an Asian power had defeated a European one – deepened their anxieties. Deakin was to the fore in warning fellow Australians about the threat posed by Japan, and as prime minister he bypassed Britain in inviting US President Theodore Roosevelt to send his ‘Great White Fleet’ to visit Melbourne and Sydney, an object lesson, as he thought, at once a demonstration of naval power and racial solidarity. Cochrane documents Australia’s increasing demands in the early twentieth century for adequate self-defence forces, naval ships under Australian control, and compulsory military service (for home defence only), demands that increased imperial tensions. Winston Churchill was unimpressed.
The one theme constantly running through C.E.W. Bean’s work is his devotion to manly character
cians through the publications of numerous scholars working in the fields of race relations, immigration, foreign policy, and defence, yet, he notes in frustration, it has had little influence on popular memory or the official commemoration of Australia’s participation in World War I. Rather, ‘misplaced patriotism’ rules. Indeed, one of the effects of the militarisation of Australian history in recent times has been the simplification of accounts of Australians at war, prompting an increasing number of historians to interrogate the fraught processes of national memory-making, and to point out what’s wrong with Anzac. In Best We Forget, Cochrane suggests that the main thing wrong with the Anzac legend is that it pays no heed to the racial obsessions that drove Australian participation in the war, that it ignores the ‘race fear’ that encouraged Australians to take up arms for the empire and sustained them in the fight for victory.
Fear of Japanese expansionism in the Pacific exacerbated Australians’ simultaneous distrust of, and reliance on Britain. With the outbreak of war, Japan honoured the Anglo–Japanese alliance by entering the conflict as Britain’s ally. To the great consternation of Australians, the Japanese forces occupied the German possessions –the Marshall and Caroline Islands – in the Pacific, and by November 1914, the last German stronghold in China had also surrendered to Japan. The British government assured Australian leaders that all territorial questions would be settled at the end of the war. By that time, the belligerent English-born Billy Hughes was prime minister. At the Versailles Peace Conference, he was vociferous – and successful – in opposing Japan’s proposal of a racial equality clause to be added to the Covenant of the League of Nations. On his triumphant return home, Hughes told Australians that the greatest thing they had achieved in the war was ‘the policy of White Australia’. As he explained to the federal parliament: ‘The White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please; but, at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory, and my colleagues and I have brought that great principle back to you from the Conference.’
In telling this story, Cochrane relies on what he calls the ‘core historiography’. As he points out, this history has been accessible to researchers, pundits, and politi-
But of course it was not just, or even primarily, ‘race fear’ that persuaded Australians to enlist, it was also ‘race pride’. We have the evidence of hundreds of war memorials and monuments that tell us that young Australian men volunteered to fight for king and country, God and empire (if not ‘freedom and democracy’, as school children are taught). It was an imperial as well as a racial war. Significantly, of those who rushed to enlist in the first months of war, the English-born were overrepresented. And many thousands of other men simply sought adventure abroad, or escape from the complications – or boredom – of life at home. Even then, despite unremitting official pressure and Billy Hughes’s relentless scaremongering, only one in two eligible Australian men chose to enlist at all. That would seem to be another historical fact lost to popular memory.
In his concluding chapter on the politics of memory, Cochrane, the embattled historian, seems to concede defeat in the face of popular ‘storylines’. Contemporary politics, he laments, plays a larger part than scholarly history, a ‘decisive’ part, in shaping popular memory. But perhaps it is the conceptual opposition drawn between history and memory – or history and myth – that is part of the problem, as it disavows the complicity of so many historians, in the present as well as the past, in ceaselessly shoring up, in the author’s final words, the ‘perpetual commemoration of the Anzacs’. g
Marilyn Lake is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. She is co-author of Drawing the Global Colour Line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and What’s Wrong with Anzac? (NewSouth, 2010). Her next book, Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform will be published by Harvard University Press at the end of this year.
From both sides
A vital addition to the ‘moment of truth’
Alan Atkinson
THE SYDNEY WARS: CONFLICT IN THE EARLY COLONY, 1788–1817
by Stephen Gapps
NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 432 pp, 9781742232140
The Uluru Statement from the Heart, in May 2017, might not have had much resonance with the federal government. However, it coincides with a new phase of writing and research that helps to round out its long-term significance and impact. Mark McKenna has expanded on the importance of the Uluru Statement in the March 2018 Quarterly Essay (Moment of Truth). He points out that, among other things, this remarkable document is partly an appeal for truth telling about the past, as a fundamental means to reconciliation, and his essay includes examples of the way that is already happening.
In our understanding of the past, we do indeed seem to have moved beyond the siloed agendas of the ‘history wars’. Divisions will continue, but the spirit of the exercise now finds its expression in the inclusive and magnanimous tone of the Uluru Statement. As another example, Lyndall Ryan, from the University of Newcastle, is leading the Australian branch of an international effort to document colonial massacres. The result so far is a minutely researched and even-handed account of interracial violence, documenting deaths on both sides, invaders and Indigenous peoples, in the Australian past.
Stephen Gapps’s new book, The Sydney Wars, belongs very much to the moment. Even-handedness is crucial. So, at the end of this book is a tabular listing of the killed and wounded on both sides, as far as the evidence allows. Gapps has searched very widely indeed, but of course settler casualties are much better documented than Indigenous ones.
But the first thing we notice about Gapps’s book is the title. Historians
have two options in writing about Indigenous people. They can emphasise their difference from the invaders. That opens imagination to any number of hidden complexities and, where possible, it includes preferring Indigenous terms to English ones. One great advantage lies in assuming the mystery and diversity of humanity. But drawing as it does on anthropological method, this approach also tends to distance actors and observers.
Secondly, their language can speak of sameness. That typically means using English nomenclature and Western ideas. In his books on Australian race relations, Henry Reynolds generally uses such language, so as to argue about sovereignty, treaties, and legal rights. Inga Clendinnen similarly called Indigenous peoples ‘Australians’ and the invaders ‘Europeans’. Generally, Gapps takes this latter approach. For him, the main contenders are the ‘Sydney people’ on the one hand and ‘colonists’ on the other. Altogether, he uses terms free of any moral agenda. His immediate aim is to show how the violence of the first thirty years is rightly called ‘war’ or ‘wars’, terms that put such violence at the heart of the Australian story and, at the same time, dignify both parties.
The fact of invasion is set aside, but in other respects this must be the most effective approach for ‘truth telling’. As with the Uluru Statement and as with Ryan’s massacre project, the aim must be to create a national story equally acknowledged by all parties, in Australia and beyond. Good writing helps too, and Gapps’s story is not only full of effective detail but also beautifully lucid.
Also, as a comprehensive piece of scholarship, it is new in the way it shows
a colonial community organised on military lines and in a state of continuous defence. The successive garrison units, especially the New South Wales Corps, have not always been taken very seriously by historians. They typically seem both ridiculous and corrupt. Gapps takes all these units seriously as the sharp edge of European occupation, with expertise essential for the safety of the colonists and for the local purposes of empire. In this sense, too, the book is part of a larger scholarly development. On the whole, we now pay more attention to the skills
His immediate aim is to show how the violence of the first thirty years is rightly called ‘war’ or ‘wars’
and intelligence involved in the settlement process, partly because we are better qualified ourselves to understand them.
Gapps’s originality involves the reinterpretation of well-known detail. Dots are joined in new ways. Other writers have conjured up the soundscape at Sydney Cove in January 1788 by stressing the noise of the axe and of busyness, but Gapps gives instead a wonderfully evocative account of punctuating gunfire, ceremonial, casual or offensive. Later in Governor Arthur Phillip’s time, the non-appearance of the Gadigal is not passivity in Gapps’s account but ‘a military stand-off’. Guns and spears are made to define the relationship between old and new inhabitants, the governors repeatedly send home for more troops, and fear is
a constant on both sides.
Throughout these three decades, 1788–1817, successive governors are shown to have tried two contradictory policies at the same time. Their first duty was to protect and extend the settlement, but they had also been instructed to upset as little as possible the lives and livelihood of the people they found in New South Wales. One of the beauties of this book is the way it shows how that contradiction unfolded, from Arthur Phillip to Lachlan Macquarie. At the beginning and at the end of the period respectively, each found it necessary to confront the problem with what was meant to be a single hard blow to Indigenous resistance. In Phillip’s case, this was the punitive expedition in December 1790, led by Watkin Tench, and it failed. Macquarie’s effort did work, partly, so Gapps argues, because the governor, who had appropriate experience on other imperial frontiers, took a more expert military approach. This was the campaign of April–May 1816, including the Appin Massacre. From that point, Sydney and the Cumberland Plain were at peace, and so a gulf opened up between these centres of European civility and the crude violence of an increasingly remote frontier.
We need to remember the limitations of Gapps’s approach. The ‘Sydney people’ had no existence in fact. In response to invasion, various Indigenous groups of the Cumberland Plain were drawn together from time to time, apparently in innovative ways, but otherwise the ‘Sydney people’ is a historical construct. A different type of argument might also have used a more relativist understanding of violence, conditioned as it is by time, place, and culture. The power of this book lies in the way its own particular logic unfolds within well-chosen parameters and towards a definite purpose. It is a fine piece of work and a vital addition to the ‘moment of truth’. g
Alan Atkinson, who taught Australian history for many years at the University of New England, is the author of The Europeans in Australia and Commonwealth of Speech. He held ABR’s inaugural RAFT Fellowship.
Protest rock
An attempt to explain the phenomenon of bullshit jobs
Gideon Haigh
BULLSHIT JOBS: A THEORY
by David Graeber
Allen Lane, $49.99 hb, 358 pp, 9780241263884
Recently I solicited impressions of his job from the new head of external affairs at a big financial organisation. What had struck him first was the manpower at his disposal. The total headcount ran into many hundreds – larger than most, if not all, Australia’s print and electronic newsrooms. There was not merely one department. Each division of the institution had its own well-resourced team.
Yet what struck him next was a paradox. Only a relatively small proportion of the external affairs personnel dealt with anyone ... well, external. What did they do all day, I asked? ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘They talk to each other.’
Five years ago, this paradox, and others like it, provoked the American anthropologist David Graeber to publish an essay in the magazine Strike! entitled ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, based on a ‘hunch’ that corporations were replete with jobs that didn’t ‘do much of anything’: in this category he lumped the like of ‘HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers’. It touched, as they say, a chord. In Bullshit Jobs: A theory, Graeber seeks to strum it.
No longer content simply to observe the phenomenon, Graeber aspires to explain it. The bullshit job he defines as a ‘form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case’.
Bullshit jobs are not to be confused with shit jobs, such as those of cleaners, ditchdiggers, etc. The blue-collar latter involve being ‘paid and treated
badly’ and ‘held in low esteem’ despite involving ‘work that needs to be done’; the white-collar former often offer ‘excellent working conditions’ despite their futility. Why? Because bullshit jobs have proliferated as a kind of balm for the workplace attrition wrought by neoliberalism and mechanisation, ‘the ruling class’ having ‘figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger’. Graeber wants Bullshit Jobs to be ‘an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization’. With the best will in the world, it is more like a protest rock thrown at a departing tank.
Graeber supports his thesis empirically in two ways, both responses to his initial essay. He has sifted 124 online discussions and 250 personal communications collected via Twitter; he cites, repeatedly, a YouGov poll which asked respondents whether their job made ‘a meaningful contribution to the world’. Graeber reports: ‘Astonishingly, more than a third – 37 per cent – said they believed that it did not ... This was almost twice what I had anticipated. So, not only has the hypothesis been confirmed by public reaction, it has now been overwhelmingly confirmed by statistical research.’ The figure is repeated, brandished and elaborated throughout the book, culminating in the proposition that ‘roughly half the economy consists of, or exists in support of, bullshit’.
Errr, no, and it is hard to see how any self-respecting social scientist could present such a compound of anecdotes and online polling drawn from a selfselecting sample and devoid of comparative data as evidence. Personally, I’m astonished that so many respondents thought that their jobs did make a meaningful contribution to the world.
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The individual stories Graeber cites, meanwhile, are readable, often wry, sometimes melancholy. But I’m not sure they amount to ‘proof’, any more than his reverberating assertions amount to more than diverting polemic. The worst torture the respondents seem to have suffered is being temporarily bored. What’s so wrong with that? Without experience of boredom, how would we distinguish the interesting?
The fact is that office work and workers have made an inexact fit since John Stuart Mill was knocking over his tasks at the East India Company in an hour as ‘an actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried out simultaneously’, and Bullshit Jobs resembles nothing so completely as those pioneering critiques of corporate conformity written sixty years ago by William H. Whyte (The Organisation Man, 1956), David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1950, with Nathan Glazer and Revel Denney) and C. Wright Mills (White Collar, 1951), with a dash of Parkinson’s Law. Which is fine, except that Graeber manifests next to no interest in history: we get some chunks of Thomas Carlyle, and a few cursory paragraphs about robber barons and scientific management that somehow elides them, when the latter’s precision was actually a reaction against the former’s caprices.
Graeber would have been on far stronger ground had he concentrated not on bullshit jobs but on bullshit work: the homage paid to corporate means, in the form of meetings and messages, appraisals and administrative tasks, that get in the way of functional ends. These are, largely, an outcome of scale, technology, the archaisms of managerialism, the pretensions of presenteeism, and the phenomenon of the free rider; connectivity, meanwhile, has blurred the lines between work and home, to the extent that we carry our job with us, bullshit or otherwise, like a paroled prisoner with his ankle bracelet.
Acknowledgement of other causal factors, however, would not suit Graeber’s politics, a mingling of Marxism and libertarianism which he defines as
‘anarchist’. The best he can do is erect a couple of straw men, touching on arguments that ‘globalization has rendered the process of production so complicated that we need ever more office workers to administer it’ and that regulation has created ‘an ever-burgeoning number of useless bureaucrats’, before deciding: ‘Both these arguments are wrong and a single example can refute both.’ This is a digression into administrative growth in universities that establishes precisely nothing beyond itself, preluding another airy association: ‘There seems to be an intrinsic connection between the financialization of the economy, the blossoming of information industries, and the proliferation of bullshit jobs.’ What this might be then never really gets answered. We are overdue a considered conversation about the quality of our work, as distinct from a mindless idée fixe with its quantity. Bullshit Jobs is not it.
I would still recommend Bullshit Jobs as an argument starter. It is a pacy, engaging read scattered with provocations, such as that ‘productivity’ is a theological concept underpinned by a ‘variation on a male fantasy of childbirth’, and that nurses and cleaners have contributed more to public health than physicians because most of the improvement in outcomes over time has stemmed from better nutrition and hygiene. But Graeber’s stretching of his essay has attenuated rather than strengthened his thesis: like the existence of those aforementioned external affairs personnel, his book is too little job and too much bullshit. g
Gideon Haigh is the author The Office: A hardworking history (Melbourne University Press, 2012).
‘We are all MFAs now’
The rise and rise of American creative writing degrees by Beejay Silcox
‘Creative writing is, in sum, as American as baseball, apple pie and homicide.’
Mark McGurl, The Program Era (2009)
My rejection from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop arrived by mail. Iowa was steadfastly oldfashioned: there were no online portals or login codes at the near-mythical mothership of American fiction; no emails or text alerts. I only knew they had received my application because they sent back the self-addressed postcard I had included with my brace of earnest short stories. When the rejection letter arrived, I opened it with a good knife because I hoped it might be a letter I’d want to keep. I did keep it, just not for the reasons I’d hoped. There was a handwritten message underneath the pro-forma niceties: This is strong work Iowa hadn’t said yes, but – with those four words – it hadn’t said no.
The week after America’s oldest graduate fiction workshop turned me down, I was accepted by one of its youngest – less than a decade old, but cloned, as all MFA (Master of Fine Arts) programs are, from Iowa’s metastasising DNA. I was offered a yearly stipend of US$15,000 (before tax), which I would earn by teaching freshmen undergraduates how to write essays, and a tuition waiver for three years of study – enough time to write a book. As MFA offers go, it was generous; I wouldn’t be in debt, and, if I lived lean, I might be able to stay that way.
I wanted to go to a place where fiction was being read, discussed, and made. I wanted to read and talk and make. I wanted, to paraphrase novelist (and Iowa MFA
graduate) Alexander Chee, to take a couple of decades of wondering whether or not my work could reach people and funnel it into a couple of years of finding out. So I flew for twenty-two hours from Canberra to Washington DC, and then rode a bus for another six out west, up into Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. There were billboards with the Ten Commandments and pick-up trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers, and a hundred other tired American clichés that tell you everything about the country, and nothing at all.
Like all nations, America is built on fictions: from its founding fathers to its middle-class dreams. Some would argue that is all the country has even been: a starsand-bars fiction wrapped around fifty separate countries, wearing ever more threadbare. How these fictions work –how they are made, and for (and by) whom – is a potent reflection of how the country works.
Below the grand opera of its politics, below the bombast, dysfunction, and partisan rage, a new generation of authors is writing America, and thousands of them are choosing to do it from within the US college network, as students and teachers of MFA programs - the ‘largest system of literary patronage for living writers the world has ever seen’.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded in 1936. In 1975 there were fifteen American colleges offering creative writing MFAs; in 2008 there were 156. In 2016 – the most recent year of data – there were 244, not to mention the ever-expanding constellation of other degree-conferring creative writing programs, from BAs to PhDs, almost two thousand in total. Every year, US colleges process more than 20,000 MFA applications,
COSTUME DESIGN
CREATIVE WRITING
DANCE
DIGITAL MEDIA
DRAMA
FASHION
MEDIA ARTS
SCREEN
VISUAL ARTS
and send between 3,000 and 4,000 graduates out to shape the future of American letters – as writers, publishers, teachers, and readers. The rise of the creative writing program, argues Stanford Professor Mark McGurl, ‘stands as the most important event in post-war American literary history’.
There is something extraordinary about it, an ever-growing chorus of young voices using the social legitimacy of a degree to carve out the space and time to be artists, but American literary history has been pointedly quiet about the MFA. As the novelist (and vocal MFA critic) Elif Batuman writes, ‘literary historians don’t write about creative writing, and creative writers don’t write literary histories’. Both disciplines (and they do see themselves as separate disciplines – the former looking backwards the latter ever forwards) seem embarrassed about the merging of art and institution, a discomfort that manifests in widespread pop-cultural derision of the MFA.
machine’ – a machine for making other machines: ‘The academically certified creative writer goes out to teach creative writing, and produces other creative writers who are not writers, but who produce still other creative writers who are not writers.’ A pedagogical Ponzi scheme.
Like all nations, America is built on fictions: from its founding fathers to its middle-class dreams
The MFA is the degree writers love to hate. As the writer Lincoln Michael sardonically writes: ‘Every now and then, the literary world likes to take a break from debating whether ebooks are taking over or whether the novel is dead to discuss an even more pressing matter: are MFA programs bad?’ It’s a blunt, subjective, and singularly unhelpful question, premised on the assumption that program fiction is a monolithic beast, distinct somehow – not only stylistically, but morally – from ‘real’ literature. ‘MFA fiction’ has become a lazy cultural shorthand for crappy fiction: generic, derivative, and dangerously toothless pap; an institutional boa constrictor slowly squeezing the life out of American letters.
In the months before I moved to Virginia, a collection of essays was published that weaponised that question, combatively titled MFA vs NYC: The two cultures of American fiction (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014). The book was a nuanced and pragmatic account of America’s vaguely bifurcated culture of literary funding (universities and New York publishing), but its boxing-ring title demanded that teams be taken: team life experience (NYC) versus team ivory tower (MFA); garret versus classroom; caution-to-the-wind versus caution; original talent versus cookie-cutter clone. It wasn’t hard to work out which team you were meant to be on. I heard you could buy ‘Fuck Your MFA’ tote bags in some of the scrappier New York City bookshops
The MFA has questions to answer: the conscionability of miring students in college debt for a degree with woeful employment prospects (less than 1.5 per cent of the US workforce is employed in the arts); and the degree’s inclusion (both in enrolment and pedagogy) of minority and under-represented literary voices. The late D.G. Myers famously described the program as an ‘elephant
But the ‘good or bad’ debate is tedious, bordering on the farcical. In 2016 The Atlantic deployed a team of computational researchers to try and pin down the differences between MFA and non-MFA authors with an arsenal of linguistic algorithms. They compared published works that had been reviewed by the New York Times , and – shockingly – found no differences. It seems that market pressures and gatekeepers might matter more than the insidious brainwashing of a few university writing classes. ‘What’s interesting about the MFA debate,’ Michael explains, ‘[is that] it tends to completely ignore the groups that actually determine what gets published in favor of an MFA-centric theory of the literary universe where all other players orbit around the MFA, propelled by its workshopped gravity.’
In a 2011 interview with Salon, the current director of the Iowa program, Lan Samantha Chang, noted: ‘It’s so fascinating to me that smart people waste, or spend, an enormous amount of effort criticizing people who love to read and write. You know?’ I do know. When I mentioned to a friend this week that I was writing a piece about the MFA, and wanted to say something new, he instantly replied: ‘Maybe you can’t. Maybe the MFA extracted any remaining thought and creativity you had, and there’s your topic.’ That’s what you earn when you earn an MFA.
I’m tired of justifying my decision to go. There are so few good choices available for people who want to make things, and a qualification matters when opportunities are scarce and established career paths are crumbling (when I first considered a mid-career change to writing, a number of Australian publishing industry professionals encouraged me to get an MFA: ‘it’s a solid way to show you’re serious’). I left a career and stretched a marriage and a mortgage across an ocean to complete my MFA, and I knew I was damn lucky to even have the option. It sure felt like the ‘real world’ to me.
More importantly, the debate is a furphy. MFA fiction didn’t infect American fiction, American fiction invented the MFA – the degree has been taught (and taken) by many of its most influential voices, from Flannery O’Connor (Iowa grad, 1947) to George Saunders (current MFA faculty, Syracuse). ‘It’s virtually impossible,’ as the novelist (and MFA graduate) Chad Harbach writes, ‘to read a particular book and deduce whether the writer attended a program. For one thing, she almost certainly did ... And even if the writer has somehow never heard of an MFA program or set foot on a college campus, it doesn’t matter, because if she’s
read any American fiction of the past sixty years, or met someone who did, she’s imbibed the general idea and aesthetic. We are all MFAs now.’
We are all MFAs now? Having spent three years inside an MFA, I’ve been trying to make sense of what that means. The model – with its antique pedagogy – is not only a potent American invention, but a potent American export. You can get an MFA in Canada and the UK; across Europe; in Israel, Mexico, South Korea, and the Philippines. In New Zealand. In Australia.
It’s hard to see the shape of a system from inside it; harder still when that system is wilfully blind. It wasn’t until my final year, when I was preparing to teach an undergraduate creative writing course, that I was encouraged – albeit limply – to consider creative writing as a discipline. It wasn’t as if some grand secret were being conspiratorially withheld; such concerns were simply irrelevant – distractions. We didn’t talk about politics or ethics, literary history or critical theory. We barely talked about how to turn our inchoate hopes into sustaining, realistic careers, in teaching or otherwise (although teaching was how we grudgingly earned our space in the department, we were cheap teachers and cheap to teach).
The same stories were submitted class after class, semester after semester. Hardly anyone read the books, and there were hardly any books to read – nothing penned outside of North America, or much before Raymond Carver. When I asked why we didn’t read beyond the continental border, a professor joked: ‘Well, this is America.’
You could buy ‘Fuck Your MFA’ tote bags in some of the scrappier
New York City bookshops
I was never allowed to forget it. I was the only international student in my cohort. My visa papers were stamped ‘Non-Resident Alien’ and that’s exactly how I felt – a zoo kangaroo, an ungainly antipodean novelty. My corner of America seemed tripwired with unspoken rules and hierarchies, and I kept snagging myself by asking about them. A fortnight into my degree, one of my teachers suggested I should do myself a favour and head back home; I didn’t belong. A semester in, I wondered if she was right.
The bullying was high-school baroque. ‘If they’d treated me like they’ve treated you,’ another professor told me when I returned for my second year, ‘I wouldn’t have bothered.’ I’m glad I did. I taught myself to write in those breathlessly, brutally lonely years. I found astute readers. I met some of my literary heroes and made new ones. I read and talked and made things – just not in the way I had hoped.
What we did was what MFA students have been doing since the very first days, out in the corn flats of Iowa: we sat around a table with copies of a classmate’s story in front of us and ‘workshopped’ it. We talked about how it worked and didn’t work, as if the author of that story were not awkwardly sitting among us, condemned to silence. On our best days, our conversations were vibrant and warm-hearted. On our worst, they were conduits for personal animus. Mostly, they were a form of pedagogically sanctioned vivisection – taking a work that was barely alive and slicing it up. Taking ideas that were ungainly and edged and rounding them off, making them smoother, safer to handle.
The unspoken goal was to ‘win’ workshop, but there were only two ways you could win: writing the best stuff or caring the least about whether or not you did. It was a cultivated apathy, deceptively competitive, and not, I later discovered, restricted to my program. ‘What I felt very strongly,’ an Iowa grad told me, describing his experience more than a decade ago, ‘was not indignation so much as sadness and bewilderment at a fundamental lack of curiosity or bibliophilic hunger.’
Yet we had all worked so fiercely to get into the program. The acceptance rate for Harvard Law School hovers around fifteen per cent. The acceptance rate for a fully funded MFA is routinely less than five. To select its fiction class of twenty-five, Iowa sifts through more than one thousand applicants. My class of eight women (four fiction, four poetry) was drawn from hundreds. But enthusiasm was gauche, writing a chore.
‘The problems in society are announced early in MFA programs,’ argues the writer Sabina Murray; ‘the arguments that we have around the areas of language and art serve to reflect greater arguments and upheavals’. I moved to Virginia in August 2014, eighteen months into Barack Obama’s lame-duck second term, and I left my Blacksburg apartment, with its family of wallnesting squirrels, in May 2017, four months into Trump’s monstrously inevitable presidency. I had a ringside seat to a country turning in on itself. America was gearing up for the next election and – as with MFA versus NYC – cultural teams were being chosen; not between the left and the right, those teams were long set, but deep within them.
In workshops, the conversations we tried to have about authorial permission – who has the right to write – were heated, messy, and important. For better and worse, these are some of the conversations that will come to define my generation of art makers; a generation for whom art is difficult – some would argue impossible, others necessary – to sever from its maker. Do authors have a right or a responsibility to tell stories that are not their own? How linked is that right/responsibility to an author’s social and cultural power? What do we lose when those with power step in to speak for those without? Where is the line between ally and appropriator, between highlighting and hijacking?
But we didn’t trust one another; rather we instinctively reduced one another to what we knew, which wasn’t much, or what we expected, which was even less.
In the lead-up to the election, America did the same thing.
When a discussion becomes a terrain, territory matters – territory is power. You patrol your borders, demarcate them. You build walls and fire from the ramparts, and before long you have bricked yourself in. The self becomes a cage. Empathy becomes impossible. In art, fiction inches ever closer to memoir. In politics, thinking becomes feeling. Feelings become fact.
‘Our understanding of what it takes to be an artist is geared to an era’s myths,’ explains Jean McGarry, director of the Hopkins University MFA program – just down the road from my school. What the rise of the MFA suggests is that the myths of this era seem to be meritocratic and professionalised, ‘the arts are more inculcated than they were before. It’s no longer the genius coming out of the ground fully fledged.’ But the hypermasculine musk of the self-destructive American writer–genius is hard to wipe off – a ‘wine-chugging Hemingway firing a homemade rifle at a rabid shark from the back of a speeding ambulance’, as Harbach delightfully summarises. It was certainly alive and well in my program. I scooped whisky vomit from the throats of paralytic classmates who had stopped breathing; overheard others snorting crushed Percocet to get through the teaching day. When a Muslim student was admitted to the program, people wondered what she could possibly have to write about because she didn’t drink. There were rumours of cheap heroin from West Virginia. It was obliteration as performance, as homework. If you didn’t participate you were suspect, excluded. Paired with the apathy, it created a toxic malaise that obscured an immovable truth. The students who wrote, were the students who wrote. And here is the grand tension of the MFA, its peculiarly American irony: the structure that makes it possible is the very structure that makes it suspect. ‘The program writer, even if he’s been both student and professor,’ writes Harbach, ‘always wants to assume, and is to some extent granted, outsider status by the University; is always lobbing his flaming bags of prose over the ivied gate late at night. Then in the morning he puts on a tie and walks through the gate and goes to his office.’ Or as McGurl more sedately writes in the MFA’s most comprehensive history, The Program Years: Postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing, ‘a discipline concocted as a progressive antidote to conformism [has been] charged with being an agent of that conformism’. The MFA is a system established on the hatred of systems and anchored in a recriminatory dialectic of shame.
In the land of the ‘Great American Novel’, the writer–genius myth speaks to something fundamental about how America sees itself – rugged, untethered. And it is hard not to see that myth’s contemporary tenaciousness as the reflection of a post-Reagan, neo liberal unwillingness to recognise the role institutions have played in American prosperity; a mindset in which the simple story of the self-made man – the puller of
bootstraps, the callus-handed tamer of The West, the John Wayne cowboy – is plastered over a more complex institutional reality. McGurl writes, ‘the creative writing program produces programmatically ... a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society’. The pop-cultural contempt for the MFA masks itself as discomfort with the first part of that sentence, but we have long since accepted the fundamental role of instruction, guidance, and practice in the role of other artforms. It is the last part that humiliates, that terrifies – the acknowledgment that American individualism is institutional.
‘It would be a great loss to our literary history if our disrespect for institutional relations as somehow embarrassing ... made us less than vigilant in remembering and understanding them,’ warns McGurl. Yet that is exactly what is happening. In a staticky call between my apartment in Cairo and his office at Providence College in Rhode Island, Dr Eric Bennett and I discuss Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle and American creative writing during the Cold War (2015), his vital account of the ‘apocalyptic fears and redemptive hopes’ that – along with the GI Bill and the progressive education movement – galvanised the postwar expansion of MFA programs in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘When I was publishing Workshops of Empire, I was hopeful that at least some of the MFA programs would pick it up and find it interesting,’ he tells me, ‘but I didn’t hear from any of them. The only people who picked it up – and I don’t know why I was surprised by this – are people who have an international perspective.’
Bennett’s book traces how creative writing programs became conduits for the soft diplomatic struggle against the Soviet Union, helmed by literary cold warriors and bankrolled by the philanthropic behemoths of corporate America (most notably, the Rockefeller Foundation), and at least once by the CIA.
If the right writers were afforded the institutional legitimacy of the university – tamed and tidied for the American consumer – it was believed that they could craft a literature of individual freedom to counter the collectivist utopias heralded on the other side of the Iron Curtain. A literature that, as Bennett writes, would ‘inoculate citizenry against fearsome ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of catastrophic global warfare, and forestall or prevent a Third World War’. These were not to be didactic, idea-driven tales, no – simply free people living free lives. The grand ideology would be disguised by its politically apolitical absence; using the self to speak for the many. Audiences at home and abroad (and the international writers imported into the MFA) would see the obvious virtue of American freedom.
Eight decades later, the centrality of the self has become an unquestioned, near-invisible reality. As McGurl shows, the aesthetic triptych of American letters is anchored in the self: show don’t tell; find your voice; write what you know. These modern ‘rules’ of writing – portrayed as craft rather than politics – gener-
ate fiction that strives for timelessness by untethering itself from history. Fiction that strives for connection by anchoring itself in the tactile and sensual. As Bennett explains through the Skype hiss: ‘individualism is simply antithetical to a book about ideas’.
The fiction we were encouraged to write in my MFA program was not stylistically similar: there were avantgarde surrealists and hyper-realists and meta-fictional narrative knotters. It was as individual as we were, but also as individualist – what McGurl calls, ‘the many different forms of American sameness’. We didn’t just write what we knew, we wrote who we were. It was not millennial narcissism, but an eight-decade legacy of narrowing the aperture in the quest to speak universally by speaking only for one. A legacy too, of bespoke consumerism, of being conditioned to mistake a form of culturally-sanctioned individuality ‘as the occasion for individualism of the wilder kind’. We are all MFAs now.
Cloudstreet. Over the fortnight we read it, my classmates bailed me up to complain about the Australian slang, the Australian history, the Australian secrets beating in the book’s Australian heart. They talked about the novel as if reading it had been a favour to me, as if I had been indulged.
When a Muslim student was admitted to the program, people wondered what she could possibly have to write about because she didn’t drink
‘The weapon that was initially directed against totalitarian ideologies – the praiseworthy weapon of the small voice – has become directed at the United States itself,’ Bennett tells me. The freedoms of American literature have become a straitjacket. ‘For decades, American writers have had so little explanation of themselves as American because of the stigma attached to American imperialism. I think a lot of them regard themselves as nationless, which might be the only thing worse than regarding themselves as American. American writers would benefit from having a fuller sense of themselves as Americans – instead of amplifying their Americanness, actually interrogate it, diminish it. It would be conducive to smarter writing.’
To become denationalised is to see your culture as the default – edgeless, normal, eternal. A denationalised writer cannot hold her country to account because she cannot see it, only herself inside of it. A denationalised voter is the same. And what of a denationalised leader, a denationalised nation? The dynamics I saw at play around the workshop table reflect the tensions and contradictions of the country that invented it. A nation that woke the day after the 2016 election and did not recognise itself, because it had been trained not to look. The MFA is a mirror of its nation. As Batuman scathingly writes: ‘The MFA stands for everything that’s wonderful about America: the belief that every individual life can be independent from historical givens, that all the forms and conditions can be reinvented from scratch.’ It feels important to recognise this at a time when America feels like a question, when it feels necessary and urgent to understand the country that made Donald Trump possible, its dark grievances and lurking furies.
I’m reminded of my last weeks in the MFA, when I cajoled a professor into assigning an Australian novel:
Our final discussion – the final hour of my degree –was intelligent and lively. There was cheap wine and a tray of supermarket barbecue chicken, and the camaraderie that comes from a pending dissolution. And – for the first time – they asked me questions about my country. Not about the spiders or the sharks, but about its national myths and Indigenous history. They asked me how it felt to be Australian, what it meant to think like one. I had tried to tell them many times before, but Cloudstreet helped them hear me. That’s what fiction can do; why it matters. In the three years I had sat beside them, the people around me had never considered that my experience of ‘their’ books might be as disorienting as entering Tim Winton’s Western Australia; they had never considered that I had spent three years mired in unfamiliar vernacular and unshared histories. For them, literature meant American literature, anything else needed to have its geography or its politics pinned to the front. Their stories were assumed to be my stories because their stories were universal. Purpose built. In being so different, Cloudstreet helped them see themselves more clearly. At least I hope it did. That’s how I’d like to remember my last workshop day.
I’ve lived a nomadic life: thirty homes, three continents and counting. I’m writing this essay from yet another new desk, overlooking the Nile. Living out of a suitcase creates a profound sense of placelessness. I used to respond to this expatriate distance by being dismissive of Australia and its literature – its tedious insistence of interrogating and reinterrogating its identity. I am ashamed to have been so ashamed. In my MFA, I saw – I was forced to see – how profoundly I am Australian. My professor was right, I did not belong in my MFA. That was its value to me.
Batuman asks, ‘Why can’t the programme be better than it is? Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, not just about adverbs and themselves? Why can’t it at least try?’ With its unstoppable momentum and astonishing potential – an international chorus of young literary voices – these are the questions the MFA needs most to answer. They are my questions for the country that built it, too. g
Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and literary critic. She is the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow. The first of her Fellowship features articles, on magazine culture, appeared in the April 2018 issue. More will follow.
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ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE
Vasco
by Claire Aman
Before I learnt the language of map-making, the word cadastre sounded like a timbre or a cadence. It was a momentous drum, a hollow ratatat. Bone, fire, dirt, stone. Like a shout, a ring, a knock, a blow. But when I learned maps, I discovered cadastre meant the legal boundary. There was no sound to it at all, only lines. The lines are normally black, but I have a range of colours and hatchings to choose from. Anyone wanting a map just needs to tell me which features they want.
A map can show anything. It’s possible to make maps of black cockatoo sightings, of cropland, of underground cobalts or silvers. I can show all the creeks and rivers, with the sea as a great green mass. Or I can plot cockatoos and creeks on a map together, adding minor roads and tracks. This was the sort of map my neighbour Vasco once might have asked me to send her.
Help me remember something good, Vasco. Sadness is making me forgetful.
Well, she was a great traveller. On her first trip she drove south in her van for seventeen hundred kilometres while I looked after her garden cats and worked at my mapping. She was gone for months. She would write to me every week asking for maps showing particular features. I’d send them rolled up in cardboard tubes to Poste Restante at the central western towns she was expecting to pass through. Sometimes the maps she wanted were hopelessly specific, such as an Australia-wide geographical representation of variances in butcherbird song, or
a certain stand of clouds in the Maude district that suggested rain, later. I did what I could, inventing features which didn’t exist in my database. When she returned from her great southern trip she showed me how she had stitched all the maps together in a patchwork, sewing on leaves or feathers in some places and adding figure drawings in smears of red. She pulled it out in a roll from under the wooden sleeping platform in the back of her van and unfurled it like a coloured sail. When I held it to my face it smelt like all Vasco’s things – campfire smoke, fragrant oils, bitter herbs.
I seldom travelled far in those days. On weekdays I had my work, often having to meet with state mandarins or land barons about what map needed to be made. It might sound strange, but I don’t have to go anywhere to make a map. Everything I need is in my computer’s geographic information system. Others have done the exploring, they have surveyed the contours and named the rivers and ranges.
Contours are indispensable. If you want topography, ask for contours. Or if it’s bathymetry, if you want to know how deep the seabed lies, contours will tell you. When I click to display contours on a map, the fine lines spread slowly en masse up my screen, from bottom to top. It reminds me of vipassana meditation, when awareness spreads like a flush through your whole body from the tip of your head to your feet and up again. Vasco would smile at that. Unlike cadastre, contour is nothing to do with territory. It’s about slope and gully and
the points of mountains. It’s about curve, fold, the feel. Contour runs its hands over the land’s surfaces. Cadastre binds it.
Before I learnt mapping, I thought contours resembled thumbprints. But it turned out that a thumbprint is about a person’s unassailable singularity, while a contour is just the vertical dimension of land. This kind of geographical fact was disappointing to Vasco, a romantic. She feared for my imagination. But as I often reminded her, I had debts and responsibilities which forced me to stay at my mapping.
Although I didn’t travel great distances, we took many weekend trips together in her van, often taking the forest roads of the Great Dividing Range. Once, when we were driving down a mountain, her bonnet flew up. We screamed as the old van took the bends blind, the bonnet like a great sail, the wheel next to the edge. Afterwards, pouring shiraz, we laughed and laughed.
We used to be children, skinny, with our hair in bunches. I grew up a thousand miles away from her until, at twenty-nine, I settled in her home town here on the floodplain. I brought my old childhood blanket with me, orange and black knitted squares like ploughed paddocks. I’d used it as a saddle blanket and it smelled of horses. When I showed it to Vasco she buried her face in it. She was a great horsewoman. The oatmeal I bought in calico bags might have come from those flat paddocks. I saved my empty bags for her so she could embroider them with cats and lines of poetry.
These days I travel. After I’d paid off my debts, I bought a small utility truck. Before I left, I stickytaped her letters from her first trip together in chronological order. Those letters used to arrive in fat yellow envelopes, instantly recognisable. There were poems, drawings, Post-it notes, and notebook pages with the sentences curling out in all directions. Tiny messages scrawled in the corners, there always being one more thing to say. Stuck together they made a tatty, coloured thing which I rolled up and tucked into a calico bag, thinking I’d use it to navigate. When I spread it out on my bonnet I had to rest my arms on it to stop pieces coming adrift and blowing away.
So Vasco, did your wheel really come off on the Moonbi Hill?
I’m trying to reach the places she described in her letters. I’m trying to run our lines over and over this country. I want the maps to show our traces. I’ve had to devise new symbols to show the landscape: old camps, fireplaces where bread was baked, boggy tracks. Where she emptied her bucket. Things dropped: a dollar, a pen, a lid. Cafés she liked, owls heard, mechanics who had an affectionate pat for the old van, the post offices where she posted my letters.
Almost too much for a map, and it’s going to take me a long time.
Despite the mapping difficulties, I’m wellequipped. My utility has a khaki canopy on the back. I like your set-up, says an ancient farmer at a petrol station, and I know Vasco would have been jealous. I sleep on the tray in a swag, rolling the canopy sides down if I want. Like Vasco, I take a box of brown rice, mustard oil, and dried beans, setting my beans to soak in the morning.
I like Vasco’s slow old country. I enjoy the longleaved eucalypts, black-soil plains, silver and purple clouds, the swirl of budgerigars. One afternoon, I waded into the fast water of a Murrumbidgee channel and anchored my heels in the mud. The current slipped around my fingers like wind. Once she would have swum across. She was the swimmer, not me. She would have loved those rough old river redgums. I prefer that country to the coastal valleys where the cold comes down early and it gets dark in a minute, oppressively. Sometimes I think I’ve found a tree she meant, and I draw it on my letter-map. I mark my route, leaving a stick arrow at a turn-off or a button from my shirt on a stump. I circle showgrounds in red and yellow. You can always camp in a showground. I wrote a letter on paperbark and stuck it in a fork where I saw a butcherbird. But it’s not an ecological exploration, or an anthropological one. I have nothing to discover. It’s not a search party either. Too late for that.
Vasco liked following tracks down to swimming holes and making a campfire. She was brave. She camped in the unconsolidated areas where there are no zones to permit or prohibit anything, where people have to use their own judgement about what is possible. Once a brown snake slipped between her feet as she sat at her camp table. They’re deadly, Vasco! Or that maniac in the state forest. But the van was like a big safe horse moving along the back roads or at rest in clearings. I know she was happy.
What else, Vasco?
Vegetation is a commonly used mapping layer, although unreliable in areas where forest is being cleared. Saltbush, saltier than salt, makes me feel happy. I like the stoop and crouch of mallee country. But the she-oak was the tree for us. Droplets sparkling on the tips after the rain, and the silkiness of the old needles when you lie down. The first time we ever spoke was in the she-oak grove at the end of our street where twelve young trees grew. There was a tiny bird that would also visit, which Vasco said was a weebill.
Our houses in Vasco’s hometown were side by side. It was a bird street with lorikeets at morning and evening, and magpies, and butcherbirds. The houses were weatherboard with ferny verandahs and mosquitoes. Even though we were neighbours
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we still wrote notes to each other with all the things we meant to say. We thought we’d always been a pair of shy laughing she-oak girls, only that there’d been a mistake with the geography. We even looked like she-oaks, complimenting each other on the elegant droop of our branchlets and our fine leaves.
There’s a story behind every cadastre. Sometimes the shape is odd, a rhomboid, two blocks consolidated into one or a small block excised from a larger one. The old explorers went questing through hard country dreaming of boundaries. We drew our own territory, making our cadastral line out of hay twine and red wool and the twigs we picked from our hair, and from mud and sticks arranged into figures dancing at the sky. The lines were in our faces and hands, we carried them in our fingerprints and as pictures drawn on a fogged windscreen, photographed and posted in a fat envelope. The body is a sensor, an indicator, a symptom. It helps us know where – and when – we are. Without a body we would float without legal boundaries in the air, or in the sea where there is no cadastre. We’d be lost like a star, unknown to our loved ones.
A map can help. Let it fold itself, it will find its familiar creases. But a crumpling started. I noticed her messy handwriting and how she craned over her steering wheel. I helped her rearrange her house. There’s a trick to everything. We used sofas and tables to make navigation routes so she could feel her way from lounge to bedroom. We ran a rope, round-turn-and-two-half-hitches, out to her back garden. She gripped it as if she was in a storm and it was the world that pitched and rattled. Once I found her under a loquat tree, overturned.
But this is not about that. I wanted to mention the cheek kiss she tried to teach me – mwah! – that I never could master. Our faces would slip, I’d miss and it meant we always greeted each other with laughter. We danced any way we could. We sat back to back on her floor to eat our brown rice with red onion steeped in golden mustard oil. Late at night we’d dip into a little bag of Twisties each, yellow pollen on our lips, glass of red wine in the other hand. Nobody else said my name the same way. My heart soars when I see you, she told me once.
We loved words. We’d open her dictionary. Duramen. Durance. Dwindle: to languish, waste away, to vanish.
In winter the battery in her van went flat. She started talking about going sailing, but I didn’t want those conversations. When I was seventeen, I went out in a sailboat with my sister. A westerly came streaming in, I felt it warm on my cheek. Sailors can be taken by surprise, too busy looking at their sails to see the weather pile up silent behind them. The main sail jammed in the mast and we couldn’t pull it down. The sky went black and the land vanished.
We went yawing sideways into the waves, hoping for nothing else but to reach shelter. Vasco knew I didn’t want to hear about sailing. She knew how I felt about the wind. But still she kept raising it.
Once in wheat country a big willy-willy raced over dust paddocks and crossed the road right in front of me. It was only red wind but I slammed on my brakes. The wind is so unpredictable. You can’t see it. Weather maps have contours, but, like many people, I only half understand them. It’s green land, white cloud, blue sea, and black contours, but apparently the lines are not about the shape of the wind. She-oaks let the wind slip through their branchlets. The young she-oak I planted in my garden is six feet high now. When I hold a branch the leaves are warm and coarse, like a horse’s mane.
Cadastre is a lonely sound. Everyone is gone. Rusty iron banging in the wind. Look, the southerlies have blown sand against the seaward side and it’s half buried. A tree has blown onto a bush cemetery fence and snapped the old wire. Cadastre is only a fine black line but I can’t shake off the sound. In my camping utility I’m trying to reach places where cadastre is not a feature, but there is always something – a fencepost, a sagging gate, a mailbox.
You’re not supposed to abandon your cadastre, but Vasco did.
Depth is one of the boundaries of water. Most of what we know about depth is from soundings of the seafloor. But ninety per cent of the deep-sea bottom is uncharted. It’s a terrible place to rest, believe me. I’ve thought about it often enough.
There is so much more to say. Years ago I wrote on a spray of turpentine leaves and gave it to her. She stuck it on her dashboard for her first trip. It was a miraculous, faded, brittle thing, liable to crumble in a breath. When she came home she stuck it to the window frame in her bedroom. It eventually formed itself into the shape of a little boat with a spinnaker full of wind.
See, she-oak gal, Vasco said.
But I still said no to any sea voyage. I couldn’t bring myself to wave my great friend off into a toss of foam-speckled water.
But Vasco, you understood the weather maps better than I did because in the autumn you chose a gusting southerly. You let it catch your cape of hair and raise it aloft like a spinnaker, and all alone you sailed off the map. g
Claire Aman grew up in Melbourne and settled in Grafton, New South Wales. Text published her short story collection, Bird Country, in 2017. Her stories have been published in Australian journals and anthologies and have won the E.J. Brady, Wet Ink and Hal Porter prizes. In 2011 her story ‘Milk Tray’ was shortlisted for the Jolley Prize. Her early writing life was nurtured by Varuna.
Post-apocalypse of the soul
The conclusion of Rachel Cusk’s astonishing trilogy
Kirsten Tranter
KUDOS
by Rachel Cusk
Faber, $29.99 hb, 232 pp, 9780571346646
Kudos concludes the extraordinary trilogy that began with Outline (2014) and Transit (2016). Following the distinctive format of the first two books, Kudos is structured by a series of conversations between the narrator (a writer named Faye, who seems to be a barely disguised version of Cusk) and various interlocutors, in which the narrator herself speaks barely at all. As before, there is nothing much in the way of a traditional plot or narrative. The trilogy’s profound emotional weight exists in strange contrast to the seemingly weightless quality of the prose, translucently clear, somehow communicating deep feeling and loss through a seemingly dispassionate medium. The effect is one of paradoxical intimacy and distance, and a voice like no other in contemporary fiction.
Faye, a writer and mother of two children, is just emerging from the devastation of divorce when Outline begins. These are post-apocalyptic novels not of society or environment but of the soul, with Faye, the traumatised survivor of a destroyed inner world, blindly making her way through the wreckage. The reader pieces together her story from fragments, clues, unreliable mentions dropped in conversation. We search these conversations for significance, wondering whether they perhaps figure aspects of her own story. In Kudos, saturated with stories of violence, cruelty, and humiliation, this is an even more unsettling game than before.
sense of purpose: she moves back to London, buys a wreck of a house, and doggedly makes a new place for herself and her family, rebuilding. Romance beckons. She begins to come back to life. ‘For a long time,’ she says in Transit to the man who seems to be falling in love with her, ‘I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry.’
Anger dominates this final instal-
at a hotel with a disorienting circular structure, prompting reflections on ideas of progress, direction, and finding one’s way by accident rather than through intention, which seems to invite comparison with the trilogy’s own project.
Outline and Transit made a satisfying pair. In the first book, Faye is unmoored and adrift in Greece, teaching a writing workshop, while Transit shows a new
ment. Kudos opens, like Outline, with the narrator on a plane from England to Europe (this time, for a writers’ festival), seated next to an arrogant man who reveals more about himself than he intends. Characters return, such as Ryan, the faintly ridiculous Irish writer in Outline, now horribly emaciated (or, as he believes, fashionably thin), a commercially successful, repugnant version of his former self. (He embodies one idea of kudos, in the sense of status and recognition, but in its ugliest form.) The narrator finds herself accommodated
Rather than another step forward, Kudos feels like a disconcerting return, and a refusal of the notion of progress suggested so tentatively by Transit . Faye has remarried, we learn, although we do not learn to whom or in what circumstances. There is no mention of the house in London – has it been restored? Does she live there with her husband? The story so far has invited these questions; now this final volume seems to regard them with mistrust. ‘What I don’t understand,’ a woman says to Faye, after describing her own abusive marriage (sitting underneath a reproduction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes, in case we missed the point), ‘is why you have married again, when you know what you know. You have put it in writing … and that brings with it all the laws.’ Faye’s answer is typically oblique: ‘I hoped to get the better of those laws, I said, by living within them.’
This interruption of readerly expectations and desires matches the trilogy’s interest in upending traditional narrative structure; still, it is hard to know quite how to take it. Faye’s absolute reticence was different when it came across as a symptom of shock; it still reads like a response to lasting trauma, but in the company of anger it is something else, more oppositional, more stubbornly opaque. Kudos feels like a return not simply to the wandering structure of
Rachel Cusk (photograph by Siemon Scamell-Katz)
Outline but further back to the excoriating, bitter satire of Cusk’s preceding novels, Arlington Park (2006) and The Bradshaw Variations (2009), and, more disturbingly, the primal agony of Aftermath (2012), her memoir of divorce.
For a novel set entirely in and around a writers’ festival, this story has an awful lot of dead animals in it, including the unforgettable tale of the nanny who kills a boy’s pet rabbit as punishment ‘and appeared the next day wearing the muff she had fashioned from its skin’. What was previously rendered as symbolic violence, or its traces, is now made brutally literal. The novel circles obsessively around questions of suffering and its relation to art, fate, and justice, and women suffer most, as Cusk draws ever more sharply an image of the world de-
termined by a literal battle of the sexes.
Amid all the idiocy, death-dealing, and cruelty of heterosexual relations, the redeeming relationship that emerges is the one between mother and child; an exchange between Faye and her son towards the end of the novel is the only genuine dialogue in Kudos, a plea for comfort and connection that the narrator answers without hesitation or cynicism.
There are darkly funny moments, such as the earnest male writer who actually begins a defence of masculinity with the words ‘not all men’. His wife is very ‘satisfied’ by her life looking after their three children and supporting his career, he says, though he admits that ‘she did do a bit of writing in her spare time and had recently written a book for
children that had been a surprise hit’. One can sense Cusk’s carefully bounded anger here, the fury of a blazing sun condensed through a miracle of physics into a bright spark of light, shining through the page.
This woman who says she wants to live within the laws, who steps so deliberately into the water at the end of Kudos, is not the woman who swam into the ocean in Outline and wanted to swim forever, heedless of her own safety, having abandoned the structures of convention. That sense of terrifying, exhilarating possibility has begun to close, and it is hard not to miss it. g
Kirsten Tranter is the author of three novels, including Hold (2016), longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award.
Syllabic Patterning
He went down to the shed to look for a chook a particular one he’d seen earlier that morning one he realised he’d never seen before, and that seemed to have disappeared. It was brown with white markings, distinctive, like wallpaper
On the ground he could see tracks of chook feet near invisible in the dust: elegant and ghostly He took photographs and wondered to himself what did they mean, if anything? It was noon the time magpies, dragonflies take siestas
The hairs on the back of his hands stand up He’s remembering an old dog detecting a beetle in the undergrowth, and putting its forepaw in a bear trap and losing it. That was in a movie. Cinema’s so didactic
Glamorous and persuasive, sunsets fade slow this pitch of summer, motes in the air
A retiree sits dreaming of martinis and rap music, or whatever is the new entertaining thing
A man runs round her yard: he’s lost his head
Lunatics are usual suggests the screen There’s one on Channel 9 now with the news. Someone in Brisbane has discovered a chook spirit, or genius, which can scratch revelations in the dirt, and they all – he claims – will come true
Luminous and genial, parsley fed, deep in, or brooding on, Nabokov as if eggs a brindle and rose-combed hen convinces her fool Counting and arrangement are all that’s necessary to find the truth: a peck on the head like school
Michael Farrell
Michael Farrell won the 2012 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. His latest collection is I Love Poetry (2017).
Lyrebird
Jen Webb
THE DROVER’S WIVES: 99 REINTERPRETATIONS OF HENRY LAWSON’S AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC
by Ryan O’Neill Brio
$26.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925589290
‘The Drover’s Wife’ was one of the first stories I read when I arrived in Australia. I was living in the bush then, in hard beautiful country, and though my difficulties were First World Problems, I shared the Wife’s nostalgia for nights in comfortable hotels, reliable transport, medical services. I did admire the story, though its casual racism disturbed me; but I remain surprised by the hold that story has on our culture. She just won’t fade away, that exhausted woman, or her dog, or her sons (forget the daughters, as Lawson himself did); they keep re-emerging. There are many examples. 1945: Russell Drysdale paints her, an enigmatic woman standing four-square in an unsympathetic landscape. 1968: the Australian Broadcasting Commission produces a feature adaptation. 1975: Murray Bail revisits the painting in a marvellously convoluted story. 1980: Frank Moorhouse adapts it as satire, and Barbara Jefferis casts a feminist eye on the story. A decade later, Damien Broderick focalises through Alligator the dog; and Kate Jennings publishes her novella Snake (1986), which is not Drover’s Wife but seems to channel it.
Then there was a break – a lacuna of two decades – after which Leah Purcell took on the story as theatre, tackling all its racism and its odd complexities (and winning Book of the Year in the 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards). Meanwhile, the ACT government was producing its own version in the form of a new suburb, Lawson, which boasts a street called Drover Rise. Last year Frank Moorhouse launched his edited volume, The Drover’s Wife: A celebration of a great Australian love affair. And then we reach the most recent version: Ryan
O’Neill’s The Drover’s Wives, ninetynine versions of the story in ninetynine modes, and most appropriately published by Brio Books. This collection exudes brio on every page, all enthusiastic vigour, often in high-parodic mode, sometimes as an in-joke for scholars of AustLit, occasionally with a tempering sadness but always with freshness and the capacity to surprise.
In this it is well aligned with the history of appropriation and adaptation of ‘The Drover’s Wife’; those works rarely offer an uninterrogated or admiring homage, but more often take a tongue-in-cheek attitude, a parody, a critique. O’Neill’s ninety-nine versions take this approach to another level. His collection is an experimental, impossible, keep-telling-the-joke-until-theyget-it challenge that pushes this cultural icon as far as it can go, stretching it into unlikely and unexpected shapes. It is a performative mode of writing, in which O’Neill shows a remarkable capacity to code-switch. Like the brilliant comic whose ruthless impersonations reduce her audience to helpless laughter, his many voices might be ruthless, but they are also convincing and compelling –and sometimes tender. He demonstrates a powerful grasp of the Australian vernacular in its many modes, including over-egged bogan, old-fashioned dinkydi, bush ballad. He weaves in elements that are expressly Australian, invoking the spirit of Baynton, invoking Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech, highlighting Lawson’s casual racism, poking fun at Quadrant
But the book does more than mirror the local context, or play games: the multiple versions and the many prisms through which this little story is revisited gesture toward something I could almost call ‘universal’. O’Neill moves, apparently effortlessly, from Beckett to Hemingway to Joyce; through cryptic crossword, wordfinder, and script; gossip mag, self-help book, and social media squabble; poem and PowerPoint and anagram. And so on, ninety-nine times, mostly in words, sometimes in images and cartoons (and props to Sam Paine for the drawings).
This is an example of a fine satirist stretching his muscles. We already
knew his capacity. Last year O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers – another modular collection (or perhaps it is better classified as a discontinuous narrative à la Frank Moorhouse) – won the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. I read it primarily on public transport: that was a mistake, because I kept laughing out loud, attracting irritated or pitying looks from my fellow travellers. This new volume carries the same risks, for the same reason: it is captivating, coruscating, brilliantly honed satire. This is not something that is easy to produce: satire and comic writing do not have central roles in the literary world. ‘The novel’ tends rather to be resolutely serious; or at least, novels that win literary awards are serious, dramatic, tragic. Their Brilliant Careers shows that it is possible to convince judges otherwise; and The Drover’s Wives reinforces it: clearly, comic literature, when well done, can achieve the accolades more often reserved for Serious Literature.
In fact, satire can double as Serious Literature. The Drover’s Wives is dedicated to Henry Lawson and Raymond Queneau: Lawson, depressed alcoholic poet of a bush he barely knew; Queneau, brilliant wit and cynic, founder of Oulipo. What a pair! And what a generous gesture to the antecedents of this book, writers who have in their own ways shaped the world of literature. With this new work, O’Neill brings something new and thoroughly engaging into the Australian literary scene, and makes the air and ear shimmer with his lyrebird capacity to reproduce the voices and genres and forms in which we humans tell our stories. Read it slowly, bit by bit, because satire gobbled too fast can overwhelm the reader or dull the senses. But read it, and odds are you will, by turns, laugh and weep. g
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, and Director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research in the Faculty of Arts and Design.
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Matheson Library atrium, Monash University, Clayton (photograph by Dianna Snape)
Homesickness
Michael Brennan
THE FIREFLIES OF AUTUMN: AND OTHER TALES OF SAN GINESE
by Moreno Giovannoni Black Inc.
$29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781863959940
Moreno Giovannoni’s collection of tales – populous and baggy, earthy and engrossing – offers not a history but the lifeblood, the living memory, of a small town in northern Italy called San Ginese, or more specifically a hamlet in its shadow called Villora. Villora is the point of departure and return for generations of Sanginesini, and the locus of the tales told.
The tales begin with Ugo, who relates them in an Italian diminished by long years in Australia and thus transcribed by a translator not unlike Giovannoni. The reader learns that ‘all the tales are true’, and that while we might find a map or image of the town (one is sketched at the front of the book for convenience, if not proof), we will never find the Villora of the tales. Ugo confides, ‘Just as migrants do not ever truly arrive at their destination, so those who remain behind disappear and become untraceable’, and that, finally, if left unwritten, the people and events recounted ‘would have faded into boundless oblivion’.
Soon after, Villora suffers just such a boundless oblivion in a chance cataclysm. This early tale, both of ends
and origins, involves the saturation of Villora with perugino, a fermented brown liquid fertiliser made of human, cow, rabbit, chicken, and pig shit, which had so spread through the village as to recall something from Gabriel García Márquez, bringing with it a miasma of all-too-flammable methane, and set the scene for the arrival of Il Pomodoro, a short-lived character who lights the match that sets off the explosion that destroys the town where the events being recounted took place, or so we’re told. So far, so salty – and perhaps unreliable. Or not. Memory, much as memoir, likes to play tricks to get at the truth. With the town taken care of, the tales flow, tangy and rich, as the relentless and relenting dramatis personae (we’re given a list of them in the back of the book for good measure) share their tales and mark their territory. It is a history of migrations through aspiration, love, and despair, machismo to pathos, arriving at a tentative homespun wisdom.Through oral culture and face-to-face encounters, the reader is witness to the fraying and recombination of San Ginese’s social fabric over a century of economic and political upheaval.
Owing more to Boccaccio than Sebald, the tales become a repository for the idioms of San Ginese. They encompass a multitude of characters making the best of their lives over generations, between the fascists and the invading armies of Germans and Americans, and the call of El Dorado, be it America, Argentina, or Australia. The tales tumble out loquaciously. Fortunes made abroad and, like love, lost at home or found again; exodus and migration; murder; revenge; betrayal – it’s got it all. We learn of Vitale in California and the Percheron, Iose Dal Porto the Flour-Eater, of Tista and the Mute, of Il Sasso, the Dinner of the Pig, of Mengale who planted nails and watched them grow, the priest Il Chioccino, and the killer Tommaso, of the dying agricultural economy, the twelve consequences of the war, and, of course, the titular fireflies of autumn. All of which is to barely scratch the surface of the compendium of local wit, gossip, and lore revelled in and unravelled. Amid all the journeying, poverty, and community
remain the impetus and return of each migration. People leave San Ginese to find their fortune and return poorer for having found it. Even those returning from Australia are called Americans.
More than a unique and well-made story of migration and memory, which this is and which would be enough, these tales of San Ginese could be read as a tacit study of campanilismo and, in that respect, as a critique of the present. Campanilismo, rudely translated, might be read as ‘provincialism’ or ‘parochialism’, and might bring to mind the kind of narrow-mindedness of Australians wearing flag capes to a brawl at the beach. Not so. Campanilismo stems from campanile, Italian for the bell towers of churches or public buildings spread across the Italian landscape, and around which local towns, such as Villora, cluster and grow. It describes a loyalty to the town, or, perhaps better, commune, that preceded city states and the nation state of Italy, resonant with self-governing, smaller communities. Think Dunbar’s number and a rough and rustic idyll at odds with modernity. Think San Ginese. The ribald and fable-like comings and goings, regrets, and longings of four generations of San Ginese not only flesh out a history of generational migration, peopling the backstory of a boy born in San Ginese who grew up on a tobacco farm in Victoria, but subtly offer a plaint for the loss of campanilismo, a concept as difficult as the word to translate to contemporary Australia.
Late in the book, the Translator tells his own tale: returning as an adult to San Ginese and being confronted by the ‘prodigious’ failure of memory, the oblivion Ugo portended. The Translator recounts how the tales his mother told him on the journey to Australia left a ‘deep, slow-burning homesickness that brought an ache into his bones that never ceased and the source of which he did not comprehend until he was old’. Such homesickness is the heart of these tales, if not the community they suggest. Slow-burning surely, but worth the time spent in San Ginese. g
Michael Brennan’s books include Autoethnographic (Giramondo, 2012), and the earth here (ASM, 2018).
Wanderings
Suzie Gibson
SAINT ANTONY IN HIS DESERT
by Anthony Uhlmann
UWA Publishing $26.99 pb, 184 pp, 9781742589787
With his maiden voyage into fiction, Anthony Uhlmann, a professor of English at Western Sydney University, has produced an ambitious novel that dramatises the intertwining of time and memory Saint Antony in His Desert is a literary thought-experiment partly concerned with a famous quarrel between Albert Einstein and French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson, where the German physicist’s theory of relativity was unwisely rejected by the latter. Some believe that their disagreement led to the division between philosophy and science. Ingeniously, Uhlmann’s novel seeks to unearth a common ground between these thinkers, and undertakes this task by exploring time as an intuitive, psychological, and even literary phenomenon.
Interlocking narratives spanning different time periods and settings reveal time as both an objective and instinctual entity. The first narrative concerns a defrocked priest, Antony Elm, who has cast himself into an environmental and psychological wilderness somewhere outside of Alice Springs. Enduring a biblical forty days and forty nights of desert exile, Elm tries to complete a secular manuscript about the Einstein and Bergson Paris meeting, only to be drawn to another story – one that is much closer to his heart. This other narrative chronicles the experiences of two young men, Frederick and Charles, who travel from Canberra to Sydney where they will meet a Triple J radio host who has offered to listen to their demo tape.
In Sydney, Frederick and Charles are challenged and tempted by a dazzling 1980s music scene. Here, the sensitive protagonist Frederick is emotionally tested and transformed. The novel subtly foreshadows this by juxtaposing Elm’s random thoughts against
Frederick’s parallel story, ‘There was someone once, or my idea of her’. This ‘someone’ turns out to be ‘Louve’, a charismatic Triple J host whose name evokes ‘love’.
The novel’s meticulous rendering of Frederick and Charles’s urban wanderings is also a movement back in time that retraces historical buildings, stores, and nightclubs that have long since disappeared: The People’s Palace on Pitt Street; Skin Deep on Elizabeth Street; Record Planet inside Centrepoint Shopping Centre. Saint Antony in His Desert conjures an even more deeply hidden world that takes us further back in time:
On the Southern side of the harbour at Circular Quay, where Joseph Conrad once came ashore, are the Maritime Services Board, the ferry terminal and railway station, the Unilever building and the Opera House rising at the tip of Bennelong Point, where the Wangal elder and the first Eora emissary to the British leaders Governor Philip and George III once lived with his second wife, Barangaroo, dead young.
References to the land’s original custodians offers an alternative, mystical perspective on the theme of time – one that disrupts both Bergson’s philosophy and Einstein’s scientific method. The measurement of time as an analogue or digital entity is unsettled by the reminder that it has always been a profoundly ineffable phenomenon that reaches back well before the first white settlers arrived with their clocks and pocket watches.
Intentionally or not, the idea of timelessness is also evocative of Arthur Stace’s ‘Eternity’ tag, which the war veteran emblazoned on pavements and walls across Sydney in the midtwentieth century. Uhlmann’s educated protagonists ruminate upon questions of eternity, the existence of God, and the possibility of an afterlife. The novel’s framing narrative, concerned with the ex-priest Elm’s crisis of faith, also ponders an infinite temporal realm underpinning our very existence.
There are many big ideas on display in a novel that psychologically and emotionally oscillates between desert
and city, past and present, literature and philosophy, 1920s Paris and 1980s Sydney. In many respects, Saint Antony in His Desert is a love letter to Australia’s burgeoning world city where the newly erected Centrepoint Tower casts its shadow across a populace foraging in a landscape that would soon change forever. Apart from its obvious historical and intellectual concerns, at the heart of this novel is a deep sense of loss: ‘“It’s like the first time you fall in love. It’s impossible to feel more intensely than when it first happens, but once it falls apart and you get your heart broken, something’s lost altogether … you can never feel that intensely again. It’s as if you had little hairs, little sensitive hairs that have all been burnt away.”’
Frederick and Charles are too inexperienced to know such grief, but their new acquaintance Kheiron – a hipster would-be rock star – is worldly enough to articulate this kind of bereavement. This rare moment of vulnerability temporarily disrupts the cerebral character of the writing, opening up a secret wound that is perhaps too hastily covered over by the novel’s innumerable literary and philosophical references.
Uhlmann knows his literary history and continental philosophy and is not afraid to show it. In light of this, one might assume that Saint Antony in His Desert is an exercise in literary modernism with its framed narrative and fragmented structure. Yet there is a smothered heat to this work that is reminiscent of Henry James’s notoriously complex but profoundly aesthetic late style.
There is also a sense that Saint Antony in His Desert is not quite fiction –the novel opens and closes with the author’s foreword and afterword. Such framing destabilises the borders between fiction and non-fiction, and is once more evocative of James, whose prefaces serve to encircle his novels. This brilliant book, awash with literary skill and philosophical intelligence, will awaken the curiosity of anyone keen to ponder the meaning of time and how it is inexorably moored to our existence. g
Suzie Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Charles Sturt University.
Richard Flanagan Critical Essays
Robert Dixon (Ed.)
9781743325827
September 2018
Commissioned in the wake of his Man Booker win in 2014, Richard Flanagan: Critical Essays is the first book to be published about the life and work of this major world author.
ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE
Between the Mountain and the Sea
by Sharmini Aphrodite
It was the first thing she noticed: all the clocks had stopped. She only mentioned it when she was shown to the dining table and the woman – his grandmother – placed in front of her a glass of bandung, bright pink and sweating. Thanking her, she held the glass, the chill of it shocking the heat of her palm.
‘Your clocks – none of them are working.’
‘They haven’t for years,’the woman said. She smiled. A gold snake coiled around her wrist; the bone pressed sharply against tissue-paper skin.
•
It was a book she borrowed from the library. A collection of short stories revolving around – but without actually taking place during – the Vietnam War. The prose was languid; it almost lulled her to sleep, but for page forty-six: pencilled in the margins in slapdash handwriting – remember to pick up onions, mother now has bunions. She wondered if the writer needed onions or was just rhyming. The book, though lovely, was not for her, but because of the note she read on. Later, on page one hundred and thirty-eight, in the same writing, but warbling out in electric-blue biro – how could she have said that? There was a girl in this story, but she was mute. Further on, in blue biro again, one word underlined – phosphorescent. It
was in the story’s first paragraph. Again and again, underlined in the same story – luminous; halogen; brittle brightness. Whoever it was had underlined all the mentions of light.
•
She was a girl who didn’t like people, generally: individually, yes – generally, no. It was not something borne out of a complex; she simply disliked burdens on her solitude. Nevertheless, she was not lonely. At university, where she was an undergraduate, she was sociable; she also often met with the old hangs from secondary school, friendships cemented over the years like loose earth that, when pressed, becomes a country. She was not conscious of hungering, but the book’s intruder made her wonder.
She did not return the book with the others. It was only when she flipped through it again that she saw something peeking out beneath the dust jacket: a slip of yellowing paper that blended almost perfectly into the page. It was an airline ticket from 17 February 2017, seven months previous. Singapore – Kota Kinabalu. Thomas Pios.
•
Sitting in front of this woman, she must now divine her past. The bandung is terribly sweet. The air from
the kitchen is thick with the smell of coconut milk. The revolution of the ceiling fan is slow, languorous – somehow heavy, limping. She is warm but not unpleasantly so. The woman is sitting with her back to the narrow window; in the brightness she is shrouded by shadow. When she moves her arm the snake peers into her eyes. She can see herself reflected in the rheumy windows of age. Glaucoma: an unbearably beautiful word. To take out her computer would be to break the pact with the past that both of them, in this darkening room – this cluttered room full of old photographs and mouldy walls and spools of cloth and bundles of books wrapped in string – have inadvertently created. She takes another sip and removes her notebook from her bag.
•
And behind the boarding pass, a receipt. 13 February 2017 – two books borrowed, from this library, under the name Thomas Pios. This time: non-fiction, something about the agriculture of Filipino rice steppes; a book of poetry by a West Malaysian poet. She puts the short story collection back in her bag and takes the lift to the reference section of the library. When she checks the catalogue online, she sees that the agriculture book is available. Always some sort of sacredness in spaces that are full of stories. In the library, muffled laughter becomes mysterious, the stranger opposite you portentous. It has the effect of turning people into scribes. She passes these strangers with a strange urge to kiss someone on the forehead. She makes her way to the shelf, one finger tracing the spines. There. Just there. She pulls the book out and flips through it slowly, passing through every page. Nothing. She walks quickly to the lift, descends with two squabbling siblings to the basement, where the fiction is stored. Straight to the catalogue: available. Heads for the shelf: a slim volume wrapped in plastic, weighing nothing more than a feather. A heart is heavier. Eighty-nine pages, plus a foreword and a glossary. She flicks through the book. Nothing.
•
Months later, she is no longer an undergraduate. Tasked with writing a research paper on Southeast Asian history, she finds herself in front of her computer. Her proposal’s parameters have become burdensome; she was aware of this failing of self –this bird-like quality she had, some sort of synapse in her brain that flickered long into the night as she lay awake, watching satellites twinkling outside her window, charting the faraway hum of a plane. She brings her mouse to the search bar. For months she has resisted this, but now she keys in Thomas Pios. It was a whim; she had not expected results. Or she had expected a plethora of results, but disparate ones. Thomas Pios (b.1991) was born in Sabah and bred in
Singapore. His practice consists of multidisciplinary approaches to Southeast Asian identity. He holds a diploma and B.A. in Fine Arts from ____, and has exhibited in…
No Instagram, no Facebook, just a website. The boy – not much older than her – has a roguish, Caravaggio quality. She has never wished for romance, but his work intrigues her. There is also a blog, in which Thomas Pios describes the work of his favourite Sabahan contemporary artists. Scrolling through the posts, she picks out a narrative. Could it be the same – ? Even if it was, the scribblings in the book could have been written by anyone. Thomas Pios is just another borrower on a presumably long list; the book is a prize-winner from the previous century. She has resisted googling him before this – it would have been too creepy. But if this is Thomas Pios, he is – while not quite famous – a public figure of sorts. He has even given a few interviews. Apart from who he is, there is a narrative emerging on Bornean art and its relationship with the peninsular that she is beginning to sense that, if picked at, might unravel. She wheels the train of thought onto the lined pages of her notebook, to take to her supervisor in the morning.
•
She had gone up to the mountains during three of the days she spent in Sabah. She had not travelled anywhere above Kelantan until then. She had been to Australia for a spell, as a child, but it had been December, sweltering. Two hours up the mountain and she was cold. Fog pillowed everything, consumed everything. She had a sudden desire to walk into the mist, to become a part of it, to feel every cell dissipate – into a nimbus of light – into nothingness. She had wanted to retrace his steps, around the mountain as it were. Everything at once crisp with cold and heaving with fog. The mountain of the ancestors.
•
Her supervisor has approved of her change in direction. At seven that evening she bites her lip and taps out an email to Thomas Pios, whose address is on his website. Her finger hovers over the button for a while, but finally, swearing, she hits Send. Just as she is getting to bed, a ping from her phone alerts her. Thomas Pios has agreed to her request for an interview. They will meet on Saturday, at a Japanese bakery. It is not romance; she is not looking for romance. She is just alight with the idea of somebody holding a blue pen, brow furrowed, pinning down sparks of brightness on a page.
•
He is waiting in a grove of trees. One could fall asleep here, close to the earth. One wanted to become the earth – the trees – the rocks – the sky. It’s all memory.
All memory. One could become the very air if one wanted to. One could wander for days through the rainforest and not think about anything other than the endless green, the foliage shuddering with something older than the known world, wiser; except this was the world – the whole world – the wide world. And he wanted to fall asleep in it.
•
She wears lipstick to meet Thomas Pios but regrets it the minute she reaches the bright, airy bakery. She is hating herself for the red lipstick, for the inevitable mark it will leave on her teacup, for the romance of it, when Thomas Pios walks through the door. In a country with four stark racial divisions and recognisable foreigners, she can’t put a finger on his face. It’s the tribal blood – sons of the earth. His Bornean half. She raises three fingers in a feeble wave and feels a new wave of self-loathing. Be bolder than that, she chides herself. Don’t – for heaven’s sake – don’t be simpering. He comes towards her and says hi. She repeats it, smiling.
‘Have you been here before?’
‘My school’s nearby,’ he says.
‘What’s good?’
‘Um … they’ve got a set …’
When they’ve ordered and returned to their seat, she decides to get down to it and pulls out her notebook.
‘I’ll be taking notes, if that’s all right with you.’
‘I mean, like … it’s an interview, right?’
‘It’s just something that I have to say.’
Throughout their conversation she tries to picture him pen in hand, hunched over, scribbling notes in a library book. Thomas Pios is not rude, but there is something about him that is jarring.
‘We’re actually having an exhibition, in Kota Kinabalu. In December.’
She looks up.
‘We?’
‘I’ve just become part of a collective – we’re having our first show in December.’
‘In Sabah?’
‘Yup. You could come, I mean, if you’re on holiday. I mean – you don’t like, have to – I’ll probably blog about it. But … it’s happening. Just so you know. You could come with me.’
She has to laugh. ‘That’s bold.’
He shrugs. ‘I mean, if you’re going, and I’m going, we might as well fly together, right?’
‘I don’t know if I’m going. I mean, you just told me.’
They part soon after. Neither of them says anything about meeting again.
•
Something’s not right, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. Of course, first impressions are often wrong
– and it is entirely possible that Thomas Pios did not write the notes – but she can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong, that something’s breathing right behind her or curled around her wrist, that someone, somewhere, is saying a prayer. She closes the page and goes to sleep – or tries to go to sleep. Part of her senses something thrumming away, something she’s missing.
It’s not that popular a location with people her age, Sabah. Bali is popular, as is Thailand: beaches and dance music and cheap beer. Enclaves. But she has heard that it is beautiful, that it is wild and sleepy at once. She picks at the string. The night after she books her flight, she heads to the library and consults the catalogue. The book is on the shelf. She borrows it.
•
Was this the place? A single hollow, sanctified by light. She had once been with a boy, a Eurasian. She was nineteen, and he had a lineage that was clearly documented: Cantonese on one side, Australian on the other. His house had tapestries made by his ancestors: settlers in Perth, from the nineteenth century. He had a crockery set that followed his great-great grandparents from Hong Kong. Her own parents had half-cobbled histories from their parents; beyond that the past was murky. She had envied him, looking at that crockery set – a feeling of jealousy so powerful she felt it in her throat. But now – now with nothing but the earth, she feels so close to some trembling, wondrous thing. The rainforest consumes all knowledge and because of that, becomes all knowledge.
•
The airport at Kota Kinabalu is small, empty. It’s different from what she knows, quieter. It’s like the older parts of her country, the parts where you can still see a clear and unencumbered sky. A city caught between the mountains and the sea.
•
The exhibition is in a shophouse gallery tucked between a tattoo parlour and a record score. She wonders if Thomas Pios will be different in the land of his birth – yet she knows the fault is hers. She had always expected something from him, something he had never promised. But still. She looks through the glass door. A few people are milling around, and he’s giving a tour. When she slips into the hall he catches her eye. She gives him a little wave – five fingers this time. He continues, and she drifts away to the exhibits. He’s done some sort of 3D interactive thing, mixing digital with a physical model of rice steppes. A stray memory floats by: a peninsular poet, Filipino agriculture. She was right. She was right.
Finally, he comes over. The book is already in her hands. His eyes become bright.
•
‘Where did you get that?’
‘The National Library.’ She points at the sticker. There is a stain on the book’s cover; Thomas Pios’s eyes are fixed on it.
For a moment he looks confused, then –
‘That’s what happened. You,’ he touches her elbow, ‘you’re a lifesaver. My grandmother was so pissed off at me. I was passed some books, from another artist here, to give to the library, to donate to the library – stuff they didn’t want but which they thought – Hafidz – Hafidz thought he could sell at some second-hand bookstore. But I thought he could donate it, and I brought them back, from my last visit here … and this.’ He pointed at the book in her hands, ‘This was not supposed to be in the stack. That’s what must have happened. And I thought I’d left it lying around some café, or on the plane –’
‘It has your boarding pass inside it.’
‘What?’
‘Your boarding pass is inside.’ She closes her eyes. ‘That’s how I found out about you’ She opens the book. ‘Look, all these scribblings. I thought they were interesting, so I paid attention: I saw your boarding pass. Look at what you underlined – ‘
‘I’d never do that, I hate people who dog-ear books. This,’ he takes the book from her, ‘this belonged to my grandfather.’
•
And so he gave her his grandmother’s address, a humble bungalow in an old neighbourhood that is quiet, faded, comfortable. All the sounds she hears are distant – a child’s laugh, a bicycle bell, the rattle of the fizzy-drink man’s cart. The trees are huge and gnarled. They are away from the city and the roads are narrow, the houses haphazard, old-fashioned, lumbering. Roofs hang wide over the houses, gracing each one with a thick perimeter of shade. Rainfall is faint, invisible when you look towards the sky, but obvious in the puddles upon the earth. She rings the bell and Thomas Pios’s grandmother, waddling and sarong-clad, emerges.
•
‘All these books,’ the old woman says, ‘they’re his –I was never one for reading. While he was here, I never bothered to touch them. It isn’t that I don’t read – it’s just that I never – well … fancied fiction. My father disapproved. You know what old habits are like. I was never rebellious. But after – my husband, not my father – I looked through them, all of them. Looking for clues. And I found myself …’ Her voice catches and the old woman looks away.
Briefly, silence. When the old woman speaks again, her voice is chirpy.
‘I found myself realising. He wasn’t very forthcoming, bah, my husband. But I realised what he had been doing. This – the book you have. It was given to him by a friend who’d been captured by the Japanese too, back in the war, held in the same prison as he was. There’s a story in that book. Page one hundred and eighty-four, that’s where it begins. It’s about a man – an American, ex-military, who has been imprisoned for what – I can’t remember. But he’s been imprisoned. And he’s underlined every word that has to do with light. Do you understand? I know the abstractions: that he was a Resistance member during the war, that his missions took him between the mountain and the valley, that for a while, in the middle, he was captured, tortured, that he escaped and hid out in the mountains until the end of the war. But all these small things – these things he never mentioned. These things I discovered afterwards, looking for clues. He left them in storybooks. He inserted them into the lives of people who didn’t exist.’
The old woman stops talking and looks at her.
She puts down her pen and shuts her notebook; she hasn’t written anything in it.
•
Thomas Pios’s grandfather chose the name Paul for himself after the Catholic missionaries visited his village. He kept his tribal name close to him; it became a secret thing – to know it was to know him intimately. The first time his wife had heard it was two days before their wedding, in 1956. During the war it had been his code name. During the war he had been far from his village. No one he knew came from it, and when the Japanese arrived and the Chinese commenced the Resistance, he had whispered that name and cloaked himself with the disguise of his past. When he was betrayed, that name was said without shadow or sanctity, spat out even, and picked up by Japanese tongues that sliced it apart, butchered it, tongues that belonged to the men who picked him up, hiding beneath burlap sacks in a small lorry, and killed his friend in front of him, as well as the first woman he had ever loved – though for her, the killing had not been deliberate. She had struggled, it was an accident. And every day for the rest of his life he hated himself for the brief moment after her death when he had offered a prayer of thanks that she had died quickly, that she would escape the torture that he would face in the immediate hours after his capture, and for weeks after that, torture that made of men maps, and women, nations.
•
‘It was always him,’ Mrs Pios was saying, ‘who changed the batteries of the clocks. I knew how to,
of course, but I didn’t want to – I had a feeling that when they stopped he finally found some peace. In whichever world that he went to. He should have told us. That is the one thing I can’t forgive him for. Your family – they should never have to wonder. They should always know.’
In one story, he had been reminded of his mother, who needed onions; it was that simple. In another, a woman’s tongue is torn out, and she refuses to acknowledge her lover afterwards; he remembered an argument he and his wartime lover had had. A language in the absence of language. Doctor Zhivago, the first sentence underlined: eternal memory. On and on they went, singing. A book of creative essays from an anthropologist from the Pacific Northwest who was excavating some European hollow: I close my eyes, and I see everything. The book she had borrowed from the library, that was the last book he ever collected. His last insertion, the last page of a ten-page story – less an insertion, more an intrusion: a phrase, underlined. And once I am away from everything, I will fall asleep.
•
He came from a coastal village. The memory that thrummed inside of him all day was of flashes in the water that signalled fish. Brown ankles gleaming in salt and silt and sun. Every day he was inside he thought of this. His method was to think of something good each time something bad happened. Her voice, above the screams. His mother’s eyes whenever hunger invaded him. In the end, he could no longer distinguish pain from peace. Those last few months in the mountain were the first time since his imprisonment that he was contented, and the last time he would ever be. He thought of nothing. So far inside, the Japanese would not come. They didn’t know –winding through the rainforest, up here where rice still grew fat and tall – of these people. He didn’t know of these people, his own countrymen. His time there was so feverish – blessedly feverish, blessedly blank. Just fog and rainforest and food placed in his mouth so he never had to think, never had to imagine, in the tropical malady of his head –
•
He stopped speaking, in his last week. He had always been quiet, but now he was totally silent. When he wanted to communicate with his wife he left books on the table with passages underlined. He could communicate most clearly through words that already existed. Only on paper were words to be trusted; in mouths, on tongues, they were made cheap. But he could have sworn he had told her that he was leaving. In his memory he was perched on the edge of the bed. Outside it was raining feverishly, and the sea beyond them was swollen. The fan above
them creaked endlessly, and he said to her: I must go. There is more life without me. And in his memory there is nothing but the sweet, wet haze of his time in the mountain, after the imprisonment. But his wife, thinking again and again – she can’t remember this. She can’t. She would never have allowed it.
Life shattered, like a house of matchsticks in the summer rain.
•
And afterwards –
His last life was there. Back to the village where he had lain with his first love, in some ramshackle hut, hastily built so that when it stormed, lightning flashed through the slats between the woods and turned everything as bright as day. Up the path he had taken, swollen with hope, feverish with courage, young and hardened, ready to die – but never to watch another die. A splinter of bright, blazing fight. The village in the rainforest where he slept, in a bed of ferns, sunlight speckling his skin, after everything he had known had been torn away from him.
He never wanted to die, but perhaps he did. Or perhaps he found the villagers he had left decades agowhen he was still a young man, and in the silent understanding of the last of the great wars, he lived to the end of his days. After all, it was years after his disappearance that the clocks had stopped. Or perhaps, beyond all understanding, beyond all knowledge, he simply walked to the very end, where the earth’s edge blurs into light, and everything that has ever happened – all sorrow and joy and grief and triumph – happens again and again. Where all of life meets with a crash most resounding.
•
This isn’t the grove; it isn’t near a village, it’s still fairly low on the mountain. After all, she doesn’t know what happened to him. The ink on the book was not months old – it was decades. She pictures a man, bent over with history: phosphorescent, luminescent, halogen, brittle brightness. She pictures a man inside that man. Pressed earth. When she opens her eyes, she is aware of her body: the mountain air settling on her skin, in her lungs. Her vision cloudy with fog. Glaucoma. She stands up from where she has been lying on the earth, collects herself, dusts off the dirt, and walks down to the path, where all the people are. g
Sharmini Aphrodite, born in Borneo in 1995, grew up in the sister cities of Singapore and Johor Bahru. Previously published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and Smokelong Quarterly, she was runner-up for her art criticism in Frieze Magazine’s Art Writing Prize, as well as in the Golden Point Awards. ❖
Linguistic gumshoe
A legendary newspaperman on good writing and mumbo-jumbo
Richard Walsh
DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?: WHY WRITING WELL MATTERS
by Harold Evans
Abacus, $55 hb, 408 pp, 9781408709665
Harold Evans, the celebrated former editor of London’s The Sunday Times and ex-president of Random House USA, is angry. He fulminates against lazy journalism, against the impenetrability of government announcements, and against the pseudolegal language of terms and conditions we are bullied into accepting during almost any online transaction these days, no matter how trivial.
Most of all, he wants to push back against the way the digital era is ‘making it easier to obliterate the English language by carpet-bombing us with the bloated extravaganzas of marketing mumbo-jumbo’. He is not so much a Don Quixote as a modern-day linguistic gumshoe, both a detective and an assayer, who confesses: ‘I don’t get mad. I enjoy finding the clues, the footloose modifier, the subject in search of conjugation with a friendly verb, the duplicitous pronoun.’ (But, hey, shouldn’t that first comma be a colon?)
There is, of course, a vast literature of complaint against the ever-changing shifts in both everyday and literary expression, and Evans’s bibliography provides an excellent guide to what has gone before him. As a paid-up member of the Anglo-American intelligentsia, he hugely admires both George Orwell’s celebrated polemic ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) and the contributions of E. B. White (Evans appears not to be aware of the writings of Don Watson). The real question is: what on earth can he bring to this vast banquet that is already laid before us?
At times, Evans can be immensely amusing and instructive. He provides egregious examples of bad writing from a wide range of sources; his scoffing, while predictable, nonetheless invigorates our
love of clear language and fine writing, of which he also provides many excellent examples. But in between all that, his book becomes a kind of high-class user’s manual.
He provides extensive lists of pleonasms, clichés, and zombies (his description of nouns such as implementation and transmittal ); he implores us to eschew all such monstrosities. Most problematically of all, he offers us ‘Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear’; here we seem to have momentarily signed up for a DIY-writing improvement course. Even worse, because it threatens his credibility, he seems to take seriously the idea of ‘readability formulas’: the seductive idea that it is possible to devise easy-to-follow recipes for good writing. This is the kind of alchemy you would imagine appealing more to the whiz-kids at Microsoft (who will not allow me type cafe or cliche in a Word document without gifting me an unnecessary and very pretentious acute on the final e) than to someone with Evans’s CV.
Evans writes admiringly of the work of Lucius Adelno Sherman, who painstakingly counted ‘the number of words, prepositions, clauses, predications, abstract nouns, and so on’ in a wide range of works by celebrated American and English prose stylists, and published his findings (with tables and graphs) in his book Analytics of Literature (1893). Evans writes: ‘He found solace in discovering that from an earlysixteenth-century average of fifty words a sentence, the average fell to forty-five in the Elizabethan era, twenty-nine in the Victorian era, and twenty-three in the early twentieth century.’ Evans fails to tell us whether anyone was amazed to be informed of this, but he goes on to
introduce us to the Flesch Reading Ease Index and the Dale–Chall Formula, the latter touted as ‘the most reliable of all the readability formulas’.
Nothing ages a man more than succumbing to pedantry or to railing vehemently against the inevitable changes that occur in our vocabulary and its usage over time. I always think it is best to imagine the English language as a coastline battling against the waves –imperceptibly, and for good or ill, it changes its shape every hour of our lives. Evans is totally aware that he is not the first, and presumably not the last, to inveigh against modern tendencies. He reminds us that Jonathan Swift condemned as vulgar slang such newcomers as mob, bamboozle, sham, bully, banter, and uppish. Dr Johnson declined to include clever, stingy, and reliable in his trailblazing (not the prescribing doctor’s word) dictionary.
Evans endorses the hostility of New Zealand academic Helen Sword to ‘zombie nouns’, so labelled by her ‘because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings’. While a posse of zombies is fearsome to behold, and to be discouraged, words like documentation, participation, and forgetfulness, which Evans singles out for censure, offer linguistic nuances that their synonyms lack. As always, he provides a long blacklist of modern carelessnesses; I share some of his horror (it never fails to scare me on the New York subway when there is a barely intelligible public announcement that the next train will stop ‘momentarily’), and I was surprised to find the modern home/hone confusion did not rate a mention (maybe it is more rampant in Australia?).
In the end, it is unclear to me who exactly is Evans’s intended reader. He seems to admit that novelists have a licence to ignore all the rules, but he does not appear to recognise that the best non-fiction today is also being written with compelling inventiveness (one of the lasting legacies of the late great Tom Wolfe). No such writers could afford to be weighed down by Evans’s well-intentioned advice in their saddlebag. It would be fatal for them to
write so self-consciously.
Evans’s ‘Sentence Clinic’, ‘Ten Shortcuts’, and lists of dos and don’ts would be a useful antidote against the prolixity and incomprehensibility of most press releases, website communications, and government pronouncements, unless, as I fear, they are actually intended to be opaque. In a world in which far too much subediting for print media is being performed by underpaid puddles of PhD students, unable to find any other useful outlet for their intellects, I fear that this noble linguistic evangelist may well be urinating in a windward direction. g
Richard Walsh was founding editor of OZ and POL magazines and the weekly newspaper Nation Review. Currently he is Consultant Publisher at Allen & Unwin. His most recent book is Reboot: A democracy makeover to empower Australia’s voters (MUP).
Dangerous days for the world
‘… Trump’s obsession with Putin constitutes a betrayal of his own country … The consequences of Trump’s European visit will resound down the decades as a turning point in history. Trump repudiates the America the world has known since World War II. In Helsinki the US President became supplicant to a tyrant … The man is a fraud on a gigantic scale … Beneath his bluster, intimidation and narcissism, Trump’s character cannot be mistaken – he will betray his friends and reward his enemies at his own convenience … Trump emerges as a figure devoid of history – he rejects the Western alliance system, the geopolitics that sustained the West during and after the Cold War and is devoted to a populist ideology that casts free trade, US global leadership and a values-based foreign policy as the instruments that must be purged … These are dark days for America and dangerous days for the world.’
Paul Kelly, writing in the Australian on 18 July 2018
Audacity
Barnaby Smith
ON PATRICK WHITE: WRITERS ON WRITERS
by Christos Tsiolkas
Black Inc.
$17.99 hb, 96 pp, 9781863959797
The Western world was well into the swing of our proverbial digital age when Patrick White passed away at his home on Martin Road in Centennial Park at the age of seventy-eight in 1990. Yet, as Christos Tsiolkas suggests at the outset of this taut and lively meditation on Australia’s greatest novelist, Patrick White is often perceived as a relic from a longforgotten and irrelevant era, a twentieth-century dinosaur who, with his privileged background and famously curmudgeonly disposition, has little to offer today’s pluralistic, multicultural milieu.
As Tsiolkas asks, ‘Isn’t White as white as his name?’
To some readers, there is something musty about White’s aura that ensures he is kept safely in the past.
There was a time when Tsiolkas himself was of this opinion – that White was just ‘another dead white male’. When the author of The Slap (2008) and Barracuda (2013) was a student in the 1980s, White was decidedly unfashionable on campuses that were exploding with ‘post-modern, anti-canonical, feminist and postcolonial criticism’. Yet the intervening years have shown that, to varying degrees, there is a place for White’s novels in all of these schools and others. A friend recently completed a doctoral thesis on queerness and sexuality in White’s work, with a chapter on The Twyborn Affair (1979) titled ‘Is Prowse’s Rectum a Grave?’ The progressive and colourful enclaves of theory are ripe to give White a new lease of life in the twenty-first century.
On Patrick White also does this. This splendid latest instalment in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series is an innovative critical reappraisal of White with a special emphasis on his partner Manoly Lascaris, a moving tribute to White’s devastating skill with language, and an enlightening insight into the nature of literary influence.
Having acknowledged his lack of familiarity with White’s books beyond a few dalliances as a student, Tsiolkas took on the task of reading throughout 2016 the entirety of White’s oeuvre. Having done so, he concluded that White wrote three of the twentieth century’s greatest novels: The Tree of Man (1955), The Solid Mandala (1966), and The Eye of the Storm (1973), and his analysis of each of these is heartfelt, poetic, and occasionally awestruck.
It is also ingenious. Tsiolkas makes
the compelling case for White as Australia’s first and most profound writer of the migrant experience. Tsiolkas recognises the audacity of this claim, but goes on to argue convincingly that the impact of Lascaris – like Tsiolkas a Greek-Australian – on White’s life and spirituality makes it valid. White, this book argues, was fascinated by Lascaris’s Greek Orthodox faith, which ‘reifies the seer, the hermit, and the seeker’. This consolidated White’s allegiance with the outcast, the outsider, the solitary pilgrim. Furthermore, Lascaris himself became
Christos Tsiolkas (Black Inc.)
a migrant in an entirely new country and culture when the pair moved permanently to Australia in 1948. ‘White took on an understanding,’ writes Tsiolkas, ‘of exile and of spirituality that was bestowed upon him by his lover.’
And there is more to White’s status as great sympathiser with the migrant. Tsiolkas rejoices in White’s unrivalled capacity to write authentically from a range of perspectives, to ‘transcend the bounds of identity’. From The Aunt’s Story (1948) onwards, he wrote as Aborigine, Jew, woman, and more, outsiders all, exhibiting a compassion and empathy, not to say astounding literary skill, that allowed him to reflect the alienation of the migrant experience with his peculiar brand of psychopoetic electricity. And this too is down to Lascaris:
I think what initiates this great audacity – this ability to imagine and speak in so many voices, from within so many experiences – is the pledging of his life to Manolis Lascaris, refracting his own experiences of exile and of being an outsider through those of his immigrant lover; and discovering, also through Lascaris, a spiritual language with which to communicate.
Interestingly, it is The Tree of Man that Tsiolkas identifies as ‘the first great migrant story in our literary culture’; regarding the Englishness of its main characters, Stan and Amy Parker, as inconsequential. The novel is a ‘folk tale’, a ‘genesis story’ that ‘unites migrant cultures across the world’. This is a relatively unexplored reading of this text, and a distinctly contemporary one. It is to Tsiolkas’s credit that he is not entirely convinced by all of White’s books. He describes The Living and the Dead (1941) as ‘unremarkable’, and suggests that the much-loved Riders in the Chariot (1961) suffers from its attempts to deal with both the Holocaust and colonialism in one novel, and its attempts to draw a connection between the two. Voss (1957), meanwhile, provokes an uneasy response in Tsiolkas in its ambitions toward proposing an Australian ‘foundational myth’ by depicting the psychological and physical journeys of
two white Europeans without any central Aboriginal component or character. Unsurprisingly, Tsiolkas exhibits a pleasing turn of phrase in his critical writing. In particular, he has an endearing habit of describing White’s books in musical terms: The Solid Mandala is a ‘deliciously exquisite song’; The Eye of the Storm is made up of ‘various operatic arias’; The Twyborn Affair is a ‘jubilant dance of sentences’. We might add that Tsiolkas has, in his contemporisation of an author whose legacy drifts in and out of the public eye and our collective
On Flanagan
Susan Lever
RICHARD FLANAGAN: NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS edited by Robert Dixon Sydney University Press $40 pb, 219 pp, 9781743325827
With The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013), Richard Flanagan became Australia’s third winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction, leading many people to pick up his novels for the first time and to look for some critical support in reading them. After my own review of the novel in SRB, I was bailed up by friends – many of whom had read it in book groups – to report on lively disagreements (often with my review). Apart from reviews, there were a few articles scattered in academic journals but no easily accessible, book-length study. So this new collection of essays on his work, edited by Robert Dixon, is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion of our latest literary superstar.
Despite his relatively recent international fame, Flanagan has been publishing novels since Death of a River Guide in 1994, after beginning his writing career as an historian with a book on the unemployed in Britain before World War II, and a history of the Gordon River area of Tasmania. Although Flanagan often presents himself as a rough-around-the-edges country boy
psyche, created his own melodic paean to a man who never forgot that we were, and perhaps remain, as he puts it, ‘a migrant and mongrel nation forging our own culture and our own language’. g
Barnaby Smith is a writer, critic, poet, and musician currently based in northern New South Wales. He has written for Rolling Stone, the ABC, The Guardian, The Lifted Brow, The Quietus, Art Guide, Southerly, Cordite, Best Australian Poems, and many others. In 2018 he won the Scarlett Award for art writing.
self-taught in literature, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship in the mid-1980s, and the contributors to Richard Flanagan: New critical essays give him the intellectual respect this deserves.
With Liliana Zavaglia, Robert Dixon writes a long introduction to the book, summarising Flanagan’s career and the main arguments of the essays that follow, at times with greater clarity than the essays themselves. It may prove to be the most consulted part of the book, particularly acute on the writer’s shift from history to fiction. Dixon then elaborates this shift in an erudite essay canvassing the influence of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt on Flanagan’s resistance to the idea of history as a progressive causal narrative, and his conviction that such narratives shore up the power of nations and empires. Flanagan chose to write fiction as a way to question and subvert the linear narratives of history, and Dixon provides the philosophical context for the novelist’s wayward and divergent mode of historical fiction. His essay is a model of thoroughly researched context, intellectual and philosophical engagement, and respect for the writer, expressed in clear and cogent writing.
The essays by Bill Ashcroft, Margaret Harris, and Zavaglia take up this idea of the fictional subversion of history, applied in detail by Ashcroft on Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), Harris on Wanting (2008), and Zavaglia on The Narrow Road . Marc Delrez follows a similar line examining the realignment of biography
over several novels’ depiction of both real and fictional characters. There are two essays on the ‘outrider’ novel The Unknown Terrorist (2006), Flanagan’s one departure from Tasmanian subjects and reflections on the past, and Nicholas Birns gives attention to the ‘almost deliberately unliterary’ love story in The Narrow Road, arguing that love, not war, is the novel’s motivation. Other essays seek out particular aspects of the novels, such as their depiction of tourism as imperialism, their sound imagery, their ‘utilising’ of ‘magic realism’, or interest in human isolation and displacement. Salhia Ben-Messahel’s enthusiasm for philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the ‘radicant’ leads to a lot of ‘enrooting’ to explain a fairly simple idea about displaced identity. The trouble with schematic readings is that they tend to categorise the novelist as a schematic writer. Flanagan’s work can appear this way, even without these critical efforts, because, as the theories of history suggest, his politics are always obvious to the reader.
As I hold to the old view that there
may be a difference between an author’s intentions and an author’s achievements, I find some of these essays too reliant on Flanagan’s many public statements about his work, and unwilling to explore the way the art of the novel might distort and change his ideas. Harris sounds a rare note of dissent when she asserts that Wanting’s ‘pervasive stress on the destructive force of desire is comprehensively over-determined’. Delrez also cautions that fiction is as prone to failure as history in representing the past, commenting that Flanagan’s bio-fiction ‘somehow forecloses the very avenue of investigation which the reader is invited to imagine’.
While the introduction claims the book offers ‘a snapshot of critical approaches to Flanagan’s work’, there is little room for disagreement here about the novels’ achievements as art. My own reservations about The Narrow Road are batted away, and Birns dismisses Michael Hofmann’s devastating review in the London Review of Books as ‘contumely’, seeming a little surprised that it was
Compelling reads
Sisonke Msimang grew up in exile, the child of South African freedom fighters. Always Another Country is the searing account of her search for belonging, written from her new home in Perth. Hers is a fierce new voice on race, feminism and politics. ‘A message that is as urgent and timely as it is eternal.’
Sarah Krasnostein
One of Australia’s most highly regarded historians explores how we recast the past in this illuminating and confronting examination of the hidden racial motivations behind our involvement in the Great War. ‘Australia’s war should never look quite the same again.’
Frank Bongiorno
A cracking noir thriller full of soul and wit. In Seoul’s corrupt underworld, Reseng was destined to be an assassin, until he breaks the rules. That’s when he meets a trio of young women with an extraordinary plot of their own. Will the women save the day? Or is Reseng next on the kill list? Discover a dazzling new literary voice.
also perceptive in its recognition of the contradictions in the novel. Zavaglia pounces on Hofmann’s comment about the novel’s ‘exploded’ form to link it with Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history who looks backward to see not a chain of events but ‘one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’.
The Narrow Road had the artist Ben Quilty on ABC’s The Book Club going down on one knee to Flanagan, while only one other panellist demurred. Les Murray declared it to be pretentious and stupid, while Tony Abbott disagreed sufficiently to intervene in the 2014 Prime Minister’s Awards, though it seems naïve to think this was a result of his own enthusiastic reading of the book. Readers often have extreme responses to Flanagan’s novels, but academic critics, on the evidence of this book, are confident that he is the goods. g
Susan Lever is general editor of Cambria Press’s Australian Literature series.
NEW FROM TEXT
textpublishing.com.au
The whereabouts of Shakespeare’s library is a mystery that continues to perplex bibliophiles worldwide. Acclaimed author and historian Stuart Kells traces the search through the centuries in an entertaining and enlightening exploration of literature’s most enduring enigma.
Reminiscent of Marie Darrieussecq’s brilliant debut, Pig Tales, this inventive and poignant novel of chilling suspense, by one of France’s great literary talents, challenges our ideas about the future, about organ-trafficking, clones and the place of the individual in a surveillance state. For fans of Never Let Me Go and Black Mirror.
ABR ELIZABETH JOLLEY SHORT STORY PRIZE
Ruins
by Madelaine Lucas
In the car we wound around the bay, which, on the map, made the shape of an ear with a tear-shaped island off the coast like a jewel earring. My mother and I were going to see the lighthouse out on the cape – or what was left of it anyway, which was not much, she told me, but stones and rubble. Sandstone stump crowning the headland. Worth documenting though, she said, since we’re staying so close by.
We had taken up our usual positions – my mother at the driving wheel and me, her navigator. I had only recently got my licence and she had been encouraging, paying for lessons at a school for adult learners. But there was something about us living together – even temporarily, in our rented shack by the beach – that made us revert to our old roles. With my brother spending the holidays at his father’s up north, it was just the two of us that summer. I was my mother’s only passenger again, just like when I was small.
On the way to the ruins, I asked her questions about love. I was put in mind of it because of something she had said that morning, describing her work at the maritime museum. It suits me, she’d said, packing her sketching tools and digital camera, because I’ve always felt something like a lighthouse keeper’s daughter. And I had imagined that to be a lonely, captive feeling.
Also, I was thinking about the man from the beach I had been with the afternoon before. Jude. Near stranger. Still too shy to say his name out loud. That kind of intimacy hadn’t been earned, so we had rushed forward with a different kind. Would I call it love? No, but it was a kind of loving. Tenderness. He had pressed a rag of vinegar on my back and throat where I’d been stung by the needles of a bluebottle jellyfish and some fire had worked its way through my bloodstream. It could have been the venom. It could have been desire. In his kitchen we
were nameless, reduced to skin on skin, mouth on mouth. What I wanted to know from my mother was how to reconcile the fact that some people never find love? That kind, or any kind. I am sure I said it that way, ‘find’, like a miraculous, unintentional discovery, as if love was a stone in the sand. But to be found also implies that something lost has to be returned to a place of belonging, and what did I know about love and stones? I was twenty-four, and still holding out for a kind of love that felt like homecoming.
It’s just one of those things, my mother said. Like trying to explain why bad things happen to good people.
It seemed easy, I said, to understand why the bitter and selfish and cruel might remain loveless. But, strangely, weren’t they sometimes the most loved? Those who did not know how to love back. Why did we feel compelled to keep on giving?
I remembered the artist who had once sat in a gallery and invited the audience to, one by one, cut a piece from her clothes. Some people took a tiny snip from somewhere inconspicuous – a hemline or sleeve – while others sheared her suit away at the seams, snipping the straps of her underwear until she was stripped bare. Exposed. Yes, I thought, love could be something like that.
I think we like the idea that people can learn from each other and change, my mother said. That we might sort of break each other in, like horses.
All my mother’s relationship advice has something to do with animals: always date men who’ve had pets because it proves they know how to look after something and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, things like that.
You might be right, I said, thinking again of Jude. All he’d learned in the years he had over me. He could name the trees that cradled the house in their branches – the bluegums and bloodwoods and ironbarks – and call out
all the flowers in his yard. Knew the tides, could explain how they were tied to the movements of the moon with an invisible thread, tracked the changes in the weather through the wind. On his porch he pressed a piece of spoiled fruit into my hands and taught me how to feed the birds. Maybe love, too, could be a learned thing.
My mother was leaning over the wheel, lifting up out of her seat a little to check her blind spots as we rounded a corner. She was concentrating on the road, or her mind was elsewhere, or perhaps she was afraid she couldn’t give me the answers that I wanted. Her responses grew vague. She said that we all want to believe that people can change, that it’s possible all our mistakes might lead to learning to love better, but in her experience what they say about old dogs and new tricks was about right.
There are no second chances, the only do-overs you get are with someone new. Look out the window there, she said then, at the lake.
On my side was the beach, and on hers a flat expanse of water like a silver disc dotted with black birds. Swans. Dark hooked necks like one half of a love heart. Once thought to be a rare, impossible thing. Existing in the minds of Europeans only as a metaphor. Until they came here, the great downunder underbelly of the world where water drained counter-clockwise and the seasons turned in reverse. Spring in September, smelling of jasmine and rain. Winter in July. Trees grey-green and dry all the year. Brittle, easy to burn.
This is right near the turn off to Swan Lake, my mother said. On the other side of that water there, and a little bit further south, that’s where we came to stay when Henry was little. Remember? How old were you then, eleven, twelve?
About to turn twelve, I said. Last summer before high school.
We had fun for a minute there, didn’t we? The four of us. You loved the cabins. They were set up like dollhouses, all matching.
I remembered the dunes – my mother leading the way through the scrubland in her hat and sunglasses, Henry only a young thing, riding high on his father’s shoulders. Still small enough to sit on my lap and slide down the sand on flattened fruit boxes. You could see the ocean up there, from the highest point of the hill. Holding my brother tight against my chest, his laughter as we gained speed, rushing towards but never reaching the blue.
Mornings swimming in the lake. Silver fish and black swans. Teenagers, older than me, older than I ever wanted to be, letting off fireworks at midnight. Finding their discarded shells and coils in the sand. And the little fibro cabins, six of them clustered around the inlet, all painted in a different pastel colour and decorated in a fifties style, with matching sugar and coffee jars, knitted tea cosies, prints of watercolour ballerinas framed on the walls. A liquid place. Surrounded by nothing but bush and bodies of water. Silt and soil damp beneath
bare feet. Gardens of wild blue hydrangeas the size of human heads. My mother holding my shoulder beneath a lamp while my brother slept, squeezing a tick from my arm with a pair of tweezers. We played at being a different kind of family that summer, stitching ourselves together into the roles of mother, father, daughter, son. Sutures only showing in the gulf between mine and Henry’s ages, which hinted at some long-ago separation, an entire childhood, almost, between us. I was a small girl at twelve, skinny and breastless, knock-knees and crowded teeth. Smiling with my mouth closed. When people asked my age and my mother wasn’t in earshot, I said that I was nine.
But time caught up with us. By fifteen I was too embarrassed to hold Henry’s hand in public. It was the way people stared at us when I was minding him. We both looked like her, which meant we looked alike, though us women were dark where he was fair. From our ages they did not guess we were brother and sister. My thick black eyeliner, steely gaze, the way I hunched my shoulders as if in shame. Looked like teenage motherhood. Called Whore and Bastard by an old man drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag sitting on the church steps beside the supermarket where I waited in my school skirt, Henry on my tartanned hip. Virgin Mary in blue plaid, white socks sliding down shins, waiting for our mother to bring the car around from the parking lot.
So, my mother said, after we’d driven in silence a while, you seeing someone back in the city, then? I’m not seeing anyone back in the city, I said.
Truths like landmines in the words I did not say. Remembering Jude’s hands on my body. Dull pulse of pleasure-pain between my legs. Picking at the small splinter left in the flesh of my palm where I’d lifted myself up on to his kitchen table. His skin tasted of salt and I’d dug my fingernails in, left half moons on his back. Knots of wood knuckling my spine while down the road my mother slept through the hottest part of the day, breeze blowing through gauzy bedroom curtains but windows bare at Jude’s. The thrill of it. Kind of heat that brings rain if you’re lucky, air thick with water. Just thinking of it, I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. It sounded like I want. I want. I want.
Are you? I said. Seeing anyone up in the Mountains, I mean.
Oh no, my mother said. I mean, I have a few wellmeaning ‘gentleman callers’. Neighbourly types, mainly. See me in the drive and help with the shopping bags, or pop around to give me the heads up about storms and fires. Offer to rake the leaves from the gutter for me, that sort of thing. But they just seem so … What’s the word? Old, I guess. They seem old. Time really does more damage to men, in the end – at least the single ones They just seem to go to ruin, unless someone’s looking after them.
Maybe you should go younger, I said. You could pass.
You’re not even fifty.
Fifty! God, how awful. I don’t feel fifty, she winced. We should make a deal. How about, I won’t see anyone younger than you if you don’t see anyone older than me. Fair?
Gee, I should hope so, I said, though already I suspected I was cutting it fine with Jude. Old enough to be – but not letting myself finish the thought. Would have had to have been a young dad, anyway. Wondered if he had kids somewhere. If he’d been married. No ring, or discernible line where one might have been. At some point I’d started checking for these things and now I looked at every left hand, like a compulsion. As if it could help me figure out the logic of who was married and who was not, but there didn’t seem to be any. Not as far as I could tell.
Is it true about Grandy? I said. Reminded always of my mother’s mother by rings and fingers. After your dad left, did she really lob off her finger, right beneath the wedding ring?
That’s what she always told us, said my mother. Her hands had swollen so much over the years she couldn’t get the ring off, over the knuckle. She said one day she just couldn’t stand to look at it anymore. Though it could have been an accident, I suppose. Out in the country, chopping wood or something. We were with Daddy that weekend. Up at the snow with his young bird. Newly remarried then, still thinking it fun to play families with us kids. But I always believed Mum. No reason not to, though I guess she could have been making a joke of it. Always had a strange sense of humour. Even so, I think that story felt more true to her. Don’t you remember her metal finger? You were afraid of it as a baby. She had this habit of tapping it against the table when she was thinking. Used to make you cry.
I remember, I said. Or at least I think I do. It was like a suit of armour. It bent where the joint should have been.
At my grandmother’s wake, when I was four, I sat in my mother’s childhood bedroom with my older cousins while they told me stories and drank the nips of liquor they’d taken from the dresser, collected from hotels and airplanes. She’ll come back for you, they said, and you’ll know it by the tap-tap-tapping of her metal finger on the windowpane at night.
I think I just would have stuck with the ring myself, my mother said. Rather than cut off my own finger. You’d think that would be the more traumatic thing.
I guess it’s different, I said, because Grandy did it to herself. She chose it.
She chose the ring once, too, my mother said. But she was always like that. Could be brutal, when she had to be. An unsentimental woman.
Iknew the story of my mother’s first memory so well it had almost become my own. Sitting between her two brothers in the backseat of the yellow Volvo on their way to the country house on the Peninsula, pulled
off on the side of the road while my grandmother stood hoisting a rock in her hands above the near-dead thing. They’d hit it – that blur of grey-brown fur now slick with blood – once-wallaby – and while her brothers laughed and made jokes about eating roadkill pie, my mother had howled, stiff-limbed, knees and elbows locked in panic, great rasping breaths stringy with spit and mucus, hot tears on her red face, body turned to board but lungs expanding, filling up with her first experience of grief, until my grandmother turned and snapped: Tell me. What would be the crueler thing?
She stopped her screaming then, shut her mouth, sniffled. Trembling. But in the end, she won. Because inside the pouch had been a baby, still breathing, still warm. My grandmother unbuttoned her blouse and swaddled it, handed it to her daughter to hold, and drove to the animal hospital in the next town. Trucks and cars honking when they passed on the highway because there was my grandmother at the wheel, driving one-handed, smoking out the window, in her underwire. String of pearls around her neck, smear of blood on her jodhpurs where she’d wiped her hands after handling the joey. No stranger to gore. Had learned to assist with births out on the farm at fourteen, pulling the foals out from the mares by their legs. My uncles were stone-silent, mortified, while my mother, my tiny mother, cradled the babe. Patted the soft grey fur. Felt the fragile heart beating against her chest as she rocked it in her arms. Hushed with soothing words she imagined a gentle mama might say. Shh baby. You’re my baby now. Go to sleep baby. That’s when she knew, she told me, that she wanted children. At four years old, in her braids and handmade Liberty dress, she already knew.
And maybe she did have some knack for it, some intuition, because my mother has this uncanny way of sensing my thoughts unravelling. Picking up the thread of lapsed conversations like a dropped stitch.
It changes things, she said then. Children do. Afterwards, all that stuff is different.
Dating, you mean? And love?
I mean, you can’t even imagine it. Sometimes it feels like my capacity for love is just exhausted. All used up on you and Henry. See, the thing is, it seems so romantic at the time – like the most romantic thing you could do – have a baby with someone. To give that to them. But once you do, it kind of eclipses everything. You think you’re ready for it, but you’re not. That kind of love? It’s terrifying.
The lighthouse was close to a navy base, and as we approached, we passed cadets on the road in grey camouflage. Tall and lanky boys who looked hardly any older than my twelve-year-old brother. They ran their drills on the far end of the beach sometimes. When I lay in the sand I could see the ships in the distance, the encampment out on the point.
We parked in a dirt lot at the edge of the cliff, car
wheels grinding on the gravel road. Outside, rocks and scrub and saltbush trees until the land cut away. Wind off the cove throwing grit and tangling hair. Making us silent. I could hear the waves below even when I couldn’t see them.
From a distance, the lighthouse looked jagged, like a broken tooth. But you could imagine the tower there, where it had once stood, and if you didn’t know you were looking at the ruins – that the navy had blown it up after a better beacon was built on the opposite shore – you might imagine it was only under construction. Demolished turret and sandstone rubble fenced off behind bars.
On a plaque, an acknowledgment of the traditional custodians of the land. Always was, always will be. Land stolen, occupied, returned in an act of reconciliation. Renamed in a recovered tongue. Translated from the regional Dhurga language to something like Bay of Plenty. Signs warning visitors about unstable ground.
My mother walked ahead, taking pictures with her digital camera. The job she had at the museum was new – something she’d applied for and taken up now Henry was getting close to high school. Needing less.
When I was very small, my mother didn’t work and then later, after we left my father, she switched between temporary jobs with children or plants or animals. Working part-time in a flower shop, cutting stems, moving bouquets between buckets of water, dethorning the roses with shearing scissors. Washing and clipping elegant dogs who went home in better cars to bigger houses than we did. Or being paid to look after other people’s kids at a local nursery. The jealousy I felt in that first year I was shuffled off to school, while these other babies got to spend the day with my mother. Later, weekends spent selling clothes at the markets. Leaving in the early dark, sleeping in the back of the car we called Big Red on piles of silk and denim and fur. It was a cobbledtogether life, most of our things second-hand or borrowed, but still my mother had her limits. There were some things she would never do for money: sex stuff, nursing, waitressing. Though once, when she was a student, before she met my father, she had posed as an artist’s model for one of her teachers. Tied up by her wrists to a wooden cross in the nude. A naked, female Christ. Left alone for an hour while the artist went out to score. She shrugged when she told me this story – it was the eighties, she said – but made me promise not to tell my brother.
Iwalked around the headland, away from my mother and the lighthouse, to look down at the sea below. Wrecking waters. Something violent, I always thought, about the edge of a cliff. All that rock hacked away by salt and water and time, weathered raw. Rougher out here, near the open ocean, than at Jude’s beach. Already thinking of it as something that belonged to him because he had fixed up a house and made a life here, and I was
just a visitor. Tourist town, he’d said, but home to him. I felt my phone in my pocket then. A message from Jude, as if I had willed it. Asking after my bluestings. I told him I was healing, and when I’d rubbed aloe on my back in the mirror that morning, the welts from the jellyfish made a pattern like the points of a constellation. He asked which one and I said Andromeda. Sent a picture of the ruins, turret in the distance a broken crown.
Round here, near a trail leading to a camping ground, was a mounted sign showing a picture of the lighthouse when it was first completed. Grim-faced Victorians in black and white, sitting on the grass in front of the lodging houses. Lounging in the sun but looking already long-dead, in the way that early photographs seem to make ghosts of the living. In the picture, bungalows with wood verandahs and picket fences making crooked boundaries like a line of matches stuck in the sand. All vanished now. The bush had reclaimed what had been hacked away.
The sign also told a story about two teenagers from early lighthouse families. Keeper’s girls. Daughter of the chief and the daughter of the assistant. Sixteen and nineteen in the winter of 1887. Near-women.
They had been playing a game, had broken in to a fisherman’s hut down on the cove in a dare or desire to be close to a man other than their fathers, to look through this stranger-man’s things. The smell, maybe, of brine and leather making blood quicken and hands quiver. Sand blowing in through the open door. House creaking in the wind like the sound of boot-leather.
The chief’s daughter dressed up in the fisherman’s clothes for a laugh – his hat, too big, fell over her eyes, and his coat sleeves slipped over her slender wrists. She picked up the shotgun he kept by the door, as they all did, living so isolated out on the edge. The bullet struck the assistant’s daughter in the temple. Tripped and it went off, she told the court. All in an instant.
I dream them. They were unrelated by blood but raised as sisters. No other children for miles. Siblings had died in infancy – of typhoid fever, smallpox, accidents from rolling hoops on the cliffs. The assistant’s daughter fair and soft-faced in an oval portrait, pale ringlets topped with a loose ribbon-bow. The daughter of the chief three years younger but tall and strongshouldered, narrow and dark. Breathless running up and down these hills. And at night, braiding each other’s hair with strips of old cotton to make it curl, threading needles by candlelight to mend the tears in their long dresses from the branches of saltbush trees. The ocean outside moving in the dark, almost animal. The rush of water breaking against rock. The beacon lighting up their rooms. Smell of kerosene and oil. Woken by the loud low heart-stopping call of the fog signals that rupture silent nights. Ships in distress. Learn to feel it in the wind and tide before it even happens but still trusting in their fathers to guide the ships in safe. Light their passage. Bring them home.
There was no further mention of the fisherman or the would-be murderess. No details of what happened to her after – whether she moved away or married or lived out the rest of her days on that cliff’s edge – nothing, except that she was acquitted at trial, since she’d meant no harm. Only skylarking, declared the judge. No one living to deny it.
I thought briefly of suicide pacts made in pinkiepromises, love triangles – but enough of ruins and islands and the dead. I held in my hands another message from Jude. Wanting a different sort of picture. Alone, and wanting me. I ducked behind a bush. Pulled down the collar of my T-shirt, stuck my phone in. Black lace on white skin never seen by sun. Captured. Sent. The rush of it. Wading into want. Salt in the air, salt on my lips. Splitting in the wind where yesterday’s kiss had caught me with his teeth. Pushing on my mouth with the back of my hand to blot blood. Straightening my shirt.
I looked for my mother, but on the other side of the cliff’s rise, could no longer see her. Brief swell of panic – a childhood feeling – of my mother moving out of sight. As if I took my eyes off her she might disappear. But as I rounded the cove and began to pick my way back towards the lighthouse I could see her there, sitting on a low wall, sketching. Black hair tucked into the red windbreaker zipped to her chin, a few strands picked up and tousled loose by the wind, hints of silver catching the light.
It is hard to explain to people who meet her now that my mother used to be a different kind of woman. I wondered sometimes if Henry could even imagine it –aviator sunglasses staring down the highway, red fingernails bitten down to the quick, cigarette burning in her left hand while she steered with her right. In the car her mother’s daughter, despite it all. Hair dyed copper from a thick paste that smelled of mud and earth and left rustcoloured rings around the bathtubs of our rented rooms. All the men who used to come to visit, leaving behind their humble offerings – flowers and wine bottles and wooden-stringed instruments shaped like strange fruits. Mandolins and banjos and parlour guitars rounded like pumpkins or papayas or chestnuts – objects for my mother to sketch, and though they were given to her to play, the beds of her fingers remained soft.
And then there was the night we came home to find the necks snapped, guitars with their bodies kicked in and splintered wood – a musical massacre. Broken bottles and shattered shards of glass, a rock through the window, my mother’s silk dresses ripped up and thrown in a heap on the floor.
Desire, I was only beginning to understand that day at the ruins, comes in many forms but almost all of them are violent. We learn this from the stories we are told about love. Struck by an angel’s arrow or drugged by a loveflower, desire wounds and I had felt its bluesting. The thought of him all through the day, like pushing on a bruise.
By the time I reached my mother, she’d finished her sketch of the lighthouse, its tumbled tower. No light now to give.
They built it in the wrong place, she said. Did you notice how it looked out in the wrong direction? Facing the open sea, instead of the cove. Caused more harm than good. Ships got their signals crossed and so they built the better one at Point Perpendicular. I suppose that’s the one I should be drawing, but I always find the ruins more interesting.
What is it about her and me that draws us to these kinds of places? Something lonely deep down in the bone. A marrowed loneliness, passed down womb to womb. We wanted to believe, my mother and I, that love could restore what was beyond repair, and if not, at least let us walk around in the wreckage.
In the palm of my hand, my phone vibrated with another message from Jude. Telling me he was at home, that he’d done enough work for the day, would leave the door open if I happened to be passing. Where are you? he said, and that, too, seemed like a kind of loving. Wanting me to be near, and if I wasn’t, wanting at least to know how far. I would come to miss this most after parting ways with someone. The absence of those messages. The beacons we make of each other. Sending our signals out and back.
I told him I was out on the cape, that I could see a tiny island in the distance.
No man is an island, he replied. John Donne said that.
No man is an island but every woman is, I replied. I said that.
All along, looking for a lover like a lighthouse or a shelter, and maybe this is what I liked about Jude. He looked like someone who had weathered a storm and stayed standing, a little lightning left in his fingers.
Maybe to be a lighthouse keeper’s daughter is to live a reckless, free-wheeling life. Dwelling on the threshold between abandon and abandonment, perched over the ocean’s violence, a father’s job to light the way for those travelling through the dark, not yours.
But no father can protect his daughters from growing and becoming the kinds of women who are bold enough to enter the houses of strange and solitary men. There is nothing that can protect them from the high wild loneliness of that place or the desires that come with it. What you might do for a way out. g
Madelaine Lucas is an Australian writer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. She is the senior editor of NOON literary annual and a teaching fellow at Columbia University, where she is completing her MFA in fiction. She has been the winner of the Overland /Victoria University Short Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Griffith University Josephine Ulrick Literature Prize. She is currently at work on her first novel. ❖
Crackle and blast
A cinematic biography of Mary Shelley
Geordie Williamson
IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY: THE GIRL WHO WROTE FRANKENSTEIN by Fiona Sampson
Profile Books, $34.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781781255285
Ahealthy suspicion should surround books that arrive neatly on some commemorative due date – in this case, the bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is not that biographer Fiona Sampson is less than able and diligent in her efforts to celebrate a novel which has resonated like few others during the long modernity inaugurated by the European Romantics. Nor is it wrong that she should foreground Mary Shelley’s life experience as a woman and a mother as a way of revivifying a text so absorbed into our collective consciousness as to be paradoxically invisible.
But there is a breathless, of-the-moment quality to In Search of Mary Shelley that undermines the consecration of author and work which the biography asserts as its venture. Sampson wraps her evidently wide reading and archival research in a jolly, gossipy, intimate tone, and opens chapters with establishing shots that look and sound like storyboarding for a BBC documentary. ‘I want to rewind the film,’ she writes, ‘to bring Mary closer to us, and closer again, until she’s hugely enlarged in close-up. I want to see the actual texture of her existence, caught in freeze-frame. I want to ask what we do in fact know about who and how and why she is – who she is – and about how it is for her.’
Beneath its cinematic inflations, such a desire is sound and potentially fascinating. This is the first biography of Shelley to appear this century, and it comes at the end of generations of masculine misprision and gendered diminishment of Mary’s achievements. Sampson convincingly shifts the weighting of literary reputation from Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary’s father,
William Godwin – and who, aside from determined antiquarians, reads much of these men outside the life-support wards of the academy these days? – to Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and her daughter and namesake, who, in the figures of Victor Frankenstein and his monstrous creation, managed to capture the psychological texture and technological implications of an emergent modern age.
The most potent argument this biography mounts is that Mary Shelley’s insights in Frankenstein could only have emerged from female experience. The story Sampson tells is reverse-engineered, so that Mary’s life is explored in order to illuminate the impulses, drives, attitudes, fears, and terrors which make Frankenstein so durable and intense, even today. The biographer concentrates her attention on the effects of her young subject growing up as a para-orphan (Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever after giving birth to Shelley; she was displaced by step-siblings and a strong-willed stepmother, and exiled from her family for long periods during her teens). Sampson wonders at Mary’s early experiences of psoriasis or eczema: episodes that would leave the girl in agony, whole limbs wrapped in poultices and bandaged up.
Sampson also lingers over Mary’s experience of childbirth and childrearing. In that era, she reminds us, babies were still called ‘animals’, and she manages to capture something of the uncanniness that clings to children, who are both of us – rhyming in personality and appearance – and yet irrevocably other. Though the biographer is alert to the scientific flavour of the day, with its
experiments with electricity and galvanism, and while she is careful to give due weight to the philosophic and aesthetic currents that flowed into the mighty river of imagination which is Frankenstein, the ambivalence that attends motherhood and the fleshly reality of childbirth belong to Mary alone. It is her embodiment as a woman which provides the crackle and blast that runs through the muscles of her most memorable narrative.
Inevitably, this concentration on the first two decades of Mary Shelley’s life (she was eighteen when the idea of the book was born out of that infamous booze-and-laudanum-fuelled night spent in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva with Shelley, Byron, and John Polidori, future author of The Vampyre, and in her early twenties when the book was anonymously published to
The book comes after generations of masculine misprision and gendered diminishment of Mary’s achievements
immediate and near-universal acclaim) means a degree of telescoping: the remainder of her work and life following the publication of Frankenstein takes up less than a hundred pages.
The result, then, is something less than a biography and more than an extended gloss on a work of fiction. Sampson has laboured over primary documents and obviously read widely around her subject and those in the circles in which she moved, but the relative brevity of the exercise necessarily entails losses in sophistication and depth in arraying the fullest picture of Mary Shelley’s moment. William Godwin and Percy Shelley perhaps suffer most from this approach. Shelley, Sampson assures us, was a man of principle and true idealism. But her bullet-point approach to his actions in relation to Mary over time render him a creep, a cad, and what P.G. Wodehouse would call a ‘sinister vegetarian’ type.
Think of the alternate picture painted by Richard Holmes in his magisterial biography of Shelley, The Pursuit (1971).
He is no less appalled by the actions of the male poets around Mary Shelley, but his willingness to dive into the poems of Percy and Lord Byron as a critic and historian of ideas gives real heft to any exonerative claims. The best of Percy Bysshe Shelley went into his work. Beyond that, Holmes manages to provide more empathetic attention to Mary in passing in his life than Sampson does with the subject at the heart of hers.
But comparisons such as this are unkind. Holmes’s immense undertaking remains one of the most remarkable achievements of the golden age of British biography. It will live for as long as readers retain an interest in the Romantics. What Fiona Sampson has done in this warm, timely, admiring biography is to keep that flame of interest alive. Sampson is convincing in her arguments about the feminine and the monstrous; she is unassailable in making the case that women are more likely to meditate on and worry about the proper stewardship of those whom they have bought into being.
Frankenstein was not a book that Percy Shelley or Byron could have conceived, because their biological nature did not permit them to. And even if they had the emotional imagination to overcome this lack, it was too easy for them to keep running down the tracks laid down by society for the benefit of their gender. Their radicalism was charismatic yet circumscribed. It was Mary Shelley who jumped the rails. Two centuries later, it is her new path – and that of her scientist and his monster – that the rest of us are still following on. g
Geordie Williamson is chief literary
critic
of The Australian. He was a founding member of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia.
What Rosie knew
A memoir about the lack of maternal love
Brenda Niall
ROSIE: SCENES FROM A VANISHED LIFE by Rose Tremain
Chatto & Windus, $32.99 hb, 210 pp, 9781784742270
‘Write about what you don’t know,’ British novelist Rose Tremain advised young authors. That has been her own strategy during a long and star-studded career. It is quite a stretch from the court of England’s Charles II in Restoration (1989), or that of Christian IV of Denmark in Music and Silence (1999), or that of the muddy goldfields of The Colour (2003) set in nineteenth-century New Zealand, or The Road Home (2008), which movingly reveals an East European migrant’s struggles in today’s London. Impressive research and an imagination that flourishes on challenge have made Tremain one of the finest and least predictable of novelists.
Tremain’s memoir of childhood raises expectations. By comparison, her contemporaries Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes are almost stay-at-homes, digging deeper into the English culture that they know. What has made Tremain such a relentless traveller in alien times and places?
Rosie: Scenes from a vanished life is embedded in ‘Englishness’. The title suggests a wistful, backward look at a world, once intimately known, now lost. Once more, Tremain shows her capacity to surprise. Although the book begins with an ecstatic return to the lost paradise of her grandparents’ house and estate in Hampshire, it becomes an exploration of an unhappy family. It asks King Lear’s question: ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’
The memoir is about the lack of maternal love in two generations, and Tremain’s attempt to understand and forgive.
There are echoes here of Tremain’s finest novel, The Gustav Sonata (2016), in which a ruinous mother–son relationship plays out in wartime Switzerland.
Perhaps, too, the bleak marriage in The Colour, or the mutual loss felt by father and daughter in The Road Home carry some emotional freight from Tremain’s early experience.
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary (Rosie) Thomson, the younger of the two daughters of a disgruntled failed playwright, Keith Thomson, and his emotionally brittle wife, Jane. This mismatched pair had a house in upperclass Chelsea in the 1940s and sent their daughters to a private day school near home. As far as Tremain can remember, it was a house without love except for the saving grace of a nanny, Nan, whom she remembers with gratitude as her rescuer. She wished that Nan, ‘the kindest person I’ve ever known’, was her mother. She shared a bedroom with Nan for the first ten years of her life.
Postwar Chelsea didn’t have the fashionable glitter it attained in the 1960s. In Tremain’s memory, it was pleasant but ordinary. Even in the early 1950s, food rationing hadn’t ended; she remembers dull meals of Spam, tinned ravioli, Kraft cheese slices, and lots of bread and jam. Holidays with Jane’s parents in Hampshire were an escape into freedom. Not that the grandparents were loving, but the place itself, Tremain says, was magical in its natural beauty and outdoor freedom. A good cook, and abundant produce grown on the estate, meant lavish meals. Instead of Spam and Kraft cheese in the nursery, the children dined with their grandparents on ‘roast grouse, honey-baked ham, rhubarb syllabubs, treacle puddings, apple pies and cream’. Best of all was the regime of more or less benign neglect. So long as they turned up to meals looking tidy, no one minded what Jo and Rosie did. They climbed trees, rode bicycles
through puddles, enjoying the muddy splashing, fed the hens, collected eggs, learned to drive a pony cart.
The first in a series of losses was the death of their grandmother, soon followed by that of their grandfather. The Hampshire paradise vanished. The next to disappear was their father. After some unconvincing stories about his being away somewhere writing a play, Jo and Rosie were told the truth. ‘He had gone away for ever; he didn’t love us anymore.’ The girls heard their mother crying in the night, but she didn’t share her grief. She sent the two of them to boarding school. That meant losing Nan, their one source of love and stability.
What has made Tremain such a relentless traveller in alien times and places?
Their boarding school had the weird blend of grand surroundings and interior squalor that English upper-class parents thought good for children. Badly fed, allowed only two baths a week, their underwear seldom laundered, ‘we stank like polecats’. While Rosie and Jo were still lost in homesick misery, ‘the grownups of the family were playing musical beds’. After two divorces, a new family grouping emerged when Jane married their father’s cousin, who had a son and daughter. Life in London ended abruptly. Nan, who had reappeared briefly, vanished again, an unconsidered victim of the new deal.
The later scenes of Tremain’s memoir continue the theme of loss. Rosie began to enjoy school where a good teacher of literature roused hopes of Oxford. This was not allowed; her mother didn’t want a ‘bluestocking daughter’. Rosie was sent to finishing school in Switzerland, to learn how to be an upper-class wife, or, failing that, a secretary to some powerful man.
This chronicle of losses, in which good things are snatched away without apparent reason, takes Tremain to her nineteenth year. That’s when her resentful compliance ended. She refused to fit into her mother’s pattern, discharged herself from language school in Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and began a
liberated student life. Later, she rejected the hated name of ‘Rosie’ and insisted on ‘Rose’.
All through her narrative of childhood, Tremain searches for the woman whom she refers to as Jane, not ‘my mother’. Pondering the family history, she begins to understand that Jane, too, was emotionally starved. Jane had two brilliant, beloved brothers: one died suddenly at boarding school from a ruptured appendix; the other was killed in the last month of World War II. Jane, the survivor, meant nothing to her parents, who shut her out of their grief.
Tremain believes that, in coming to understand a destructive sequence of maternal failures, she herself has been able to break it. Her relationship with her own daughter is happy, and she has two grandchildren whom she loves. For this restoration of the natural order, she gives full credit to Nan, the one constant protective presence in her early life, her only teacher of love.
There is another story which perhaps Tremain will one day tell. This memoir ends before she began to write, before she married (unhappily, twice), and before biographer Richard Holmes became her life’s companion. The author focuses on the child who struggled to make sense of a bewildering world. The gap between knowledge and understanding is subtly measured. For its emotional range and its deft management of a limited point of view, the memoir recalls Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. ‘What Rosie Knew’ would have been an apt title. g
Brenda Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea? My grandmother’s story, published by Text Publishing.
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Intoxicating manias
Shannon Burns
THE RAPIDS: WAYS OF LOOKING AT MANIA
by Sam Twyford-Moore NewSouth
$32.99 pb, 280 pp, 9781742235653
In The Rapids: Ways of looking at mania, Sam Twyford-Moore takes a personal, exploratory, and speculative approach to the subject of mania. Because the author has been significantly governed by manic episodes on several occasions (he was diagnosed with manic depression as he ‘came into adulthood’), The Rapids offers an insider’s perspective. It also considers some of the public and cultural manifestations of the illness, via figures as diverse as Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Kanye West, Carrie Fisher, Andrew Johns, and Matthew Newton, but with a particular focus on literature and film.
The best parts of The Rapids are confessional and uncertain, and they follow a simple formula: This is what I did, thought and felt during a manic episode. I don’t know exactly what to make of it, but I don’t want to hide it either. These confessions are forthright and enlightening. ‘Mania,’ Twyford-Moore reminds us, ‘is a state of mood disturbance, typically associated with, and used to diagnose, what was once called manic-depression … which has been clinically replaced with Bipolar Affective Disorder.’ While the depressive side of the disorder typically attracts some public sympathy and understanding, the manic aspect – which can manifest as overconfidence (or grandiosity), excessive talking, a heightened sexual drive, and an overall loss of self-restraint – is little understood and rarely tolerated.
The Rapids begins with an account of activist–filmmaker Jason Russell’s public breakdown in 2012. He was recorded naked on a street corner in San Diego, ‘acting out of his mind’. TwyfordMoore calls this ‘the most public manic episode recorded’. Russell, he says, is
now irredeemably ‘stained by stigma’. The implicit question is: why is this so, when other disabilities and misfortunes attract a more sensitive response?
The Rapids is a ‘collage-like’ exploration composed of short sections. This is partly the result of circumstance and partly derivative. Twyford-Moore began writing during his most recent manic episode, he says, when it was difficult to concentrate, but it is also ‘how my mind works most of the time’. He credits Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (2011) as a guiding influence, but the resemblance between the two books is superficial.
This is how Koestenbaum explains the formal qualities of Humiliation: ‘Some of my fugal juxtapositions are literal and logical, while others are figurative, meant merely to suggest the presence of undercurrents, sympathies, resonances shared between essentially unlike experiences.’ Humiliation features highly patterned flourishes, where connections run together artfully. Twyford-Moore doesn’t achieve this. Instead of developing ideas and building resonances between The Rapids’ various ‘ways of looking’, he tends to glance at an idea then abandon it, or to repeat it with shifts in emphasis or wording. For example, he writes that mania produced ‘a driving sense of strength and invincibility, and, along with this, a feeling of supreme healthiness … I miss my manias – a deeply dangerous, potentially deadly desire to go back.’ Just two pages later, we read: ‘My memories of my manias are largely fond, and intoxicating. I want to go back to them, back to that place of fun and play. But I can’t – or won’t – go back to the manias. They are, ultimately, dangerous ...’
At times, the need to identify a ‘shared way of thinking’ and discover ‘the river of similar feeling and same thought’ pushes The Rapids into absurd territories. Twyford-Moore exhibits unusually strong feelings for the public figures he writes about. This quirk culminates in the hero worship of Carrie Fisher. He says of her novels: ‘These are not perfect fictions, but, somehow, they equate to a perfect life.’ Somehow is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Then he asks: ‘If I say that
“Carrie Fisher was my mental health icon” what do I mean? Part of it is the fact of saying it at all – the idea of there being such a thing as a mental health icon, or a mental health hero – feels like a relatively new concept ...’ Perhaps icon and hero are being used in an exaggerated or semi-ironic way, but it is discomfiting to see celebrities elevated to this level of personal and social significance. Dependence on or identification with icons or heroes appears more regressive than revolutionary, especially in a context where grandiosity is symptomatic.
Twyford-Moore is an uneven stylist. One of his sentences begins: ‘In his latest film, as I’m writing this, Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson crafts a film …’ He is not above describing a work of art as ‘a love letter to’ something or other, and it is hard to know what to make of sentiments like these: ‘Reading can be good, of course, for building character’ and ‘People base their morals on films’.
But artfulness and critical acumen aren’t essential qualities in this context. The Rapids’ true value is the part it plays in ‘fighting for [mania’s] legitimacy, in both medical and cultural terms’, since ‘It remains contested ground’. By this measure, the book is a success. I’m far more attuned to the signs, symptoms, and consequences of mania than I was before reading it.
Twyford-Moore asks: ‘Is there any other illness that has as a symptom, “makes you into a raging arsehole”?’ The lines that separate manic behaviour from brattish entitlement, criminality, or abuse aren’t always obvious. People gripped by mania are not fully themselves, yet they are more fully themselves; they are not entirely responsible for their behaviour, yet they are responsible. If we want to approach mania with maturity and compassion, we have to hold these contradictory truths in mind. Twyford-Moore effectively conveys the anguishing social and personal conflicts that mania can provoke, without offering crude solutions. g
Shannon Burns is a freelance writer and a former Australian Book Review Patrons’ Fellow.
‘To belong and also to be free’
An insider–outsider
view
Dorothy Driver
ALWAYS ANOTHER COUNTRY: A MEMOIR OF EXILE AND HOME
by Sisonke Msimang Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781925603798
The name Sisonke Msimang may be familiar because of her reported claim in 2015 that Australia was ‘more racist’ than South Africa was during the apartheid era. What she in fact criticised were Australians’ failure to deal adequately with racial difference. Their recourse, she claimed, is to treat historical and present-day practices and manifestations of racism with ‘fake kindness’ rather than ‘honesty’, promoting a monoculturalism that obliterates, for example, deep-seated differences regarding land ownership and the land.
Australians are, nonetheless, ‘the nicest racists I have ever met’. Msimang should know: she has lived in Western Australia with her Australian husband and their young family for some years, while continuing her career as one of South Africa’s most interesting, wellinformed, and outspoken journalists. She publishes across a wide range of media, including the New York Times, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, Newsweek, and the South African Daily Maverick, and is a contributing editor for the online journal Africa is a Country, which features some of the best writing about Africa and its diaspora.
Msimang’s memoir, Always Another Country, registers her relocation from South Africa to Australia, but its overall coverage is the series of moves she made, mostly with parents and siblings, from Zambia, where she was born, to Kenya, Canada, and the United States, usually on account of her father’s political activity (as a young man he had been recruited to the armed wing of the African National Congress). These countries, she suggests, have their own varieties of racism, but the memoir also traces the stealthy shifts of power via class and gender in their intersections with race.
Three events in particular mark Msimang’s early years, each involving physical violence, with the author placed as victim. Rather than offering a simple story of blame or possible complicity, however, she prefers to consider each event from its other side to offer intimate insight into the complex power differentials at work. Her account of an attempted rape when she was thirteen – marked by terrified assent (‘Is it nice?’; ‘I said yes so that I could live’) – portrays her attacker, the family gardener, as himself a victim, abandoned by Zambia’s ‘stunted revolution’. There is a similar account of the theft of her bicycle by a Luo street child, who is set upon by the lighterskinned Kikuyu. The child is ‘desperate and poor and needlessly malnourished’, affording Msimang a glimpse of Kenya’s dire future.
The third event is different. Arriving just before the start of term at her liberal arts college in Minnesota, Msimang is harassed by a sinister young man who almost succeeds in entering her room (‘I ain’t gonna do a thing, pretty girl’). He mocks her for being ‘uppity’, albeit brown-skinned like him. Some passing college girls help shield her, but the threat will linger: ‘America is just like Kenya which is just like Canada which is just like Zambia which means there is nowhere in the world any of us can go to be safe.’ To be a girl, and black, may mean to be constantly on guard, fists at the ready, as her parents have taught her, but they instilled respectfulness, kindness, and self-inquiry as well. Msimang is a master of nuance and open-endedness: neither rage nor sentimentality can close off this event, and so, alongside the lingering threat, lies the memory of the eighteen-year-old’s
polite apology to a pursuer she already knows will turn nasty: ‘I’m really sorry, I have to go.’
Msimang’s narrative ability – angling stories to provide new perspectives, judgements, and meanings – enlivens the memoir as a whole. Even her arrangement of chapters bears thematic significance. The narrative pacing is by turns brisk or leisurely, and the figurative language, dialogue, and characterisation are superb. Persons familial, befriended, or merely encountered take on the kind of individuality we associate with fiction: her beloved great-aunt Lindiwe Mabuza (well-known to many South Africans as a political and cultural activist and writer); the amusing little sister who matures into Msimang’s wise adviser; the group of friends who chastise a Johannesburg café owner for her unkind treatment of a busking beggar; and the domestic helpers Msimang employs
Msimang prefers to consider each event from its other side to offer intimate insight into the complex power differentials at work
and cares for in her first days of marriage, who react to her as if she were their white ‘madam’. However self-conscious and acerbic her take on black self-righteousness and the contradictions of black class, she by no means blunts her critique of what she repeatedly calls the ‘heart of whiteness’ she confronts in South Africa, entering in the mid-1990s.
Msimang’s South African years are almost forestalled by her meeting, in her final year of college, a young man whose life she shares for a while. He is bipolar, paranoid, and insanely possessive. Although his delusions distress her, Msimang defends him as a product of US culture, but also finds in him a liberating unorthodoxy, for he eschews material possessions and refuses to get a job. It comes as a relief to her family and friends when this man’s strange allure is superseded by the tug of a newly liberated South Africa, and a relief to this reader as well, for the memoir at this point threatens to pall.
After Msimang’s parents return to South Africa, they energetically and optimistically engage in social and political reform. But Msimang’s years there are marked by a bleaker view. For her, the dream of a new South Africa fades, partly through the insidious perpetuation of white economic and social power coupled with white patronisation, partly through misgovernment. Betrayed by the political organisation that had once been a source of stability and honour for her and her extended family in their exile years, she quits the ANC. Her departure commences, she says, ‘when I pick up my pen’. In the act of writing she finds a new belonging, but it is necessarily coloured by distance and departure. ‘Home’, she writes, ‘will always be another country.’ Msimang’s life now involves shuttling between Australia and South Africa.
From her insider–outsider perspective, Msimang also gives an engaging and enlightening account of the years since 1994. Her memoir thus stands as a pinnacle in the newly burgeoning field of black South African feminist writing. Marked by self-assertion, selfreflection, and wit, along with a strong critique of the white economic stranglehold and what Msimang calls ‘white saviour sanctimony’, this feminist writing generally – and Msimang’s memoir particularly – may help repair the fabric of a society profoundly damaged by colonisation and apartheid. Msimang fears the neoliberal greed of the ‘new and arrogant black’. But this is just one possible outcome her lively memoir invites us to imagine. g
Traumarchy
Ceridwen Spark TRAUMATA
by Meera Atkinson
University of Queensland Press
$29.95 pb, 285 pp, 9780702259890
At first glance, Traumata seems to provide an exception to the rule not to judge a book by its cover. Featuring photos of the author’s mother, a woman in her forties, alongside photos of the young Atkinson on the precipice of adolescence, the cover portrays the filial relationship that is central in this memoir. But Atkinson’s exploration is much more kaleidoscopic than the cover suggests. While the familial bonds and betrayal hinted at in these pictures are evident in the book, the author is chiefly concerned with what lies outside the frame: namely, the social forces that shape our selves and our intimate relationships.
The force that Atkinson identifies and seeks to trace is ‘patriarchy, with its endemic traumata’. While acknowledging that patriarchy ‘seems like an old-fashioned word’, Atkinson explains that she uses it because ‘there is no other word that gets at it’. Early on in the book, she declares her case, specifically why, in writing about patriarchy, she is focused first and foremost on her own experiences:
this is a book about patriarchy and its endemic traumata … I’m going to make the case that patriarchy is inherently traumatic, and that we might coin a new word – traumarchy – to denote the
intersection of the two. Why, then, am I talking, in the next breath, of myself, my life? I have to speak from the inside out because patriarchy isn’t ‘out there’.
Traumata is an ambitious project. It covers much ground, including the author’s mother’s ‘addiction’ to destructive men, a close-up examination of the institutionalised bullying that manifests at school, and the meaning of female ‘beauty’ and its relation to patriarchy and trauma. It is honest, sometimes brutally so. Little escapes scrutiny: her mother’s ‘boob job’, done at the behest of her boorish partner, and Atkinson’s own sexual adventures and misadventures, are all described and analysed. While never easy reading, the book is provocative and poetic.
It is also courageous, for Atkinson surely endures the barrage of misogyny directed at women writers that seems now to be a norm. Perhaps it helps that she, unlike others with whom she is in conversation, including Clementine Ford and Amy Gray, would interpret such hatred as symptomatic of ‘traumarchy’. Because of the experiences she discusses – sexual abuse, addiction, living with violence – Atkinson makes a compelling case that trauma is everywhere. She writes, for instance, that ‘[n]ot all unfortunate events or even extreme sufferings are traumatic, but many are’, that ‘shit going down’ is ‘chronic’ and ‘common-place’, and that ‘no one gets out alive’.
With the exception of the chapter on friendship and the surprisingly more hopeful conclusion, the book is a palimpsest of suffering and survival. Atkinson stitches disparate moments together to demonstrate that she has been wounded. Declaring, ‘I’m writing through stigmata, but I don’t mean to suggest I’m a martyr’, she uses a matterof-fact tone to describe being raped as a young woman, ‘fingered’ by her stepfather as a child, and her less clear recollections of interactions with the old man next door whom her mother says sexually assaulted Meera. We learn of other violations too: her mother’s betrayal of her to the violent stepfather with whom she was enthralled; her ‘pretty’ grandmother’s barbs about her
Dorothy Driver is Professor of English at the University of Adelaide
weight, and her father’s absence, actual and emotional, from her life. While women are shown to perpetuate the wounds of patriarchy, they are also its victims, as Atkinson argues, are we all.
As a result of her openness, we learn much about Atkinson, and the shaky existence that is the lot of those who bear the wounds of what she refers to as complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). Characterised by lingering fears and uncertainty that can rear up at any time and that underpin beliefs such as ‘The World Is Not Safe And You Will Be Annihilated Any Minute Now’, CPTSD is not yet recognised in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Described by Judith Lewis Herman as occurring in patients exposed to ‘prolonged repeated trauma’, it is a label Atkinson uses to describe her own condition.
It is difficult to question either the logic of Atkinson’s argument, namely that patriarchy is the ‘big rape’ that damages and diminishes us all, or her own claim of having been damaged by it. Her case is further strengthened by her intellectual and literary chops. As well as being a creative writer, Atkinson is also an academic at Sydney University. Drawing throughout on neuroscience, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis to make her case, she enters ‘a tryst with the works of bygone philosophers’, including Nietzsche and Spinoza, to seek an answer to the question at the heart of the book: if traumata is so pervasive, what, if anything, can stand against it?
For some, her answer, that she weathers it, ‘in the rooms of therapists, in the community halls of support groups … on the phone to friends … patting a cat’ may be enough. For others, possibly those who have ‘endured a [less] privileged kind of traumata’ than that belonging to ‘white western womanhood’, it may not be. Either way, it is good that Traumata acknowledges that patriarchy wounds some more than others. Had it not done so, it would have succeeded as a memoir, but is unlikely to have been convincing as social analysis. g
Ceridwen Spark
is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.
‘The returns of history’
A tale
of the real and the imagined Israel
Mark Baker
IN SEARCH OF ISRAEL: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA
by Michael Brenner
Princeton University Press (Footprint), $49.99 hb, 392 pp, 9780691179285
While there have been many histories of Israel written over the decades, Arthur Hertzberg’s The Zionist Idea, published in 1959, remains a classic guide to the intellectual underpinnings of Zionism. It is now joined almost sixty years later by Michael Brenner’s excellent book, In Search of Israel: The history of an idea. Inspired by the seventieth anniversary of Israel’s establishment, the passage of time has allowed Brenner to do something different from Hertzberg in his retelling of the Zionist idea. He has written a book that uses the founding voices of Zionism to test whether their vision has been fulfilled. In this sense, In Search of Israel is a retrospective overview of Israel’s history, a kind of parlour game in which the reader gets to ask if so-and-so came back to life, would they recognise the state in its contemporary incarnation. This method of mixing vision with current reality can also be read as a counterfactual history, opening up questions about the paths not taken, or the options available in the Zionist armoury beyond military occupation. As Brenner writes of his project: ‘It is the story of the real and the imagined Israel, of Israel as a state and as an idea.’
For Brenner, the central axis around which the themes of his book are organised is the tension between Jewish exceptionalism and universality, uniqueness and ‘normalisation’, or, in its biblical expression, the aspiration to be ‘a nation like all other nations’ versus ‘a light unto the nations’. While Theodor Herzl might have balked at these religious ideas as the basis for his nationalist vision, Brenner argues that Zionism could never escape its prophetic vocabulary, even in its secularised form, suppressing what Herzl’s neighbour on Berggasse in Vienna,
Sigmund Freud, might have called ‘the returns of history’. Brenner writes how this tension winds itself as a thread through debates that continue to inform social and political fissures in Israel today.
In an era when Israel’s long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, insists on Palestinian recognition of the Jewishness of the state, readers of Brenner might be surprised to learn how contentious the concepts of Jewishness and statehood were in the writings of Zionism’s early progenitors. Herzl, for example, moved from his messianic dream of leading Jews to the baptismal font at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna to the idea of a ‘Judenstaat’. It is a word that is variously translated as a Jewish State or a State for Jews. The difference between the two is more than semantic hair-splitting. Brenner illustrates that there was very little that was Jewish about Herzl’s vision for an Altneuland – ‘Old-New Land’: the lingua franca for Jews would be German; the state would be named the Seven-Hour-Land for its innovative workday; Arabs would be given equal rights and could be elected as leaders. As Brenner quotes Herzl: ‘Let me tell you that neither I nor my friends make the least distinction between one man and another. We don’t ask about anyone’s race or religion. It is enough for us that he is human.’ As for Jews who remained in the Diaspora, they would evaporate through a process of radical assimilation.
Brenner also relays that when Herzl gathered followers to the first Zionist Congress to lay out his cards in a casino in Basel, other ideologies were competing for attention to solve the growing plight of Jews born of poverty and pogroms. The Bund rebirthed Yiddish from a vernacular to a literary language
that would mobilise the masses in a socialist movement that gave expression to Jewish national autonomy, or what the historian Simon Dubnow called Diaspora Nationalism. Simultaneously, a Territorialist movement grew under the aegis of the English writer and politician Israel Zangwill to establish a homeland for Jews in other territories, be it Argentina, South Rhodesia, South Africa, and, later, the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and Tasmania. While most Jews simply sought an escape route to the New World, Brenner argues that all these ideologies shared a secular conception of the Jews as a nation, a product of both the rise of nationalist autonomies granted to ethnic groups in the crumbling empires of fin-de-siècle Europe, and, after World War I, of the new nation-states and Minority Treaties forged to protect national groups. Even Herzl contemplated his Judenstaat being located in Argentina, and later in Uganda, but these notions were rejected by East European Zionists led by Ahad Ha’am, who aspired for an entity that would be a spiritual centre for a Jewish renaissance of language and secular culture – an antidote to assimilation – one that would also nurture the Diaspora rather than extinguish it.
On the question of sovereignty, Brenner reminds us that the idea of partitioning Palestine to make way for two states was only articulated during the Holocaust. Until then, Zionists limited their aspirations to arrangements other than full sovereignty: a national homeland (the language of the Balfour Declaration of 1917), an ‘association of citizens’, or a Society of Jews that would transcend statehood, a loose federal structure composed of cantons or districts, or a protectorate under the British commonwealth. A group of intellectuals that included Martin Buber argued on principle for a binational state, while even the founding ideologue of the Revisionist Likud Party, Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky, initially proposed ‘a loose federal state rather than a full-fledged nation-state’ in which Jews and Arabs would hold equal civil rights.
The homeland for Jews only found its name in 1948 at the last moment
after David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of statehood following the UN partition plan: the State of Israel. In telling us this, Brenner makes an important contribution that compels us to reflect on other roads that might have been taken. Instead, the forces of history followed the logic of choices made, steered also by serendipity and chance, to unleash the suppressed biblical roots of the Old state buried in the New one, leading after 1967 to an occupation that has not ended. As an historian of the Zionist idea, Brenner has no obligation to present Palestinian voices and the impact of the occupation on their lives. He might have chosen Hertzberg’s path sixty years earlier to focus on the Zionist idea as an abstraction and to ignore the contemporary realities of each of their times. Yet Brenner has committed himself, and the reader, to a history that
measures the present through the lens of the past. While his book succeeds in its search for the idea of Israel, it falls short of drawing serious attention to the failings of its founders. Hertzberg chose to write about his disillusionment after the publication of his book, and for that he was excoriated by the American Jewish establishment. Brenner’s innovative book, which endeavours to present an idea and critique its actualisation, will face no such criticism, for its neutrality positions it as part of a landmark birthday celebration. g
Mark Baker is the author of two memoirs, The Fiftieth Gate (1997) and Thirty Days (2017). He is Associate Professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation in the School of Philosophy, History, and International Studies at Monash University. ❖
break
a spirit into splinters or a night into day the quavers levitating just the same see a kind of orangeness tinge the wrenched event & head falls & sun caws & moon forgets her name a muteness
is the music played for spills of vital force taciturn the violin still the metronome the birds are always first to know a murmuration leaves then the dogs who sniff the wind & go & when you wake
to world again you have no industry but this wretchedness conducting nerve to ground & it bothers you & bothers you as though it were a thorn another dawn upon December broken & profound
Jordie Albiston
Jordie Albiston’s new collection, Warlines, is published by Hybrid Publishers.
Parties and movements
An ambiguous analysis of progressive populism
Matteo Bonotti
POPULISM NOW!
THE CASE FOR PROGRESSIVE POPULISM
David McKnight
NewSouth, $29.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781742235639
Over the past few years, no term has been more ubiquitous, among political scientists and political commentators alike, than ‘populism’. The 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, Donald Trump’s election later that year, and, more recently, the formation of a government mostly supported by two populist parties (the Movimento Cinque Stelle/Five Star Movement and the Lega/League) in Italy, are only some examples of what many observers consider a global populist wave. Most of the growing debate on populism, however, has focused on right-wing populism, due to the ideological underpinnings of the majority of populist movements and actors emerging in Europe and North America as part of this global wave. Yet populism is not inherently associated with right-wing ideological positions. It is, itself, an ideology, but one that is sufficiently broad, or ‘thin-centred’ (Cas Mudde), to be combined with thicker ideological positions, both on the right and left of the political spectrum.
David McKnight’s Populism Now! The case for progressive populism has the merit of reminding us of this ‘thinness’, arguing that while right-wing populism might be the main political symptom of the numerous injustices nowadays afflicting Western, liberal democracies, including Australia, leftwing populism can be their cure. In defending his argument, McKnight also cites recent examples of successful left-wing populist parties in Western Europe, such as Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza. (Surprisingly, he does not mention prominent left-wing populist politicians such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez or Bolivia’s Evo Morales, key
representatives of the so-called ‘third wave’ of Latin American populism.)
What are the injustices that, according to McKnight, progressive populism could help to counter? Through a detailed and well-documented analysis, McKnight shows how over the past few decades in Australia, socio-economic inequality has deepened; climate change has been pushed to the margins of the political agenda due to the presence of an increasingly powerful fossil fuel élite; privatisation has enriched inefficient private businesses at the expense of ordinary citizens; jobs have become
McKnight shows how over the past few decades in Australia, socio-economic inequality has deepened
more precarious; tax evasion among the super-rich has become widespread; and, finally, predatory banking has almost entirely replaced the traditional role of banks, i.e. that of being at the service of individuals and businesses within the community. The common thread running through all these injustices is, according to McKnight, easy to identify: the interests of the élite, or more precisely of the ‘corporate and political elite’, have become the driving force of political decision-making in Australia, whereas those of the common people have been almost entirely neglected. Progressive populism, McKnight argues, would provide a solution to this state of affairs by driving mass mobilisation against the dominance of neo-liberal élites, and leading to policy reforms aimed at countering the aforementioned injustices.
While McKnight’s argument is, at
first sight, appealing, one puzzling problem seems to run throughout his book: the absence (or near absence) of political parties. The aforementioned Podemos and Syriza, which McKnight enthusiastically cites, are political parties. And yet when it comes to proposing strategies for progressive populist social mobilisation in Australia, parties are strangely absent from McKnight’s account. Indeed, he explicitly states that ‘[c]ontemporary governments and the political parties which form them are not designed to act in the long term’, and that progressive populism ‘[does not] require the formation of a new political party’. Instead, McKnight’s emphasis is on the need for ‘a powerful social movement’, or ‘a broad, united front for social change’.
This is problematic. Much has been written in recent years regarding the crisis of political parties in the Western world, manifested, for example, in parties’ increased inability to provide a linkage between ordinary citizens and the state, and to offer sufficiently diverse political platforms. Yet parties remain the key political players in liberal democracies, and, if suitably reformed (e.g. through various mechanisms of intraparty democracy), they could help fulfil two of the key tasks that McKnight considers necessary for countering the injustices fuelled by neo-liberal élites.
First, political parties can put forward political programs that reflect the common good rather than factional interests. They are encouraged to do so by the need to appeal to, and combine the interests of, different sectors of society, a point repeatedly stressed by those contemporary political theorists and political scientists who have rediscov-
ered the historical roots of parties and partisanship in recent times. However, while placing ‘the philosophy of the common good’ at the centre of his progressive populist agenda, McKnight entrusts its realisation not to parties but to a not well defined social movement. Yet social movements rarely aim to advance the common good of an entire society. Instead, as prominent scholars of populism Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser have argued, they tend to advance the interests of specific social groups, such as pensioners, workers, or students. Second, unlike most political parties, social movements are often short-lived, as the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement shows. This makes it difficult for them to advance long-term goals, such as the fight against climate change or the demanding socioeconomic reforms invoked by McKnight. Parties’ organisational structures, often built and consolidated over many decades, offer more credible channels for advancing the kind of changes invoked by McKnight, especially if suitably reformed and democratised.
But it is not only McKnight’s emphasis on social movements that signals a tension amid the advancement of the common good. It is the very essence of progressive populism that, behind its apparent ‘common good’ façade, conceals a sectarian dimension. McKnight does not particularly conceal this aspect, as he explicitly states that ‘progressive populism puts the interests of ordinary people first, beginning with their economic interests’. This is not the same as defending the ‘common good’, which would require explanation as to how the reforms invoked by McKnight would benefit both ordinary people and those who are currently members of the élite, or, to quote Jan-Werner Müller, devising ‘an approach that seeks to bring in those currently excluded … while also keeping the very wealthy and powerful from opting out of the system’. Parties are better equipped at this task than social movements.
A further aspect of McKnight’s analysis is ambiguous. While arguing that, unlike right-wing populism, ‘[p]rogressive populism refuses to define standards of citizenship in racial, ethnic
or religious terms’, he also claims that ‘[g]overnments should give their first allegiance to local residents’, and therefore should be entitled to establish immigration schemes accordingly. On what grounds does McKnight reach this conclusion? How would he respond to those political theorists who have defended a human right to immigrate and therefore rejected the very idea of immigration schemes based on a state’s right to exclude foreigners? Unfortunately, McKnight’s book does not provide an answer to these crucial questions. This
ambiguity, together with McKnight’s neglect of political parties, suggests that the diagnosis offered by Populism Now! may well be persuasive, but its prescription is unsatisfactory and raises more questions than it answers. g
Matteo Bonotti is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, School of Social Sciences, at Monash University. His monograph Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. ❖
‘The tracks were buckled and warped’
Changing attitudes to martially denuded POWs
Carolyn Holbrook
THE BATTLE WITHIN: POWS IN POSTWAR AUSTRALIA by Christina Twomey NewSouth, $39.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781742235684
The director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, recently announced plans for a $500 million underground expansion of the memorial. In justifying the expenditure, Nelson claimed that commemoration is an ‘extremely important part of the therapeutic milieu’ for returning soldiers: ‘I’ve particularly learned from the Vietnam experience it is important to tell the stories and tell them now. We tell them broadly and deeply and we don’t wait a decade.’
Christina Twomey’s new book, The Battle Within, traces the experiences of a group of returning soldiers who had to wait a lot longer than a decade to have their stories told. It was not until the 1980s that prisoners of the Japanese during World War II were invited into the temple of Anzac. Twomey uses the metaphor of the Thai–Burma Railway, which she first saw as a twelve-year-old in 1980 and revisited in 2012, to describe
their passage from exile to the increasingly elaborate centre of Anzac commemoration:
It is tempting to see the current veneration of POWs as running along clear rails, from the past to the present. This book suggests that the sidings were many, that the tracks were buckled and warped, and that the burden of this difficult journey fell most heavily on the people with the least social, cultural and economic resources to carry it.
The Battle Within is both an eloquently written, page-turning story about suffering and survival, and a compelling analysis of the changing nature of Australian society in the decades after World War II. In tracing the plight of the returned POWs, Twomey also documents the transformation of the Anzac legend, from a mythology grounded in an ideal of masculinity that prized
military prowess and stoicism, to one that allowed for emotional vulnerability and physical frailty. The Battle Within shows how this transformation was made possible by the embrace of ‘trauma culture’ from the 1980s.
More than 30,000 Australians were imprisoned during World War II; nearly three-quarters of those by the Japanese. The death rate among prisoners of Germany and Italy was three per cent. It was thirty-six per cent among those captured by the Japanese; a rate second only to those in Bomber Command who flew air raids over Europe. Whatever joy the emaciated, diseased prisoners of Japan felt upon liberation was soon tempered by their reception in Australia
Derision of POWs trickled down from the top of the army and the repatriation bureaucracy into the community at large. The head of the army, Thomas Blamey, wrote to his minister, Frank Forde, that ‘surrender … in preference to death is dishonourable’. Thus, any tendency to ‘extol’ the prisoners ‘or give them privileges greater than soldiers who have not surrendered’ must be resisted, lest their behaviour be seen to be condoned. The Repatriation Department was adamant that POWs not receive special treatment for the same reason. Its policy of ‘complete avoidance of any publicity concerning them’ only compounded the resentment and isolation of the former POWs.
Messages about failed masculinity were reinforced by the leaders of the returned POW community, men whose class and rank marked them apart from the bulk of the returned prisoners. Ted Fisher and Albert Coates, both of whom served as doctors in the camps, would not countenance the existence of ‘barbed wire disease’ – the notion that captivity and mistreatment might cause specific forms of psychological illness.
Fisher was particularly adamant. He had no truck with ‘sob stuff’, and insisted that the majority of neurosis cases could be explained by gastrointestinal infection. Fisher was cross about the fact that some men suffering from anxiety ‘got to the psychiatrist before stool examination had been reported’.
The POWs themselves were deeply ambivalent about an experience that confounded entrenched principles of gender behaviour. How could they reconcile their nightmares, impotence, and social anxiety with cultural mores that told them their suffering was the result of inherent flaws and moral weakness? Self-hatred and shame sat alongside anger and bitterness about their rejection by the military establishment.
The voices of these ordinary men come to us through the records of the Prisoners of War Trust Fund. The organisation was set up by the Menzies government after the veterans’ campaign for subsistence pay compensation was rejected by an independent panel. It is through their poignant and sometimes desperate appeals for financial assistance that we learn about the difficulties many returned prisoners faced in maintaining intimate relationships, steady employment, and peace of mind.
By the 1980s, large-scale studies of the health of returned POWs began to show what had long been understood by those who were prepared to listen. Former POWs suffered from psychiatric disorders, most commonly anxiety and depression, at nearly twice the rate of other ex-service personnel. The newfound ability of military and bureaucratic institutions to acknowledge the psychological suffering of POWs can be attributed to a change in the Zeitgeist. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was listed in the 1980 edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Crucially, PTSD was triggered by external trauma rather than the innate fragility of those who suffered.
Anzac Legend 1.0, with its emphasis on Australians’ martial prowess, had no place for the martially denuded prisoners of war. Increasingly, the imperial and racial connotations of the traditional Anzac myth were spurned by a society that was shedding its British identity and navigating economically towards Asia. It was only after Anzac divested itself of its imperial, martial, and racial connotations and re-emerged in the 1980s as a mythology of mateship, sacrifice, and suffering, that it could be begin its extraordinary revival. A notable new feature of Anzac 2.0 was the prisoner of war experience, with Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, a former medical officer on the Thai–Burma Railway and campaigner for POW rights, as the POW poster boy.
In 2015, Christina Twomey gave a talk about the struggle POWs faced to have their plight recognised at a conference that included contemporary veterans and mental health practitioners. After she finished her talk, a veteran of Somalia and East Timor turned to Twomey and said: ‘Nothing’s really changed.’ Twomey’s book documents the failure of the state and society more generally to look after the POWs of World War II. Furthermore, it suggests that the $500 million Brendan Nelson wants to spend on displaying Chinook helicopters and F/A-18 Hornets in the Australian War Memorial would be better directed to support services that help contemporary veterans as they fight the battle within. g
Carolyn Holbrook is an Alfred Deakin Research Fellow at Deakin University. She is the author of Anzac: The unauthorised biography (NewSouth, 2014).
WRITTEN WORD
‘By night and by day’
Geoffrey Blainey
POMPEY
ELLIOTT AT WAR: IN HIS OWN WORDS by
Ross McMullin Scribe
$59.99 hb, 544 pp, 9781925322415
General ‘Pompey’ Elliott was a famous Australian in 1918, half forgotten seventy years later, and is now a national military hero. This Anzac Day he stood high. On French soil he was praised by France’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, in one of the most mesmerising and sensitive speeches ever offered by a European leader to Australian ears. Probably Elliott now stands just below General Sir John Monash in the honour roll of Australia’s military leaders, though we cannot foretell whether Pompey’s status – he was a cult figure in his day – will persist.
Son of a battling farmer, Pompey interrupted a distinguished law course at Melbourne University in order to fight as a trooper in the Boer War. As a citizen soldier, he became a high-ranking officer in World War I. He kept a vivid diary and wrote numerous letters to his wife and two children; this large book is a selection of his wartime writings.
On 25 April 1915 he was rowed ashore at Gallipoli, where the narrow
beach and the white cliffs reminded him of ‘Sandringham at home’. Shot in the ankle on the first day, he was shipped to Egypt, all the time deploring the scarcity of doctors. Returning to the war zone, he was quick to praise his Australian soldiers. To his wife, Kate, he wrote: ‘Fancy seeing a man you knew blinded and with both hands blown off trying to get up on his feet.’ In the intense fighting at Lone Pine in August 1915, four of the seven Australian VCs were won by soldiers in his battalion.
Reaching the French frontline almost a year later, Elliott saw the huge opposing armies unable to break a long stalemate caused by the deadliness of their own artillery and machine guns. Those weapons were so lethal that it was almost impossible for troops to advance the short distance between their own trenches and the enemy’s. Privately he confided that the sound of the big guns ‘is continuous by night and by day’. Resembling ‘the roar of the seas in a storm breaking on a rocky coast’, the din was so overpowering that the ‘drums of one’s ears seem to be continually vibrating to the quiver of the air’. His wife must have been worried by his casual message that fellow officers in the trenches ‘take no more notice of the bursting shells than one does in Melbourne of the passing tram bells’.
Elliott is often observant, like his skilled biographer Ross McMullin. There is a touch of the romantic in some of his letters, written when his soldiers were camped somewhere behind the main fighting zone: ‘it was a wonderful sight last night to see the camp fires of this vast army blazing east and west and north and south like the lights of some huge city, whilst on three sides the glares from the guns lit up the sky like gleams from distant lightning’. To Jane he described the tents capping the ups and downs of the landscape like ‘the pictures of old digging days of Ballarat and Bendigo’.
As winter approached, his diary recorded rain and mud: ‘My poor boys had a terrible time in the trenches. For the 3 days and 2 nights they were there they had practically no sleep or rest, for the trenches were two or three feet deep in water.’ In December the severe frost froze the toes of many of his soldiers
who, standing up, tried to sleep by leaning against the firm sides of the trenches.
Elliott relished his letters from home, though they could be two months old when they arrived. Even on the narrow battle zone, the news travelled slowly. After his wife’s brother, not far away, was killed by a sniper’s bullet, the news did not reach Pompey for almost three weeks: ‘It is with a sad heart that I write to you again, my poor darling wife.’ Constant is his concern for his own soldiers and their health, their
Elliott now stands just below General Sir John Monash in the honour roll of Australia’s military leaders
wounds. On the other hand, he despises some Australian soldiers: ‘there are cowards, curs and shirkers who clear out and leave their mates in the lurch’. He would like to shoot them but under ‘the Commonwealth law we cannot touch them’. He is quietly pleased when his own soldiers visit farms a few miles from the trenches and help the French women by digging potatoes. Disliking German soldiers, he usually called them ‘The Bosche’, a sneering slang phrase. He feels sure that if Germany wins the war it will regulate Australia, intervening harshly if necessary. I have the impression that today we cannot conceive how a German victory might have affected Australia.
The war over, Elliott stood for the Senate, topping the Victorian poll in the federal election of 1919. He continued to practise as a solicitor, but began to suffer from war-induced stress. In 1931, attacking his left elbow with a razor, he committed suicide.
He received one slice of luck long after he was dead. He was found and brought back to life by an impressive historian. g
Geoffrey Blainey wrote about World War I in his book, The Causes of War First published in 1973, its latest edition is a Brazilian translation.
Tsunami
Robert Reynolds
TELL ME I’M OKAY: A DOCTOR’S STORY
by
David Bradford
Monash University Publishing $29.95 pb, 226 pp, 9781925523348
Midway through this account of his life as a gay doctor who specialises in sexually transmitted infections, David Bradford diagnoses his first case of AIDS. It is February 1985 and Bradford is the director of the Melbourne Communicable Diseases Centre (MCDC) and the chief venereologist of Victoria. His patient James is a working-class MalteseAustralian man in his late twenties whom Bradford had met while conducting a clinic testing for syphilis at a gay sauna. James, a good-looking and popular patron, presents with troubling symptoms: black spots on his skin; swollen glands; weight loss. He is terrified. Bradford gently breaks the probable diagnosis of AIDS. ‘James looked like a scared school boy.’ He departs with a referral to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital and Bradford’s home phone number. Bradford watches him leave and then takes a moment to collect himself. ‘I trembled for the future. Was James the first of many? Was my practice now to become an endless succession of gay men turning up with AIDS … Was my lot going to be to provide a medical service for my patients as they gradually became weaker, and eventually died because their immune systems had shut down completely? What a grim outlook I was facing.’
This book is a personal, and personable, history of one doctor’s career in the HIV and STI sectors of the Australian medical profession. As an autobiography, it is primarily structured around Bradford’s homosexuality and the Australian AIDS epidemic. This is not surprising, for both sexual identity and AIDS tend to define Bradford’s generation of Anglo-Australian gay men. Bradford was born in 1941 and grew up in a deeply religious Baptist
family in Sydney. His youth and early adulthood were marked by his conflicted and lonely struggles with his homosexual desires. He studied medicine at his parents’ behest and joined the army in the 1960s as a medico to be in tantalising but chaste proximity to men. Stationed in Vietnam during the war, he quietly appreciates the surfeit of handsome, well-built young men, and takes particular delight in the gunners who lay naked in the sunshine next to their armaments. The war provides Bradford with a heavy caseload of servicemen suffering venereal diseases, and he becomes fascinated with venereology and empathetic to the shame the diseases produce in his patients. In 1969, Bradford travels to London for further medical training and loses his virginity half a world away from home. Falling in love with his life partner in the 1970s, Bradford comes out to his parents and must navigate a resulting mist of parental disappointment that never lifts. By the early 1980s, now living in Melbourne, Bradford is contentedly partnered, happy professionally, and making new friends in Melbourne’s gay community.
It is not uncommon for those memorialising the impact of the AIDS epidemic on gay communities during the 1980s and 1990s to invoke comparisons with natural disasters and war. As Bradford recalls, for well over a decade he and his patients were ‘battered by the AIDS tsunami’. Waiting in Melbourne for the epidemic to arrive from the more populous gay metropoles of New York, San Francisco, and Sydney was ‘like living though the early days of World War II in Britain – the so called “phoney war”’. There was nothing phoney about the epidemic when it did encircle Melbourne’s gay community. Bradford’s fears about the future – which he had tried to quieten by faith in medical science – were soon realised. The number of unwell and frightened gay men trooping through his office quickened. Informing patients they had AIDS or were HIV positive ‘never got any easier’. How could it when, during that first decade of the epidemic, an AIDS diagnosis usually presaged a cycle of opportunistic infections before death? Bradford gives us
an intimate account of what it was like to tend to patients – mostly gay men, but later increasing numbers of women and heterosexual men – as they came to terms, or not, with their diagnosis, fell ill, and died. Over a series of chapters, Bradford breaks the epidemic down into different historical stages: the wave on the horizon before the tsunami hit; the first diagnoses; debates over whether to test for HIV or not; the panic and fearmongering over infected blood supplies; the emotionally taxing years tending the dying at Fairfield Hospital; and the advent of new treatments in the mid-1990s that reshaped the Australian epidemic. In each of these chapters, Bradford introduces individual patients whose stories capture something larger about the epidemic.
To describe these stories as clinical case studies would be to do a disservice to Bradford and his patients. There are some achingly sad stories in this book. James dies in 1987, a few months short of his thirtieth birthday. Trevor is turned away at a hospital and denied emergency surgery for appendicitis because he has AIDS; he never fully recovers from the delay in hospital admission. Martin, having moved to Melbourne to become a hairdresser and live a gay life, returns to his parents for his final months of life, barely in his twenties. ‘That’s the place for me now,’ he tells Bradford at their last consultation. The constant in these tragic stories is Bradford’s gentle, empathic ministering of care. It is the good doctor himself who offers his patients – and his readers – comfort in grim times. g
Robert Reynolds co-authored (with Shirleene Robinson) Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian stories from a social revolution (2016).
Creation
Robyn Williams
CONJURING THE UNIVERSE: THE ORIGINS OF THE LAWS OF NATURE
by Peter Atkins
Oxford University Press
$29.95 pb, 208 pp, 9780198813378
Peter Atkins writes a sentence at the beginning of this bewildering book that seems both preposterous and cheeky: ‘I would like to assert that not much happened at the Creation.’ And then: ‘I would like to replace the “not much” by “absolutely nothing”.’ How can any leading scientist, and Atkins is certainly that, claim that the very beginning of the universe and everything could have been just a bit of a doddle? All that Big Bang and stupendous expansion, all that evolution in microseconds, from nothing to lumpy gas and, eventually stars and galaxies ,was ‘not much’?
As for cheeky: Atkins gives Creation a capital C as the first example of the Atkins tongue in cheek. He teases those of us who know that he is a renowned atheist, more assertive even than his friend Richard Dawkins about God’s absence from The Creation. So, he sets up the big C to demolish it.
What about Nothing? Yes, I put another capital there, as does Atkins, because there are different sorts of nothing. This is not a piece of intellectual capriciousness: entire books have been written about Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss, Frank Close, and others. Atkins introduces us to Emmy Noether, a German mathematician who fled the Nazis to do her calculations in the serenity of Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She has been described as the ‘greatest woman mathematician who ever lived’, and was known to Einstein. Her work showed that the Nothing that preceded the universe, if I may say such a thing, was symmetrical. Such symmetry (trust me) is conserved – it is maintained as a key, a vital characteristic of the Something called the universe that comes after Nothing and provides the laws that
emerge from the way its constituents behave. (How Nothing can have properties is another trick from this conjurer – but he’s in good company.)
All this, as I indicated, is bewildering. It helps if you know some physics and, especially, quantum mechanics. So why should the ordinary reader want to bother? There are two good reasons.
First, Atkins writes in a charming, even chummy way. He understands our confusion and leads us onwards with the promise of great insights: how the very laws of physics came to be. Secondly, he takes us down among the electrons, photons, waves, and warps and shows how their ‘anarchy’ gives us physics. He offers little thought experiments to illuminate what’s going on. And he uses demotic language to play with the concepts: there are in-laws and outlaws, particles are indolent, and there is always anarchy.
Instead of a world where physical phenomena follow strict rules established by Something Up Somewhere, he shows us light and particles zotting off in all directions and being curtailed by one another to give order out of potential chaos. Along the way we meet Boyle, Charles, Hooke, Boltzmann, Maxwell, Planck, and other geniuses who reveal the next stages of the cosmological adventure. There are a couple of equations in the body of the text, but all the hard stuff, should you want to follow it up, is in the notes at the end.
You read Atkins not only for his ‘powerful mastery of the English language’ and his ‘chiselled prose’, as Richard Dawkins has it, but because of who he is, a publishing superstar.
I met him a few years ago after chatting with Dawkins about God. This was before Dawkins had written The God Delusion (2006), and we were arguing about the need for decorum in the debate, about being nice to the religious. Dawkins then said I must meet Peter Atkins at Lincoln College, he who takes no godly prisoners. Shortly afterwards, there I was at the Senior Common Room in Lincoln. I was looking at the famous professor of chemistry who has sold so many textbooks he is said to have bought himself a green Rolls Royce on the proceeds. As it happened, Atkins
had just separated from his second wife, the equally renowned brain scientist, Susan Greenfield, whom I know well. The discussion ranged around marital breakdown instead of God’s nonexistence, but was intriguing nonetheless.
I had always assumed that Atkins, like Dawkins, had risen to Oxford through the predictable shining paths of smart schooling and patent talents, and was surprised to find that he had left school at fifteen and managed to gain an academic start only by good luck and a last-minute place at the University of Leicester. So, the picture of the lifelong Oxford don, however true, is deceptive. Along the way, his
Atkins leads us onwards with the promise of great insights
reading has been deep and far-ranging. Conjuring the Universe is a clear example of his extraordinary erudition and flair. But who is this book for? You have to know, as I indicated, the basics of physics, otherwise you’ll be googling every concept. You have to know that photons and electrons can be both particles and waves, and cannot be placed exactly anywhere but only given a probability of locus. Then you must have a working knowledge of entropy, energy, electricity, ennui – no, I jest –though the author insists that plenty of all he describes is more prosaic than it is magical.
Atkins succeeds in half of his magnificent ambition. He does make clear the laws of physics and their origins in the same way a mathematician explains how flights of birds or shoals of fish go off in one direction without having a leader (each co-ordinates with its neighbour). The half in which he fails is in showing that The Big Bang was but a whimper, so that you don’t need a Deity. You see, all the believer then has to say is the usual ‘Fine! That’s the way God chose to do it.’ You can’t win, even as a conjurer. g
Robyn Williams has presented The Science Show on ABC Radio National since 1975.
Curiouser and curiouser
Andrea Goldsmith
ELEMENTS OF SURPRISE: OUR MENTAL LIMITS AND THE SATISFACTIONS OF PLOT by Vera Tobin
Harvard University Press (Footprint) $66 hb, 332 pp, 9780674980204
On the dust jacket of Elements of Surprise is the well-known picture by John Tenniel, illustrator of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), depicting Alice gazing up at the grinning Cheshire Cat perched on a branch of a tree. I felt very much like Alice while reading Vera Tobin’s book, as if I had fallen into a world in which the rules, concepts, and vocabulary were completely alien to my own.
In her analysis of surprise in plot, Tobin, a cognitive scientist at Case Western Reserve University in the United States, is primarily interested in two issues: how it can happen that in book after book, readers can be surprised, even though the same plot tricks are used over and over again; and secondly, how readers can believe one thing through several chapters, then, when a surprise is revealed, easily switch to another view without condemning the whole novel as incoherent. These are questions that no fiction writer would ask; rather, we assume that such reader responses will occur if we writers do our job properly, if we create coherent narratives fuelled by secrets and mysteries, desires and ambitions, all carried by fleshed-out, credible characters.
Tobin does not totally ignore authorial techniques; she makes reference, for example, to the use of unreliable narrators and differing character points of view. But her emphasis throughout is that of the cognitive scientist, drawing on a wealth of experimental data stretching back to the 1980s. And while her main focus is on plot in novels (Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations are two examples) she also addresses surprise
in films such as The Sixth Sense. The primary concept Tobin draws on in her analysis of why people can be surprised when they read novels (or watch films) is ‘the curse of knowledge’. This refers to the common assumption that others will have the same knowledge and understanding as we do ourselves. The curse of knowledge leads to unconscious bias. After all, ‘the more information we have about something and the more experience we have with it, the harder it is to step outside that experience to appreciate the full implications of not having that privileged information’. By drawing on the curse of knowledge and how this cognitive tendency can be exploited, Tobin shifts the effects of surprise entirely on to reader cognition. In contrast, writers regard surprise and secrets as narrative material and in our control: how these are timed, the sorts of signposts and clues that are provided in the text, when to produce the moment of revelation and through which character, which characters will be in the know, and so on.
Authors are understandably vexed when they believe their books have been reviewed by someone ill equipped for the task. Might Tobin have the same complaint about this reviewer, one who has an interest in science but not particularly in cognitive science? I can’t evaluate the research she draws on, although I did find many of the experiments interesting. At times I was annoyed, at times I was frustrated, at times I shouted aloud – What about the writer? What about the effects of the reader’s imagination? What about the intimacy of reading? – but mostly I was caused to reflect in a way I would not if I had read a book about surprise in fiction written by another novelist. There were occasions when I found the language absurd (‘narratology’ and ‘narratological’, for example), and certain terms unnecessarily obscure: Tobin uses the terms ‘intradiegetic narrative’ and ‘extradiagetic narrative’ to describe a story within a story structure, or the framed story such as in Heart of Darkness or Wuthering Heights. Mostly, however, her approach was as Alice might have said, curiouser and curiouser, and I found myself in dialogue with the book
in a way that I expect would not occur if I were reviewing a manual for writers or, indeed, if I were face-to-face with the author herself.
I am surprised that Tobin, as a cognitive scientist, ignores the dynamic of reading. It is such a captivating, intimate, exclusive process, one with the capacity to block out the surrounding real world and immerse the reader in a fabricated one. Surely this contributes to readerly susceptibility to surprise in fiction. And might there be something intrinsic to narrative itself that hooks into human cognition? After all, very young children respond to story. Indeed, storytelling has formed a part of human history since the cave dwellers, possibly earlier. And I question whether one can approach sleights of hand in film and in novels in the same way. While both employ techniques to manipulate reader/ viewer response (e.g., selective character point of view in print and camera angles in film), time is a crucial factor in surprise. In film the viewer goes at the director’s pace, but the reader of fiction sets her own pace, stopping here and there to mull, to wonder, to predict, to hope.
In the course of everyday life, we read books, watch television programs, and visit online sites that confirm our own views. Our friends in the real world and those we follow in the digital one are people like us who tend to hold the same views. I appreciated the opportunity offered by Vera Tobin to subject my own taken-for-granted interpretative framework to critical scrutiny. There seems to be far too little of it these days. g
Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel, The Memory Trap, won the Melbourne Prize. Her new novel, The Science of Departures, will be published by Scribe in February 2019.
Pale imitation
Lucas Thompson
SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE: ESSAYS, CRITICISM, AND COMMENTARY
by Lorrie Moore Faber & Faber
$39.95 pb, 432 pp, 9780571339921
It saddens me to say it, but Lorrie Moore’s first collection of non-fiction is a serious disappointment. Having long admired her astonishing fiction, I came to this new book expecting to find obscure essays and little-known gems from across Moore’s long career. Instead, I came away wishing that Moore would give up writing non-fiction and devote herself entirely to short stories and novels.
Despite being described in the subtitle as a collection of ‘Essays, Criticism, and Commentary’, the bulk of these pieces are in fact reviews, spanning thirtyfour years of writing for such prestigious publications as The New York Review of Books , The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. The collection’s seemingly endless list of reviews is broken up with the odd essay or reflection on writing craft, along with some occasional pieces commissioned by various glossy literary periodicals (soliciting Moore’s reflections on such topics as 9/11, the GOP primary debates, and her first job) and introductions to other people’s books. It thus seems disingenuous to be marketing the book in ways that make it look like an essay collection.
Many of these reviews, it has to be said, are witty, erudite, and helpfully attuned to the kinds of details that only a professional writer would notice. Moore’s range is truly impressive, and the collection gives us a sense of her eclectic interests. These pieces range from Anaïs Nin to Marilyn Monroe, from Edna St. Vincent Millay to the finer points of Homeland and The Wire. In her brief introduction, she praises the late NYRB editor Robert Silvers for being ‘hiply catholic in his tastes and interests’ – a description
that applies equally to her own.
And yet there’s something unsatisfying about many of these reviews, which seem increasingly anaemic as one progresses through the book. Too many of Moore’s assessments of novels, short story collections, and television series are taken up with lengthy plot summaries punctuated with droll asides, an approach that works well in context, but quickly tires across an anthology. Oddly enough, Moore also tends to steer away from strong judgements, or even judgements of any kind: one often has to wait until the end of a review to discover what she really thinks about a particular book or television series. Her occasional attempts at more trenchant forms of critique mostly fall flat: she prefers a breezy approach that skips lightly across the surface of texts, only rarely revealing what is at stake in her own aesthetic encounters.
In short, almost every element of this collection seems a pale imitation of what Moore is able to pull off in her fiction. The prose throughout is serviceable, rather than spectacular; the analysis sound rather than inspired; the tone vaguely companionable rather than truly intimate. The gags, too, are fewer and farther between than one might expect, though it has to be admitted that she does get in some of her trademark literary sass and snap from time to time. There is her description of Gertrude Stein, for instance, as ‘the literary love child of William James and Tweedledee’, and a memorable wisecrack on the orthography of ‘Crosby, Still, Nash & Young’ – ‘Ampersand and no oxford comma for Young’, she notes: ‘when he needs to get out of a band, he flees quickly’. Elsewhere, she impishly suggests that Edna St. Vincent Millay ‘owned, perhaps, too many evening gowns’ to be claimed as a feminist poet by subsequent generations, and wonders whether the appeal of Lena Dunham’s Girls arises from ‘the partially handheld camera or the partially hand-held life’.
At times, it’s difficult to tell whether she’s deliberately holding back, or if the format simply won’t allow for the expression of her full range of linguistic talent. Moore also isn’t particularly
sharp on politics: her ‘Thoughts on Hillary’ from 2017 aren’t especially original or interesting, and she wisely chooses not to include two other pieces she wrote on Clinton in 2007 and 2008, which are even more dated. (She also admits to having voted multiple times for the ‘spoiler’ Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader, which I suspect will cause many readers to disregard her political opinions and analysis.)
While none of these pieces would have raised eyebrows or seemed out of place in their original settings, in this anthologised format they prompt one to wonder whether they really deserve collecting. There simply doesn’t seem to be enough variation, or insight, or originality to justify this kind of treatment. While Moore’s fame and literary prestige will guarantee that the book sells, who is this collection really for? Doubtless certain fans and completists will be happy to have these once-far-flung pieces corralled within a single volume, as will academics trying to piece together the interests and obsessions that have informed Moore’s ground-breaking fiction. But who else needs such a book?
Reading this collection, I had to keep reminding myself that Moore’s fiction is truly luminous. She has an almost unparalleled gift for capturing the casual wittiness, intimacies, and self-deceptions of everyday speech, and an effortless way of enfleshing characters and locations. Her 1998 collection Birds of America is surely one of the best American short story collections of the postwar period, and her three novels offer profoundly rich and complex pleasures. All of which makes See What Can Be Done even more disappointing. Revealingly, in the Acknowledgments section, Moore thanks ‘the tiny handful of people who thought this book was a good idea and encouraged it’. For my money, she should would have been far better off heeding those dissenting voices of the majority. g
Lucas Thompson is a lecturer at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
An appropriate polemic Sara Savage
WHAT GOES UP: THE RIGHT AND WRONGS TO THE CITY
by Michael Sorkin Verso
$39.99 hb, 368 pp, 9781786635150
Early in What Goes Up, Michael Sorkin shares an anecdote from the final collection by fellow architecture critic, the late Ada Louise Huxtable. ‘Just what polemical position do you write from, Madame?’ asks a French journalist of Huxtable, who, to Sorkin’s discomfort, fails to produce ‘an appropriate polemic’, instead responding that she prefers to write ‘from crisis to crisis’. Treating the question as daft, Sorkin argues, reveals both Huxtable’s position and limitations. Likewise, Sorkin’s meditations on the exchange are telling of his own raisons d’être as a critic. Aside from Jane Jacobs – a clear and oft-cited influence in his writing – it feels apt to consider Sorkin in relation to someone like Huxtable, not least because he has a tendency to invoke her views in order to assert his own. In an earlier collection, Exquisite Corpse (1991), Sorkin makes mention of Huxtable on several occasions in not uncolourful ways, among them ‘the doyenne of development’ and ‘the erstwhile Hedda Hopper of post-modernism’. In What Goes Up – an anthology of his more recent work – Sorkin shares an obituary of sorts for Huxtable in the form of a 2013 Architectural Review column published five months after her death. In a rare moment of praise for Huxtable, Sorkin commends her critique of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan – that Beaux-Arts bellwether designed by Carrère and Hastings at the dawn of the twentieth century and, at the time of Huxtable’s fierce commentary, under threat by a controversial Norman Foster-designed renovation that would have seen three million books shipped offsite to New Jersey. The plans were famously scrapped the fol-
lowing year, thanks in no small part to Huxtable’s efforts. ‘It was Huxtable at her best,’ writes Sorkin. ‘Impassioned, learned, acute, rising powerfully in defence of an architecture of real value and real values.’
To which ‘values’ is Sorkin referring? In ‘Critical Measure’, an excerpt from a 2014 anthology published by the International Committee of Architectural Criticism, we get some idea. Sorkin’s penchant for concluding his columns with a rousing exclamation mark is elucidated when we read that he believes architectural criticism must be ‘tireless propaganda for the good, the just, the fair’. He continues: ‘Criticism must play a role both in advocating for the most expansive ideas of artistic self-expression and human possibility and in making ardent arguments through which to expand, refine and acquire real outcomes for real people …’
This attitude is particularly alive in the first half of What Goes Up, with the collection split into two sections: ‘New York, New York, New York’, covering Sorkin’s beloved home state, then ‘Elsewhere and Otherwise’, covering, well, everything else. The opening section sees the author scrutinising Greenwich Village, his cherished neighbourhood, (‘A Dozen Urgent Suggestions for the Village’); the reconstruction of Ground Zero (‘Ground Zero Sum’; ‘Business as Usual’; ‘The Cathedral at Ground Zero’); property rights, zoning regulations, and affordable housing (‘The Fungibility of Air’; ‘What’s behind the Poor Door’); plus MoMA and the former American Folk Art Museum (‘Big MoMA’s House’), among much more. The spirit of resistance bubbles up in the latter section, too: ‘Cells Out!’ is a call to action urging architects to refuse the temptation to design prisons and other spaces of discipline, while ‘Architecture against Trump’ – a letter to the executive director of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) immediately following Donald Trump’s election in 2016 – presents a collective denunciation of the ‘temperate, agreeable, indeed feckless’ statement issued by the AIA after the election. This is peak Sorkin: fired-up and deliberately provocative, but with a purpose
rooted in social-minded pragmatism. This isn’t the case across the board in What Goes Up. The chapter ‘Lost at Sea’ – which ends with an unforgiving takedown of art historian and critic Ingrid Rowland’s ode to the Whitney Museum in the New York Review of Books, ‘drown[ing] in nautical-metaphorical overdetermination’ – feels like a purposeless, if admittedly entertaining, attack. In the same vein, though with comparatively acute motivation, is ‘Krier ♥ Speer’ – essentially a roast of architectural theorist Léon Krier, known defender of the formal qualities of Nazi architect Albert Speer’s buildings. On its own this is a surprisingly humorous read; in What Goes Up, it is an extreme example of Sorkin’s broader speculation that architectural form can never be divorced from its function or context. (‘Buildings have motives,’ he writes later in ‘Critical Measure’. ‘As Gilles Deleuze puts it: “No one ever walked endogenously.’”The chicken did have a reason to cross the road!’ – there’s that galvanising exclamation mark again.) Overall, Sorkin’s idiosyncratic, unabashed critique of critique is a vital aspect of the collection and his oeuvre on the whole, and reading What Goes Up in Australia makes palpable at times how small the pond of Australian architectural discourse can feel by comparison. Ultimately, the ‘real values’ to which Sorkin refers hinge on the book’s subtitular ‘right to the city’ – the slogan first introduced by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s, and made sense of by Sorkin as ‘a style of [community] participation grounded in both need and consent’. It is not uncommon for Sorkin’s critics to complain that his own architectural and planning practice (through Michael Sorkin Studio) fails to properly address many of the issues so prominent in his writing. And while this may be true in some instances, it is hard to overlook the real value of a voice like Sorkin’s, whose enduring critical reflections on architecture, public space, and the city are concerned with people first, and buildings second. g
Sara Savage is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and producer based in Melbourne.
MEANJIN A–Z: FINE FICTION 1980 TO NOW
edited by Jonathan Green Melbourne University Press
$29.99 pb, 225 pp, 9780522873696
The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection.
Without doubt, every story selected from Meanjin’s cache of the last thirty-eight years deserves this second airing, but if, as editor Jonathan Green attests, short fiction hardly sells, then his parsimonious introduction could bear expansion. It would be interesting to know, for example, why 2009 boasts five contributors, among them Georgia Blain’s astute rendition of childhood injustices in ‘Intelligence Quotient’, and Chris Womersley’s account of a sudden flood of grief spiked with ghostly undertones in ‘The Very Edge of Things’; and why the 1990s warrant a scant two inclusions, both of which, ‘The Wolfman’s Sister’ (1996) by Barbara Creed and ‘The Swimmer’ (1999) by Kevin Brophy, portray disconcerting aspects of gender relations. Nor does Green’s alphabeticalby-author arrangement illuminate his claim for the gradual admission of the broadest range of voices to Australian letters.
What emerges is not so much a shift in the literary landscape as a continuum, a homogeneity challenged only by the inclusion of two Indigenous voices: the rhythmic vernacular of Melissa Lucashenko’s ‘Sissy Girl’ (2001), and Bruce Pascoe’s story in dialogue ‘The Headless Horseman of the Drummer’ (2009). Otherwise, it seems that women continue to grapple with the conflict between domesticity and independence, objectification and violence, and men with their relationships to women, to their fathers, and to aspects of the world they cannot control. Every character is dealing with an obscure yearning, dissatisfaction, or emptiness; every story with transitions, uncertainties, and the precarious nature of reality.
This may be an accurate reflection of the contemporary condition or, in an ironic reading of Gerald Murnane’s cover blurb, an indication of Meanjin ’s unwavering preference for conventional content over experimental form.
Francesca Sasnaitis
Rites and rights
David Rolph
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION: ORIGINS AND FUTURE by
Luke Beck
Routledge $242 hb, 288 pp, 9781138555785
The role of religion in public life in Australia has become a prominent issue again as a consequence of the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. Significant opposition to the passage of marriage equality in 2017 was due to the mobilisation of many faiths and denominations. The centrality of religion in the marriage equality debate is best demonstrated by the title of the legislation amending the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) to permit same-sex marriage – the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 (Cth). Although religious and other objections to marriage equality did not prevail, the interests of religion were protected. Before marriage equality became law, the Turnbull government established an expert panel, chaired by Philip Ruddock, to conduct a review of the adequacy of legal protections of religious freedom in Australia. After receiving more than 15,000 submissions and conducting private hearings, the expert panel gave its report to the government in mid-May 2018. What it recommends, and whether its recommendations are acted upon, are as yet unknown.
The Commonwealth Constitution already provides some degree of protection of religious freedom. Under section 116, the Commonwealth is prohibited from doing four things: making laws to establish a religion, or to impose a religious observance, or to prohibit the free exercise of a religion, or requiring a religious test as a qualification for office. It is not a comprehensive guarantee of religious freedom. This, though, is about as close as the Constitution gets to the entrenchment of an individual right. Australia is unique among Western liberal democracies in having no con-
stitutional or statutory protection of human rights. Australian constitutional law and culture has long been averse to recognising individual rights. Another curious feature of section 116 is that it limits the Commonwealth’s power and says nothing about the States, but it is located in the chapter of the Constitution headed ‘The States’.
The history of this provision is the subject of Religious Freedom and the Australian Constitution by Luke Beck, a constitutional law scholar at Monash University. The story behind this provision, how it came to be in the form it is and where it is in the Constitution, is fascinating. There are many strands to this story and Beck marshals them admirably. There are the experiences of religious minorities, such as the Seventhday Adventists, the enforcement of Sunday observance laws against them and the political and legal reactions to that. There is the drawing from the experience of United States constitutional law and practice. The drafters of the Commonwealth Constitution variously considered, adopted, adapted, and rejected aspects of United States constitutional law. In an area predating mass communications, let alone digital communications, there is a live issue, well handled by Beck, about which primary and secondary sources of American constitutional law that the drafters of the Commonwealth Constitution had access to. There are also the many debates and resolutions of the various meetings that occurred in cities and regional centres throughout the colonies in the 1890s. As well as crafting a satisfying narrative from these disparate threads, Beck is also effective at evoking the quite different political and cultural milieu in Australia around the time of Federation, where civic Protestantism and sectarianism were features of public life in a way which is alien to the present day.
A significant strength of this book, then, is the engaging way in which it is written. What might otherwise have been quite dry historical, legal, and political material is rendered clearly and effectively. There are some necessary aspects of constitutional theory and law in the book which may be forbidding to the generalist reader. Overall, though,
while still being scholarly, Beck has produced an account of the origins of section 116 which would be accessible to the educated, non-expert reader interested in this aspect of constitutional law.
Beyond the historical account of the origins of section 116, Religious Freedom and the Australian Constitution explores the periodic, unsuccessful attempts across the twentieth century to reform it, often in combination with other constitutional reforms. Reforming the Constitution is notoriously difficult, with only eight out of forty-four referenda succeeding since Federation. Given that the prospects for changing the Constitution are so low, an understanding of the origins of section 116 becomes even more important.
Rather than reforming section 116, perhaps a more productive approach is a re-evaluation or reinterpretation of it. Beck argues that the purpose of section 116 has been misunderstood. He contends that the provision is intended to provide a safeguard against religious intolerance, rather than simply placing the Commonwealth in a neutral position in relation to matters of religion. This reinterpretation, if accepted, would give section 116 a greater role than it previously has had. It would affect the way in which contemporary issues, such as the Federal government’s school chaplaincy program, were treated. It would have been interesting to have the impact of Beck’s reinterpretation of section 116 on these topical issues more fully explored in this book. Religious Freedom and the Australian Constitution deals more with the history, rather than the future, of section 116. However, given the ongoing importance of history and context in the interpretation of the Constitution, Beck’s book is a significant contribution to Australian constitutional law scholarship. g
David Rolph is an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Faculty of Law. He is the author of several books, including Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law (2008) and Defamation Law (2015). From 2007 to 2013, David was the editor of the Sydney Law Review, one of Australia’s leading law journals.
Hillary and Donald and Julia and George
Jennifer Maiden’s phenomenal oeuvre
Gig Ryan
SELECTED POEMS 1967–2018
by Jennifer Maiden Quemar Press, $29.50 pb, 378 pp, 9780648234210
Jennifer Maiden’s first books, Tactics (1974) and The Problem of Evil (1975), introduced a fantastically complex and enquiring poetry, with strangely fragmentary assemblages of character wrought from conflict. Both books were partly inspired by television’s gory nightly footage of the Vietnam War. While much poetry in the 1970s was of seditiously unvarnished protest, Maiden’s was intricate and stylised, poems toppling with moral dilemmas and extraordinary images, or restrained in pure lyricism such as ‘The Windward Side’: ‘The island has a windward side / walkless long and crossless wide / & winds across the cliff-face ride: / a woman’s face / caved in with pride / that craves for every blow.’
Tennyson remains an influence in later poems such as ‘My Heart Has an Embassy’, which imagines Julian Assange’s intramural London quandary, and ‘Maps in the Mind’, an eerie reckoning of Manus Island: ‘The isle of the dead is always sand ... as wide as grief away, / as quarantined as cholera, a day / away from any port, like Manus Island.’ There are some erudite nods to many poets, to Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, and Slessor, along with echoes of the Middle English ‘Pearl’ poem in the repetition of last and first lines from stanza to stanza, and in the use of dream and waking as enlightenment, but Maiden’s poetry remains utterly original.
The early poems are flashier, with cramped menacing images and elusive endings: ‘The beach here has / a grin of treachery. It jangles / its serrated coins at the moon.’(‘For Schools’), while later poems tease out theories that once were
cryptically suggested: ‘Is the US / need for war not “a way to teach Americans / geography” as Bierce is often quoted, but / a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather, / not met by food or sex or fashion, by / any intimate geography but this?’ (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’). For the past twenty-five years, Maiden’s mellifluous facility has turned to interpretative commentaries on current politics. Characters wake up in the world’s hotspots, which they then investigate, yet, as they stir, the poet is also awakening into a dream of her imagining, her world that is the poem. In lilting conversational tones, Maiden creates what she has called a threedimensional philosophy, in which action and dialogue might cohere into, or perhaps disrupt, theory: ‘Any / writer is a private revolution, all / writing is desire, although such / axioms are vulnerable.’ (‘Dracula on the Monaro’). These discursive blank-verse narratives and fencing dialogues also include ‘diary’ poems, a movement that began most directly with The Winter Baby (1990), which signalled motherhood. The poet’s private irritations can seem jarring, but Maiden, like John Kinsella, is unabashedly open to a poetry that disentangles all thoughts and censors none: ‘One needs the private voice / to balance a public terror’(‘Diary Poem: Uses of Privacy’). Among 1991’s television reliquaries of the first Gulf War and, later, the internet’s ubiquity, Maiden’s tableaux further investigate the media’s simultaneous familiarity and estrangement. Acoustic Shadow (1993) and Mines (1999) introduce contemporary figures of power. As digital media bear the news instantly,
so Maiden responds instantly, creating a parallel exploratory medium – poetry. Friendly Fire (2005) and Pirate Rain (2009) heighten this movement, with a credibly bumbling and vengeful George W. Bush ‘obsessed as always with Baghdad’:
Before the Land War, the Republican Guard in their bunkers choked on sand bombed down ventilation shafts. The children smart-bombed to bones in Baghdad suffered less.
We’ve buried the war. It always was something the good journalist expects who knows his side will win ...
(‘Keeping the Lid On: A Gulf War retrospective’. 16. Premature Burial’)
Hillary Clinton, Gillard, Rudd, Bush, Trump et al. are plucked from the newsfeed’s simulacra into a confessional of frailty and doubt where they can commiserate with their immortalised mentors. Character, and the casual immoralities of power, are revealed not through the un-selfied soliloquy but through dialogue, dotted with learned interjections from the poet. Some poems switch abruptly from third-person narration into first person: ‘I will have / a face that means I must have a brain / when I am older. And use it ... my heart and my hair / will explode like the first gold rose’ (‘Madeleine Albright Wears
Two Lapel Pins’). Here, character can only exist through contrast. Even Trump (Appalachian Fall, 2017), in an astounding feat, cannot escape the writer’s curse of imaginative empathy as he converses with his Scottish mother. Pairings of people, places, and theories rustle through Maiden’s poetry, erecting a vibrant stage of argument and slippery negotiation. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, a May–December stereotype transposed from the now five-volume ongoing novel Play With Knives, weave through scenarios like an agile soccer drill, examining, even sometimes resem-
Maiden is unabashedly open to a poetry that disentangles all thoughts and censors none
bling, each new catastrophe and conundrum like a Greek chorus. They infiltrate, or awaken in, each new locale, manoeuvring through shadowy hierarchies of power. George meets Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad cafe:
‘There’s a 25 million reward.’ The man sighed, ‘Do you want that, Mr. Jeffreys?’ George said, ‘No, but George Bush Junior has the soul of a bounty hunter. I’ve met him - there’s more danger there than a sane man might suppose. You just destroyed your country, you know,
but he is destroying his whole empire, bit by bit like Lego for a suitcase ... (‘George Jeffreys: 6’)
Maiden’s impetus is partly driven by the ethical dilemma of how to ideally balance the incarnate and the disincarnate – between life as it is experienced and how one must theorise, or write it. This eternal steering between thought and action propels the poems, perhaps most apparent in her recent book, the profoundly lyrical Appalachian Fall, in which a politician’s dead mentor is often a writer. Such pairings are also life and death, comedy and elegy. Maiden’s poems teem with ideas and opinions, ‘cartoons ... too energetic to be sinister’ (‘George and the Holy Holiday’), with brief but illuminating disquisitions on art, poetry, music. In this, her third Selected Poems, the first seven books are pincered into sixty pages, which lessens their impact and Maiden’s variety. It is unfortunate, too, that the new, mainly digital Quemar Press has chosen such an inelegantly busy cover, strewn with awkwardly lopped images of the poet reclining, and a crowded, unsympathetic layout. Nevertheless, this volume is the most thorough and up-to-date compilation yet of Maiden’s phenomenal oeuvre. g
Gig Ryan’s books include New and Collected Poems (2011).
‘Cancel the lot’
Tim Wright
CLICK HERE FOR WHAT WE DO
by Pam Brown Vagabond Press
$24.95 pb, 147 pp, 9781922181343
Afew pages into this collection we read the line: ‘all of it is lies’. ‘It’ signals the irritation that motivates much of Pam Brown’s writing in click here for what we do. Memory, in these poems, is a problem. Brown’s is very much a poetry of movement: she desires to stay light and mobile, not to be detained by memory (in this way she sometimes brings to mind a serious hiker, weighing the items in her pack by the gram). And yet, she cannot help but take on that extra weight of the past; her present is perforated by it. This dialectic of memory and forgetting runs through the collection. For Brown especially, there is no satisfactory point of rest or synthesis: it is not only memory’s burden that she has to contend with, but also the particular ways that the memories of her own generation of sixty-eighters have been imagined and historicised.
The third poem, ‘Susceptibility Song’, contains the most extended invective against ‘the past’: ‘discarding the discarded / tired of the past // finished with recounting’; ‘erase / remembered moments’; ‘forget it // never retrace steps / cancel the lot’; ‘the past is / stifling’. On the page following this imperative to ‘cancel the lot’, Brown describes some of the things to be forgotten, thereby remembering them and illustrating this double helix of memory and forgetting. Her circumspection in the poems comes across as honouring the integrity of that collective and individual past. Memories appear, but only as glimpses, as if the door must be quickly shut lest they escape and mutate. And yet, for the reader, the excursions into the past are gifts amid the otherwise predominance of present tense. Following a discussion of spartan furnishing aesthetics, a beautiful, brief memory appears of an empty room from Brown’s past, its two occu-
pants, ‘high on cleanskin / & cynar’.
Brown’s poetry, particularly of the last twenty years, works the realm of the minor and the non-transcendent. It proceeds by hesitation, doubling back, selfquestioning, and is heavily shaped by the time of its writing. The form of swaying, concatenated fragments is continuous with Brown’s previous collections; the difference is in the dimensions. Each of the four poems that make up this volume is longer than any single previous poem of Brown’s, and are interconnected to the degree that the work could be read as one long poem in four movements. One result of this increased length is that there is simply more middle to these poems; they keep going, past the point that close readers of Brown’s work might expect them to begin shaping towards an endpoint, creating an effect palpably reminiscent of the infinite scroll feature of web design. (Incidentally, some of the material in click here for what we do was first published online: a format which suits these longer poems well, being able to present their verticality in a way the codex book cannot.)
The poems acknowledge various horrors, as these are relayed through the news cycle. At times Brown seems to throw her hands up in desperation. What there is not is a wintry acceptance of the status quo. In ‘Susceptibility Song’, a moment of hope appears with news of the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, which was finalised in May 2017. As the reader of this poem knows, and the Pam Brown writing this note of optimism does not, the Statement’s recommendations were summarily rejected by the Turnbull government several months later. And yet this section and its situational irony remain in the poem, testament to Brown’s loyalty to a process ethos, to thinking and emotion within the time of writing. This loyalty can at times be exhausting; when a different tense appears – a past tense, a conditional – it comes as a relief. There is anxiety in this mode of writing, and simultaneously composure, steadiness. The poet may throw her hands up, but the poem continues.
The second poem, ‘Left Wondering’, transitions between fragments of lived duration and observations on a
variety of topics: fragments of a letter, a discourse on ‘rejectamenta’, a note of gratitude for having lived ‘in the time / of so many / women of influence’, and four pages ruminating on the topic of the painter Agnes Martin. Right at the end, the poem arrives at the contention that to understand abstraction you have to ‘ask the women’. The rightness and clarity of this is immediate but it is also underwritten by the ‘working out’ that has preceded it, the poem’s rhythmic, overlapping thinking. We are fruitfully ‘left wondering’, encouraged to track back to work out how it was we arrived here. Which brings us to the imperative title of this collection, in which the ‘here’ to be clicked is non-compliant, a dead link: tap it and nothing happens. As with so much of Pam Brown’s poetry, we are not offered an elsewhere, but attuned to where we already are. g
Tim Wright did his PhD on the poetry of Ken Bolton, Pam Brown, and Laurie Duggan. His poetry collection Suns will be published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2018. ❖
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Publisher of the Month with Carmen Callil
What was your pathway to publishing?
I put an advertisement in the London Times newspaper in 1964 or thereabouts, which stated ‘Australian BA, typing, wants job in publishing’. I got three offers and accepted one, which was being a menial for a sponsored book editor at Hutchinson’s. But my real pathway was my mother and father, both great readers; I grew up surrounded by books.
Do you edit the books you commission?
Sometimes, but as time went by I had editors who worked with me. I did the first read, made notes, and the final editorial procedure passed to one of them.
How many titles do you publish each year?
I have not been a publisher since 1995. The number was very different, each year, and in each of the companies I managed. At Virago, we started out with about ten titles, but ultimately I think published about fifty titles a year. At Chatto & Windus we published less each year over the years I was there (1982–95): cutting down the midlist started many decades ago. Now, I am told the number is even less. But in my day it was about thirty new books a year, I think.
What was the first book you published?
Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen: A portrait of women in an English village, in 1975.
What qualities do you look for in an author?
Someone anxious to say something to a reader, hopefully something they want to hear. Good writing, great writing, great use of words and imagination. Wit was always a way to my heart, a gift for storytelling –narrative – and a humanity above and beyond all that. NOT always found.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
Them. I loved most of them, and their love of words and books. The greatest challenge were the disagreeable egomaniacs, whom nothing could please. Next came the conglomeration of publishing and always having to cut staff and talk to the accountants of new international conglomerates and other pontificators, as book publishing changed entirely in the 1980s and 1990s.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
Yes, I write, and no, being a publisher doesn’t inform it. They feel quite separate endeavours to me. Being a publisher, you are the servant – a proud servant, but one all the same – of writers. Writing yourself uses an entirely different part of one’s brain and heart.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?
Sonny Mehta (Knopf) and Liz Calder (Bloomsbury).
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
I can’t imagine so. Why should it be?
On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales? Rapid sales. They make up for everything, and usually incorporate the other three.
What’s the outlook for new writing of quality? As good as it ever was, perhaps better, because there are so many new methods of using the written word. Financial rewards for writers will always be a problem. Many good writers may have to use new methods of publishing their work and not depend only on traditional book publishers. This is happening already.
Carmen Callil, who lives in London, is an Australian writer, publisher, and critic. She founded Virago Press in 1972 and was managing director of Chatto & Windus from 1982 to 1994. She was a committee member for the Man Booker Prize for five years, and was made a Dame of the British Empire for her services to literature in 2017. Her books include The Modern Library: The best 200 novels in English since 1950 (1999, with Colm Tóibín) and Bad Faith: A forgotten history of family and fatherland (2006).
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Ben Brooker on Brothers Wreck
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Trevor Jamieson in rehearsal for Brothers Wreck (photo by Tim Grey)
Foxtrot
Tali Lavi
Adoorbell rings. Along with the Feldman family, we are catapulted into Samuel Maoz’s mesmerising drama, one worthy of its Greek and absurdist antecedents. Deeply shocked, a woman faints; a man is frozen. Their son, Jonathan, a soldier, has been killed. Hell descends on the stylish apartment at eight am. We know this because one of the three solicitous soldiers, emissaries of tragedy, has set the father’s phone to beep on the hour so that he is reminded to drink water. There are protocols for loss. After all, it happens regularly.
In David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land (2008), another Israeli masterpiece, the hero Ora is beset by anxiety that she will be informed of her soldier son’s death. She flees her apartment to evade this inevitability, or perhaps to magic it away. If she is not there to receive the news, it might not become a reality. To the End of the Land was rendered doubly mythic by its prescience; while writing it, Grossman was informed of his son’s death in the 2006 Lebanon war. Foxtrot begins by encountering this horror up close, in a domestic space. It is an Israeli societal fear that runs deep, particularly among families whose children serve in army combat units.
Foxtrot, apart from its framing device, resembles a three-act play, particularly in its first and concluding scenes. For much of the first act we witness the father Michael’s rapid dissolution, while his wife, Daphna, lies on their bed heavily sedated. Michael, played by Lior Ashkenazi (Footnote, Late Marriage), attempts to sublimate his grief by enacting small violences upon himself and his doting dog, but finds he cannot. Maoz and cinematographer Giora Bejach make accomplished use of the close-up and the extreme close-up throughout the movie, as they did in Lebanon (2009). It is no coincidence that Ashkenazi, one of Israel’s most recognisable film stars for both talent and dashing looks, has been cast in this role. His depiction of a successful man whose life has been upended – further signified by disorienting camera angles and the sensation of falling into the vortex of a geometrical painting – is profoundly affecting. A young ineffectual soldier from the rabbinate briefs Michael
on the protocols of the funeral, informing him that ‘the mother’ will be most affected; ‘after all, we’re men’. Maoz’s exploration here is of the archetypal Israeli male. A spirit of absurdism occupies this film from its first twist to references to military euphemism; much is made of the language employed for the ‘fallen’ soldier (in Hebrew the word nafal holds the same double usage as English). This style is heightened in the middle section, which takes place in a desolate landscape where four young male soldiers guard a roadblock. Such is the remoteness of the location that a boom gate rises for a passing lone camel. Bejach’s camera captures the strange beauty and impenetrability of the desert landscape. But the mud is ubiquitous, intractable. A container housing the soldiers is sinking. Like a horror film, a viscous fluid threatens to erupt from the ground. Is it the land or nature itself, threatening to swallow its inhabitants or cover them without leaving a trace? Is this ‘God’s revenge’, as one character laments in the film.
As in Waiting for Godot, the waiting involved in these soldiers’ lives is interminable but punctuated by bleak humour. Inertia and ennui are palpable, as are teenage male hormones, something that Maoz has previously explored.
Foxtrot contains strong condemnation of the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian territories – the manner in which it corrupts the nation’s morality and dehumanises its subjects – but to reduce it solely to this would be a mistake. Maoz means to make the experience discomforting for his fellow Israelis and viewers bearing witness. The bold use of the gaze as Palestinian characters look back at the checkpoint’s soldiers, including Yonatan (played with impressive vulnerability by Yonaton Shiray) reveals the indignities that emerge with such intense surveillance and policing. The expression of those subject to such checks range from intimidation, resignation, and rebellion. One memorable scene restores dignity to a Palestinian couple by a manifestation of love amid a deluge of rain, whilst highlighting a banal cruelty.
Surprisingly, Foxtrot, which won the Grand Jury Prize (Venice Film Festival 2017), is as much about love as about tragedy. There is a romantic glaze to the film, one of acute nostalgia: Jessica Rabbit as object of desire; a smiling vintage pin-up incongruous in its glamour adorning the guard van; mysterious velvety tones of a radio host; the frisson of an unlikely flirtation; recollections of early stages of love. Unlike Lebanon, a brilliant and visceral experience, there is a complex female presence in Foxtrot. Michael’s mother, a German survivor of Auschwitz, is unable to give succour to her son. But once woken from sedation, Sarah Adler is luminous as Daphna; her spirit is transfiguring. Love shatters, transmutes, an incandescent flare in the dark.
Amid this devastation, Foxtrot is gloriously and audaciously tender. g
Foxtrot (Sharmill Films), 113 mins, is directed by Samuel Maoz.
Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer, and public interviewer.
Brothers Wreck
Ben Brooker
One would have hoped that in the four years since Jada Alberts’s fine début play, Brothers Wreck, premièred at Belvoir Street, its concern with the issue of Indigenous despair would have come to feel less vital, but the problem remains as acute as ever. Recently, we learned that every child in detention in the Northern Territory, where Brothers Wreck is set, is Indigenous. Meanwhile, Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people are ending their own lives at a rate at least twice that of the non-Indigenous population, with men under the age of thirty-five most likely to do so.
Brothers Wreck opens with such a suicide, offstage but harrowingly depicted. Typically of intergenerational trauma, and the virus-like creep of hopelessness, six months later it is Joe’s cousin and friend Ruben (Dion Williams) who is at risk. Tormented by guilt, the nature of which Alberts adroitly teases out over the course of the play, Ruben has withdrawn into a kind of dissociative state. His interactions with his sister Adele (Leonie Whyman) and friend (and Adele’s boyfriend) Jarrod (Nelson Baker) are characterised by evasion and violence. He is on bail, having assaulted a policeman, and is receiving counselling from David (Trevor Jamieson), a gruff but fatherly parole officer who draws Ruben’s ire for his perceived class privileges. Ruben calls him ‘Stuart Park’, a reference to the well-to-do Darwin suburb, adding, ‘You had choices.’ One of the great strengths of Alberts’s play is the way it complicates this statement, illustrating the grossly unequal distribution of opportunity and social mobility in Australian society, but not losing sight of the power of individual or familial agency.
Family is everything. While the engine of the play’s drama is Ruben’s anger, it is his quietly determined sister and rambunctious, iron-willed aunt Petra (Lisa Flanagan, the only actor here reprising her role from the 2014 production) who are the vehicle’s chassis. In their resolve and generosity of spirit, they hold everything together without absolving the men of their responsibilities to the family and to themselves, shown, for example, by Petra’s fierce insistence that Ruben visit his adopted mother in
hospital no matter the depression and alcoholism he has sunk into. As reflected in Dale Ferguson’s oppressive set –a sort of abstracted bivouac of clear tarpaulin, inlaid on walls, floor, and ceiling with screen doors – Alberts’s characters are not only walled in by social disadvantage but also by expectation. As much as anything else, the play functions as a commentary on the destructive effects of a society that continues to deny young men tools to manage hardship and trauma other than repression and rage. As David says to Ruben: ‘Mob can’t survive like that, you can’t survive like that. We gotta talk to each other, as hard as it is, ’cause I guarantee you, that phone will ring and you’ll have to say goodbye again.’
Though perhaps over-reliant on monologue as an explicatory device, Brothers Wreck is a tightly written, compactly structured, tonally varied play. For all the grimness of its content, it is impressively warm. The playwright herself directs with a firm hand, although the gestural language introduced in the first scene – intended, presumably, to leaven the production’s realism – is never satisfyingly developed.
For such a green cast – both Baker and Williams make their stage débuts here – the performances are nuanced and compelling, despite the latter’s occasional lack of clarity. Flanagan is a joy as Aunty Pet – many of the Indigenous members of the opening night audience recognised the type immediately and gleefully – while Whyman, tentative at first, grows into her role with skill and verve.
In Brothers Wreck, Alberts has found an intriguing title for her play. Minus the expected possessive apostrophe, it suggests that wrecking is what men do, rather than what happens to them. More literally, it is the name of the bay where Ruben and Jarrod sometimes go to fish, once a site of escape now tainted by a connection to Joe’s suicide. But I wonder if Albert’s title doesn’t also allude to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, that mighty invocation of disillusionment and despair:
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
Eliot, himself referencing Shakespeare’s The Tempest –in which a revengeful Prospero summons a storm to shipwreck his brother – paints a bleak picture of the members of a family turning their backs on each other. Alberts’s play, however, reverses Eliot’s cynicism. For the playwright, family is a source of hope, a bulwark against the institutional racism that continues, two centuries after colonisation, to overdetermine the lives of Australia’s First Nations people, whose resilience Brothers Wreck powerfully captures. g
Brothers Wreck, written and directed by Jada Alberts, was performed at the Odeon Theatre, Adelaide from 27 June to 14 July 2018.
Ben Brooker is an Adelaide critic.
William Tell
Michael Shmith
It has to be said straight away that William Tell is a colossal challenge, almost as much for its audiences as its performers. People talk of Wagner’s Curse, but Rossini’s operatic swansong is not far behind. What makes it especially daunting for any opera company is how much of the score to use. An uncut version, stuffed with ballets and other orchestral material, can run for close to five hours. Then, which language? Do you perform it as Guillaume Tell (the original Paris version of 1829), or as Guglielmo Tell, Wilhelm Tell, or plain old William Tell?
Richard Mills, Victorian Opera’s artistic director and conductor of this production of William Tell, writes in the program book that he has cut the opera down to three hours, as well as omitting the ballets. This is a good thing, although, I have to say, even with slashings of the red pencil, the piece still contains its fair share of what the French delicately call mauvais quarts d’heure.
Berlioz, among other enthusiastic Rossini contemporaries, was more positive about the score. In 1834 he described it as ‘seriously thought out, considered at leisure, and conscientiously executed from beginning to end’. So it proved in the expanses of the Palais, a theatre whose own architecture reflects similar ambition and execution. Indeed, its recent refurbishments, including a repainted exterior, provides the place with an extra, almost Rossinian dash of smart elegance.
Mind you, once the famous overture – excellently, deftly played by Orchestra Victoria – galloped to the finish line and the curtain rose, a chilly draft straight off the bay seeped into the stalls; a frigid reminder of Switzerland that never quite lost its grip on the first-night audience. Director Rodula Gaitanou has set the opera in occupied Switzerland in a ‘dystopian future’, which I suppose is a good reason for the cross-chronology of costumes (by Esther Marie Hayes), which included boiler suits, polo shirts, jeans, sci-fi helmets, and the occasional nod to alpine-wear, rag-and-bone, and other shreds and patches.
Simon Corder’s permanent and economical set cleverly emphasised the opera’s twin themes of the beauty of nature and the darkness of political oppression. Less effectively, as it turned out, this setting proved awkward and distracting, as most of the large cast had to negotiate the various foothills and peaks with understandable care, especially with the fog machine working overtime. (Corder’s lighting, although pertinent, was often obtrusive.)
A tragic melodrama in four acts requires a substantial force of singers to do it justice, and, for the most part, they did. There are eleven main roles, and, let’s not forget, a large chorus of forty-eight (well prepared by Richard
Mills and Phoebe Briggs), which sang with unerring strength throughout.
The lynchpin of this performance was the mighty William Tell of Armando Noguera, who reached the very heights of impassioned pride and dignity in the appleand-arrow moment, ‘Sois immobile’, when he beseeches his son, Jemmy, to stay still. Alexandra Flood, as Jemmy, was also a remarkable performer, dramatically as well as vocally. The romantic interests – the firebrand Arnold and the impassioned princess, Mathilde – were well sung by Carlos E. Bárcenas and Gisela Stille. The tenor’s superhuman role, festooned with high Cs and with his most treacherous aria not until Act IV, sometimes lacked the vocal heft required; but his determination never let him down. It was a bravura performance. Likewise, Stille’s flexible and serviceable soprano did her proud, especially in her Act II aria, ‘Sombre forêt’.
In other roles, there was fine singing from Jeremy Kleeman, as Tell’s compatriot Walter Furst, and from Liane Keegan’s compassionate and motherly Hedwige Tell. It was luxury casting indeed to have Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the village elder, Melcthal, who gave a marvellously stentorian performance. Here’s one role where Teddy will have to keep his shirt on, I thought. But, no. In the dystopian future, even bearded old men are stripped to the waist before being summarily executed with dagger and gun.
Less satisfactory, though, were the tyrant Gesler and his henchman, Rodolphe, in over-the-top, hiss-the-villain performances from Paolo Pecchioli and Paul Biencourt, respectively. It remains a mystery as to why it was decided to ramp up the comedy in Act II, by having Gesler and Rodolphe conduct their own rehearsal of apple-balancing during one of the most plangent scenes in all opera. Particularly coarse singing from Pecchioli did not help.
In the end, though, even hampered by the prolix libretto by V.J. Étienne de Jouy and H.L.F. Bis, Rossini achieved a triumph of sorts with William Tell. For all sorts of reasons, most of them practical, the work is not performed all that often, especially in this country, where it hasn’t been professionally staged since 1876. Full marks, therefore, to Victorian Opera, for having the courage to take on Tell.
Really, the evening belonged to Richard Mills, who conducted this long and sometimes unwieldy score with steadiness and majesty, letting the music unfold with respect and with naturalness. Orchestra Victoria responded with playing that was anything but routine: it was as if each player was discovering the inner beauty of the score. The company – and, for sure, this was a company effort, right down to that final sunlit chorus in C major – rose above a sometimes clumsy production to achieve its own sense of triumph over adversity. g
William Tell was presented by Victorian Opera at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne from 14 to 19 July 2018. (Longer version online)
Michael Shmith was arts editor of The Age from 1985 to 1993.
Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask
Jim Davidson
‘Iinvented a character called Barry Humphries,’ the program promised. Beyond his characters, he said, the real man had always lurked behind a mask in various interviews. ‘Tonight you’ll see me.’ And there he was, in mauve jacket and polka-dot tie, his features sharp, the voice crisper than ever ... but in fact he couldn’t do it. Humphries is too interwoven with his characters: they form a baroque circle of projections of himself. (As he once remarked, Sir Les Patterson is the part of him that kept drinking.) No wonder he revels in being on stage. ‘Alone at last!’ he cries.
Hump hries needs that psychic space, not least because his relationship with his mother still seems not quite resolved. Her often disapproving remarks form the spine of the show. Feeling he’s been a little too hard on her, he now emphasises her stylishness, her little benefactions. His less complex father is relegated with an epitaph: ‘He was a great man.’ But while Humphries insists that Edna is not based on Louisa Humphries (and perhaps she wasn’t, in her simpler Moonee Ponds days), that is what she became. The ‘hats and glads’ his mother spoke of were writ large, the act grounded in a child’s naughty imitation.
So what do we learn, now that Humphries stands before his audience unmediated by his characters? Nothing about his early Dada experiments and the deep nihilism that impelled them. He simply says he was always a provocateur. He does tell us about his early acting with the Melbourne Theatre Company, and how he soon found he was much better at making up lines than remembering them – and in comedy best of all. ‘You must realise’, the director told him, ‘you are naturally ridiculous’. There’s practically nothing about his private life – just a passing reference to a kid, and a wife, when he’s had four of each. And not much beyond the 1990s, and his conquest of America.
The truth is Humphries has a zest for the past. With his sensitive ear, he takes particular offence at neologisms and crap-speak, since they double as repellent intrusions of the contemporary. It is not surprising that his favourite character should be Sandy Stone, the decent little man of static, classic suburbia. And this evening, fixed ideas reappear. There are swipes at Sydney (which in real life he likes), a reference to the Japanese during the war, and inevitably a number to the Nazis. Almost the last thing he says in the show – a made-up story, surely – is how an ex-Nazi told him that the Führer would have loved him.
At most, Humphries reciprocates a loathing fascination. Generally, his politics have been implicitly right-of-centre: there are none here to speak of. An image of Les Patterson mutates first into Bob Hawke, and then into a procession of politicians, culminating improbably in Malcolm Turnbull. John Howard is not among them; Humphries never commented on him. If he had, he would have been compelled to call him Sandy Stone on speed.
As the show moves on, Humphries draws on his two autobiographies more and more. But how flatly certain episodes read on the page, compared with the real-life exposition by a master of pace and timing, drawing on a vast repertoire of voices and accents. It is like the difference between a musical performance and the printed score. There are also numerous clips of his characters, including Barry McKenzie.
Humphries has always pushed at the boundaries, bitten the hand that fed him, ultimately questioned the arbitrariness of everything. A schoolboy victim of bullying, he has difficulty in relinquishing unpleasant memories. Repeatedly we have been told of a persecuting primary school teacher, and of another bully who, in the afterlife of university, he saw one day calmly sitting under a tree reading a book. Humphries decided to get him. Returning to the scene with a can of white powder, he unloaded it upon the man – only to realise, as he moved away, that his victim was an innocent stranger! No matter, says Humphries. He had found a scapegoat, and expiation was achieved.
Humphries has always been conscious of his celebrity, and evening the score has been one of its entitlements. But he also talks about it revealingly: in a way you become un-personed. ‘People will speak about you, quite loudly, as if you’re a thing, an object,’ he says. The opposite approach can be almost as bad. In Sydney one day a youth, dismounting from his motorbike, yelled across the street: ‘Baz! You’re a fuckin’ icon!’
It all felt like a valedictory performance – though Humphries may harbour hopes of more. The dreaded audience participation came down pretty much to one person; the gladdies were notable for their scarcity. But the audience, overwhelmingly consisting of greyheads, was totally with him. It was their lives he had punctuated – even punctured – with his performances, particularly here in Melbourne. ‘The forgiveness of laughter,’ as Humphries put it at one point. In the week La Mama burnt down, it is worth recalling that it was Humphries who, with his daisy chains of clichés, first made theatre of the Australian idiom – and found an audience for it. This the new playwrights would build upon. For the rest of us, he was court jester to a generation. g
Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask was performed at Hamer Hall, Melbourne, from 23 to 26 May 2018. (Longer version online)
Jim Davidson’s latest book is A Führer for a Father: The domestic face of colonialism (2017).
Why do you write?
Open Page with Rose Tremain
To find out what I truly think and believe. Every novel is a new journey of discovery. It’s just a shame it has to end one day …
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. But nearly all my dreams turn around the same anxiety: being lost. Sometimes I’m in an alien city or sometimes in a wilderness, or sometimes in a banal environment like a hotel corridor or a car park, but in every case I have no idea where I’m going, or how to find true north.
Where are you happiest?
At home in Norfolk, England, working in my study.
What is your favourite film?
Anthony Minghella’s film of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I fall in love with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes all over again each time I watch it.
And your favourite book?
Let me give you a selection: Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, Quarantine by Jim Crace, The Spire by William Golding, Voss by Patrick White, Bad Land by Jonathan Raban. And oh yes, the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Can I invite some of my own characters – to see whether I love them as much as I think I do? Merivel from Restoration, Lev from The Road Home and Gustav from The Gustav Sonata. The only trouble is, Merivel would snaffle all the food …
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
What I dislike most are not individual words but acronyms. We live in a forest of imperious CAPITALS, which, after a while, become separated from what they stand for, or BSFWTSF. Bring whole words back into the conversation, I say.
Who is your favourite author?
You mean, it could be somebody else, not Shakespeare? I don’t think so.
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Saul Bellow’s Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, a man tormented by material need who saves his sanity by going to live among a primitive African tribe, is a profoundly affect-
ing anti-hero. Staying in Africa, Lucy in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace strides towards the reader in all her marvellous severity. Her refusal to compromise shakes my very bones.
Which qualities do you most admire in a writer? Imagination. Humour. Seriousness. A quest for truth.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
Lawrence Durrell. At fifteen, I loved his prose so much, I wanted to eat the book; now I want to chuck all that purple nonsense into the bin.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Everything potentially impedes it. But I long ago understood that if I’m not writing, I just fall into sadness and negativity about the state of the world. When I come into my study, I try to leave the world outside the door and just commit to the next thought, the next idea, the next line …
How do you regard publishers?
All of them publish far too much, so that bookstores are drowning in the mediocre. The shelf life of books is very short, and the reading public is wildly confused about what is good and what is weak. This needs to be addressed.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
Not exactly brilliant. Reviewers seldom seem to read beyond the work in hand, to get a deeper sense of what an individual writer is trying to do.
And writers’ festivals?
Very uneven, and most of them put writers on a humiliating minimum wage. But the best of them –e.g. Adelaide, Toronto, Cheltenham, and Hay – can be enormous fun and a great showcase for new work.
Are artists valued in our society?
The arts have been horribly monetised, so I think the public is profoundly confused about what is genuinely worthy and what is pure garbage.
What are you working on now?
A new novel set in 1865, partly in the city of Bath and partly on the island of Borneo. My heroine, Jane Adeane, is 6’3” tall and proud of every inch.
Rose Tremain’s most recent books are the short story collection The American Lover (2014), the novel The Gustav Sonata (2014), and the memoir Rosie (2018).
(photograph by David Kirkham)
Brothers Wreck
Ben Brooker
One would have hoped that in the four years since Jada Alberts’s fine début play, Brothers Wreck, premièred at Belvoir Street, its concern with the issue of Indigenous despair would have come to feel less vital, but the problem remains as acute as ever. Recently, we learned that every child in detention in the Northern Territory, where Brothers Wreck is set, is Indigenous. Meanwhile, Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people are ending their own lives at a rate at least twice that of the non-Indigenous population, with men under the age of thirty-five most likely to do so.
Brothers Wreck opens with such a suicide, offstage but harrowingly depicted. Typically of intergenerational trauma, and the virus-like creep of hopelessness, six months later it is Joe’s cousin and friend Ruben (Dion Williams) who is at risk. Tormented by guilt, the nature of which Alberts adroitly teases out over the course of the play, Ruben has withdrawn into a kind of dissociative state. His interactions with his sister Adele (Leonie Whyman) and friend (and Adele’s boyfriend) Jarrod (Nelson Baker) are characterised by evasion and violence. He is on bail, having assaulted a policeman, and is receiving counselling from David (Trevor Jamieson), a gruff but fatherly parole officer who draws Ruben’s ire for his perceived class privileges. Ruben calls him ‘Stuart Park’, a reference to the well-to-do Darwin suburb, adding, ‘You had choices.’ One of the great strengths of Alberts’s play is the way it complicates this statement, illustrating the grossly unequal distribution of opportunity and social mobility in Australian society, but not losing sight of the power of individual or familial agency.
Family is everything. While the engine of the play’s drama is Ruben’s anger, it is his quietly determined sister and rambunctious, iron-willed aunt Petra (Lisa Flanagan, the only actor here reprising her role from the 2014 production) who are the vehicle’s chassis. In their resolve and generosity of spirit, they hold everything together without absolving the men of their responsibilities to the family and to themselves, shown, for example, by Petra’s fierce insistence that Ruben visit his adopted mother in
hospital no matter the depression and alcoholism he has sunk into. As reflected in Dale Ferguson’s oppressive set –a sort of abstracted bivouac of clear tarpaulin, inlaid on walls, floor, and ceiling with screen doors – Alberts’s characters are not only walled in by social disadvantage but also by expectation. As much as anything else, the play functions as a commentary on the destructive effects of a society that continues to deny young men tools to manage hardship and trauma other than repression and rage. As David says to Ruben: ‘Mob can’t survive like that, you can’t survive like that. We gotta talk to each other, as hard as it is, ’cause I guarantee you, that phone will ring and you’ll have to say goodbye again.’
Though perhaps over-reliant on monologue as an explicatory device, Brothers Wreck is a tightly written, compactly structured, tonally varied play. For all the grimness of its content, it is impressively warm. The playwright herself directs with a firm hand, although the gestural language introduced in the first scene – intended, presumably, to leaven the production’s realism – is never satisfyingly developed.
For such a green cast – both Baker and Williams make their stage débuts here – the performances are nuanced and compelling, despite the latter’s occasional lack of clarity. Flanagan is a joy as Aunty Pet – many of the Indigenous members of the opening night audience recognised the type immediately and gleefully – while Whyman, tentative at first, grows into her role with skill and verve.
In Brothers Wreck, Alberts has found an intriguing title for her play. Minus the expected possessive apostrophe, it suggests that wrecking is what men do, rather than what happens to them. More literally, it is the name of the bay where Ruben and Jarrod sometimes go to fish, once a site of escape now tainted by a connection to Joe’s suicide. But I wonder if Albert’s title doesn’t also allude to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, that mighty invocation of disillusionment and despair:
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death before him.
Eliot, himself referencing Shakespeare’s The Tempest –in which a revengeful Prospero summons a storm to shipwreck his brother – paints a bleak picture of the members of a family turning their backs on each other. Alberts’s play, however, reverses Eliot’s cynicism. For the playwright, family is a source of hope, a bulwark against the institutional racism that continues, two centuries after colonisation, to overdetermine the lives of Australia’s First Nations people, whose resilience Brothers Wreck powerfully captures. g
Brothers Wreck, written and directed by Jada Alberts, was performed at the Odeon Theatre, Adelaide from 27 June to 14 July 2018.
Ben Brooker is an Adelaide critic.
William Tell
Michael Shmith
It has to be said straight away that William Tell is a colossal challenge, almost as much for its audiences as its performers. People talk of Wagner’s Curse, but Rossini’s operatic swansong is not far behind. What makes it especially daunting for any opera company is how much of the score to use. An uncut version, stuffed with ballets and other orchestral material, can run for close to five hours. Then, which language? Do you perform it as Guillaume Tell (the original Paris version of 1829), or as Guglielmo Tell, Wilhelm Tell, or plain old William Tell?
Richard Mills, Victorian Opera’s artistic director and conductor of this production of William Tell, writes in the program book that he has cut the opera down to three hours, as well as omitting the ballets. This is a good thing, although, I have to say, even with slashings of the red pencil, the piece still contains its fair share of what the French delicately call mauvais quarts d’heure.
Berlioz, among other enthusiastic Rossini contemporaries, was more positive about the score. In 1834 he described it as ‘seriously thought out, considered at leisure, and conscientiously executed from beginning to end’. So it proved in the expanses of the Palais, a theatre whose own architecture reflects similar ambition and execution. Indeed, its recent refurbishments, including a repainted exterior, provides the place with an extra, almost Rossinian dash of smart elegance.
Mind you, once the famous overture – excellently, deftly played by Orchestra Victoria – galloped to the finish line and the curtain rose, a chilly draft straight off the bay seeped into the stalls; a frigid reminder of Switzerland that never quite lost its grip on the first-night audience. Director Rodula Gaitanou has set the opera in occupied Switzerland in a ‘dystopian future’, which I suppose is a good reason for the cross-chronology of costumes (by Esther Marie Hayes), which included boiler suits, polo shirts, jeans, sci-fi helmets, and the occasional nod to alpine-wear, rag-and-bone, and other shreds and patches.
Simon Corder’s permanent and economical set cleverly emphasised the opera’s twin themes of the beauty of nature and the darkness of political oppression. Less effectively, as it turned out, this setting proved awkward and distracting, as most of the large cast had to negotiate the various foothills and peaks with understandable care, especially with the fog machine working overtime. (Corder’s lighting, although pertinent, was often obtrusive.)
A tragic melodrama in four acts requires a substantial force of singers to do it justice, and, for the most part, they did. There are eleven main roles, and, let’s not forget, a large chorus of forty-eight (well prepared by Richard
Mills and Phoebe Briggs), which sang with unerring strength throughout.
The lynchpin of this performance was the mighty William Tell of Armando Noguera, who reached the very heights of impassioned pride and dignity in the appleand-arrow moment, ‘Sois immobile’, when he beseeches his son, Jemmy, to stay still. Alexandra Flood, as Jemmy, was also a remarkable performer, dramatically as well as vocally. The romantic interests – the firebrand Arnold and the impassioned princess, Mathilde – were well sung by Carlos E. Bárcenas and Gisela Stille. The tenor’s superhuman role, festooned with high Cs and with his most treacherous aria not until Act IV, sometimes lacked the vocal heft required; but his determination never let him down. It was a bravura performance. Likewise, Stille’s flexible and serviceable soprano did her proud, especially in her Act II aria, ‘Sombre forêt’.
In other roles, there was fine singing from Jeremy Kleeman, as Tell’s compatriot Walter Furst, and from Liane Keegan’s compassionate and motherly Hedwige Tell. It was luxury casting indeed to have Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the village elder, Melcthal, who gave a marvellously stentorian performance. Here’s one role where Teddy will have to keep his shirt on, I thought. But, no. In the dystopian future, even bearded old men are stripped to the waist before being summarily executed with dagger and gun.
Less satisfactory, though, were the tyrant Gesler and his henchman, Rodolphe, in over-the-top, hiss-the-villain performances from Paolo Pecchioli and Paul Biencourt, respectively. It remains a mystery as to why it was decided to ramp up the comedy in Act II, by having Gesler and Rodolphe conduct their own rehearsal of apple-balancing during one of the most plangent scenes in all opera. Particularly coarse singing from Pecchioli did not help.
In the end, though, even hampered by the prolix libretto by V.J. Étienne de Jouy and H.L.F. Bis, Rossini achieved a triumph of sorts with William Tell. For all sorts of reasons, most of them practical, the work is not performed all that often, especially in this country, where it hasn’t been professionally staged since 1876. Full marks, therefore, to Victorian Opera, for having the courage to take on Tell.
Really, the evening belonged to Richard Mills, who conducted this long and sometimes unwieldy score with steadiness and majesty, letting the music unfold with respect and with naturalness. Orchestra Victoria responded with playing that was anything but routine: it was as if each player was discovering the inner beauty of the score. The company – and, for sure, this was a company effort, right down to that final sunlit chorus in C major – rose above a sometimes clumsy production to achieve its own sense of triumph over adversity. g
William Tell was presented by Victorian Opera at the Palais Theatre, Melbourne from 14 to 19 July 2018. (Longer version online)
Michael Shmith was arts editor of The Age from 1985 to 1993.
Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask
Jim Davidson
‘Iinvented a character called Barry Humphries,’ the program promised. Beyond his characters, he said, the real man had always lurked behind a mask in various interviews. ‘Tonight you’ll see me.’ And there he was, in mauve jacket and polka-dot tie, his features sharp, the voice crisper than ever ... but in fact he couldn’t do it. Humphries is too interwoven with his characters: they form a baroque circle of projections of himself. (As he once remarked, Sir Les Patterson is the part of him that kept drinking.) No wonder he revels in being on stage. ‘Alone at last!’ he cries.
Hump hries needs that psychic space, not least because his relationship with his mother still seems not quite resolved. Her often disapproving remarks form the spine of the show. Feeling he’s been a little too hard on her, he now emphasises her stylishness, her little benefactions. His less complex father is relegated with an epitaph: ‘He was a great man.’ But while Humphries insists that Edna is not based on Louisa Humphries (and perhaps she wasn’t, in her simpler Moonee Ponds days), that is what she became. The ‘hats and glads’ his mother spoke of were writ large, the act grounded in a child’s naughty imitation.
So what do we learn, now that Humphries stands before his audience unmediated by his characters? Nothing about his early Dada experiments and the deep nihilism that impelled them. He simply says he was always a provocateur. He does tell us about his early acting with the Melbourne Theatre Company, and how he soon found he was much better at making up lines than remembering them – and in comedy best of all. ‘You must realise’, the director told him, ‘you are naturally ridiculous’. There’s practically nothing about his private life – just a passing reference to a kid, and a wife, when he’s had four of each. And not much beyond the 1990s, and his conquest of America.
The truth is Humphries has a zest for the past. With his sensitive ear, he takes particular offence at neologisms and crap-speak, since they double as repellent intrusions of the contemporary. It is not surprising that his favourite character should be Sandy Stone, the decent little man of static, classic suburbia. And this evening, fixed ideas reappear. There are swipes at Sydney (which in real life he likes), a reference to the Japanese during the war, and inevitably a number to the Nazis. Almost the last thing he says in the show – a made-up story, surely – is how an ex-Nazi told him that the Führer would have loved him.
At most, Humphries reciprocates a loathing fascination. Generally, his politics have been implicitly right-of-centre: there are none here to speak of. An image of Les Patterson mutates first into Bob Hawke, and then into a procession of politicians, culminating improbably in Malcolm Turnbull. John Howard is not among them; Humphries never commented on him. If he had, he would have been compelled to call him Sandy Stone on speed.
As the show moves on, Humphries draws on his two autobiographies more and more. But how flatly certain episodes read on the page, compared with the real-life exposition by a master of pace and timing, drawing on a vast repertoire of voices and accents. It is like the difference between a musical performance and the printed score. There are also numerous clips of his characters, including Barry McKenzie.
Humphries has always pushed at the boundaries, bitten the hand that fed him, ultimately questioned the arbitrariness of everything. A schoolboy victim of bullying, he has difficulty in relinquishing unpleasant memories. Repeatedly we have been told of a persecuting primary school teacher, and of another bully who, in the afterlife of university, he saw one day calmly sitting under a tree reading a book. Humphries decided to get him. Returning to the scene with a can of white powder, he unloaded it upon the man – only to realise, as he moved away, that his victim was an innocent stranger! No matter, says Humphries. He had found a scapegoat, and expiation was achieved.
Humphries has always been conscious of his celebrity, and evening the score has been one of its entitlements. But he also talks about it revealingly: in a way you become un-personed. ‘People will speak about you, quite loudly, as if you’re a thing, an object,’ he says. The opposite approach can be almost as bad. In Sydney one day a youth, dismounting from his motorbike, yelled across the street: ‘Baz! You’re a fuckin’ icon!’
It all felt like a valedictory performance – though Humphries may harbour hopes of more. The dreaded audience participation came down pretty much to one person; the gladdies were notable for their scarcity. But the audience, overwhelmingly consisting of greyheads, was totally with him. It was their lives he had punctuated – even punctured – with his performances, particularly here in Melbourne. ‘The forgiveness of laughter,’ as Humphries put it at one point. In the week La Mama burnt down, it is worth recalling that it was Humphries who, with his daisy chains of clichés, first made theatre of the Australian idiom – and found an audience for it. This the new playwrights would build upon. For the rest of us, he was court jester to a generation. g
Barry Humphries: The Man Behind the Mask was performed at Hamer Hall, Melbourne, from 23 to 26 May 2018. (Longer version online)
Jim Davidson’s latest book is A Führer for a Father: The domestic face of colonialism (2017).
Why do you write?
Open Page with Rose Tremain
To find out what I truly think and believe. Every novel is a new journey of discovery. It’s just a shame it has to end one day …
Are you a vivid dreamer?
Yes. But nearly all my dreams turn around the same anxiety: being lost. Sometimes I’m in an alien city or sometimes in a wilderness, or sometimes in a banal environment like a hotel corridor or a car park, but in every case I have no idea where I’m going, or how to find true north.
Where are you happiest?
At home in Norfolk, England, working in my study.
What is your favourite film?
Anthony Minghella’s film of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I fall in love with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes all over again each time I watch it.
And your favourite book?
Let me give you a selection: Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy, The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, Quarantine by Jim Crace, The Spire by William Golding, Voss by Patrick White, Bad Land by Jonathan Raban. And oh yes, the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.
Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.
Can I invite some of my own characters – to see whether I love them as much as I think I do? Merivel from Restoration, Lev from The Road Home and Gustav from The Gustav Sonata. The only trouble is, Merivel would snaffle all the food …
Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?
What I dislike most are not individual words but acronyms. We live in a forest of imperious CAPITALS, which, after a while, become separated from what they stand for, or BSFWTSF. Bring whole words back into the conversation, I say.
Who is your favourite author?
You mean, it could be somebody else, not Shakespeare? I don’t think so.
And your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Saul Bellow’s Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, a man tormented by material need who saves his sanity by going to live among a primitive African tribe, is a profoundly affect-
ing anti-hero. Staying in Africa, Lucy in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace strides towards the reader in all her marvellous severity. Her refusal to compromise shakes my very bones.
Which qualities do you most admire in a writer? Imagination. Humour. Seriousness. A quest for truth.
Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.
Lawrence Durrell. At fifteen, I loved his prose so much, I wanted to eat the book; now I want to chuck all that purple nonsense into the bin.
What, if anything, impedes your writing?
Everything potentially impedes it. But I long ago understood that if I’m not writing, I just fall into sadness and negativity about the state of the world. When I come into my study, I try to leave the world outside the door and just commit to the next thought, the next idea, the next line …
How do you regard publishers?
All of them publish far too much, so that bookstores are drowning in the mediocre. The shelf life of books is very short, and the reading public is wildly confused about what is good and what is weak. This needs to be addressed.
What do you think of the state of criticism?
Not exactly brilliant. Reviewers seldom seem to read beyond the work in hand, to get a deeper sense of what an individual writer is trying to do.
And writers’ festivals?
Very uneven, and most of them put writers on a humiliating minimum wage. But the best of them –e.g. Adelaide, Toronto, Cheltenham, and Hay – can be enormous fun and a great showcase for new work.
Are artists valued in our society?
The arts have been horribly monetised, so I think the public is profoundly confused about what is genuinely worthy and what is pure garbage.
What are you working on now?
A new novel set in 1865, partly in the city of Bath and partly on the island of Borneo. My heroine, Jane Adeane, is 6’3” tall and proud of every inch.
Rose Tremain’s most recent books are the short story collection The American Lover (2014), the novel The Gustav Sonata (2014), and the memoir Rosie (2018).
