The Jolley Prize – the shortlisted stories
Peter Goldsworthy Stanley Kubrick
Marilyn Lake The AUKUS debacle
Roger Benjamin Paul Gauguin
Diane Stubbings Evie Wyld
Indispensable prophet
Paul Kane on James Baldwin’s centenary
Celebrating twenty-one years of great world poetry!
Entries are now open for the twenty-first Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010).
This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Paul Kane and Peter Rose.
For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs
First place
$6,000
Four shortlisted poets
$1,000 each
Entries close 7 October 2024
Advances
The Jolley Prize
This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted 1,310 entries. Of these, 413 came from overseas, attesting to the high regard in which the Jolley Prize – one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished story in English –is held internationally.
Our three judges – Patrick Flanery (Adelaide), Melinda Harvey (Melbourne), and Susan Midalia (Perth) – longlisted thirteen stories from twelve different writers (John Kinsella doubled up). These are all listed on our website, and we congratulate the longlisted authors.
The judges have now shortlisted three stories, and it’s our great pleasure to publish them in this issue:
‘First Snow’ by Kerry Greer (WA) ‘M.’ by Shelley Stenhouse (USA) ‘Pornwald’ by Jill Van Epps (USA)
In their report, the judges had this to say about the wider field:
We were pleased to encounter a range of forms and genres, from literary realism to satire, speculative and historical fiction, dystopia, autofiction, and more experimental work. The stories explored themes of love, sex, and the pain of being alive, while many took an overtly political stance, addressing anxieties about climate change, social justice, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence.
The judges gravitated towards stories marked by an inventiveness of form and a distinctiveness of voice, stories that had something surprising to tell us and found imaginative ways of expressing ideas. The shortlisted stories negotiate the challenges of the form by skilfully combining brevity and depth, economy and resonance, offering refreshing perspectives on the world.
The judges’ full report, which can be found online, contains remarks on the three shortlisted stories.
The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500, and here, as ever, we thank Ian Dickson AM, who has generously supported this prize since its creation in 2011.
and supporters in New South Wales.
It’s essential to RSVP via Gleebooks’s event page on their website.
On the roof with James Baldwin
‘Inimitable’ is a trite word – a hairdresser’s word, as Pasternak said of ‘genius’ – but it seems uniquely applicable to James Baldwin – novelist, essayist, activist, incendiary polemicist – who died far too young, in 1987. The centenary of Baldwin’s birth falls on 2 August. To commemorate it, and to explore his matchless and fluctuating influence, Paul Kane writes about Baldwin’s life and work in this month’s cover feature.
Now to find out who has won the overall prize and thus receives the first prize of $6,000. We don’t have long to wait. Join us at Gleebooks in Sydney on Thursday, 15 August (6 pm), when we will introduce the winner.
It’s been a while since we hosted a big event in Sydney, so this will also be an opportunity to thank our countless writers
This enables us to reproduce Juno Gemes’s portrait of Baldwin, which was taken (at Baldwin’s suggestion) on the roof of the Athenaeum Hotel, London in 1976. Juno, in 2020, wrote about that hour-long photographic session for the Rochford Street Review (still available online). ‘With respect and warmth, I said to [Baldwin] cheekily, “You are the prince of all your survey.” He looked out across the roof parapet. He smiled wryly … In that moment I had my portrait.’
In December, Upswell will publish Juno Gemes’s magnum opus: Until Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights: Photographs 1970-2024.
On the verge
Advances always looks forward to the new iteration of Verge, the annual creative writing anthology from Monash University Publishing. This year’s edition is crisply titled Click. The editors – J. Taylor Bell, Julia Faragher, Isabella G. Mead, and Anna Pane – have included twenty-six writers from Monash University and beyond. Among them are Kayla Willson, Dominic Symes, and ABR’s very own Will Hunt, who has a work of autofiction – his first creative publication. Congratulations to all.
David Marr and LNL
After Phillip Adams’s epic reign at Late Night Live, everyone was looking forward to David Marr’s commencement in midJuly as the new host of this essential latenight radio program. Early on, he spoke at length to military historian Joan Beaumont – a fascinating elaboration of the ideas advanced in her article on Ambon and postmemory in our July issue.
Look out – or listen up – for Paul Kane’s appearance on the program, apropos of James Baldwin. Paul also features on the ABR Podcast this month.
Kerry Greer
Shelley Stenhouse
Jill Van Epps
Australian Book Review
August 2024, no. 467
First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)
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Image credits and information
Front cover: James Baldwin on the roof of the Athenaeum Hotel, London, UK, 1976 (© Juno Gemes)
Page 25: Canadian born novelist Rachel Cusk portrait at home, Bristol, UK, 2004 (Jeff Morgan / Alamy)
Page 49: Paul Gauguin, Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin, 1889, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation, the Armand Hammer Collection
ABR August 2024
Paul Kane
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James Baldwin – an indispensable prophet
Popular science writing in our literary landscape
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Everything Is Water by Simon Cleary
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From prehistory to now, the fascinating story of why music is vital to the human experience
‘Is there some aspect of the musical experience that is common to us all? Is there a need for music – even Takemitsu’s single strum or pluck –that is universal? The most avowedly unmusical among us, left alone in a room with a drum or a piano, a guitar or a child’s glockenspiel, will be unable, in time, to resist coaxing a sound from it …’
Andrew Ford OAM is an award-winning composer, writer and broadcaster. He has been composerin-residence for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian National Academy of Music and the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, his music played from Hong Kong to Helsinki, from Bogota to Bradford. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC’s Radio National.
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ABR Podcast
Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.
James Baldwin Paul Kane
‘First Snow’ – Jolley story Kerry Greer
Mitty Lee-Brown: artist in exile Nick Hordern
America’s forever war Timothy J. Lynch
‘Pornwald’ – Jolley story Jill Van Epps
Science in our literary landscape Robyn Arianrhod
Stanley Kubrick Peter Goldsworthy
‘M.’ – Jolley story Shelley Stenhouse
James Baldwin this time
The centenary of an indispensable prophet by Paul Kane
In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’
He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.
This abysmal situation would not surprise James Baldwin, whose centenary is being celebrated – or at least marked – this year (he was born on 2 August 1924). Beginning with his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and up to the end of his life, the colour line was his subject, the object against which he aimed his polemics. In The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin warns, ‘A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.’ He cites Du Bois’s remark and then calls it ‘[a] fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world – here, there, or anywhere’. The root of the problem, as he analyses it in ‘Stranger in the Village’, ‘is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself’. In other words, it’s not a black problem, but a white one – a dialectical inversion typical of Baldwin. He goes on:
And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans – lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession – either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once.
This leads to a sentence that clinches the argument with
a clutch upon our attention: ‘The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”.’
Baldwin is at his best in diagnosing this illness, in laying bare the ignorance, hypocrisy, and sheer inanity of American culture and politics as it relates to American blacks. In this, Baldwin speaks from his own experience and gives rein to his anger and anguish in a way that implicates the reader, whether white or black. Baldwin makes us uncomfortable. He sees it as his job. Eddie Glaude admits in his book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own (2020) that Baldwin was someone he evaded for a long time: ‘Baldwin’s essays forced you to turn inward and confront whatever pain was there, and I did not want to do that. I damn sure didn’t know what to do with my pain philosophically. Moreover, and this mattered most, I could not read him with my white colleagues without having to manage whatever he made them feel.’ In the end, Glaude had to come to terms with Baldwin and, therefore, with himself. It’s not just the content but the urgency and intimacy of Baldwin’s style that tears at the reader’s defences so that one either embraces Baldwin or pushes him away, or tries to do both simultaneously. The very coolness of his rage can be discomfiting:
It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American
Edited by Phillip Toner and Michael Rafferty
AUGUST 2024
Negro, this is who he is – a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one. (The Fire Next Time)
There is very nearly a consensus that Baldwin is among America’s finest essayists, but he stands alone as the most despairing and bitter. And yet that is not the counsel he urges. He is not one of Job’s ‘comforters’; he is, as he puts it, a Jeremiah, whose aim is a New Jerusalem.
The procession of numerous centennial events this year, in the United States and in France (where he lived most of his life), raises two questions: what is his standing or reputation now? And can we discern his legacy from our current vantage point? These are big questions, but they are worth considering even in cursory fashion.
Although he didn’t publish his first book until he was twenty-nine, Baldwin published twenty-two books and almost 100 essays and reviews by the time he died at the age of sixtythree in 1987. By the early 1960s he was already famous, and in 1963 he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. He was also popular with the FBI, which compiled a file on him of more than 1,800 pages (he was considered a dangerous revolutionary). His was a rapid rise, followed by a precipitous decline during the next decade. An article by a young Henry Louis Gates Jr in 1973 was rejected by Time magazine because Baldwin had become – in the intervening ten years – ‘passé’. More wounding, though, considering Baldwin’s deep engagement with the civil rights movement in the 1960s, were the vicious criticisms by Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Power and Black Arts leaders, who saw Baldwin as not only passé but as insufficiently radical and shamefully ‘sycophantic’ towards whites. More telling, perhaps, were the homophobic remarks about his supposed lack of black masculinity, whereby Baldwin, as gay, was attempting to become a ‘white man in a black body’.
contemporaneous films about him, there have been two major documentaries, The Price of the Ticket (1989) and the awardwinning I Am Not Your Negro (2016), with a major biopic, starring Bill Porter as Baldwin, currently in production. In 2018, Barry Jenkins adapted the late novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) into a successful film, which had the salutary consequence of introducing Baldwin to a new generation of readers.
As a stage and television character, Baldwin is also in evidence: He appears in James Graham’s play Best of Enemies as friend and adviser to Gore Vidal, and, more recently, in episode five of the television series Feud: Capote vs the Swans (Binge), where he comforts and admonishes Truman Capote. Both cameos are entirely fictional, but that’s all the more indicative of his new celebrity status. We have moved from
By the 1980s, Baldwin ruefully accepted his diminished fame (while at the same time becoming more markedly militant, and even strident, in his rhetoric: ‘in a couple of days, blacks may be using the vote to outwit the Final Solution, Yes. The Final Solution’). Not long after his death, there was a revival of interest and admiration, to the point that there is now a fully fledged James Baldwin industry of academic articles and monographs, as well as an increasing Baldwin presence in popular culture. In addition to three
history to myth. This would not sit well with Baldwin, were he with us today. Aside from grasping the fleeting nature of fame, he was clear about its corrosive effect:
It’s difficult to be a legend. It’s hard for me to recognize me. You spend a lot of time trying to avoid it. It’s really something, to be a legend, unbearable. The way the world treats you is unbearable, and especially if you’re black. It’s unbearable because time is passing and you are not your legend, but you’re trapped in it. (Interview with Quincy Troupe, 1987)
Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, and Marlon Brando at the Civil Rights March in Washington DC (National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Part of that legend included a developing narrative of artistic diminishment: in the wake of the assassinations of black leaders he had befriended (the trio of ‘Medgar, Martin and Malcolm’, as he put it), Baldwin – it’s asserted – withdrew and never regained the power of his rhetorical genius or the imaginative reach of his fiction. He was a disappointment; he did not fulfil his promise as a writer. But when one looks more closely at the various critiques, from the 1960s to the present, it is noticeable that such evaluations are often based on shifting notions of aesthetic value and political exigency. We know that reputations often rise and fall and then rise again. What’s interesting now in Baldwin studies is not the attempt to sum him up but to use him, to put him to work in different contexts and for different ends. He has been woven into the fabric of contemporary American culture. He is, in a word, canonical.
Baldwin makes us uncomfortable. He
sees it as his job
There is something mercurial in James Baldwin which seems central to his writing. At the level of style, he frequently surprises with abrupt turns or turnings back, not unlike what we experience in the essays of Joseph Brodsky, especially when there is an ironic reflection that seems to open up a void beneath the sentence. In ‘Notes of a Native Son’, Baldwin recalls how on the day of his father’s funeral a race riot broke out in Harlem: ‘I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision [as a preacher]: very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.’ That archness is pure Baldwin. At the same time, you can discern influences, including the psychological subtlety of Henry James; the rhythms and diction of Harlem and the blues; the cadences of the Bible and the gospel hymns he grew up with. There is a protean quality to Baldwin’s prose. It is richest in his fiction, where he can ride the language like a surfer, as if catching waves of pulsing life.
At the level of ideas in his non-fiction, and of character in his stories and novels, this mutability suggests a deeper source, something that cannot be caught or held in a linear grid of meaning. One of the difficulties in apprehending Baldwin is how prolific and varied he is: 6,895 pages of material in multiple genres: essays, novels, stories, plays, poems, reviews, interviews, articles, commentaries. Evaluations of him are almost always focused on one or two genres. His quicksilver versatility might be traceable to his status as a double exile: a black man in a white society; and a gay man in the hypermasculine culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Not only is he alienated from white America, he is often an alien to the larger black community for being ‘queer’ and an aesthete. It’s no wonder he had to leave America, for Paris, to write about America.
Baldwin, it’s worth noting, did not consider himself homosexual, but androgynous (like everyone else: ‘there is a
man in every woman and a woman in every man,’ he argues). His notion of gender fluidity is likely to resonate in our contemporary world in a way that is wanting in many of his peers (Norman Mailer, William Styron, Philip Roth, even Truman Capote). It is also analogous to his fluctuating use of pronouns and identities. His deployment of we, especially, can alter according to his sense of audience. It can refer to his identity as an American or an American black, when speaking to whites; it can indicate his identification with fellow blacks exclusively, or to fellow artists. But there are times, as in ‘Many Thousands Gone’, when he is so focused on conveying a thought or situation to a white American readership that he will slip into using ‘we’ for emphasis, as if he too was a white man: ‘Time has made some changes in the Negro face. Nothing has succeeded in making it exactly like our own’ (emphasis added). That startling shape shifting is indicative of how far Baldwin will go to get under our skin. And there’s a reason for this: it serves a purpose.
Baldwin’s second book, Giovanni’s Room (1956), a gay novel set in France, is narrated by a white man, David; there are no black characters. If Beale Street Could Talk, a late novel, is a love story about two black childhood friends who get married; it is narrated by the woman, Tish. ‘Going to Meet the Man’, the eponymous story of his short story collection (1965), employs free indirect discourse from the point of view of a white bigoted deputy sheriff in the South. These are three examples of the way Baldwin refuses to be pinned down or boxed in. Because he saw himself primarily as a witness to what was happening in his world, he felt free to find the best vantage point from which to view it and report it. And early on, what he saw was violence, injustice, and fear, but also courage, forbearance, and tenderness.
For all the anger and even hatred that animates his work, Baldwin insisted that the only way forward, the only way out, was through a renovation of the self, and this could only be accomplished through deep communication and empathy. In the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Baldwin says, ‘my own experience proves to me that the connection between American whites and blacks is far deeper and more passionate than any of us like to think’:
The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.
That James Baldwin should have preached a gospel of love is a continuous surprise, but in this time of moral panic in America, he remains an indispensable prophet. g
Paul Kane is Professor Emeritus at Vassar College in upstate New York. With Harold Bloom, he edited Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and poems for the Library of America. His Earth, Air, Water, Fire was produced as a CD set by Fairpoint Recordings.
The great debacle
Urgent
reading for Australian citizens
Marilyn Lake
NNuked:
The submarine fiasco that sank Australia’s sovereignty by Andrew Fowler
Melbourne University Press $35 pb, 198 pp
uked – a compelling but depressing read – is a deeply researched and strangely suspenseful account of the AUKUS agreement struck between Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and United States President Jo Biden and announced in September 2021; a deal that included supplying Australia with a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines at the staggering cost of $368 billion. Nuked should be compulsory reading for all Australian citizens.
A tale of ambition, betrayal, duplicity, and deceit, Andrew Fowler’s account unfolds as a tragedy replete with treacherous villains and guileless heroes brought undone. The cast includes political cowards and corporate go-getters. Christopher Pyne was ‘not alone in seeing the possibilities of making money from the heightened concerns of a resurgent China’. As an example of national policy making, AUKUS, Fowler suggests, moves between ‘fiasco’ and ‘debacle’. His account concludes in despair, but there is still a hopeful question mark: ‘No way out?’
Initially, as we know, the Australian government, following a ‘competitive evaluation process’ that reviewed submissions from the Japanese, Germans, and French, decided to invite the French Naval Group to supply the required fleet of conventionally powered submarines to Australia. Malcolm Turnbull, prime minister at the time, was pleased at the prospect of working with the French. ‘The French submarine was the clear winner,’ Fowler writes. ‘Turnbull would now relish the sweet taste of success on the world stage – or so he thought.’
Turnbull travelled to Paris and dined at the Élysée Palace ‘on a balmy Parisian evening in July 2017 … under ornate chandeliers’ with French President Emmanuel Macron. In retrospect it is a poignant scene. Turnbull encouraged Macron in his vision of France as a strong ally in the Pacific, and liked to think that Australia could emulate France in forging an independent foreign policy. As would soon become evident, ‘Australia was playing a double game’ and when pro-American Morrison succeeded Turnbull as prime minister in August 2018 he began entrenching US military personnel in the Australian Department of Defence at the highest levels.
Even before the French deal was announced, Morrison and his co-conspirators had set about undermining it and creating in its place the AUKUS agreement to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, partly made in the United Kingdom and
partly made or lent by the United States. Fowler suggests the first approaches to the Trump administration were made in October 2020. President Biden was in on the plot from the beginning. An idealistic Democrat, Biden was, if anything, more hawkish about China than Donald Trump. Nuclear submarines were deemed necessary for Australia to take the fight up to China. The aim of the new submarine was to ‘contain’ China – not to defend Australia – and to join the Americans in a revamped strategy of forward defence in the South China Sea.
One legacy of the international drama of AUKUS is the memorable and inimitable line ‘I don’t think, I know’ from Macron, when asked whether he had been deceived by Morrison (dubbed ‘that fella down under’ by a memory-challenged Biden at the time of the AUKUS announcement).
The story combines pathos with bathos. How could a national defence program designed to acquire a fleet of new submarines become so compromised and corrupted by political opportunism and ideological madness? Because this is Australia. ‘Just as Morrison was only too willing to trade Australia’s independence for the chance to win an election,’ concludes Fowler, ‘so too was Labor.’
Labor feared being ‘wedged’ on national security. Now in office, it must manage not only the disastrous nuclear submarine acquisitions program but must also pay the French $835 million compensation for the government’s failure to honour their submarine contract. It also has to deal with another legacy of the Morrison government: the arrival of more B-52s and their nuclear capabilities. ‘US influence [in Australia] is as strong now as it has ever been.’
Framing this tale of intrigue is a larger argument about the sacrifice of Australian sovereignty, the retreat from a more independent foreign policy, and the near total integration of the Australian and US militaries. Morrison the serial deceiver emerges in this sorry tale as an unlikely political mastermind: his ‘brinkmanship and deception worked, with the help of the United States’. All the while he was aided by the seemingly ever-present courtier and ‘vehemently pro-America China hawk’ Andrew Shearer, former national security adviser to John Howard and Tony Abbott, one time director-general of national intelligence, and Cabinet Secretary under Morrison. Fowler quotes a former intelligence officer: ‘The regard in which [Shearer] is held in DC is something else.’
One of Fowler’s themes is the necessary ‘manufacture of consent’ (a phrase of Noam Chomsky’s) in Australia for the AUKUS agreement and the prospect of war with China. Morrison’s legendary marketing skills are cited as crucial to this process, along with the quiescence and connivance of journalists at News Corp and Fairfax Media.
In the most hysterical of interventions, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald offered a series of articles in 2023 titled ‘Red Alert’ accompanied by graphics depicting scary Chinese fighter aircraft heading south, conjuring the Chinese hordes of yesteryear heading in our direction.
There is clearly a deeper historical context that enabled AUKUS and fuelled the revived China threat narrative on which it rests, one that goes back much further. The China threat narrative was indeed constitutive of Australian nationhood. The newly evoked ‘rise of China’ rests on a deep fear of Asia that saw the
self-declared ‘white man’s country’ erect the great white walls in 1901 and Alfred Deakin’s orchestration of the visit of US President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet in 1908.
The transnational solidarity of white men in the face of a perceived threat of Chinese global power has a long and dynamic history. More than 130 years ago, in 1893, the English-Australian journalist and politician Charles Pearson predicted in National Life and Character: A Forecast China’s ‘inevitable position as one of the great powers of the world … the preponderance of China over any rival – even over the United States of America – must be overwhelming’. The rise of China as a global power, warned Pearson, would see the ‘white man’s pride of place’ in the world ‘humiliated’. Certainly, Joe Biden’s ‘pride of place’ would not
New horizons
Narratives of identity and experience
TPersonal
Politics: Sexuality, gender and the remaking of citizenship in Australia by Leigh Boucher et al. Monash University Publishing $36.99 pb, 313 pp
he slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.
What then of fathers’ groups who continue to target the family law system, or women’s groups such as Women’s Action Alliance, which mobilised as stay-at-home mothers to oppose no-fault divorce after its introduction in 1975 – or, more recently, the Australian Men’s Shed Association, commonly assumed to be ‘non-political’, and which has been successful in attracting mainstream support and government funding for its men-only spaces? All of these political actors have made claims on the state at least partly on the basis of gender and sexuality, but to date have mostly been analysed in opposition to other social movements, especially feminism.
As Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Barbara Baird, and Robert Reynolds, the authors of the vibrant new history Personal Politics: Sexuality, gender and the remaking of citizenship in Australia, compellingly demonstrate, ‘the deployment of gender and sexual
be humiliated. The United States ‘would remain the leader of a unipolar world’ and Australia would do all in its power to support it. Indeed, as Sam Roggeveen (quoted by Fowler) astutely notes, ‘Australia is more committed to US leadership in Asia than the US itself.’
Even as the Labor government wrestles with how to make the disastrous Morrison legacy work, Peter Dutton, Morrison’s successor as Liberal leader, has built on his example, proposing a fleet of seven nuclear power plants across Australia. Nuclear is being normalised. g
Marilyn Lake is Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
identities as the central vehicle of citizenship claims’ has not been a feature exclusive to ‘feminist and gay and lesbian politics’. Nor did men’s interest groups suddenly appear on the scene with the advent of Women’s Liberation in the 1970s. Chronologically, they begin in the mid-1960s, when ‘a set of masculinist dissatisfactions’ with amendments to the Matrimonial Causes Act 1959 inspired the formation of the Divorce Law Reform Association (DLRA). Their targets were not feminists, but what they saw as ‘swindling and interfering lawyers and conniving and dishonest wives’.
As the authors narrate in their erudite introduction, Personal Politics traverses the shift from the ‘social liberalism’ of the 1970s and 1980s through to our current moment of ‘late modernity’ or ‘advanced liberalism’, via the ascent of neo-liberalism in the 1990s. To put it in less academic terms, we follow ‘unpaid activists’ in the 1970s campaigning for abortion and homosexual law reform, some of whom became ‘employees in government-funded community services’ and ‘femocrats’ and ‘poofycrats’ devising policy in the 1980s and into the 1990s, on to the ‘campaign professionals’ who were key players in the marriage equality campaign in 2017. Pitched as a ‘cultural history’ and a ‘new political history’, Personal Politics succeeds as both, with the authors consistently pulling off the admirable feat of engagingly narrating the necessary though sometimes inevitably dry details of policy development and political campaigning in tandem with the wider social and cultural changes and aspirations that motivated those involved.
With four authors on board (and with Boucher at the helm), Personal Politics is a remarkably coherent history yoked together by their reframing throughout of ‘personal politics’ as a notion, and an inspired approach to organising the material. The research team are all experts on the topics and themes covered and have individually published books and articles in recent years that overlap with, or are pertinent to, Personal Politics, including Arrow’s The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia (2019) and Abortion Care is Health Care (2023) by Baird. While their previous research clearly informs and strengthens the new book, they also keep things fresh by swapping areas of expertise, sharing research, showcasing recent scholarship, and merging histories they have individually covered elsewhere to yield new insights. For instance, HIV-AIDS activism (earlier historicised by Reynolds) and ongoing campaigns for abortion law reform (Baird’s terrain) are skilfully brought
Zora Simic
together as emblematic of a shift to ‘health centred activism’ from the late 1980s. Theirs is a convincing authorial ‘we’, particularly in those moments where they critique what forms of ‘personal politics’ have been most successful in mainstream terms, and at whose expense.
Most chapters feature an illuminating pair of case studies. Considered together, activist campaigns concerning abortion and male homosexuality in the 1970s ‘reveal a shared refusal of citizenship’s reproductive bargain’. In the same decade, ‘groups representing home-making mothers and working fathers’ mobilised against the new Family Court, sharing a ‘vision of a domestic order’, but ultimately with different ambitions. An especially sobering chapter compares the contrasting fates of the Women’s Refuge Movement, which, despite its early and ongoing efforts, has not managed to fend off the encroaching tides of neo-liberal reforms, and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, as it was known in the early 1990s, when it successfully recast itself as a profitmaking community organisation.
Elsewhere, the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to save the Safe Schools program, after it became the victim of a culture war launched by The Australian, is generatively paired with the less visible but more politically palatable men’s shed movement. If at first glance the comparison seems ‘incongruous, even controversial’, given that Safe Schools aimed to support and empower queer youth while the men’s sheds service (mostly) white, heterosexual men, the two political projects shared a strategy of making appeals based on ‘distress and vulnerability’. The benefits and limitations of such an approach are sensitively pondered. The Safe Schools
campaign was one crucial element of the ‘emergence of Trans Youth as a political identity in Australia’, but at the same time the public visibility of queer pain and trauma did not stop the federal government withdrawing funding in 2017. That same year ushered in marriage equality, following an often bruising No campaign which targeted Safe Schools, and a Yes campaign that, while ultimately successful, also divided, or failed to adequately represent, the LGBTQI+ community. The final chapter of Personal Politics boldly takes on this very recent history by examining diverging accounts published in the immediate aftermath of the postal vote.
An afterword comparing the achievement of marriage equality with the failed Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023 is valuable on its own terms, while further emphasising some of the overarching themes and concerns of Personal Politics. These include the fact that the ‘remaking of citizenship’ in Australia is not a progress narrative; that sexuality and gender are fundamental features of Australian political life, in both explicit and implicit ways; and that Australian citizenship and nationalism continue to be racialised and shaped by settler colonialism. If, at times, the last point is made perfunctorily, particularly in relation to migrants and refugees, the effect is an impressively nuanced survey of political campaigns and strategies in which each chapter provides fresh analysis. Finally, beyond its value as history, Personal Politics provocatively and persuasively encourages its readers to contemplate new political horizons, less tethered to narratives of pain and grievance, and which extend beyond the parameters of one’s own identity and experience. g
Melbourne rally for marriage equality, 2017, photograph by Paris Buttfield-Addison (CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Bearing witness
Not a journey but a pilgrimage
Danielle Clode
TEverything Is Water
by Simon Cleary
University of Queensland Press
$34.99 pb, 328 pp
here are few places more restful than a riverbank on a fine day, few sights more enticing than a disappearing river bend, few places more intriguing to follow than the tumbled rocks of a creek line. Following the water, to its source or destination, seems hard-wired into our psyche.
Simon Cleary’s latest book, Everything Is Water, takes this fascination to an extreme. Rivers are easy to take for granted, particularly in cities, where they often become integrated into the urban infrastructure. But they have a way of demanding attention, even from the most inattentive city-dweller, when they rise over their arbitrary banks, flowing across field, forest and mangrove, through streets, basements, and houses. When the Brisbane River flooded in 2011, it forced many people to reconsider their relationship with the waterway their city was built upon. Such floods make Cleary, who could never be described as inattentive, reflect on his lifelong relationship with the river, from his childhood mucking about in the headwaters, to his adult life living and working towards the mouth.
Rivers can be both barriers and conduits, to be crossed or followed. When dry, waterlines often form the easiest access inland; in flow, they can provide a rapid ejection downstream. Cleary chooses not to go against the flow, in the tainted footsteps of white explorers, but nor does he go with the flow. Instead, he takes one of the most difficult routes, that of walking alongside the Brisbane river – all 344 kilometres of tangled vegetation, muddy banks, eroded cliffs, dams, weirs, fences, drains, overpasses, and tiresomely diverting tributaries.
Riverbanks are liminal territory in more ways than one, never a simple line on a map, but an estimation or average across time and space and an unreliable boundary marker, with access rights often determined by the difficulty of getting there. Cleary’s trek from headwaters to the sea, largely by foot, takes four weeks. This is not a journey but a pilgrimage.
Cleary’s reflections on the nature of the river, its history and future, lie at the heart of this book. There are no expositions, explanations, or simple answers, just thoughtful observation and insightful contemplation, assisted by an array of often knowledgeable walking companions and river residents along the way.
We often think about Australia as being defined by its aridity, but it could equally be said to be shaped by its long meandering rivers. Life clusters along the riverways, which carve rich channels
of biodiversity across the country as they cycle nutrients from the mountains and hinterland down onto fertile plains. Humans cluster here too, both Indigenous and introduced, leaving very different footprints.
City rivers, along with their catchment tributaries, have been simultaneously exploited as freshwater supply, mode of transport, food supply, waste disposal, recreation, irrigation, mining, and a host of other not always compatible or sustainable activities. With heavy rains and a rising river dominating Cleary’s journey, the need to balance water supply against the need to protect the lives of those living downstream of major catchments is sharply demarcated.
Attitudes towards the river vary, and admiration is not assured. One resident, when asked what they know of the river, replies succinctly, ‘Bastard of a thing.’ Nature is always trying to kill you, although, as Cleary puts it ‘the river isn’t breaking the cycle of life and death but continuing it’.
Cleary does find one thing he’s searching for, if only in glimpses: an idea of what the river once was. At the start of his journey he is told, ‘this is cattle country’, a fact that is indisputably scarred into the landscape. But we are reminded by James, a Jagera man, that it used to be kangaroo and emu country. Finding the traces of that country is not always easy.
On the sixth day, Cleary comes across a sign to Greenhide Scrub:
To call it a scrub feels inadequate, almost a slight. In the days when forests like these were obstacles to farming, the naming was probably deliberate. This forest may only be a few acres, but it is amazing. Ecosystems are collapsing all around us, but not here, not yet, not now. This resistance is fierce.
As Cleary walks through the regrowth/remnant rainforest in Greenhide Scrub, he comes across a single red cedar and wonders how it survived the logging that obliterated the vast forests that once blanketed the plains of the rivers of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. A few days later, a patch of remnant hoop pine on top of a hill – a species equally devastated by forestry – reminds him of ‘[t]hat question again: what did it once look like? Like that, I think, like that.’
Cleary’s journey reminds us of the importance of taking the slower path, the more difficult path. Even if not all of us would have wanted to share that often arduous trek with him, we can all be grateful that he has shared it with us.
‘Has anyone ever walked through a forest of Xanthorrhoea and not been humbled?’ he asks. I can think of some who have not, who have only seen cheap cattle fodder, and they are the poorer for it. As Cleary explains of these ancient plants, ‘You know they’re kindred. But older and wiser. You have to stop. Listen. Hear them sigh. Hear them murmur. They have borne witness.’ After reading this book, so have we. g
Danielle Clode is an author and associate professor in creative writing at Flinders University. Her book Voyages to the South Seas won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Non-fiction in 2007. In 2014 she was the ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. Her latest book is Koala: A life in trees (2022).
Chains of connection
Anthropology at its best
Stephen Bennetts
DDreaming Ecology: Nomadics and Indigenous ecological knowledge, Victoria River, Northern Australia
by Deborah Bird Rose ANU Press
$59.99 pb, 337 pp
reaming Ecology is the posthumous third volume in a trilogy that also comprises Deborah Bird Rose’s earlier anthropological study Dingo Makes Us Human (1992) and Hidden Histories (1991), an account of the recent history of Aboriginal people in the Victoria River District (VRD) region in the north-western corner of the Northern Territory. As an anthropological neophyte, I came across her briefly in 1994 during the Palm Valley Land Claim in Central Australia, in her role as anthropologist assisting the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Commissioner. Although by the time of her death in 2018 she had worked on nearly twenty Aboriginal land claims, her own anthropological research diverged from Australian anthropology’s preoccupation for nearly fifty years with Indigenous land tenure systems dictated by the land claim and native title claim process.
Dreaming Ecology follows another trend, initiated by W.E.H. Stanner, exploring traditional Aboriginal people’s intimate economic, cultural, and spiritual connections (and even kinship relationships) with the natural world and its plant and animal species. Her important insights into Indigenous life worlds are based on a lifetime of engagement with senior Aboriginal authorities from the VRD district, especially the Yarralin community. Many of her Aboriginal ‘teachers’ (she eschews the anthropological convention that objectifies them as ‘informants’) walked the surrounding country from the early years of the twentieth century, sustaining themselves through a detailed knowledge of local plant species and animal behaviour. As Rose’s collaborator Daly Pulkara remarks in a characteristically pithy Aboriginal Kriol exposition of Dreaming Ecology’s key ideas: ‘And some kartiya [whitefella] might [be] walking there [and] he reckon “no tucker”. And he’s walking on top of the tucker now!’
Relying at first on conventional ethnobotanical survey methodologies, Rose found that ‘in working through piles of specimens with teachers like Jessie, Dora and Hobbles, it became clear that people in their age range (over sixty) easily identified well over 150 plants and knew of more for which I had no specimens’. From 1986 to 1991, she introduced an innovative biographical-ecological mapping technique:
I decided to work with maps to take memory journeys and revisit the places people had walked in their youth. I sought to document the foods they had eaten as they travelled. The maps
document resources in some areas for which no scientific surveys have been conducted. In addition, they document distributions from a time which is no longer accessible and document former abundance of some species which are now absent entirely or present only sporadically and in scarce amounts.
Rose’s background – she was the daughter of a Protestant minister and granddaughter of Congregational and Unitarian ministers –seems to have equipped her well for her powerful cross-cultural dialogue with Aboriginal cosmology.Indigenous totemism rejects the Western division between culture and nature and Christianity’s notion of a transcendent plenum beyond the material world, and instead proposes an immanent system of connectivity and kinship that brings not only people but also plant and animal species into connection, and in which human subjects are consubstantial with the natural world rather than separated from it.
Flesh is shared across species so that human life is implicated in the lives of other species. Subjectivity is located within the site of the body, within the bodies of other people and other species and within the world in trees, rock holes, on rock walls and so on.
In her Aboriginal teachers’ world view, Dreaming Women placed baby spirits in particular locations during the Dreamtime; later they seek to be born by attaching themselves to animals, which are then hunted by the baby’s father and eaten by its mother, with the spirit’s arrival in the mother’s womb often signalled by vomiting: ‘chains of connection give the person a genealogy that not only includes parents, but also Country, dreaming sources and the mediating animal’. Rose provides an emblematic example of a man who
was a barramundi before he became a person. His father speared the fish, his mother ate some, then the spirit became the baby, who grew into the man known as Hobbles Danaiyarri. On his right temple he had a small mark where his father speared the fish … A group of Aboriginal people had been fishing and were shot by white fellows. One of the men died in the water. His spirit became a barramundi: the barramundi became Hobbles.
Rose was herself assigned to the flying fox matrilineal totem (ngurlu), and Shimmer, the book she completed only a few weeks before her death, reflects her long fascination with the species, while Wild Dog Dreaming similarly explores human connections with the non-human.
A melancholy feature of the anthropological vocation (captured so well in Lévi-Strauss’s memoir Tristes Tropiques) is the elegiac sense of loss that accompanies the passing of ethnographic collaborators who have handed on to us their testimony of bygone and now irrecoverable worlds. Rose’s writing bears witness to the ecological and cultural losses inflicted on the First Peoples and ecology of the VRD by frontier violence, ecocide, and genocide, as ‘colonising society laid a grid of cattle stations over [Aboriginal] countries’. Cattle grazing has had a devastating effect on the VRD environment, wiping out many once familiar plant species. Although some of Rose’s oldest teachers had seen bandicoots, bilbies, brushtail possums, and quolls in their youth, no one had
seen any of these four animals in decades.
In a stunning Indigenous inversion of the colonial concept of civilising ‘land improvement’, some of Rose’s collaborators referred to areas of ecological devastation caused by overgrazing as ‘Wild Country’. In Hobbles Danaiyarri’s view, ‘before kartiya, blackfellas bin just walking round organising the Country’, the apparent implication being that, in contrast to Aboriginal land management practices, kartiya had been ‘walking around and disorganising the Country ever since they came here’.
The idea of extinction looms large in Rose’s work, no more so than in her notion of ‘double death’: ‘the first death is ordinary
While men meditate
Asiatic civilisation in the West
Alison Broinowski
TThe Light of Asia: A history of Western fascination with the East
by Christopher Harding Allen Lane
$65 hb, 463 pp
he world isn’t quite what it seems. We often imagine the modern world as if it were a halved orange, East clearly separated from West. For centuries, the West has claimed superiority over the Rest, despite knowing little about them, as Edward Said copiously showed in Orientalism (1978). An equally influential proposition in The Clash of Civilisations (1996) was
death; the second death is destruction of the capacity for life to transform death into life. Languages obliterated and maybe gone forever and clans or tribes eradicated and maybe gone forever are examples of double death.’ In one dispiriting passage, Rose cites several cases of now extinct plant or animal species that are totemic relations of people still alive today: ‘the people live and their totemic sites, songs, designs and practices live, but the animals themselves, the non-human descendants of the ancestral totemic figures are gone’.
Rose’s decades-long research on Aboriginal plant use appears nowhere to have uncovered evidence to substantiate Bruce Pascoe’s recent claim that Aboriginal people practised European-style agriculture, although co-editor Margaret Jolly appears in her prologue to give some credence to this notion. Her otherwise exemplary exegesis will certainly assist the non-specialist reader in navigating the key themes of this rich but at times philosophically dense text. Deborah Bird Rose’s sympathetic and sensitive engagement with the life worlds of traditional Aboriginal people seems to me to represent anthropology at its best, and it is difficult to argue with the words of her second co-editor (and ex-partner) Darrell Lewis: ‘[Debbie’s] passing is a major loss to this country, but her numerous writings dedicated to social and ecological justice and to helping bridge the gap between Aboriginal and settler Australians are an ongoing gift to this country, and to the wider world.’ g
Stephen Bennetts is a Perth-based writer and anthropologist. He is a Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society.
Samuel Huntington’s. He saw the world of Islam as having ‘bloody borders’ and being pitted in conflict with the West over cultural differences. In 1984 (1949), George Orwell imagined two fictional hemispheres in conflict, Eurasia and Eastasia, leaving unresolved the problem of what to do about Oceania.
The southern region with its many islands, including Australia, was usually seen as an inconsequential appendage. Despite calling itself a ‘Western’ country, Australia always was and remains part of the East Asian hemisphere, an Island off the Coast of Asia, as Clinton Fernandes named it (2018). In anticipating a ‘logic of one world’, former Singaporean foreign minister Kishore Mahbubani’s optimism in The Great Convergence (2014) was premature. It will take longer before such a new view of the world, with many interconnected segments, more like a geodesic soccer ball than a bisected orange, informs our belief systems and Australia’s place in it.
For centuries, the violent pursuits of Christian nations in Western Europe were recorded and read as the progressive history of ‘Western civilisation’ and its beneficial colonisation of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Europeans were kept busy with successive alliances, wars, sieges, massacres, and assassinations, ignoring Christian teachings about treating
Deborah Bird Rose at Jasper Gorge in 2012 (photo by Darrell Lewis, via Duke Univeristy Press)
one’s neighbour as oneself and loving one’s enemy. Many conflicts involved religion, including disputes with their co-believers in Eastern Europe. With lofty arrogance, fifteenth-century popes divided the known world to allow Castilians to take their flags, swords, and crosses west, while Portuguese went east. Dutch and British traders and colonisers followed, and later French, Belgians, and Germans, often appropriating whole countries.
This persistent Western belligerence could not be further from the peaceful aspirations of Buddha and Confucius in the fifth century BCE, and their millions of later followers. Buddhists revered the Five Wisdoms as their guide to a good life and afterlife. Confucius’s teachings stressed high moral principles and universal virtue. From the fifteenth century, Western travellers to the ‘Indies’, whether East or West, found ancient civilisations, many impressive cities, well-fed and educated people, and leaders who were receptive to foreign technology and ideas.
As well as bringing back spices, tea, silk, lacquer, and porcelain, the travellers, traders, and missionaries – particularly those who stayed long enough to learn languages and customs –acquired cultural knowledge of Asian societies and their religious practices. Audiences at home received the travellers’ tales with rapt attention, some responding with admiration, and others with condescension. Enthusiasm for Asia waxed and waned, according to periods of rejection or acceptance of the Western travellers by their hosts. In his latest book, The Light of Asia, Christopher Harding traces the interactions, particularly of Christians, with India, China, and Japan over five centuries.
In multi-religious India, the Mughal emperor Akbar, who often discussed philosophy with Muslims, Brahmins, Jews, Jains, and Zoroastrians, invited Portuguese Jesuits to his court in Fatehpur Sikri in 1580 for a series of discussions. Akbar had trouble understanding the Trinity, miracles, and monastic monogamy, and asked how God could have a son. India for the Jesuits was not a missionary success, and the prospect of converting a leader to rival the Emperor Constantine faded. In China, however, two Italian Jesuits, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, made a favourable impression from the 1570s with their world map, and demonstrated practical mathematics and the mechanism of clocks. Another traveller, not a missionary (so not mentioned by Harding) was Engelbert Kaempfer, a German physician who spent two years in Japan from 1690, employed by the Dutch East India Company, and collaborated with Japanese doctors who were eager for Western knowledge of medicine and surgery.
From his study of Buddhist texts, British scholar Edwin Arnold in 1879 produced a narrative poem, The Light of Asia, or The Great Renunciation, describing the life and philosophy of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who, after attaining enlightenment, became the Buddha. Arnold’s work was translated into more than thirty languages, including Hindi. Its influence spread to Western enthusiasts who had never been to Asian countries but used them as exemplars to redress the shortcomings of their own European societies. Earlier examples of this included Voltaire, Montaigne, Montesquieu, Schelling, Coleridge, and Goethe, followed by T.S. Eliot. Harding’s eloquent survey shows how Arnold’s poem provided an influential introduction to Buddhism for Western readers, some of whom based new, occult belief systems on it. Theosophy was established in the United States
in the late nineteenth century by Helena Blavatsky and her collaborators Colonel Henry Olcott and Annie Besant, who gained Swami Vivekãnanda as their figurehead: his name meant ‘bliss of discerning knowledge’. Theosophy attracted many followers, including in Australia. In the mid-twentieth century, the lure of Asia included various mind-altering substances, accompanied by exotic musical instruments, in both of which the Beatles and other performers engaged enthusiastically.
For centuries, the West has claimed superiority over the Rest, despite knowing little about them
Harding begins in 1893 with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, planned to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of ‘Asia’ (although held a year late). Events included the World Parliament of Religions, listed as Shintō, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To the American organisers’ surprise, Japanese and Indian guests were unconvinced by claims of the superiority of Christianity, and Vivekãnanda commented that, while Westerners were newly interested in Hinduism, they still sought ‘the exclusive survival of [their] own religion’.
For Zen proponents Shaku Sōen and D.T. Suzuki, the World Parliament was an opportunity to bring ‘Asiatic civilization’ to the West, which Shunryu Suzuki succeeded in doing at the San Francisco Zen Centre – although his successor, Richard Baker, later resigned following scandals about his use of the community’s funds and his affairs with women at the centre.
Advocates of religion in Chicago could have been challenged about the absence of women at the top of their hierarchies, Western and Asian alike. Why, for example, were yogi masters all male? British traveller Isabella Bird in the 1870s was fascinated by Japan, as was Arnold, whose third wife was Japanese, but women were excluded from the Buddhist leadership. Presumably they performed other tasks while men meditated. Harding, however, finds Western women who personally immersed themselves in aspects of spirituality in India and China: Houn Jiyu-Kennett, Erna Hoch, Sharon Salzberg, and others. He progresses – or regresses – through the ‘New Age’ 1980s and 1990s, when two Englishmen, Alan Watts and Bede Griffiths, promoted a synthesis of Asian wisdom based on long immersion in Buddhism and Taoism for Watts, and in Hinduism for Griffiths, which he combined with Christian belief and scientific modernity.
Wide as Harding’s range is, it omits Oceania entirely. Jill Roe’s Searching for the Spirit (2020) on Theosophy in Australia does not appear, nor does Judith Snodgrass’s detailed account of the Columbian exposition, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West (2003). Nor do David Walker’s highly relevant Anxious Nation (1999) and Stranded Nation (2019). As Western wars rage on, the question of what so much religious disputation has achieved awaits an answer. g
Alison Broinowski, a former Australian diplomat and academic, is the author of The Yellow Lady (1991).
The guilty ones
How to try Vladimir Putin in absentia?
Nick Hordern
Vby Geoffrey Robertson
Biteback Publishing
$34.99 pb, 218 pp
ladimir Putin must be tried in an international court for ordering the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He must be tried, not just indicted, and to do this a new international court explicitly intended to deal with leaders responsible for such territorial aggression must be created. Since the Russian president won’t appear before any international court, he will need to be tried in absentia. Nevertheless, such a trial is essential not only to uphold international law, but to deter other international leaders who are contemplating aggression.
This is Geoffrey Robertson’s argument in his new book, The Trial of Vladimir Putin. The book has several strands: a discussion of how the veto power of the five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council (UNSC) has circumscribed the expansion of an international jurisdiction; a history of how, despite this, such a jurisdiction has haltingly evolved; and a description of the type of new court that Robertson says is needed to try Putin. He goes on to describe a hypothetical trial of the Russian dictator in such a court, and outlines the sort of arguments both the prosecution and the defence would mount.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has already issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on the irrefutable charge of ordering the transportation of children from Ukrainian territory – irrefutable because he actually boasted on television of having done so. Because it doesn’t conduct trials in absentia, the ICC, to try Putin, would need him brought before it in The Hague. This is unlikely to happen, hence the need for Robertson’s proposed court.
In recent decades, several ad hoc international tribunals have paved the way for such a court, including the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. But these were established by resolutions of the UNSC, and the certainty of a Russian veto there means that no such resolution to establish a court to try Putin – as well as his ministers, generals, and cheerleaders such as Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church – would be forthcoming. As a model, Robertson prefers the Special Court for Sierra Leone which was set up by a different method, a bilateral agreement between the UN Secretary General (UNSG) and the government of Sierra Leone. Such an arrangement would endow the court with UN authority while making it independent of the UNSC. In this case, the tribunal would be established by an agreement between the UNSG and the government of Ukraine; it would be best seated in The Hague and it would be explicitly empowered to conduct trials in absentia.
Although much to be desired, the punishment of Putin would not be the main goal of the trial. This would be to demolish for all time his ‘justification’ for aggression: that he was compelled to invade Ukraine for historical and strategic reasons. In order to thus set the record irrevocably straight, the court must go to exhaustive lengths to establish its impartial credibility. It must be separate from the Ukrainian legal system – unlike the quasi-international tribunal established to try the Khmer Rouge leadership, which was fatally embedded in a ‘dysfunctional’ Cambodian legal system. The judges could be drawn from countries like Trinidad, South Africa, and Brazil, rather than from Ukraine and NATO members. The absent Putin must be vigorously defended by lawyers of the highest calibre and reputation. The absence of such lawyers, Robertson believes, compromised the trial in absentia of those accused of shooting down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
Robertson recounts the deplorable history of the P5’s opposition to the expansion of an international jurisdiction – not just from the Russians. George W. Bush was implacably hostile to the exercise of international law, and Donald Trump actually placed a ban on ICC personnel entering the United States (President Joe Biden reversed it). This is an unedifying tale, but to get a sense of just how far the world has travelled since World War II, it is worth revisiting Orwell’s 1943 essay ‘Who Are the War Criminals?’. Orwell was a sceptic, and he mocked the idea of putting Benito Mussolini on trial on the grounds that, in the (then) absence of international law, it would be hard to accuse the Italian dictator – despite his appalling record of crimes against humanity and genocide (a term that hadn’t yet been coined) –of anything concrete.
The filling of that void, the development of international law and an international jurisdiction, is precisely the achievement chronicled by The Trial of Vladimir Putin – and so, on that point Orwell’s criticism has been answered. But Orwell also argued that any such trial must inevitably be tainted by hypocrisy because geopolitics are a ‘moral pigsty’: some hands are dirtier than others, but none are clean. This point still holds good, and for all Robertson’s championing of scrupulously impartial international courts, the cynic wonders why it always seems to be African warlords and Slavic despots who wind up in front of them. Are they really the only guilty ones?
Things might be changing. On 21 May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as three senior Hamas figures, for crimes against humanity. The application for warrants must be approved by a panel of ICC judges, which could take months. Netanyahu, Biden, and Hamas all immediately condemned the ICC announcement as implying moral equivalence between the participants in the Gaza war.
Robertson’s book barely mentions Israel – merely to note that it opposed the creation of the ICC. But in light of his analysis, a decision by the Court to issue warrants for Netanyahu and the Hamas leaders would be highly significant – and a decision not to, equally so. The Trial of Vladimir Putin will be essential background reading as the world awaits the ICC’s decision. g
Nick Hordern is the author of Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books, 2023)
The Trial of Vladimir Putin
Beyond the mundane
Popular science writing in our literary landscape
by Robyn Arianrhod
After Netflix’s intriguing sci-fi thriller 3 Body Problem streamed into Australia earlier this year, readers rushed out in droves to buy the book on which the series is based: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008), which was first translated into English in 2014. Most reviews have focused on the philosophical, literary, and cultural aspects of the book – and they are, indeed, fascinating. But the thing that interests me here is the accurate scientific detail that Liu uses to drive the story. Of course, this is sci-fi, so ultimately he presses real concepts into unreal (but imaginative) service. Still, much more physics and maths appear in his book than in the Netflix series, which, according to Tara Kenny’s review in The Monthly (April 2024), ‘offers a welcome workaround’ the science through visual effects. In the book, by contrast, ‘Lengthy passages are spent dutifully explaining physics theories and technological functionality, which is likely to deter readers who haven’t thought about science since they dissected a rat in high-school biology.’
Kenny’s assumption about the likely response of Australian readers to complex scientific ideas is telling – and probably fairly accurate overall, judging by the relatively low number (around ten per cent) of Year Twelve students undertaking advanced mathematics and physics courses. Perhaps this is why in-depth popular science writing is rarely rated as ‘literature’ by our literary gatekeepers. For instance, it rarely makes the shortlists of our non-fiction literary awards, now that the special science categories that existed a decade or two ago have disappeared. When it does, the emphasis is on the social and political consequences of science, rather than on its ideas. Still, ‘hard science fiction’ (a science-oriented subgenre of sci-fi) attracts quite a readership here, as does popular science. In fact, many passages in The Three-Body Problem read like popular physics, including, naturally, an explanation of the eponymous problem, in which the paths of three or more gravitationally interacting bodies can become chaotic, unlike the predictable orbital ellipses of a two-body system such as Earth and Sun.
For Liu, science fiction ‘is a literature that belongs to all humanity’, and for me this is even truer of popular science.
The best popular science writing offers readers a deeper appreciation of the sublimity of the natural world – and of the human intellect, which has unveiled so many of nature’s mysteries, like a marvellous magic mirror. Such writing also engages readers in the long view of our forerunners’ painstaking quest to understand the universe we all share –a quest whose imperative stems from our species’ insatiable curiosity, our yearning to know ‘why’; an odyssey whose history offers insight into the nature and conceptual development of science as it happened, wrong turns and all. And finally, the best science writing today acknowledges the multicultural foundations of modern science, and the significance of First Nations knowledge and of women’s contributions, which were marginalised for so long.
The best literary fiction writers also aim to capture something relatable and universal in the diverse specificity of human experience. As the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote in The New Yorker (6 November 2019), ‘Science and literature alike are readers of the world.’ Yet literary popular science writing does not seem to figure in our literary canon, the books we set as recommended texts in English classes or recognise in our literary festivals and awards.
It hardly rates in our world-first national literary database, AustLit, either. This is no doubt due largely to AustLit’s small team and to our relatively small number of literary science writers, but still, we have more science writing than the current database suggests.
It is partly a matter of perception, and indeed, in her recent ABR essay (May 2024) AustLit director Maggie Nolan noted, ‘The definitions of both Australian and literature shift over time.’ She also hoped that the database would help us ‘to ask new kinds of questions about the Australian literary field’. This is an excellent goal, and an invitation, too, which I have taken up here as I offer some thoughts on why we should include our literary science writing – including literary writing that explains core scientific ideas – in our notion of Australian literature.
Of course, we live in a market-driven economy, so that if easier books are bestsellers, ever more of them are published.
But a country’s canonical literature – or the literature recognised as the country’s best at a given time – encourages readers (and writers) to extend themselves in a deeper engagement with their place in the world. We often think of literary fiction in this light, but non-fiction also plays its part. Science, in particular, can take us beyond the mundane as well as any fiction. It allows us to marvel at the near-miraculous chance of our own existence, and glimpse our fragile, awesome place in the universe itself. And it allows us to see ourselves as part of the delicate web of life, as First Nations naturalists have done for thousands of years.
In his New Yorker piece, Knausgaard went on to say, ‘And, sooner or later, both [science and literature] lead us to the unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins’ – what Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell described as the boundary where ‘thought weds fact’. But here physical science has the edge. This is because its laws are written in a unique language, an elegant, universal language that is sometimes astonishingly prescient. For example, in their modern vector form Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism (1864) look like a four-line poem, the patterns and repetitions of their symbols – intertwined like the physical electric and magnetic fields they represent –expressing a kind of visual assonance; but the truly remarkable thing about these equations, which Maxwell built from the observed physical behaviour of these fields, is that their poetic, mathematical structure also revealed to him things about electromagnetism that were not known at the time: the electromagnetic nature of light, and the likely existence of radio waves.
Maxwell’s prophetic equations, and their significance for our wireless, electric age, is one of the many thrilling scientific stories that literary popular science writers aim to retell in more accessible language. This is a challenging creative task, just as the best novelists must work hard to find the right language to illuminate aspects of everyday life in new ways. Maxwell himself was a brilliant popular science writer: a wonderfully lucid expositor and a wickedly witty popular writer whose speeches and articles ranged over vast scientific, literary, and philosophical terrain.
The mathematician Bertrand Russell is another legendary ‘insider’ who wrote popular science and philosophy with erudition and wit, deservedly winning the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature. In presenting the award, Anders Österling, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, noted Russell’s academic achievements – he was the co-founder of mathematical logic – but this was not what his prize was for; rather, ‘ What is important, from our point of view, is that Russell has so extensively addressed his books to [the] public … ’ His popular writing on science, philosophy, politics,
and ethics promoted ‘humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought’, according to the Nobel Committee’s citation. Promoting public understanding of science as a way of championing such ideals and freedoms has quite a long history, including the works of the radical French Enlightenment poet and playwright Voltaire, and his partner, mathematician Émilie du Châtelet. They are part of a centuries-old tradition of popular science writing, from both inside and outside the academy, which has long been recognised as a vital means of educating and entertaining the public. As Russell’s Nobel Prize attests, popular science has also been valued as literature. Indeed, the British novelist Ian McEwan has suggested the idea of a scientific literary canon (The Guardian, 2 April 2006). Acknowledging that any canon reflects prevailing assumptions and invites challenge, he ventured his own canonical list. It includes Voltaire’s Letters on England, which has some fine pieces about science, including, as McEwan pointed out, an article arguing for the then-new and controversial idea of immunisation. Voltaire’s wit and erudition in the cause of rationality is, like Russell’s, still relevant in these posttruth, anti-vax days.
As a novelist, McEwan really ‘gets’ the literary value of science writing. He says there ‘ is a special pleasure to be shared, when a scientist or science writer leads us towards the light of a powerful idea which in turn opens avenues of exploration and discovery leading far into the future ... Some might call this truth. [But it also] has an aesthetic value …’ When I started writing literary popular science, I felt that it was valued this way in Australia, too, and I felt proud to be an acknowledged part of our literary community. Today I’m not so sure.
This is partly because of the chronic underfunding of all the arts, and of cuts to university humanities departments and the linking of STEM education funding to industry, devoid of philosophy and history. There is also the shrinking review space for books in general and popular science in particular, and changes to non-fiction book publishing, all largely in response to the digital financial model that favours headlinegrabbing click-bait stories, and to the online world where information abounds, and everyone can be a writer. But it is more than that.
Our literary benchmarks seem to me to have become more parochial, while big, universal scientific stories are mostly relegated to news of the latest ‘breakthrough’, no matter how premature. When these big stories are recognised in literary forums – our festivals, magazines, and awards – the concepts underpinning them are rarely considered intrinsically worthy of attention; rather, the emphasis is increasingly tangential to the science: the political, cultural, and environmental ramifications of scientific technology; nature writing; and
Bertrand Russell (Bassana Ltd, via Wikimedia Commons)
‘self-help’ in the form of science-based tips to improve mental or physical health. Important topics, all. But we live in a scientifically sophisticated society, so we need to understand – and enjoy – the science itself, too. A recent report from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority found that fewer than half the school students surveyed ‘reported having “in-depth discussions about science ideas” in their science lessons’, and that students have better attitudes to science if they can discuss it outside class, with friends and family. Good popular science writing can help here, both by explaining core ideas and by showing that science is a way of thinking. It is much more than the sum of its parts, the facts.
For McEwan, a literary tradition ‘ implies an active historical sense of the past, living in and shaping the present’. Analogously, Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic (2 October 2021), ‘When done properly, covering science trains a writer to bring clarity to complexity, to embrace nuance, to understand that everything new is built upon old foundations …’
Unfortunately, many gatekeepers, here and abroad, seem to be guilty of presentism; in the case of science, this includes favouring writing that focuses on the latest shiny new tech or interim discovery over intrinsically interesting historical
or expository stories that explain and contextualise today’s developments. Still, we have some fine science writers, as NewSouth’s annual Best Australian Science Writing anthologies attest, although even here the emphasis now is on the present, and on description rather than exposition.
On the other hand, many literary novelists include references to science in their fiction, especially to tech and climate change. Yong believes that science and society are now so intertwined that what counts as science writing is up for grabs. He has a point, but it is too broad: emphasising the personal and sociopolitical aspects of science is important, but not a substitute for writing about science itself. I prefer McEwan’s view, that science and science writing themselves have literary value.
In fact, I would go further, as I have tried to show here: literary science writing is worthy not just of a literary science canon, but of a place in ‘the’ literary canon – whatever we define this to be. g
Robyn Arianrhod is an Affiliate in Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her new book in 2024 is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation.
Itinerant
A citizen of a difficult memory, I travel at the full speed of sleep. In my coat pocket: a fruit knife to peel the sun, a wine -dark passport that keeps me company en route to anonymity. When the war ended, mountains learned to crouch in the distance like snow-capped suspicions. The night in my eyes longs to hold and be brightened by such distance and my sleep, when it wraps its lanky arms around me, will be the sleep of those wintry mountains: a pale cold chrysalis, a crystalline coat a child bride drapes around her shoulders to vanish, without a trace, from her wedding. Dear winter, I don’t care what country your sadness comes from.
You have half of my blood in your wine cup. Your streetlights stammer in statics. Your appetite is a white flower of steam clarified by heat. And you, dear stranger whose name winter has scrawled in frost across my window, don’t vanish without a trace. Don’t believe the departure screen above the railway platform. The overnight train heading east will never reach dawn.
Don’t trust the news you read –on the wind’s lips, in the dust dispersed by the wind, its alternately slurred and quicksilver speech – the news of my disappearance. I’m not leaving without the sun, not without its entire orchard of light in my pocket.
Gavin Yuan Gao ❖
Questioning patriotism
A meticulous historical examination
Zoë Laidlaw
IThe Truth About Empire: Real histories of British colonialism
edited by Alan Lester Hurst
£25 hb, 304 pp
ncreasingly, public understanding of issues vital to humanity’s well-being and future – climate change, health policy, international relations – is informed by debate that pits specious prejudice, masquerading as opinion, against expertise. Communicating with a lay audience, experts on complex yet politically charged subjects confront twin challenges: they must present evidence that is multifaceted and can provide no perfect or certain solution, while simultaneously dismantling arguments, founded in denialism, that endorse simple strategies and offer comforting but false hope. Experts and those who wish to construct evidence-based policy are struggling to meet these challenges. If with less apparent jeopardy, these dilemmas also confront historians. Although Australia’s ‘history wars’ of the early 2000s are now a historical episode to be picked over by academics and casually invoked by the media, the national past remains a publicly contested site. We continue, as a nation, to debate the present via the past, as was especially evident during the 2023 referendum campaign. In this, Australia is not alone. In 2020, British Black Lives Matter protesters toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour and daubed ‘was a racist’ on Winston Churchill’s Westminster statue. Scholars researching the history and legacies of Britain’s empire are subject to vituperative attacks, especially if they are non-white or female. A 2019 report on colonial links to stately homes across the United Kingdom provoked a barrage of abuse for its author, Professor Corinne Fowler, and an attempted coup at the National Trust’s 2022 council elections. British Nigerian David Olusoga, a high-profile historian of Black Britain, has to employ a bodyguard at public events. Arguments ostensibly concerned with longlost imperial power and its consequences are actually contests over the very nature of the not-so-United Kingdom and its less
than glorious post-Brexit present.
Leading the rhetorical charge against both the statue-topplers and the historians of empire is a group calling itself ‘History Reclaimed’. It decries presentations of Britain’s past as ‘overwhelmingly and permanently shameful and guilt-laden’, hosts a slick website, and writes opinion pieces for Britain’s conservative press. Several members are historians, although their areas of expertise are not British colonialism. Their champion, Nigel Biggar, studied history long ago but made his career as an academic theologian before retiring in 2022. Last year, Biggar published Colonialism: A moral, which sought to present ‘a more historically accurate, fairer, more positive story’ about the British Empire.
As this suggests, those who promote a more positive reading of British imperialism make claims about the practice of history. Scholars whose work exposes the crimes, violence and graft associated with empire are charged not only with exaggerating, confecting, or wilfully misinterpreting the past but also with doing so to pursue contemporary ends, which might be characterised as ‘woke’. A new collection, The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British Colonialism, edited by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex (with whom I have collaborated), robustly counters this charge. Lester, who critically reviewed Biggar’s Colonialism for the field-leading Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, now brings together sixteen experts on Britain’s empire to expose distortions of history and, crucially, to place History Reclaimed in its own historical context. In a dozen pithy chapters, The Truth About Empire systematically reveals the questionable foundations of apologies for British colonialism. Each essay demonstrates how an aspect of Britain’s complex imperial past is understood by an academic expert. The arguments are compelling, the evidence transparent. Some respond directly to Biggar. Margot Finn’s final chapter is forensic in cataloguing the failures of Biggar’s historical method: his selective and skewed quotations and citations; his ignorance of ‘large and distinctive swathes of the historiographical landscape’; and his measurable bias against women and non-white people, whether historians or historical figures. Chapter after chapter – on Canada, China, India, South Africa, Singapore – reveals Biggar’s over-reliance on a small range of secondary works, his ignorance of crucial historical context, and his systemic bias against the perspective of the colonised in favour of the colonisers.
Few historians of empire will quibble with the book’s conclusions. It provides accessible, rigorously researched and clearly argued discussions of aspects of colonialism, including the end of empire, the opium wars, and why Britain opposed the slave trade.
Graffiti on the Winston Churchill statue, photograph by Aaron Chown (PA Images / Alamy)
But it is unlikely to give pause to History Reclaimed or Biggar’s defenders: they are interested not in the ‘facts’ or ‘real histories’ of empire, but rather in a romanticised imperial past that serves a set of contemporary political myths.
Where The Truth About Empire will prove important is for those interested in the wider problem of the ideologically driven denial of expertise. It provides a meticulous historical examination of how and why questions about the morality of empire and responsibility for its consequences have proved such a political flashpoint in Britain. This scrutiny begins with a chapter on Tasmania by the late Lyndall Ryan. Ryan returns to the ‘history wars’, and one of the central provocateurs, Keith Windschuttle. In a self-published volume, Windschuttle sought to deny the scale of colonialism’s impact on Tasmania’s First Nations. In so doing, he used out-of-date population statistics, made unfounded claims about Tasmanian Aboriginal society, disputed contemporary accounts of massacres, and created a series of straw men by misrepresenting the arguments of scholars like Henry Reynolds and Ryan herself. Ryan shows how Biggar’s discussion of Tasmania ‘appears to take an even-handed approach’, but on each point privileges the long-discredited arguments of Windschuttle. Notably, Robert Manne’s collection Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history (2003) foreshadowed what Lester seeks to do in The Truth About Empire, by bringing together expert historians to counter Windschuttle’s denial. The Truth About Empire shows that an explicit but misleading emphasis on even-handedness has been a hallmark of British
The biggest invisible thing
Building on a trove of unknown history
Max Walden
IRevolusi:
Indonesia and the birth of the modern world by David Van Reybrouck translated from the Dutch by David Colmer and David McKay
Bodley Head
$36.99 pb, 656 pp
n 1906 and 1908, on the island of Bali, thousands of people dressed in ceremonial Hindu attire walked towards Dutch gunfire in acts of mass suicide known as puputan. These were not the first events of mass violence by the Dutch against the indigenous people of what we now call Indonesia – nor the last. In 1621, the native inhabitants of the Banda Islands were slaughtered en masse to secure Dutch access to nutmeg; it was the starting point for Amitav Ghosh’s brilliant non-fiction work The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). The only Bandanese who survived were enslaved. During the so-called Dutch Golden Age of the 1600s, Batavia (now Jakarta) was home to 27,000 people – half of whom were enslaved. In 1740, the Dutch massacred almost all
defence of empire for decades. There is, indeed, nothing new in seeking to present a positive view of Britain’s imperial record, nor in deploying an inherently flawed cost-benefit analysis to do so. Liam Liburd examines how interwar Black writers recognised the entanglements between fascism and imperialism. Yet to compare the two today is to provoke ‘hysterical opposition’. Erik Linstrum documents how swiftly Britons shed responsibility and evaded accountability for both empire and the violence of decolonisation. As Stuart Ward puts it, the genre of ‘empire retrospective’ is characterised by ‘the outward show of wrestling with the moral implications, while working subtly to wrest them from a weary conscience’. It is, it turns out, only ever apologists for empire who seek to deploy the colonial balance sheet.
To write about the past is not necessarily to write ‘history’. As a historical intervention, Biggar’s Colonialism does not deserve attention from academics. The Truth About Empire is both a masterclass in historical scholarship about facets of Britain’s empire ranging from slavery and statues to China and the South African War, and a reminder that history is about evidence and its provenance, that it involves rigorous and replicable analysis, and that the most robust findings are also nuanced. It will give ammunition to those who, like Richard Huzzey in his chapter on the abolition of slavery, question the idea that historical truth should be ‘subservient to patriotism’. g
Zoë Laidlaw is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne.
ethnic Chinese residents of Batavia, establishing what would become a dark history of anti-Chinese violence in the archipelago.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the birth of the modern world by David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian cultural historian, tells the epic story of Indonesia’s journey from colonial subjugation by the Dutch to wartime occupation by the Japanese and its people’s ‘vast, comprehensive, and complete’ revolution, which achieved independence. The book is translated from the Dutch by Amsterdam-based Australian writer David Colmer and David McKay, an experienced translator of Dutch texts about Indonesia. Centuries of apocalyptic violence committed by the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch colonial authorities, along with slavery, economic exploitation, and a humiliating system of racial hierarchy, provide the backdrop for the emergence of Indonesia’s anticolonial nationalist project. Then there was the pain inflicted by World War II, during which four million Indonesians died – the fifth-largest death toll from the war globally. ‘The experience of famine, scarcity and need, of sheer physical degradation, contributed to the radicalisation of young Indonesians,’ Van Reybrouck writes.
The author describes being in Jakarta during a terrorist attack in 2016, and the flurry of short-lived international media attention, to underscore Indonesia’s status as a ‘quiet giant’. It is a characterisation reminiscent of epidemiologist and writer Elizabeth Pisani’s description of Indonesia as ‘the biggest invisible thing on earth’ in her beloved travelogue Indonesia Etc (2014), one of the few books on Indonesia to have entered the Anglo-
phone mainstream. Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority society on earth and the biggest economy in Southeast Asia. ‘This is not some dusty corner of the world, but a strategically located archipelago in a vast, maritime region between India and China … If you could click on Indonesia, and drag it over to Europe on the map, it would start in Ireland and
end somewhere in Kazakhstan.’ Van Reybrouck sees ‘ultradiverse’ Indonesia – with its 300 ethnic groups, 700 languages and thousands of islands – as a fascinating, essential case study in the global struggle for postcolonial nationhood.
Revolusi builds on a trove of history not widely known in the Anglosphere, nor outside academia, to tell the brutal and inspiring story of the Indonesian fight for freedom from imperial domination. Indonesia was ‘one of the first dominoes to fall’ in European colonialism’s collapse, Van Reybrouck writes, and its revolution shaped expectations worldwide about the nature of decolonisation, including encouraging newly formed nations to work together. In that way, as well as being written in a conversational, at times first-person voice and privileging the individual accounts of interviewees, Revolusi serves as the ideal prequel to American journalist Vincent Bevins’s brilliant book The Jakarta Method (2020), which told the human stories of Indonesia’s anticommunist mass murder in 1965 and contextualised the events (also little known in the Anglosphere) within the broader global history of the Cold War.
In the closing pages, Van Reybrouck notes that the ‘Jakarta method’, by which the CIA covertly encouraged an explosion of anti-communist violence and the establishment of a military-backed dictatorship, was repeated across Africa and Latin America in the following years. A trusty bastion of anti-communism during the Cold War under general-turned-president Suharto, Indonesia’s transition to democracy from 1998 gave hope to democrats across the global south, just as its successful war for independence had done.
Revolusi is the product of impressive transnational and multilingual field research. The author undertook ‘formal’ interviews
with 185 people, mostly elderly, in nearly twenty languages, including Javanese, Balinese, Japanese, Dutch, and more. Van Reybrouck interviewed senior citizens in locations from nursing homes in the Netherlands to suburban Jakarta, and says he even found some sources in Indonesia and Japan (through their grandchildren) on the dating app Tinder – reflecting the ability of this book to not take itself too seriously while telling an epic tale of war and politics in meticulous detail.
The oral accounts of people who experienced World War II and the Indonesian War of Independence (1945-49), captured while the last eyewitnesses are alive, are what make this book so compelling. The story of Indonesian nationalist and medical student Djajeng Pratomo, who had been studying in the Netherlands and became the sole Indonesian internee at Dachau among 32,000 Europeans, is remarkable. Pratomo was forced to build machine guns for the Nazis before they put him to work as a nurse in the concentration camp. He describes subtle acts of resistance. With the Americans on the advance, the SS began executions; Pratomo attached the names and numbers of living anti-fascists to the corpses of people who had just died.
The limitations of oral history are, however, often underscored in Revolusi. Van Reybrouck, not an expert on Indonesia per se, draws sweeping conclusions from anecdotes that don’t always ring true. Where he discusses Indonesian Islam – a complex yet widely researched and written-about topic – the analysis leaves much to be desired. For example, he repeatedly refers to the popular Muslim groups Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) as ‘apolitical’, simply because they were not Islamist (i.e. advocating the establishment of an Islamic state). Given the role of NU’s paramilitary wing Banser in anti-leftist mass killings in East Java in 1965-66, the author’s conclusion that they were ever apolitical is demonstrably untrue. Under the presidency of Indonesia’s founding father, Sukarno, the post of minister for religion typically rotated between NU and Muhammadiyah members. Eight out of ten of the country’s most recent religion ministers have been NU or Muhammadiyah.
Still, for the casual reader or engaged Indonesianist alike, this book offers a range of new insights. For one, it challenges the oft-repeated shorthand that Indonesia was colonised by the Dutch for 350 years – even included in the book’s official blurb. The island of Ambon in the eastern ‘spice islands’ of Maluku was held by the Dutch for 337 years, while Aceh in the far west was subject to European colonial rule for just twenty-eight years. Indeed, Van Reybrouck observes that the battle for Aceh was the longest colonial war in history, beginning in 1873 and ending four decades later in 1914. More than 100,000 people were killed, and the Dutch fought Aceh longer than they ruled it.
‘In a quality bookshop in Paris, Beijing or New York, it’s easier to find books about Myanmar, Afghanistan, Korea and even Armenia (countries with tens of millions of inhabitants or fewer) than Indonesia with its population of 268 million,’ David van Reybrouck writes. This mammoth yet highly readable account of modern Indonesian history goes some way to changing that. g
Max Walden is a journalist and editor who has worked for the ABC and The Age. He holds a PhD on Indonesian law and politics from the University of Melbourne. ❖
Queen Juliana and President Suharto, 1971, photograph by Joost Evers (Nationaal Archief via Wikimedia Commons)
Futureshock
Glimpsing the fullness of time
Ben Brooker
GBig Time
by Jordan Prosser
University of Queensland Press
$34.99 pb, 374 pp
iven the global resurgence of interest in compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca, it is a wonder more contemporary novelists have not turned to psychedelic experience for inspiration. It is, after all, hard to think of the golden age of psychedelics – roughly the mid-1960s to mid-1970s – without recalling the trippy, Zeitgeist-capturing literature it produced, including Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and Tom Wolfe’s (highly fictionalised) Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).
Then there were those authors, chief among them Philip K. Dick, who refracted the psychedelic experience into fictions altogether stranger and more opaque. Perhaps it is the aseptic nature of the current psychedelic revival – grounded in clinical trials rather than acid tests, its figureheads more likely to sport lab coats than kaftans – that has so far obviated against a fresh wave of psychedelic literature.
While mind-altering drugs continue to be strip mined for their usefulness in treating various mental health disorders alongside psychotherapy, Jordan Prosser’s first novel, Big Time, imagines a hallucinogenic drug – F, as in ‘future’ – as an aid of a different kind, one which facilitates a kind of mental time travel. Consumed as a liquid applied directly to the eyeballs, the drug plunges its takers into fully immersive trips which reveal their own and other people’s futures. Taken often enough and at sufficiently high doses, F allows users to skip ahead weeks or months. Of course, there are prices to be paid for the attainment of such valuable foreknowledge, not the least of which is a PTSD-like condition called ‘futureshock’.
It is sometime in the 2040s and Australia has become an autocracy following a series of domestic and international crises. The eastern states, renamed and redrawn, comprise the Federal Republic of East Australia (FREA) while Western Australia has (finally!) seceded. Draconian laws that had been ‘percolating for decades in the desk drawers of neoliberal apparatchiks’ have been passed by an unnamed, dictatorial Leader. The internet has been replaced with the state-controlled AusNet (not to be confused with an existing Australian energy company of the same name) and work camps constructed in remote areas. The borders are closed. Immigration and tourism are at negligible levels. ‘Whatever’s bad about it now was there before,’ one character observes of the country. ‘It just became the law of the land.’
Prosser lends these familiar Orwellian tropes an amusingly
Australian inflection. FREA mines and exports coal in defiance of international trade sanctions. The local content on an in-house hotel cable channel includes ‘footy tipping, home renovation, paedophile hunting, docudramas about single-term prime ministers’. Big Time also differs from its dystopian predecessors in centring not on a single protagonist like Winston or Offred, but rather on an ensemble: the four members of the rock band The Acceptables, including bass player Julian, lead singer Ash, drummer Tammy, and guitarist Xander.
While the book’s perspective shifts, it is primarily narrated by Wesley, a music journalist trailing the band as they tour the country, work up new material, and draw the attention of a resistance group whose members include Oriana, Ash’s girlfriend. Of particular interest to the rebels is Julian’s use of F, his ability to trip through time almost at will, touted by resistance leader Charlie Total as ‘the defining spark to set the tinder box ablaze’.
In its telling, Big Time reminded me less of the major dystopias – Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) et al. – than of Ben Elton’s more speculative novels, such as Blind Faith (2007). Prosser’s prose, like Elton’s, is fast-paced and satirical, even when the object of its satire is less than apparent. It also invites comparison with the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick, especially the latter’s Ubik (1969), which shares, among other elements, the plot device of time travel mediated by a chemical agent.
Its blurb describes Big Time as ‘anti-fascist’, but it is hard to see how that descriptor applies, except in the most general sense. Unlike in other dystopias, it is never clear what the guiding principles of Big Time’s authoritarian regime are, nor how the resistance relates to them ideologically. There are times when Prosser appears to be satirising the music industry – such as when The Acceptables’ management company is revealed to be using an algorithm to determine the viability of bands, as well as in his unflattering depiction of audiences single-mindedly interested in the hits – but if so, the critique never fully lands.
While Prosser is evidently a writer of imagination and ambition, Big Time is not without technical flaws typical of a début. There are sentences that clunk – ‘the two of them lurch gently as the plane fondles a pocket of turbulence’ – and perspective shifts that feel less like considered choices than narrative convenience. Perhaps the most egregious of these occurs during one scene that jarringly shifts from first to third person as Wesley exits the room, and the account of a conversation he is no longer privy to is suddenly taken up by an omniscient narrator.
There are other problems. The individual band members never feel fully fleshed out. Nor does the phenomenology of the F experience, despite a key plot element revolving around a ‘chronophenomenology’ summit. Also left underexplored are the temporal paradoxes F would surely give rise to. What becomes of debates concerning free will, determinism, and the nature of causality in this non-linear world? We can only guess. Perhaps, in a more oblique and less plot-driven novel, such details would feel less important, even irrelevant, but here they prove irksome.
Prosser is something of a renaissance man. I have long admired his criticism, and he directs and performs in addition to writing. But Big Time, like F itself, provides only a glimpse of what he might be capable of as a novelist in the fullness of time. g
Oscillating paradoxes
Pushing the boundaries of fiction
Kirsten Tranter
DParade
by Rachel Cusk Faber
$27 pb, 198 pp
ominated by tropes of repetition, inversion, and doubling, Parade feels like a hall of mirrors that reflects and reimagines pieces of reality while also refracting elements of Rachel Cusk’s own body of work. This is not recognisably a novel or a collection of short fiction, but a new iteration of the style initiated by Cusk’s lauded Outline trilogy (2014), a patchwork of vignettes unfolded by an enigmatic narrator. Cusk continues to push the boundaries of fiction, exploring oscillating paradoxes of connection and disconnection, passion and dispassion, attachment and hatred, creation and destruction. At the heart of all of these is the generative primal conflict of gender; together these form the bleak coordinates of the Cusk cosmos.
A painter in the first storyline (classic Cusk, a celebrated misogynist who does not believe that women can be artists) creates inverted landscapes with a quality of ‘demented calmness’, a term that aptly describes Cusk’s own tone. Is it the coldness of absurdist detachment or the eerie sedation of disassociation symptomatic of trauma? Can it be both?
In this disparate parade of vignettes, the misogynist painter and his wife torment one another in silent emotional torture; a woman is traumatised by a savage, random assault; a couple visit a distant commune in a state of decline and experience a brush with a mythological death-dealing figure known as ‘the midwife’; a man throws himself to his death inside a museum; a woman artist struggles to free herself from an oppressive marriage; a collection of critics, artists, and curators gather in the aftermath of the museum suicide, unable to construct a coherent narrative of the tragedy. Children are born, igniting the possibility of love amid this dark matrix of heterosexual misery; parents die, leaving their adult children lost and not entirely free.
Three of the four obliquely connected stories follow a similar structure of interwoven sections in different voices, one told in distant third person about an artist (or artists) known only as ‘G’, and the other narrated in first person, mostly through the collective pronoun ‘we’. Confusingly, all the artists in all the stories are known as ‘G’. Painters, sculptors, authors, filmmakers, women and men, living and dead – as ‘G’ they all blur together.
The effect is just as confusing as it sounds. Parade takes Cusk’s work further in the direction of philosophical puzzle, and further away from realist fiction. Some of these artists are recognisable versions of real figures – Louise Bourgeois’s nightmare giant spider sculptures in the suicide museum story are impossible to
confuse with another artist, for instance. Others seem possibly invented or generic. There are no helpful notes at the end. I am not against allusion, if that is the correct name for it – in fact, I treasure it – but here it raises questions that are not resolved by the book, or at least not for me. Does it matter that I recognise Bourgeois? Am I showing my ignorance of experimental cinema by not being able to exactly place the filmmaker character who makes observational cinema with non-professional actors? Which museum, which sociopathic art critic, restaurant, parade, city, is being referenced from one story to another? Am I following all the clues? What mystery will I solve if I do? What meaning will be closed to me if I don’t?
There are compensations for this maddening confusion. Cusk seems bent on frustrating the pleasures that might come from more conventional storytelling, but her style is entrancing, filled with luminous images. In the third story, an account of a dinner party filled with art-world figures, the setting is evoked as the evening wears on with an attention to detail that is strikingly attuned to beauty and possibility, in contrast to the excoriating satire the author brings to her descriptions of human beings: ‘The air was still thick with heat but the blue of evening had started to collect in the courtyard. The shapes of people and objects began to grow harder and more distinct, as though with the departure of light they were acquiring substance.’ Meanwhile, Cusk’s spectacularly unsympathetic characters complain about the inconvenience caused by people killing themselves on commuter train lines, casually reflect on their own emotional emptiness, and wonder if masculinity is incompatible with any display of weakness, like being afraid of pigeons. ‘I thought masculinity didn’t exist any more,’ remarks a dinner party guest named Betsy, distilling one of the questions at the centre of Cusk’s work; ‘I thought there was just violence.’
In the face of the intellectual severity of Parade, it feels embarrassing to admit nostalgia for some of the things I loved about Cusk’s early novels – the artful comedy, the carefully calibrated narrative tension, the characters who felt somehow real even when they verged on caricatures – and the deliberate unfolding of internal and external conflicts in the Outline trilogy that seems Dickensian in contrast with Parade. Am I showing kinship with the critics who do not appreciate the complex work of the filmmaker ‘G’ in the final story, the ones who ‘expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it’?
What is art, asks Parade, and what is it for? Is it, as another guest suggests, the equivalent of moments when infants proudly display their own faeces? Or is it a kind of spiritual communion? It is undoubtably a vehicle for expressing emotions – chiefly hatred, shame, and ambivalence about the body in this fictional world. How might a writer approach its potential as an expression of human longing for freedom and transcendence through the art of fiction? Cusk’s approach to this problem rejects traditional narrative as a way to get there, and instead breaks fiction down into fragments, remaking it into something exhilarating and disorienting in equal measure. g
Kirsten Tranter publishes essays, journalism, and literary criticism. Her most recent book is Hold (2016).
Ineffectual incarnations
Temporarily entangled heroines
Laura Elizabeth Woollett
SBird
by Courtney Collins Hachette
$32.99 pb, 308 pp
tories about women from disparate times and places leading parallel lives are almost a genre unto themselves. In
Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, a well-known literary example, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, connects the lives of three twentieth- century women (one of them Woolf herself) in an intergenerational portrait of queerness and mental illness. In Evie Wyld’s The Bass Rock, a trio on the Scottish coast are linked over several centuries through themes of violence against women. In Tracey Chevalier’s The Virgin Blue, an American woman living in France noses out the story of a persecuted ancestor.
These tales of Temporally Entangled Heroines, while often classifiable as historical fiction, seem to gain commercial appeal from their foothold in the modern world and the momentum of shifting perspectives. Despite varying in scope, style, and quality, Temporally Entangled Heroine narratives can be conceived of as a kind of historical fiction lite: history made explicable through a personalised connection to modernity, and consumable to audiences specifically interested in women’s stories.
Bird, the second novel of Australian author and screenwriter Courtney Collins, is one such narrative, with a spiritual twist. It centres on two fourteen-year-olds named ‘Bird’, both of whom are desperate to spread their wings and fly free. Past Bird (as I shall call her) lives in ‘the Himalayas, Unknown Year’. Present Bird lives in Darwin, but feels the pull of another existence – i.e. her past life in the Himalayas. Present Bird’s sense of presque vu expresses itself as a lifelong urge to draw and paint five girls, whose names she instinctively knows (‘That’s Cleo, Dev, Kai, Reya and Bambi. Bambi’s my favourite,’ she informs her bemused grandmother). Watching the evening news, she glimpses the five girls taking part in a juvenile detention centre riot and resolves to be arrested in order to join them.
If this premise sounds ludicrous, it is. Nonetheless, the question of who the five girls are and how they are connected to the Birds is propulsive. Present Bird’s life is further complicated by her neglectful young mother, Mia, her unknown paternity (‘it could have been an Indian man [Mia] met in Puna or a South American man she met in Nepal,’ she reflects, suggesting a nebulous genetic connection to Past Bird’s homeland), and the threat of sexual assault from Mia’s boyfriend, Jerome. Concurrently, after Past Bird’s father loses her in a bet, she must flee an arranged plural marriage to her brutish brother-in-law, Cho. Both Birds are supported by various sympathetic yet largely ineffectual incarnations and reincarnations, including love interest Teshi,
nurse Margie, and Bambi et al. Both are virginal, free-spirited, plucky, and constantly running towards or away from something.
As part of her research for Bird, Collins travelled to the northernmost Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. While Collins’s descriptions of thick butter tea and prostrating pilgrims suggest a level of familiarity (and fascination) with the region, these details do not save the novel from its ahistoricism. Although I am loath to brandish my non-existent PhD in Himalayan Studies, the lack of specificity regarding Past Bird’s origins, the areas she travels through, and the time period that she inhabits seems remiss, given that the Himalayas span 2,400 kilometres across five culturally and linguistically diverse modern-day countries.
Characters bear traditionally Tibetan names (Pema, Lhakyi), vaguely East Asian-sounding names (I could not help but recall the Harry Potter Cho Chang discourse, though it is possible that the male character Cho’s name is derived from the same source as the mountain Cho Oyu), and anachronistic names like Bambi. This, along with Past Bird’s casual use of the word ‘fuck’ and her apathy towards marriage and religion in a society where these forces reign surpreme, create an impression of Ancient Himalayan cosplay rather than fine-grained historical fiction.
Inauthenticity is likewise an issue with the modern-day chapters. Aside from some stray references to watching YouTube and streaming music, Present Bird and her peers are unusually offline 2020s teenagers. They are not anxious about the climate or the economy. Their education and broader development do not appear to have been impacted by Covid-19. As with the imprecision of ‘Himalayas, Unknown Year’, Collins’s inattention to the Zeitgeist has a stultifying effect. Mostly unscathed by the sociopolitical pressures particular to their times, the Birds are oddly interchangeable – equally defined, in past and present, by their bird-like desire for freedom and their vulnerability to predatory men.
It is relatively uncontroversial to insist on the importance of stories about girls and women, especially when these stories feature diverse characters. Were Bird to be adapted for screen, the heroines, their love interests, and many minor characters would likely be played by non-white actors. Present Bird visits a Vietnamese nail salon. Margie hooks up with a Brazilian soccer player. Present Bambi, upon meeting Present Bird, asks, ‘where’s your mob?’ and ‘What’s your Country?’, assuming a shared Aboriginality, and implying that a proportion of the juvenile detention centre residents are Indigenous. The trouble is, Aboriginality is only implied, referenced – never engaged with or contextualised. Diversity, in Bird, is only ever skin-deep. Present Bird, who boasts ‘DNA from every continent on earth, except Antarctica’, is as depoliticised as an AI-generated image of a biracial girl.
Although not all stories featuring non-white protagonists need to focus on experiences of marginalistion (indeed, there are valid criticisms to be made of white authors co-opting stories of racialised trauma), we do not live in a post-racial society. There are differences between being Aboriginal and maybe half-Indian in 2020s Darwin that Collins does not meaningfully interrogate, as she does not seem to appreciate what it means to be from any particular region of the Himalayas at any particular point in history. The past is simply a more exotic version of the present. Girls are always girls, whimsical and intrepid, stronger together, deserving of freedom but not of specificity. g
Violence and desire
Echoing the Australian gothic
Diane Stubbings
WEchoes
by Evie Wyld Vintage
$34.99 pb, 228 pp
hen we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.
A past whose vestiges infect the present moment is a recurring motif in Wyld’s writing. Her previous novels – After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009), All the Birds, Singing (2013), winner of the Miles Franklin Award, and The Bass Rock (2020) – braid two or more timelines, demonstrating how knots of violence and desire snarl each new generation of a family; how long-held secrets cast protracted shadows.
The Echoes is structured similarly. Drawing on her exquisite grasp of suspense, Wyld musters the stories of Hannah, her forebears and descendants, into a novel that lucidly captures the bitter-sweet arc of one woman’s life, tracing that life’s tendrils as they lace back and forth through time. More importantly, Wyld exposes the troubled relationship between white Australians and the land they have come to occupy. In this, The Echoes is not merely a poignant and beautiful novel, it is also a consequential one.
Before his death, Max lives with Hannah in a small London flat. Max teaches writing, is finicky about cooking, and imagines a future with children. Hannah once showed potential as a writer, but now she chooses to work in a bar. She has just had an abortion, without telling Max she was pregnant. Max wants them to travel to Australia so that he can meet Hannah’s family. Hannah never wants to visit Australia again.
Hannah’s childhood home – where she lives with her parents, her sister Rachel, and her mother’s volatile half-brother Tone – is situated in The Echoes, an unproductive wasteland in rural Australia, a ‘dead paddock that smells of dead goats’. Hannah and Rachel are inseparable. Their mother, Kerry, hoped her daughters would be sweet ‘little helpers … nice, clean little girls’. Nevertheless, Kerry seems content. She hides her cleverness under a layer of bafflement, fabricating a version of herself that will, she imagines, protect her from the past.
Max and Hannah’s flat is situated on a major ring-road.
Unbeknown to Max, Hannah has chosen the location deliberately. It is close to the house where Hannah’s grandmother lived as a child. Since seeing a photograph of her grandmother outside the house – taken not long before the family moved to Australia –Hannah has been fascinated by her family’s history and, tellingly, by her mother’s feigned ignorance of that history. For Hannah, living near her grandmother’s old house is her way of ‘sink[ing] back into the space my grandmother left behind her’.
Salvaging the photo from a bucket of scraps set aside for the goats, Hannah conceals it inside a book about sharks. Despite living days away from the nearest ocean, Hannah is fascinated by sharks. She speculates about what might happen were a shark ever to bite her in two, leaving one half of herself adrift in the ocean. What she will feel, she soon discovers, is ‘forgotten and alone’.
Wyld’s writing is rooted in the Australian gothic without ever being defined or limited by that genre. Through the several strands of the narrative, lives echo. Time folds back on itself. The past manifests like a ghost, a fleeting, inexplicable sensation caught at the edge of experience. History’s currents and deviations ripple through time, shaping the present and the future. As Max intimates, blood that has been spilled runs through time ‘trying to find a new body to inhabit’.
This narrative effect is mirrored in images that purl through the novel: spiders, fingerprints, cycles, burial and excavation, a dress with a lemon print, ‘a small, sharp cube of green glass’, white-ridged scars and the scratching of mice. Even the novel’s abrupt and shocking climax pulses with a vein of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.
What becomes apparent is that Hannah has not just run towards an England that seems, to her, more suited to her sensibilities and heritage. She has also escaped – or at least tried to escape – the afflictions of her own family, her dislocation from her sister, her disillusionment with Uncle Tone, and her own accompanying sense of incompleteness.
Hannah has also tacitly escaped the land itself: its barren plains, its isolation, and its tragic and inescapable history. ‘This whole fucking place,’ Tone moans to his nieces as he surveys The Echoes. ‘There’s bones all over the whole fucking place.’ The bones he is referring to are those of dead Aboriginal girls, stolen from their families, physically abused at the nearby ‘training institution’, and unceremoniously buried on the land where the family now lives. Gnarled by the abuse he suffered in his own childhood, Tone understands implicitly that this is a country built on privation and death. He knows that a nation cannot – should not – be seeded among bones; that landscapes, too, haunt.
What The Echoes ultimately reveals is the tension at the heart of the white Australian experience. No matter that we no longer belong anywhere else, any sense of our belonging to this continent will always be marred by our inability to escape the history we have created, a history whose truth will, perennially, ‘come bursting through the topsoil’. g
Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne. Her plays have been shortlisted for a number of Australian and international awards, and staged in Sydney, Melbourne and New Zealand. She has written for Australian Book Review, The Australian, The Canberra Times, and the Sydney Review of Books
The
Echoes of truth
A classic novel of manners
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
IJade and Emerald by
Michelle See-Tho Vintage
$34.99 pb, 336 pp
n the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.
Cut to 1990s Melbourne, where Lei Ling Wen is struggling to fit in. At twelve, she is still treated as a child by her single mother, Jing Fei, and bullied at school by her wealthy classmate Angela Nu, the only other Asian girl in her grade. Lei Ling aches to be seen as her own person, and when she befriends Angela’s rich, worldly aunt Gigi at a birthday party, she senses the opportunity for escape.
Lei Ling and Gigi develop a mentor-mentee relationship. Thus begins a double life. At home, Lei Ling is a latchkey child, studying violin (with hopes of joining the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) and helping her mother to cook every night. With Gigi she is Chanel, a promising young woman with luxurious taste and an appreciation of the finer things in life.
Through Gigi, she sees the possibility of a different future: ‘I wished that I could be older, independent and in charge of my life. I wished that I could be rich and powerful and impervious to pain.’ She develops a heightened disdain for her mother, who represents an uncultured, parochial world she wants to leave behind.
Jade and Emerald is a classic novel of manners, splitting its young narrator-protagonist between these two disparate worlds, and inching closer to the divide that opens the story. Class is a primary concern, intersecting often with race. See-Tho asks what a person of colour must do to be seen as sophisticated or even worthy. Lei Ling learns this early when, upon meeting Gigi, the older woman tells her, ‘You should give yourself an English name. Especially if you live in a Western country.’ Later, she tells her mother, ‘I want a Western name … a normal name.’
Lei Ling’s rigorous violin training has echoes of Jena Lin, the troubled, self-destructive protagonist of Jessie Tu’s A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing (2020). In both novels, there is the migrant’s longing for upward social mobility, manifested through participation in a world with high social and cultural capital. It is not a stretch to see a character like Jena as a logical progression for Lei Ling, under the weight of parental and cultural expectation.
Yet there are aspects that do not feel realistic. Would Angela, the daughter of wealthy parents who go out of their way to advertise their social status (every child who attends her birthday party receives a Game Boy), really go to a state school? The world Lei Ling enters through Gigi feels exaggerated, bordering on fantastical. Perhaps that is the point, to show the stark difference between these two modes of being through the eyes of an adolescent who is still coming to an understanding of life.
The novel has much in common with Alice Pung’s One Hundred Days (2021), particularly in the liminality of its genre: it blends elements of literary fiction with the tropes and language of young adult fiction to explore the heady tensions of adolescence, exacerbated through third-culture alienation.
See-Tho
asks what a person of colour must do to be seen as sophisticated or even worthy
The mothers in both novels are cold, clinical, and often emotionally abusive, but the daughters come to understand the trauma and sacrifice that has made them so. This narrative trajectory is common to the point of cliché in diasporic fiction; the tiger mother, in particular, is a well-worn trope, signified in Lei Ling’s thought: ‘My mother was so controlling and seemed determined to ruin my life.’
Using Gigi as a foil is Jade and Emerald ’s point of difference, but there is a tension in the nature of Lei Ling’s relationship with Gigi. What does the older woman want from a random young girl? Gigi’s provision of expensive gifts has a sense of disquiet about it – the threat of grooming is never distant. The power in the relationship is inherently unbalanced, so even when Gigi’s relatively benevolent motivations are revealed, the discomfort never completely dissipates.
The 1990s setting provides both nostalgia and levity: Lei Ling is a devoted fan of the television show Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and uses it as a yardstick for how Western people might react or behave. It is also an effective tool to illustrate the claustrophobia of the pre-internet age, as when Lei Ling has to secretly read fashion magazines at the library to catch a glimpse of what exists outside her immediate surroundings.
Food as metaphor is another frequent feature of this type of writing. While this, too, can often veer into stereotype, See-Tho’s version is charming: Lei Ling’s embarrassed face ‘felt as if it had been rubbed with Sichuan peppercorns’; creases in a character’s forehead are like ‘pinched dumpling pleats’; limbs ‘softened like noodles in hot water’. These vivid descriptions link Lei Ling’s outer world to something inescapable within, and carry the reverberations of the rituals she performs with her mother. In these visions, that bond is everywhere.
A tragedy brings mother and daughter closer together and unfurls the complexities of Jing Fei’s life to culminate in the novel’s emotional denouement. The threads seem to be tied too conveniently, with some melodramatic flourishes to boot. But there are echoes of truth and pain throughout this novel, which delves into the way that class tensions of the diaspora can cause confusion in a third-culture child who is simply trying to belong g
‘I am the jungle’
A deft take on Virgil
Cassandra Atherton
ITo Sing of War
by Catherine McKinnon Fourth Estate
$32.99 pb, 454 pp
n an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.
In the prime and most indelible of the narratives, Lotte and Virgil are reunited in New Guinea. Originally childhood sweethearts, Lotte has become a nurse and Virgil is a soldier fighting the Japanese in the jungle. His father names him after the poet because of his ‘long-held belief, evoked in the story, that any hardship can be overcome if one perseveres, faces it stoically’. Virgil has a copy of The Aeneid on the battlefield and, at crucial junctures, juxtaposes his experiences with some of those recounted in the poem. In a less experienced writer’s hands, this might have become self-conscious or pretentious; however, McKinnon’s deft touch ensures that when ‘Virgil reads The Aeneid to the [soldiers] … I sing of arms and of a man … I sing of war’, it is a truly salutary and moving passage.
Perhaps because of this, when Robert Oppenheimer – one of the narrators of the second of the novel’s interconnected narratives – is likened to Aeneas, ‘leading us to a new land, a new home, a way of being’, it is an empty, rather than a chilling, moment. There are three narrators of the sections set in Los Alamos – the other two are Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, and the young physicist Mim. Indeed, Mim is such a complex and feisty character that she could easily have carried the entire section of this narrative on her own. Because Robert and Kitty are historical figures (made even more famous by the recent blockbuster film Oppenheimer), their characterisation is somewhat constrained by the facts connected to their lives, whereas the depiction of Mim, who is one of few women physicists working on the atomic bomb, is written with insight and panache.
Finally, in Miyajima, an island in Hiroshima Bay, Hiroko waits with her family for her husband, Kenzo, to return from the war. McKinnon creates some gorgeous, lyrical passages about the environment for this character. They are focused on transience and a deep understanding of the natural world: ‘Hiroko can hear the
earth shifting and sighing. Falling snow covers the branches that form a thick canopy above. Everything jingles as the wind whips through the trees and the air is scented with air earth and bark.’ This troping on the natural environment is reiterated in references to the song ‘sakura sakura’, meaning cherry blossom, that haunts the text, and which is also inextricably linked to gender, precarity, and war. McKinnon has crafted so many extraordinary passages on ecofeminism and intersectional environmentalism that it is difficult to particularise. Lotte makes some of the starkest observations, and it is through this nuanced character that McKinnon challenges the enduring stereotype of women not being ‘fit for war’:
Women are always at war. Always under threat. She can’t remember a time when she felt safe, completely safe, for longer than a few days. Safety has always been temporary. Is it only her or is it all women? The daily terror so normalised that it has become habitual to fend it off. She does not want to go her whole life feeling like a hunted animal.
Animals, especially birds, are totems and omens for characters in To Sing of War. McKinnon makes a compelling case for a greater consideration of the animals’ experiences of war, as well as war’s destructive environmental effects. Numerous animals are innocent victims of armed conflict; in particular, McKinnon flags how the loss of wildlife has enormous environmental consequences. Furthermore, ordnance from the war – such as shells and bullets – often remains in the environment long after it has been fired and introduces heavy metals and other contaminants into the earth. When characters such as Lotte, Virgil, and Hiroko are described in metaphorical terms as various animals, or have encounters with the environment, McKinnon implicitly asks the reader to consider all living things in human conflict and battle. McKinnon’s various critiques of oppressive gender hierarchies coalesce in Virgil’s statement about the nature of violence, which boldly brings the novel’s multifarious narrative strands together:
But where violence comes from is deeper, hidden. Not just in men’s hearts, but in systems, in language. What sets it off doesn’t even look violent. It’s greed and selfishness and self-obsession. Most dangerous is revenge. Violence is small fears that grow into big ones and explode. Everything starts small, at the level of an atom, that’s the thing.
Importantly, To Sing of War includes powerful depictions of Virgil’s encounters with Japanese soldiers, where he tellingly asks himself, ‘If he were Japanese, could this be the same story? Is war always the same plot, just different characters?’ However, it is the moments when characters empathise with the environment and when McKinnon demonstrates a poignant awareness of the place of humans on an increasingly fragile planet that are deeply uncanny and unforgettable: ‘I am the jungle, he thinks. I am mud, tree, leaf; I am vine, insect, bird. He hears nocturnal calls, responds by mimicking an owl hoot.’ g
Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University.
‘Little bits of horror’
The unravelling of the self
David Jack
IWar by
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell
New Directions
US$14.95 pb, 144 pp
f Louis-Ferdinand Céline were around today, he would almost certainly be cancelled. So why publish a previously unknown fragment of his? Unlike some writers, whose views are inferred from their work, Céline’s anti-Semitism was beyond doubt, if at times a little confused. He wrote two anti-Semitic novels and a pamphlet, and associated with collaborators and Nazis. He was, however, not a card-carrying member of any political party and did not subscribe to fascist ideology, beyond the notion of the expulsion of the Jews from France. He certainly didn’t believe in the possibility of some master race. Humans are vile, was his central belief. As the character Ferdinand says in War: ‘Your instinct is never wrong when it faces the ghastliness of man [sic].’
Guerre was first published in French in May 2022, followed in October the same year by London Bridge, a much longer fragment based on Céline’s time spent as a clerk in the French passport office in London. War is a short book compared to Céline’s other works, and it might serve as a brief introduction to his ideas and style for the uninitiated or as a literary curiosity to those who know him. The publication of fragmentary works, under the banner of ‘literary curiosity’, is itself a curious phenomenon which War only vaguely satisfies. Of course, this has nothing to do with Céline, who apparently dismissed the fragments as ‘a few rough drafts’. While true to an extent, this undersells their literary merit. Literary curiosity extends only so far: plans by French publishing house Gallimard to republish Céline’s anti-Semitic works were scrapped in 2018 amid a public backlash. There is no overt anti-Semitism in War, which dates to around the time of Céline’s earliest works, particularly his masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night (1932), to which these pages could easily belong.
The novel begins in medias res, for the first half of the book was lost. This doesn’t make a lot of difference: all of Céline’s novels begin this way, with little context or preamble. It follows the adventures of Ferdinand, Céline’s delirious alter ego, a corporal in the French army who, after deserting with his regiment’s coffers, is mistakenly awarded a medal for valour. As with Journey, War is based on Céline’s experience during World War I and his wounding at Ypres in West Flanders. Most of the book is set in the military hospital and streets and bars of Hazebrouck, a French but culturally Belgian town, which Céline renames Peurdu-surla-Lys, which might loosely be translated as ‘fear/lost among the lilies’. It is a classic Célinian juxtaposition, as is the idea of birds ‘whistling like bullets’, which captures the lasting trauma of
warfare, both physical and psychological. The narrative – if you can call it that – is full of the type of modernist allegory readers of Céline will be familiar with: the ‘endless detours to end up in the same place’, a belltower which ‘is as good a destination as any’, and the idea, central to Céline’s philosophy, that ‘[f]rom a certain point onward, life becomes a load of bollocks’.
John Banville suggests, in his review of the book, that there is enough in War to make it more than just a curiosity and this is true to an extent. The strength – and this is something War shares with Céline’s early masterpieces, Journey and Death on Credit (1936) –is the unravelling of the self as a narrative construct, that ‘whole person you get given and stick up for’. Céline’s narratives unfold in the space between dream or hallucination, and what can only loosely be called ‘reality’. While Marcel Proust, the other side of the coin of French modernism, was busy piecing the self together from its fragmentary remains, Céline was content to see it in ruins, much like the cities and landscapes he wanders through.
Style may be the reason one rereads Céline; his prose (his ‘music’ as he called it), is unique in the history of literature, and his ability as a wordsmith has been compared to that of James Joyce, even if his use of language makes Ulysses seem like high tea. Racism and sexism aside – and this is a lot to set aside – Céline often writes with brilliant humour and is capable of great pathos, almost in spite of himself. His ability to construct striking and visceral imagery is possibly unmatched – perhaps Henry Miller, who includes Céline among his influences, comes closest. Take for example the soldier lying next to Ferdinand on the battlefield ‘split open like a pomegranate’. It is difficult to think of a pomegranate in the same way once you have read this.
War was written in the patois Céline adopted as his signature style which, as translator Sander Berg points out in his introduction, presents certain difficulties for the translator. I am not convinced these difficulties are solved here, although it does improve slightly on translations of Céline’s earlier works in its ability to reproduce some of the more vulgar turns of phrase. The choice, however, to transform Ferdinand into an English ‘lad’ creates a few issues, least of all in his frequent encounters with the English army. Choices like ‘geezer’, ‘bint’ (woman), and ‘porky pies’ (lies) feel imposed rather than natural. The sometimes puzzling blend of English dialects renders Ferdinand part Artful Dodger, part Alex from A Clockwork Orange – both not unreasonable comparisons, except for Ferdinand’s distaste for violence of any kind.
Céline/Ferdinand describes the goal of his writing in War thus: to ‘create beautiful literature with little bits of horror’. War is closer to burlesque than horror, with the reader more likely to cringe than to gasp. As for beauty, that depends on Ferdinand, who is likely to see more beauty in the green and rotting teeth of an obliging nurse than in the woods and fields surrounding the town.
Times critic Adam Sage called the discovery of Céline’s lost manuscripts the most important and the most troubling literary discovery of the last century. What they confirm is something already known to those who still read Céline: we need more writing like his ... and less. g
David Jack is an Affiliate at Monash University.
First Snow
by Kerry Greer
The baby had no name because they couldn’t agree on one. She was twenty-nine, and he was thirty-two, and they were going nowhere, but she fell pregnant. And she thought this might be somewhere she wanted to go with him. Only when it happened did she become aware of this urge, like the unfurling of a moonflower. Some process had taken place inside her in the dark, and much later she saw herself in the light, and knew: This is who I am. But Jack noticed none of this. The baby woke every night – wanting to be fed, held, changed, rocked, carried to the broad sash of sky at the window, all the things any newborn wants – and Jack dragged a blanket to the living room, leaving Mara in the bedroom with the baby. In the morning, Jack would shrug his shoulders: ‘You know I have to be alert for work.’
Mara didn’t mind those sleepless hours alone with this unfamiliar-familiar person. Something sacred was unfolding in the inchoate night, galaxies colliding and moving apart. She whispered to the baby while feeding him – words that came easily to her, making her think maybe she had been loved once, by someone whose face was unreachable now. Her own mother was a blank space – someone her father referenced with brittle, halting words.
‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay, Robin,’ Mara said, bending over her son’s head to study the astral blue of his eyes, yet to solidify into a particular colour. The mother’s voice is a kind of naming. The first moments of light and sound reaching down through space and time to leave an indelible mark. It was the Big Bang, over and over, that infinite love. So she called him Robin, and when he heard his name, he turned, and this was love moving, arcing through the air between them. Nobody could cross it. Her voice was a kind of naming, too.
But Mara didn’t tell Jack that she used the name he rejected. Every time she said Robin, she was calling something impossible into being. It was a spell. It was a lullaby. At night, and in the day, it kept Mara going, to have this secret only she and her son knew.
Jack said to her: ‘If you leave, don’t come back. I won’t be here.’ Like he could read her mind. He wore skinny leg jeans which were stretched at the knees, and when he talked, he hitched his jeans a little higher on his slim hips. A smooth pebble of fear sank through Mara when Jack said these words, but the next moment he was smiling.
Outside, the sky was a sort of grey that bled into orange and pale pink around the edges. It was late afternoon. The horizon would be washed out soon, colourless, and then black. But for a few minutes, the sharp contours of the Sandia
Mountains were lit up with their own aurora streaming down like tears.
Mara watched the mountains transforming in the sunset, the sheer granite face receding into shadow as if its eyes were closing to the world. ‘You ever watch the sky and feel thirsty?’ she said to Jack. ‘So thirsty you know nothing will quench it?’
‘You’re a crack-baby,’ he said, one of his favourite phrases. ‘You need to put some clothes on. I want to go eat.’ He pulled a singlet over his head. It was late autumn. Everything was fading away there in the high desert. The leaves, the grass, the sky.
These days, Mara and Jack had sex while the baby slept in the next room, the door ajar in case he woke. They had to time everything around an unpredictable schedule of naps. Jack wanted Mara to make noises like the girls he watched on his laptop. ‘Louder,’ he’d command, and she’d acquiesce as quietly as possible, like she was a doll, not a woman whose breasts leaked milk when she bent forward. ‘Louder,’ he’d say again. ‘Tell me that it hurts.’ And she would look away to the corners of the room, training her ears on the sounds beyond the doorway.
Jack’s sexual preferences were all there in his search history. Mara trawled through his laptop when he fell asleep or went out with his buddies. She checked everything he did. Lately, when he was in the shower, she’d pretend she wanted to lie on the bed reading. Once she was sure he was under the stream of water, she would drag his jeans off the bathroom floor, slide her hand into his back pocket and take out his phone.
Mara was lying in bed still. She could hear Jack in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. Maybe they’d made love, or maybe it was something else. Her feelings for him were like a vapour she couldn’t pierce. Things were shifting, part of a larger weather pattern. Jack was messaging some girl. He’d been doing it for months – the whole time Mara was pregnant. When she first found the messages, a vein of ice had moved upwards from her stomach into her chest, fanning out like glaciers coming apart. She’d intended to confront him that evening, but her throat was cold, her tongue a lump of meat that made it hard to breathe. She said nothing, and the silence swelled inside her. It made her feel high at times, like she was rising into the air and might burst.
She had decided to watch Jack, to figure out why she should stay with him, or why she couldn’t bring herself to leave – which were not the same thing. She was frozen in the moment before deciding, half indecision, half despair. She kept hoping fatherhood would transform Jack, would make him say: Yes, this is who I want to be.
Mara rose from the bed and went to rinse off in the shower. The baby was asleep, but if he woke, she’d have no time to get ready. It would be wet wipes and dry shampoo another day in a row – and hoping Jack didn’t lose his mind while he waited, rocking the baby. Activities of daily living as damage control – and every day unravelling into the next, the night not even a border between past and future, because she was awake in the dark to watch dawn approaching through every lighter shade of black: charcoal, blue-black, grey. And, finally, the sky white as a sheet of paper, briefly blank before the rising yellow day.
Jack was always getting into something. He could land a straight job and act the part of a real adult for a few months, fooling everyone but Mara. They shared a car, and she took him to work most days, driving there like it was a game to roll through every amber, taking corners tight and fast because he was never ready on time. It was work to keep him in a job.
The latest thing was that Jack had trained to be a peer support counsellor at a suicide prevention hotline. The more serious phone calls were diverted to psychologists with bachelor’s degrees, and Jack took the ones who just wanted to talk, the regulars who’d call up every night. Some of them were veterans, others had been homeless but were getting back on track, accessing resources, keeping up with phone payments. All of them were lonely. Jack had a disarming manner, so he was good at this job. In grocery stores and on the street, he’d stop to chat to anyone, squaring his shoulders and planting his feet. In the moment of conversation, he was fully engaged –like a politician, but real, without the polish. He was the sort of person you’d want to talk to if you called a suicide prevention hotline. He would find a way to make you laugh, have you agreeing to build some new skill – slacklining or public speaking. But he was like this because he carried nothing with him – no burden of the past, not even his own.
Mara wasn’t working right now. In fact, she had given her job to Jack. That was the whole joke of it – Mara, who had genuinely cared about what happened to each caller after they talked, who had stood alone in the icy carpark after her shift, unlocking her car and half-expecting a certain male caller to materialise at her shoulder. When she realised she was pregnant, she had gone to her boss and said: ‘I know someone who could step in for me. A friend of mine.’ She didn’t plan to refer to Jack as a friend instead of her boyfriend. But there it was – the lie was in the air like a blue thread of smoke, snaking from one point to another, and now Jack had her job. Jack who smoked and drank and shoplifted, who’d carried drugs, and gone AWOL from the Marines – that Jack, telling everyone he was clean, saying things like: ‘Focus on where you are right now. Nothing else. What can you see, hear, taste, feel?’
Her name was Rose. The girl Jack was messaging. Perhaps more than messaging. Rose was blonde and had a nose like Nicole Kidman. Mara was sure she’d paid for that perfect nose. Maybe Rose was Jack’s type. Mara checked Rose’s social media profiles daily, then deleted the
search history. Rose was one of those girls who uploaded precise details of their exercise regime like they were doing everyone else a favour. She worked in a sports bar, but it seemed she was studying business, or planned to start her own business. She was definitely involved in a health-shake MLM at one point.
Mara was studying Rose’s latest social media post while drinking coffee. It had become a bad habit, the first place she went when alone. Rose had shared a photo of her lunch that day and tagged the location as Billie Jean’s Blue Corn Dreams. The photo showed a table for two, a blue corn burrito on the table, and someone’s legs angling out from under the table – stonewash jeans, sneakers. The shoes caught Mara’s eye. She had cleaned Jack’s grey sneakers when he came in from mountain biking. They were his sneakers in the corner of the photo, his long legs stretching out.
Mara had dropped Jack at work that morning. He’d been wearing a white polo shirt, black slacks, and black Oxfords, which she’d found for him at a second-hand clothing store before his interview for her old job. While she was examining the photo, a phone call came through. She let it go to voicemail, then listened to the message. It was the New Mexico Bureau of Vital Records. She deleted the message before the voice could continue. They had called before, requesting name information for the baby’s birth certificate, but nothing could be done without Jack’s signature. The real issue was that Mara wouldn’t go along with Jack this time, so he was turning the disagreement into something more, refusing to meet her in the middle.
Mara returned to Rose’s photo. Maybe it was taken weeks ago. Maybe it wasn’t even Jack in the photo. She tried to remember when she’d last seen him wearing the grey sneakers. If she could push through the fugue state of broken sleep –grasp onto a clear image of him in the sneakers – she might know what to do next.
Jack could draw and loved visiting art galleries. He would become quiet in those wide, white spaces, standing reverently before the haloed frames on the gallery walls. Jack talked about becoming a tattoo artist, but he didn’t have the patience to develop his talent. Once, they went away for the weekend to a town in the Jemez Mountains that had more art galleries than residents. Jack bought a postcard and some adhesive tape in a gift-shop. The tape had little snowmen on it. It was nearly Christmas. The air moved like a sheet of glassine paper, carrying the feeling of the coming snow.
Later, Jack had sketched Mara’s face on a yellow legal pad at the motel. Mara had been in the bath. Their apartment only had a shower stall, so she had remained in the motel bathtub a long time, emptying and re-filling the tub, letting the steaming water run over her feet and circle slowly towards her shoulders, her neck. When she came out of the bathroom, wearing a towel around her head and nothing else, she glanced over Jack’s shoulder to see what he’d created. Jack had cut his sketch of Mara’s face apart and taped her features at odd angles onto the postcard, so that she hovered distorted – luminous as a harvest moon – over the Jemez Mountains
featured on the postcard. The back of the postcard was blank. He handed the postcard to her and said, ‘Happy Anniversary. I got you the next best thing to an Ellsworth Kelly.’ Mara had laughed then, and tucked the card into her bag so that the motel staff wouldn’t see it. She loved him like she loved the postcard. Everything about him was wrong, and yet she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. All her broken parts were matched in him. He called her beautiful as if it was her name. He said it loudly, so that people turned to see her, to see if it was true.
In the morning, they had driven south through the valley back to the city. Jack wasn’t feeling well, so Mara had been at the wheel. The Jemez Mountains had become smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. Jack was asleep. If she had turned the car around and driven north, he wouldn’t have realised until it was too late.
Mara paced from the kitchen to the bedroom. She stopped in the kitchen and took out a cup, then stood at the sink with the water running. The cup filled and overflowed, cooling her hands. She walked to the sliding door which led to a sliver of balcony. The door was coming off its runner, so she used her shoulder to steady the glass as it opened. The apartment was small, yet it opened into the sky, if viewed from a certain angle near the balcony. Far away, the precipitous face of the mountains cut through the horizon, but in between there was blank space: white-blue sky, squat beige homes in the pueblo style, and utilitarian apartment blocks in every shade of concrete. The bleached hues of a desert city that might blow away, grain by grain, into the surrounding sands. Today, however, the sky was draped in grey – reams of cloud unspooled almost to the rooftops – and nothing seemed to move.
Robin started to cry, so Mara sat down with him on a bench on the balcony. She lifted her shirt and held him to her breast, feeling his velvet-soft hair, the shape of his skull, which was a copy of Jack’s head – the architecture of bones replicated in miniature. It was a shape she would recognise by touch alone, or by the shadow made on a wall at night, when she held him upright after feeding, and he looked around, and around, as if the room might be revolving towards some new sight when his back was turned.
‘It might snow soon, Robin. I think these clouds are nimbostratus,’ Mara said, speaking out to the air. She had read it was important for adults to talk to babies, to expose them to as many words as possible. Beyond money or social standing, this, it turned out, was what marked an ineradicable line between rich and poor: vocabulary. It still felt odd, to narrate the day, not expecting a reply in words.
Robin’s eyes were fixed on her face in an expression that perfectly merged innocence, vulnerability, and wisdom: only a baby could master this expression, and only for a year or so. But in that year, the mother knew the baby was not of this world, or of her body, and in fact the baby knew more than her. A hundred times a day he asked her to be still, to stop for a moment, and this was a language too: the language of Time, who lay in her arms, who fed from her breast, who refused to
be put down for long hour-minutes, and then: sleep, suddenly sleep, never enough of it – only to wake into it all again, to find a month had passed like this, but where were the days? How were the days? Whole lifetimes surely might not hurt the way this love hurt, the knowledge of time passing, and her being left behind one day – a remote planet on an interminable path around its beloved star.
A shiver went through Robin and along the length of Mara’s arm. The wind was picking up. Mara found herself unable to breathe deeply, to soften against the cold bench and the colder air. As she fed Robin, he moved his hands gently, absent-mindedly, across her stomach, as if to soothe her. She started to bounce her knees, then stopped abruptly, hoping Robin would sleep. It was close to 5 pm. Jack would need to be picked up soon.
Once Robin was asleep, Mara placed him in his baby-seat to be carried to the car. She went to the corner of the bedroom, where she and Jack kept their clothes – her own clothes in neatly folded piles atop an old papasan, and Jack’s clothes on the floor, wherever he had dropped them. Shoes were scattered under his clothing, the laces still tied.
Before Robin had arrived, Mara had folded Jack’s clothes, but lately she couldn’t pick up the mess. She would pause above the first crumpled pair of jeans, then straighten up, and walk down the hallway away from the bedroom. Now, she lifted everything from the floor in a hurry, dumping it on top of her own clothes, scanning the shoes.
Jack stood at the entrance to the carpark, away from the glass façade of the office. Seeing him was like satisfying a terrible craving. He was there, waiting for her, knowing she would come.
‘Where have you two been?’ Jack said, a smile lingering at the edges of his mouth. He closed his car door and leaned across to kiss Mara. At this proximity, the precise angle of his eyes above his cheekbones seemed to have been created by a blade in clay. He was a sort of god to her, once. She had watched him sleeping, had seen the space of vulnerability in the rise and fall of his broad chest. Briefly, he was hers. She loved him most in the dark, when he pulled her towards him and whispered: You were too far away, expecting nothing, not even sex. And then he would wake, would go to the toilet with the door wide open, would take her to children’s movies on dates, would glance sideways at any woman with a certain hip-to-waist ratio.
‘Sorry we kept you waiting,’ Mara replied. She glanced up at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, her eyes ringed by days-old eyeliner. Her dark hair was bundled into a knot at the nape of her neck, because it really was one vast knot, and it might be days before she could disentangle the mess carefully with conditioner in the shower.
Jack was studying something on his phone. Mara’s gaze moved from Jack’s hands down to his shoes. He was wearing the Oxfords. Seeing this, Mara wasn’t sure what she felt anymore. She wanted further proof – specifically, to hear him say he did or didn’t love her. But if she had to ask him for this proof – well, in the asking (the painful asking) it would seem
she had her answer, coming from her own voice, the rising inflection and the acute angles of shame.
Mara drove slowly along the streets near the office building. She matched her breathing to the progress of the car, focusing on the street signs, the evening traffic. While they were inside the car, she felt safe. It was the three of them, nobody else.
‘Hey, can we stop by the taco truck on Marquette?’ Jack asked.
‘Sure,’ Mara said. She tried to relax her face.
‘The little man is down for the count.’ Jack looked back at Robin for a moment. ‘I might need some cash for dinner. I’m all out until Thursday.’ He started typing a message on his phone, avoiding Mara’s gaze. She tried to see the message through her peripheral vision, but at that moment Jack sank lower into his seat and raised his knee, so all she could see was the screen reflecting the sky outside, dusk across a blue-black sheen.
A memory of Jack crossed through Mara’s mind – an image from the long night and day when Robin was born, slotting smoothly into place over the present. Mara had gone into labour around 2 am, waking to twisting pain in organs she’d never been conscious of before. Jack had driven her to the birthing centre at 6 am, rubbing her back while steering the car. Around midday, Jack went to buy tea at a café across the road. ‘It’ll help you keep your energy up, baby,’ he’d said, before leaving her alone in the birthing room. Mara had avoided caffeine the whole pregnancy, but she figured that rule didn’t apply once labour started. Jack returned carrying a chai for each of them. He placed Mara’s chai on a bookshelf, and sat down on a couch to drink his own, elbows on his knees, hollow-eyed and watching Mara as if she were at the opposite end of a football field. For a long time, Mara was too nauseated to think about eating or drinking. She got in and out of the bath-tub, unsure if it was doing anything to help the contractions. The midwife kept telling her to hold off on pushing, and Mara felt nervous energy ballooning inside her. When she finally gave up on the bath and reached for the chai, the cup was empty. She had turned to look at Jack then, to signal What the fuck? with her eyes – a look that wouldn’t be possible when she was on all fours with contractions. But Jack had settled back into the couch, his arms folded, his baseball cap pulled down over his eyes – asleep, despite the caffeine.
Mara stopped beside the taco truck and passed Jack her bank card. She wanted to ask him where he’d been all day, but already he was outside, walking towards the taco truck. Then she could hear his voice beyond the windows, placing the order. Robin was in a deep sleep, and Mara kept the engine idling, watching him in the rear-view mirror.
After a minute or two, the owner of the truck came into view – a bony man of about forty, with teeth that could have been cut from an ad for teeth whitening. He had the look of a perpetual teenager, like he’d never grown into his body. He placed a box of tacos on the counter, but Jack ignored it and started to chat. The heating in the car seemed to have two settings – placebo effect, or suffocating humidity – so Mara
opened her window a crack, while the warmth circulated at her feet. She kicked her boots off and let her body relax into the seat. Condensation filled the car, flowing out the window like pale smoke. In the cold beyond the car, everything was still –except for Jack, loud and gregarious, settling in as if talking to an old friend.
‘Yeah, like I hear the thing is exposure to dirt,’ Jack said. ‘You’ve gotta be in it and around it. Forget the probiotics and digestive enzymes. What we’re really not getting is dirt.’ Mara stared at Jack’s profile as he talked, willing him to finish his conversation. Before long, Robin would wake, wanting to be fed, and she wouldn’t be able to eat.
‘Well, I’m thinking with my little guy – did I tell you we had the baby?’ Jack nodded in the direction of the car, and the owner of the taco truck glanced over. ‘Yeah, so –’
The owner said something, smiling, with his too-large teeth shining whitely out from the truck into the grey air. Jack listened for a moment, leaning his elbow onto the counter, and angling his body away from Mara’s view.
‘Dante. We went with that. I’m a big fan of the Inferno.’ Mara cringed into her seat. Maybe he’d played the video game. Jack didn’t read much poetry, as far as she could tell. She hadn’t read much either in a long while.
‘Yeah, so I’m thinking I’ll take him up to the mountains and let him crawl around there, get some of that good dirt into his system. Organic wasn’t even a word in our grandparents’ vocabulary.’ Jack started laughing to himself and moved forward to shake hands with the taco truck owner. As he did, Mara saw the owner’s hand reach forward, a glint of white hidden against the palm – and the old handshake of the boys who grew up on these streets: right there, a small white flash in the universe of possibility, dropping through her chest and stomach.
Jack got back into the passenger seat and placed the box of tacos on the centre console. ‘I ordered double barbacoa because I knew you’d want some of mine.’ Mara turned her head to see if the taco truck owner was visible. He was looking up the street, hands on the counter, a smile plastered to his face.
Mara tried to start the car again, forgetting it was already running, and the engine caught like a seam about to tear. Next thing, she would start laughing. Every incongruous emotion was flooding back into her cells. Drugs, real drugs, paid for with her money. Barbacoa and a side of grit or rock or godknows-what. He was so clever. He was so stupid. She checked Robin hadn’t woken, and pulled out onto the road. The anger was a sort of rush. She wanted to speed, to enact how Jack had crossed the line, but she had to drive carefully.
Jack glanced at her. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he asked. His head was tilted as he lifted one of the tacos to his mouth, trying to catch the salsa leaking from the tortilla.
Mara continued looking straight ahead. Thick flakes of snow were falling across the windshield now. She was brittle with fatigue, a sculpture of ice that would be gone with the first sharp rays of light.
‘It’s okay. I’m not hungry yet. Can I have my card back?’ She couldn’t look at him or her resolve might unravel. Once she would have taken her card back later, when he was asleep,
searching in the dark for his wallet in the pockets of his jeans.
If you know the thing you fear, if it comes to meet you head-on – no longer some shapeless phantasm of a childhood dream, a mother’s paranoia – then it is not fear you feel moving with glacial determination along your airways, through your blood. Already you are reacting to the creature, now real, now stalking with its long, pale legs across the dreamscape of your life, which has taken on – suddenly, vividly – the colours and sounds of the past, a place you will not go again. There was a certain vertigo in letting it all go. One love was vaster than the other, one love was infinite and would drown out the other love, and that would be for the best.
‘I’ll drop you back home,’ Mara said, studying the rearview mirror. ‘I’ll keep driving for a little while. I want to let Robin sleep.’ Jack didn’t react to hearing the name. Mara could see Robin turning his head slowly towards her voice – towards his name, spoken aloud – eyes blinking as he woke from the fog of dreams, or wherever it was that babies went in sleep. Something passed between mother and child in the air. A warning bell, which only they could hear. Robin remained quiet, and Jack didn’t turn around.
‘Are you sure you don’t want any?’ Jack held up a taco, like he cared, like he’d let Mara eat as much as she wanted if she said: Actually, I’ve changed my mind.
‘It’s okay. I can get something later,’ Mara turned into their carpark, smiling blankly as she stopped the car. She felt like a mannequin pretending to be a real human, unable to coordinate facial expressions with body movements – unable to turn her head towards Jack.
‘Okay, well, shoot me a text when you’re on the way home, baby. I might need the car.’ Jack kissed her cheek. He didn’t glance back once he left the warmth of the car, running to the steps in front of their apartment.
Mara took slow, deep breaths, feeling her limbs and fingertips soften. The car still smelt like barbacoa and corn tortillas. She turned to check on Robin. He was looking at the night beyond the window, where snow fell like white stars towards the ground.
‘Hey there, mister,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s snowing.’ Mara watched Robin. ‘It’s your first snow.’ The snow made patterns of light in the darkness, soft and sudden, then gone. In the stillness of the car, it felt as if they were in a spaceship flying through the eternal night of the cosmos. She was seeing it all again, for the first time: the snow, and her child, and the snow.
Mara started the car, heading for the highway. In the morning, the roads would be icy, impassable. If she crossed the Jemez Mountains soon, the world behind might be cut off, for a time. g
Kerry Greer is an Irish-Australian poet and writer. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Kerry has been shortlisted for the Calibre Essay Prize, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, and more. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Cedar Crest College. Her début poetry collection, The Sea Chest, was published by Recent Work Press in 2023. ❖
NEW RELEASE
This sensitive and groundbreaking collection explores the human condition, how we relate to family and partners and the shaping of our identity through the shifting currents of love, friendship and illness. Each poem propels the reader into a sensual, visceral and passionate world. With settings as diverse as the Great Ocean Road, Santiago, Athens and the Greek Islands, Simon draws readers into the intimacies of his life.
SWIMMING IN WORDS brings together seventy of Simon’s poems, some previously published, many revised for this collection as well as completely new works such as the 4,000+ word eponymous prose poem.
Pornwald
by Jill Van Epps
I
In the airless beige office she finds ways to kill time. She spins in her taupe chair until she feels faintly nauseous. She flicks through the papers in the greyish filing cabinet. She kicks the nude heel off her left foot and wedges its leather between her big toe and second-biggest toe. She cradles the putty-coloured phone in her elbow and coos to it like it’s a baby, feeling its plastic coldness. Through the half-open blinds, she stares at the signs for other businesses, reading their names out loud. First with an Aussie accent. Then a British one. Affordable Massage. Life Thrift. MRIs R Us. Poke Town. Inlet Market. Peat Bog Tanning. The Dark Fowl
‘The Dark Fowl, innit?’ she murmurs to herself.
The fluorescent lights flicker. The air conditioner practically screams. The off-white box of paper clips shudders.
When her boss gets there – you’ll know he’s her boss by the illegible insignia of the company machine-stitched over his left pec – she will knock the box of paper clips onto the carpet. He will ignore her. She will kneel down on all fours. He will ignore her. She will pick up the paper clips one by one, looking up at him and apologising for the great big mess, crawling closer and closer to his knees.
II
In the overstuffed armchair caddy-corner to the kitchen island, she waits. Her accessories are a calculator and wire-rimmed glasses without lenses.
Carry the two and. Transfer those credit card points and wait to pay interest. Carry the one and. Transfer from this account so. Re-insert the $60 recently taken from the ATM … Still doesn’t work.
She tries to imagine a future beyond not-paying-the-rent and can’t do it.
Try harder. It’s maybe a white room with no door. An elevator without buttons. A desert with grey sky and grey sand and a giant globe of tumbleweed, tumbling. An infinite staircase you could climb and climb without getting out of breath, which somehow makes it scarier. There is no end. It’s a fucking circle. Always the repetition of the first of the
month, just around the corner.
On the phone to an ex-boyfriend she sobs, ‘I’m drowning, I’m drowning!’ His response is inaudible. But he’s probably thinking the same thing we are: she should have thought of this a long time ago. Before the first of the month came rolling around.
‘I already sold all my clothes,’ she scream-whispers into the phone. ‘Even the Coach bag shaped like a cat. I told you that!’
She thinks of her disappeared clothes. She thinks of the sweatshirt she found in a flea market with ‘Lovely Nymph’ emblazoned on it in fuzzy cursive, how she lent it to her ex as a joke, how he wore it out clubbing as a joke, exposing his furry belly, how he laughed, how she laughed, poking at the furry belly button below the lovely nymph, how there was no future then, either, but in a good way, how beneath the sickly sweet candy shades of dawn the sweatshirt ended up (confusingly!) in a gutter, covered in sooty slush.
Where was that flea market, again? When was that night? The memory of the ruined sweatshirt makes her hang up on her ex mid-sentence.
Back to the calculator. Multiply this times two. Carry the. Subtract this from that and what do you have left. She feels like she’s choking on air. Like the air is full of something toxic –carbon monoxide, Rohypnol – and she’s taking it in in great big gulps.
Knock knock. Enter the landlord.
Pressing her knees together, she fakes primness. Then she falls into the plushness of her chair and fondles the calculator. The landlord looms over her regretfully. You can barely see his eyes beneath the shadowy brim of his hat.
He frowns. She says, ‘I think I knew you in another life.’
III
Hours pass without meaning. Light dances on the Formica countertop and mocks him by doing so. For the first time in a long time, it seems particularly tragic that he can’t tell red from green.
Days he lopes around the sun-filled modern Spanish, passing the French doors and infinity pool and custom built-
ins, thinking the same toxic thoughts on a loop. Nights he … There are no nights.
He paces. On the forum they tell him to measure it bone-pressed. On the forum they tell him to gobble zinc. Try losing twenty pounds, they say. Released from its fat pad, the transformed creature will throb and bloom. He will have one more inch, maybe two more inches, a life.
The smallness of his cock is no more or less tragic than the myriad homeless people hunched over tattered bags on Sunset, or the widespread abduction of children by a cabal of liberal élites, or the sureness of our collective destruction hurtling at us faster than you can say ‘California wildfire’, or, in the face of all of this, the gobsmacking prevalence of single-use plastics. Rather than distract from each other, these problems tug at him and aggregate, forming a giant doomsday bubble populated by tiny grimacing dicks.
(Paperclip Girl, meanwhile, is too filled with something else – happiness or sadness or a frantic combination of both – to worry about single-use plastics. Can’t-Pay-Her-Rent Girl doesn’t have the brain space, either. She can’t process the significance of her landlord glowering down at the chewed straw of her iced latte. She just knows that one way or another, and maybe in all of the ways, she is about to get fucked.)
He paces and thinks and paces and thinks. Do you believe in karma? i.e. the idea that we’ll all be reincarnated clean, beautiful, easy to love, and all with the exact same dick size? He sinks into the beige couch and places his head in his hands.
Ding dong. The giantess is here with her kit.
IV
Two Pine-Suckers walk through a pine forest, searching, in a lazy, haphazard way, for each other. One wears khaki cargo pants and no top. She fondles her breasts. The motion is repetitive, almost unbearably so, like writing the same sentence over and over on a chalkboard.
Pine-Sucker Two wears an orange sweater and plaid skirt and clutches a backpack.
She is as tall as the low branches.
She is of the age range eighteen+ but still teen.
The backpack chafes, too small for her sturdy shoulders. Inside are her colourful notebooks. Their pages are filled with her doodles – eyeballs, boxes, pyramids, crushes’ names in letters shaped like clouds, positive traits of a Scorpio in letters shaped like flames, chessboards with rooks, bishops, and knights, their faces non-existent or grotesque.
Doodling is more than a way to pass time. It helps her get ideas, ideas that have nothing to do with her doodles. For example.
The eyeballs multiply upon themselves, filling the page psychotically. Sometimes she switches to mouths, smiling, the teeth too precisely drawn, not blurry as they would look in real life. (But what exactly would you call real life, at this point in time?! Imagine a life where you weren’t a Pine-Sucker?! Seems sort of impossible?!) The precise toothy mouths crowd the page.
Pine-Sucker One can’t remember a time when she wasn’t in trouble. For example, about the berries. She didn’t know
the berry juice rule until after she’d broken it. Don’t track the goddamn berry juice in the house, it’s not beyond me to make you pick up a mop, stop telling me there’s no berry juice, that’s the whole problem, you feel it before you see it, feel the sticky smears under bare feet, are we feral? Should we pretend like we’re feral? Because it seems like you want us to live like feral animals?
Like all the other sham authority figures, his face is hard to picture. The house, too.
Probably it was rustic? A vaguely Bavarian cabin with a couch and a bed? More so she can remember the juice, almost invisible, with watercolour splotches of red, coming as it did from those anaemic berries that could kill you in two bites …
Walking through the woods is both a punishment and an escape. The Pine-Suckers listen to the cracking of ice in the branches. They shiver. Overhear woodpeckers working. Spot waxwings drunk on fermented berries. Their minds wander and stop at dead shivery ends.
Wander and stop, wander and stop.
When the Pine-Suckers find each other, they stare at each other with big blank eyes, doing their best impression of a tree. It’s as if they’ve been together in this clearing all along, nearly still, growing imperceptibly.
Cut to them kneeling.
Like in church? No. Not so graceful. Less out of grace than a practical necessity, with the added complications of mud, roots, crawling things.
The two Pine-Suckers have never been aware of singleuse plastics, and likely never will be. They know about pinesap consistency, the colour of loam, the way sticking your tongue out in crisp air can predict a storm, how to make your whole freezing body a weathervane. They can decode the scars in tree rings, feel the pine roots gossiping beneath their knees.
VDamn Daryl, I’m not even gay either but you look magnificent.
Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, Daryl tucks into a meal of venison steak, ground deer pancreas, raw deer heart. Silverware separates Daryl from the latent life force and therefore Daryl eats with his hands.
To taste the organ meat is to roam the forest, sniff the dirt, rush through the prickly brush in pursuit of his prey. When he downs a shot of bone marrow, he tastes the gaminess of death but also the gaminess of life, a slippery thing swimming down his throat and into his bloodstream. He feels electrolytes, triglycerides, minerals flowering in his own guts, healing him and making him vital.
It’s a beautiful thing that the deer gave to Daryl.
Oh Daryl. I love the way you make each and every girl fall in love with you the way you do your thing.
Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, Daryl washes his hands and goes over his choreography. Kiss neck, breasts, belly. Determine exact right depth of thrusts and exact right rhythm of thrusts. Stare into eyes at proper intervals. With right look. A kind of puppy-dog look. More like a mixture between puppy dog and murderer. It has to skirt
the line perfectly. Thusly he often practises this look in the smudged mirror above his sink.
With the focus of an élite athlete he ignores the mothballs between his toes, the incessant buzzing of the fly he can never catch. He stares at his face and practises the look.
His eyes (a striking blue) bore directly into the (imagined) girl as if weapons. His eye-weapons melt the (imagined) girl.
Daryl’s own face stares back at him. The grey tufts infecting the black mane like a virus. The sunken hollows of his cheeks.
He stares at his naked face and thinks, I am Daryl. I am of the age range of twenty to fifty. I am strong and versatile. And I have T-minus eight minutes to make the girl in the sailor hat fall in love.
Hey whoa Daryl that sure is a gnarly scar snaking down your abdomen, groin area. What’s up with that?
Pretty sure it’s a tattoo.
One helluva tattoo.
Why you gotta cover your whole body that way? Makes it look like you’re still wearing clothes.
The other day he was doing his thing with the redhead in the white robe and suddenly the cough came back out of nowhere. He was lying on his back and the way she pressed his chest made him feel like he couldn’t breathe. Without failing to continue doing his thing he propped himself up on his elbows to give the cough more leverage and in fact he did end up coughing up some blood, some phlegmy flecks of which made it onto the puddled wad of the redhead’s robe.
She didn’t notice. Her eyes were closed. He stared at her until she opened them. Boring into her. Creating a his/hers magnetic pull of understanding. They could be going at it till the end of time, barring any more hacks.
Except she stared back, and then she did something orders of magnitude worse than registering his phlegm: she laughed.
Can you believe what Daryl did with those knots? Daryl’s knotwork has been super above-par lately!
Before the girl with the sailor hat enters the room, a sadness envelops Daryl, won’t go away, threatens to swallow everything – the standard Ikea shelving and substandard futon, the row of tinctures and powders on said Ikea shelving, the refrigerator full of organs, the ointment he puts on his tattoos, which are always hurting as if they’re brand new.
Sadly he checks his muscles in the mirror. Sadly he notes that they never change, not even to atrophy. Sadly he takes a gulp of Mucinex. Mucinex can either stop your coughing or thin your mucus, making your coughs more productive. It’s not made for blood-mucus – just regular mucus. Shit. Now he’s imagining thinned blood-mucus splattered all over the girl in the sailor hat, her holding her sexy little hands to her sexy little face to shield herself from the deluge.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ she would say, ‘When I said sicko.’
I want you to feel my (me) deeply in myself.
A powdery splotch has reappeared on his lungs. Bad luck.
People think death doesn’t matter when you’re in Daryl’s position, but it does matter, it matters a lot; find out you have an aggressive form of cancer and suddenly everything, every goddamn object in the room, is ringed in a residue of death, like mildew in tile cracks.
The annoying mystery of death. The embarrassing grossness of death. The video game-like unfairness of death, the way your body could make one stupid mistake and suddenly smiling orbs fill the screen shouting GAME OVER. The undeniable possibility that when it happens – this thing you’ve been thinking about non-stop, as ever-present and familiar as the ticking of the clock – you won’t understand what the fuck is going on.
You’ll lose the plot.
Your tattoos won’t make sense.
The girl won’t be a girl anymore, her face will be a TV screen turned to a non-existent channel.
Or worse – the girl won’t be there at all when it happens. What if the girl with the sailor hat exits the room and his body chooses that exact moment for game over?
Because the girl with the sailor hat is taking her good sweet time entering the room, Daryl runs through a mental catalogue of every girl who has ever entered the room. Kind of Futuristic Girl and European Girl and Neighbours A and B and Girl in Pleated Army Miniskirt. The stunning variety of girls entering and exiting the room brings to mind the stunning variety of creatures in the animal kingdom, their feathers and camouflage, their noises and silences, their varied and glorious adaptations. A rainbow blur of animals and girls. The possibilities compound and compress into one little deer underneath Daryl, looking up. Here, take it. Take my life.
He wants to not die alone. He wants, he wants, he wants. It’s incredibly painful, the wanting. He smooths his plaid flannel sheets and pictures the girl with the sailor hat splayed out on them (except he can’t quite picture her clearly, she’s more like an eye floater or a chalk outline) and tries not to want. Without meaning to, he places his head in his hands. He smells pancreas; feels despair.
A husky, cigarette-flecked voice enters the room. The voice says, ‘It’s okay to want. Wanting is the essence of being alive. No duh.’ The voice sounds – familiarly – like it’s trying not to explode into laughter.
I’m looking for a sweet companion, someone to respond to my ‘sup’ late at night.
But the redhead in the white robe isn’t here. At least not bodily. Not her irritating smile. Not the smear of dark wine on her inner lips. Not the warm package of her body gently unspooling from her white robe. Nor the robe itself to remind him of blood-soaked bandages, or a shroud.
Her laugh is here. Prickly as a campfire, redolent with vocal fry. Her laugh makes Daryl want to punch a wall.
Sometimes it’s hard to formulate your own algorithm for
wanting. For example, five seconds ago all Daryl wanted was for a woman to enter the room, preferably the girl in the sailor hat, but really any of the aforementioned women would do; he wanted a woman to enter the room and he wanted to do his thing with her until she was weak, helpless to love. By Daryl’s calculations, that factor combined with his stamina meant they’d never stop going at it. Ergo, no dying alone.
But now that an (almost) woman has entered the room, all Daryl wants to do is be alone so he can enter ketosis. Ketosis will sponge up his brain fog, freshen his mitochondria, allow his cancerous cells to achieve cell death, ensure that he will live forever with or without the girl in the sailor hat.
Then again. After a while, modelling optimised behaviour gets blah and you wonder what else there is. That’s when your mind wanders – poisonously – to dying alone. Its nearness.
The head-free redhead laughs.
‘Do you ever stop talking?’
‘I said that out loud?’
One misconception about not being real is that you are immortal. In fact, your cancer metastasises quicker, cartoonishly so; from the warped cells lining your small air sacs it snowballs uncontrollably, rushing towards your adrenal glands, your liver, your brain.
Any moment you could spontaneously combust in a confetti blast of guts. And there it is – an end to your wanting, your wondering, your dumb circular misery …
Oh angel of death, clean me, make me perfect.
‘Daryl, relax.’
VI
We spent forever preparing for the orgy. We utilised lotions, pomades, lubricants, almond-based exfoliants, ice cubes, tweezers, waxes, laxatives, Vitamins A and E, Korean red ginseng, Cordyceps capsules, horny goat weed, the bark of an African evergreen tree, Nair, merkins, freckle erasers, toenail polish, eyebrow threads, nood flashers, douches that made our insides smell like funeral homes, epilators that made us smooth and raw like plucked chickens.
Then we curled against the edges of our wireframes, goosebumped and tan, trembling, every sorry piece of ourselves concentrated on an atom-thin filament of feeling wanting to expand. Wanting to and not allowed.
We stayed in our wireframes without being found. We grew older without changing.
Then news came that the orgy had already happened. There were rumours that it had been over in a millisecond, and was nothing but a trick of light.
We weren’t sure how to register our displeasure. We were
exhausted from doing nothing. We were pixelated, seethrough, idiotic, not threatening in the least.
At first we were like, ‘What the hell?’ Except the words didn’t escape our slippery mouths. It was more of a thought, thought all at once. When we shouted, no sound came out. When we pounded on the walls, the walls had too much give. With even gravity an iffy proposition, every movement felt unbearable, like a bad tickle, or a banshee screeching through our arteries.
We were pissed. We were so pissed we thought we might burst.
We were afraid we might burst.
We were sure the only thing left to do was to burst.
At that point we were still swingers and grannies, dilfs and real estate agents, college co-eds and international glamour models; we had our own desires and outlines, even if our desires ranged from watery pale to burning, and our outlines would sometimes slip and combine with another’s.
And yet suddenly we had the acute sense that we were underground, and always had been, sort of trapped inside fibre optic cables, sort of trapped and frantically moving.
We throbbed forward. We bulged holographically. We burst.
We got juices on our nothingness. We squirmed against invading mycelia. We felt just as pissed, but with new, distracting sensations. The thing is, Daryl was with us. We could feel his Daryl-ness, separate from our we-ness. There was something qualitatively different about him. Something beautiful and wrong.
Wrong like the scenario with the babysitter? No. Wrong in a new way. His wrongness had a smell to it. The smell of latespring air floating into a house and mixing with must and old wood. The smell of coming home from school when it’s still light outside, and knowing it will be light for some time.
Daryl was ahead of us now, blending with the webs and root forms outside. Now he could taste every element of the soil: that fragment of mouse, that gas void, those particles of quartz.
We remembered the first time we were naked for a reason. How our teeth kept chattering. How matter-of-factly or not our lover’s gaze drifted and fell on our belly buttons, our dimples, our hips. How we gazed back and/or squeezed our eyes shut. How stupid we felt, and how fantastic to feel stupid.
Then we felt like before that. We felt nude as insects, as springtails and maggots.
The mycelia made a slow feast of us, licking and sucking our toxins, our we-ness.
We were past enjoying being slowly feasted on. We were that fragment of mouse, that gas void, those particles of quartz. We were mycelia, feasting. g
Jill Van Epps is a writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in visual art from Goldsmiths College in London and studied video art in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship. She was awarded the Margaret C. Annan Award for fiction and has had several poems published in journals, including The Pedestal Magazine, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Oyez Review, and Visions International. She is currently completing her first novel, Teenage Babylon. ❖
by Shelley Stenhouse
… And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum— Kept beating—beating—till I thought My mind was going Numb
from Emily Dickinson’s ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
At the fellowship lunch after our AA meeting, I’d hear him describing an afternoon sky in Paris, a shaft of shadow on a Tuscany hill. His flat unstoppable narrative was better suited to rambling American suburbs than Europe’s concise landscapes. In the tiny restaurant, we shoved four wobbly tables together, ordered Asian greens, and sat for hours fiddling with our chopsticks and drinking burntorange-coloured Thai iced tea. No one but M. talked and no one listened to him. His nervous and joyless verbal traverses were the out-loud equivalent of knee-shaking or leg-swinging. I’d hear occasional individual words: dusk, kindness, playful, accoutrements, heavenly. Make it stop, make it stop, I’d pray (I’d learned to pray in AA), watching his mouth move evenly and continuously like a machine in a factory, punching hole after hole in my day.
I knew M. had very little to do during his early sober weeks – he always looked sad when our lunches broke up. As he was walking me home (I could put up with the
two blah-blah blocks to my apartment), I interrupted his monologue about Catholicism’s effect on Spanish architecture to ask him – the request felt altruistic – if he’d be willing to help me carry bags of clothes to Beacon’s Closet to sell. I told him I was broke. He welcomed this change of subject. Oh, I am too, he agreed. This contradicted what he’d rolled out as he walked me home from lunch earlier that week, when I’d asked him what he did for a living. I get a steady flow of royalties from my father’s literary estate; he’s an author. We’d all been trying to figure out who his father was; M. was evasive, while simultaneously dropping constant hints, as if his father were so famous we’d see M. in weak reflected light if we knew.
And I’ve got the Schnabel portrait of him I keep in storage, he added. I might have to sell it. That didn’t sound like broke to me. It’s just one Schnabel, he said defensively. And the royalties are more of a trickle, he assured me, flow is hyperbole
That hot June afternoon a few days later, he showed up at my apartment sweating in a wife-beater and apologising formally about his need to perform ablutions. On the walk to the L train, manoeuvring the heavy bags down the stairs to the platform, and during the ride to Williamsburg and the five blocks to the biggest branch of Beacon’s Closet, where I thought I’d have the most luck, he talked pleasantly, endlessly. He then aimed this verbal stream at the salesgirls behind the counter. In a knapsack, he’d brought a motorcycle jacket and
a wool suit to sell and detailed their provenance as he laid them out on the table. Montparnasse, twilight, piazza, youth. (In his defence, I later found out that his mother fell down the stairs drunk and died; he could not begin to live up to his father’s bad-boy reputation; he had a powerful rich stepsister who intimidated him; his own lumpy nothing of a sister embarrassed him. He was constantly trying to compensate for his own shoddy provenance.)
I had never heard talk used so effectively to deflect communication: it was counter-intuitive and a remarkable feat to witness. M. was teaching me the value of silence and patience. So I packed more bags, we took more June and then July trips to Beacon’s Closet, all to the soundtrack of his faded observations. We carried knapsacks of coins to the coin counter machine in the bank on 14th Street where you won a pencil sharpener if you guessed close to the correct amount. M. guessed $84 on $86; he was very pleased with his prize.
Eventually the talk moved from the street to my apartment. I remember the first time he sat on my sofa (upholstery cat-clawed down to internal wood), which was then in front of my left living-room window – I can track years by the position of that sofa: against the back wall (1980s), in front of the fireplace (most of the 1990s), under the right or left window (early aughts). He looked out onto Sheridan Square and talked about his girlfriend in Washington DC. She expects too much from me. He’d mentioned once, walking me home, that he had a long-distance relationship, but I didn’t entirely believe in this woman’s existence, at least as a legitimate girlfriend. What does she look like? I asked. She’s a petite lawyer who makes gobs of money, he said. The word ‘petite’ sounded stilted to me. She wants me to commit to this trip to Aruba. He argued at the air about this. And here was the unintentional crux: This haunts me, he said. We were in her Audi driving to a dinner party, and she double-parked so I could run into the store to buy a bottle of wine. I got out of her car, took a couple steps and fell flat on my face on the sidewalk, I was so drunk. She was fiddling with her phone and had not even seen. I stood up, went inside and bought a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, got in that car again and cruised through the whole damn dinner. This story made me question – as I do when I look at a visual trick like the vase and the faces – which is the primary reality? The fall or the evening on either side of it? Perhaps he was a pretty prop for her. He had large, beautiful hands and feet like a kitten’s, tawny blond hair like his father’s, but he had his mother’s stair-plummeting eyes.
M. started cooking dinners at my apartment and inviting our AA group over – my sponsor, the Buddhist bellhop; the two jazz brothers; Pet Food Jay; the conspiracy theory writer from Minnesota; the ageing Williamsburg artist who’d had a career in the 1980s; and the Southern girl who lived on the corner and changed her name from Angela to Autumn. M. was territorial and sensitive about cooking. When my sponsor wanted to add some lowbrow guacamole and chips to M.’s highbrow salmon meal, M. pouted. They fought it out and my sponsor made a little fun of him and took it in stride, opening the tortilla chip bag with an explosive sound and a wink.
The AA group started referring to M. as my little dog because he followed me everywhere and seemed happy to be included. My relationships with men always progressed in a similar way to my relationships with furniture: if offered to me, I took it and felt obligated to keep it. On my living room floor stood a parade of broken lamps. I could not seem to let them go. I was always about to get them fixed, but I never did. This pattern of reluctant acceptance went one step further with men: if I disliked someone on offer, I felt guilty and had to head straight toward him.
My last boyfriend, the finale of that final drunk year –following a string of guitar players of descending talent – was a very fat guy who worked at National Public Radio. After I recorded my 9/11 poem, he followed me out and asked if I’d look at his poems and give him some pointers. He offered to take me to lunch at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. Because it was clear that he also wanted to sleep with me and I felt repulsed by his fatness, I had to go through with it. To atone. He was so fat he actually hurt my thighs and he was frightened of breaking my loft bed, so the next day he took me shopping at Ikea to buy a Captain’s bed that sat firmly on the floor. He helped me buy a new television and he had a stereo delivered to my apartment, as a gift. He worshipped me for exactly two months, then dropped me after a night of drunken arguing.
In early sobriety I got involved with a skinny ex-actor and musician who used a ukulele case as a kind of purse. He even called it his purse. Eventually he started seeing a twenty-oneyear-old while he was seeing me (I had just turned fifty) and I showed him the door, but two months later I let him in again and he continued to see the twenty-one-year-old. Finally during a phone conversation, he said You’re too good for me, and in a moment of clarity I agreed, and we broke up.
M. and I spent more time together. He manifested out loud the way I felt inside – which in boating terms was run aground. I wanted to pry him loose. I practised compassion and also urged him to speak less, as an experiment. It was very difficult for him and those moments were highly charged. He turned red and fidgeted, then he had to talk about not talking.
In the evenings, my daughter came and went with her tap team friends, their chirping voices magnifying, then receding. The living room was her room, so M. and I often had to decamp to the bedroom; we could hear them practising their dance routines: Samantha, No! It’s step-ball-change-shufflekick-shuffle – wait, no, is there an extra shuffle there or only on the break? Shit! hahaha. I could hear the girls giggling in the kitchen, making macaroni or a Betty Crocker cake. On Tuesdays the tall SAT tutor would arrive – always exactly on time – and sit for two hours on one of our broken chairs at the table. Before he arrived, M. and my daughter and I piled all her junk under a blanket. I have to beat back the blob, I joked. M. liked participating in our rituals. My daughter’s bed was a monstrosity she’d designed with her dad (the carpenter) – it had tall ends that were supposed to house shelved cabinets with doors, but he never finished building it, so the exposed sides were dark maws of pressed board that filled up with
tossed-in sneakers and clothes and books and Sharpies and notebooks and broken pencils.
I couldn’t bear the beauty of my own life with my daughter – I ran from it as if from a burning building. I spent an inordinate amount of time holed up in my bedroom listening to M.’s voice droning like an air conditioner, while my real life blazed in the living room. On M.’s one-year AA anniversary, I floated the idea of a relationship (in AA you’re supposed to wait until you have one year sober to get involved). He wanted to talk about it. No, I said. Let me see where you live. M.’s apartment was not far from mine, but he’d never invited me over. As we walked down Sixth Avenue, he tried to diminish it: a sublet, tiny, untenable, indefensible, etc.
It was charming. Bare and white: white painted floors, an old dropleaf table like mine in the kitchen, a dresser like mine too, and a custom handmade bed and mattress, much better than mine, from an exclusive SoHo shop I’d always admired but never dared to enter. He sat down on the bed and I said, Let’s take our clothes off. He balked at this, but obeyed since he was my dog. After disrobing, he cowered, shivering in the most distant corner, and apologised because he could not get an erection. He explained the reasons in detail while I admired a wooden box on his dresser – it had a secret compartment. He told me I could keep it. He dressed and we walked back to my place. I carried the box. I never took off my clothes. It all happened very fast, like a scene in a Marx Brothers movie.
My bed was up against my windows then, and we got in it. It all seemed absurd and beautiful. It’s you. It’s M., I said out loud in the moonlight. He was good in bed.
The next day we aired this whole new relationship at our meeting, and the reaction was similar to my own, with a less sentimental tone: It’s M.! She’s with M.!?
The celebratory mood quickly shifted. The second morning I heard the locks turning as my daughter left for school, and before M. and I had even had coffee, I was trapped in the Hamptons in the 1960s in a morose but sentimental history of his father, his stepmother, his whole family. M.’s voice grew mournful and hollow as he slid off-track into irrelevance, finally ending somewhere in Key West.
That night we went to see Midnight Cowboy at Film Forum, and afterwards M. grilled me. Why did you like it? What about it exactly did you like? I was crying, unable to wipe out the image of poor lame Rizzo dying in his Hawaiian shirt on the bus to Florida, a scene so poignant and sad I could not even imagine what needed explaining. But why? Why? he kept asking, falling behind then rushing at me like Rizzo. For the first time I noticed how pigeon-toed he was, and how much shorter.
He started pulling back from seeing me almost immediately. He had to proofread a history textbook. A flatrate job he spent days on, and came in at less than five dollars an hour (I resentfully calculated). I asked him if he could get work for me at the same company – they were short of proofreaders – but he refused; he was afraid I’d be faster (yes, much!) and they’d somehow find out. He insisted on wearing a three-piece suit to his interview at another textbook publisher; it made him look antiquated and desperate. Add to that the
nervous talk of Paris sky at dusk and you had a non-hire.
I was watching him baste a roast at his apartment the night a certified letter arrived. For months he had neglected to pay his storage bill, and valuable correspondences and mementos from his father’s estate had gone to auction and sold cheap. He’d have to buy them back at a premium. How could you have missed all the payments leading up to this? I was outraged that he still had a small pile of money and could afford to mismanage it. He threw himself onto his magnificent bed, and I argued down at him while the roast overcooked.
The following week I stood at the window looking out for M.. He was ten minutes late, then fifteen, eighteen. This felt disrespectful. I thundered downstairs to meet him. You’re late, I pointed out pointlessly, and fumed all the way to Citarella in silence. At the fish counter, watching the lobsters bang into the tank with their rubber-cuffed claws, I erupted in accusations that lasted all the way through the check-out line and the video store, where I refused to offer input, and he chose Klute and La Dolce Vita. We came home with our grocery bags and videos to find my daughter Skyping with the boy she had a crush on; she coached him in Calculus, and teased him wittily when he missed all the answers. She was a whiz at Calculus, and I loved listening to their banter, but I didn’t. I retired to my room, slammed the door and sulked while M. cooked a terrific meal – salmon with ginger and scallions – for the three of us. I consoled myself on my bed with my long cat, Ralph (who M. called Stretchy). My daughter came into the bedroom and tried to cheer me up: Mommy, come on! Don’t be such a baby. You can start the evening over. I want you to eat with us. I came out sheepishly and sat on the huge Kevyn Aucoin book we used to cover the missing cane on one of the cane-sprung chairs (Kevyn Aucoin had taken my first headshot – for that abandoned career – before he became a famous make-up artist). After our tense delicious dinner, M. and I spent the rest of the evening in bedroom-court. Our rental movies went unwatched.
One night when my daughter was at her father’s, M. and I had a particularly aerobic fight, and he left the apartment. I ran down the stairs after him, begging him to come back. I may have even grabbed his leg and pulled him. To cap off these fights we had perfectly choreographed sex in his custom bed, or my bottom-of-the-line Ikea bed that had been my daughter’s (I’d sold the better Captain’s Ikea bed that the fat guy helped me pick out). One night he searched through his extra room (where he hid all his junk – he had his own ‘blob’) for the vibrator, and never found it, while I stared at his ceiling and mentally remarked on the obscene high-quality comfort of his mattress.
Because I was so broke, I tapered off my anti-depressants and the world started to wobble and pulse. Walking beside M. I stopped on the sidewalk and slapped my face. Insults flew down the Hudson River path, from Christopher Street to Battery Park. Threats. Dropped gauntlets. I could have been at home reading, enjoying my cats, or the sweet trill of my daughter’s voice on the phone with her friends, but this is what I did.
There was a memorable night in Elephant and Castle
restaurant that my AA sponsor and I still talk about. M. sat frozen and would not respond in any way to either of us. He seemed hollowed out, empty. I’d invited him to Cape Cod with my family and he could not see himself going as planned, considering how he was feeling. I must arrive a few days late, he insisted dramatically. No, that’s ridiculous, I said. He had to come with me. My boyfriends were always changing but I had to have one to face my family. The two-timer with the ukulele purse had come the year before.
Memory sorts events. M. did come, and that summer I saw my first gay wedding, two men on the sun deck at our rental cabin community. Before the ceremony M. and I had sex in my sun-drenched attic bedroom. I wore a long pink silk tunic and lime green silk pants to the wedding. Fresh oysters, a fresh fight later, a long walk down the wooden stairs to the bay to burn off steam, no recall of my daughter or the rest of my family.
The last day M. and I and were together we took a trip up to the Cloisters. (I’d been there only once, for a fun picnic with my friend Randy, a couple of years before he died of AIDS.) The sky was blaring blue and the trees seemed to snicker. Inside the museum I stared at ancient tapestries and M. made historical comments. I was angry at him for having lunch with an AA fellow I’d introduced him to, Pet Food Jay, and not inviting me. It was childish, but I couldn’t shake it. He’d been secretive about it, as if Jay were his lover. He was behaving this way to infuriate me, I thought, but I took the bait. We sat on a bench outside and watched the Hudson move by. My head grew bigger and heavier. On the downtown subway platform I leaned forward ominously and looked at the rats and puddles, and in the train car I tried to simply focus on my breath. IN faith, OUT fear. Everything hurt. He left me at 14th Street, but I called him later and begged him to spend the night. I’ll spend the night if you’re suicidal, he said. I am, I said, and so he did. And that was the last time.
A few months after we broke up, my daughter graduated. I went to the ceremony with Phil the drummer (one of the
jazz brothers). Phil joked that M. was Little Lord Fauntleroy in his short pants with a lollipop. He’s just too small, Phil said. You never liked M. – that’s why it wouldn’t work, Autumn sagely pointed out at an AA lunch.
After my daughter left for college, I realised I’d spent most of her last year of high school behind my closed bedroom door. I’d killed the time I could have had with her. I felt the weight of all those days and nights and events and spaces between events I’d missed. Mommy aren’t you coming to the tap rehearsal, they said you could come? The senior parent party? The school picnic? The lunch, the dinner? Can you walk me to the train? Daddy and I are going to the park, want to join us? No, no, no. I had drifted farther and farther away, and none of it was M.’s fault. I had engineered the whole relationship. And I’d started drifting long before I met M.. All the blackouts, the ‘naps’ in the bedroom with men whose last names I can’t remember while she was in the living room doing projects – once she made a turtle out of leopard material, stuffed it and sewed it herself, she must have been ten – Here, Mommy, see? I leaned down languorously from the loft bed. No, Mommy wasn’t here. Mommy didn’t see. I gripped my crummy bed now as if it were a life raft. The floor tilted and roiled and I feared what was under it if I fell through. My mind kept replaying the insanely fun all-nighter my daughter and I had pulled her last semester, analysing Emily Dickinson’s poem: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ for Ms D’Amico’s English class. We’d made popcorn and added Raisinets – salty/sweet, our favourite. And the ideas had popped all night; my daughter and I channelled those stanzas until she had written the best possible paper (stringent Ms D’Amico gave it an unprecedented A).
That poem had been prescient. The pounding boots, the coffin – I was inside it now, moving downward. As I began to fall, I heard a faint flat voice – was it the radio? – saying something about hills at sunset. I hovered on the line just before the plank broke:
‘Wrecked, solitary, here—’ g
Shelley Stenhouse, a New York City-based poet and fiction writer, recently won the Palette Poetry Prize (judged by Edward Hirsch). Her collection, Impunity, was published by NYQ Books. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Allen Ginsberg Award, was a National Poetry Series finalist, and had two Pushcart Prize nominations (one by Tony Hoagland). Her work has appeared in New York Quarterly, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Nimrod, Margie, Third Coast, Brooklyn Rail, Washington Square, and Poetry After 9/11: An anthology of New York poets (among others). ❖
Boy Wonder
The protean and hubristic Stanley Kubrick
Peter Goldsworthy
TKubrick: An odyssey
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
Faber
$65 hb, 655 pp
here might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.
A small, shy, nerdy, baby-faced misfit, he ‘preferred the street to school’ and therefore didn’t go much. Instead, he went to the movies – a lot – read comics and pulp magazines, and played a high level of chess, often in Washington Square, for money. Having declined a bar mitzvah, he was given a camera for his thirteenth birthday instead. This proved useful to hide behind, like dark glasses (which he also affected), and helped his social life. Born obsessive, he soon became the school photographer. He discovered Shakespeare through photographing a teacher who would declaim Hamlet, but still watched every movie that came to town, including Italian, French, and Yiddish movies at the local Arthouse cinema.
As for school, when he finally dropped out, aged seventeen, he lucked in: landing a million-to-one job as the youngest-ever staff photographer at the upmarket Look magazine, which had a circulation in the millions. This was the first of various big ‘breaks’ that came his way.
He was a superb photographer. It would be good to see more of his work in this biography, but they can be tasted online. He was handed plum assignments; one for an article entitled ‘Boy Wonder Grows Up’ about Leonard Bernstein, ten years his senior.
The Boy Wonder behind the lens chucked in the security of Look in his early twenties to make documentaries, which, however amateurish, always looked beautiful, unsurprisingly. Good pictures, in the pre-motion sense of the word.
After a disastrous first feature – Fear and Desire (1952) is so comically bad it is worth checking out on Prime TV, where such things go to die – Kubrick lived for a couple of hard-scrabble years partly on the earnings from chess hustling, working up to twelve-hour day shifts in Washington Square, at a quarter a game. ‘I did make about two or three dollars a day ... it really goes a long way if you’re not buying anything except food.’
This 600-page biography, co-written by two film scholars –Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams – is a seamless and often mesmerising read. It is packed with riches on every level from the personal to the political to the gossipy to the artistic, but Stanley’s early struggles, and his sheer will to overcome them, no matter
who got in the way, are especially riveting. He never stopped hustling for film money between chess games, borrowing and begging from friends and relatives, shooting low- but always over-budget films on what might be called the Micawber principle: the cheque is in the mail. He was driven, obsessively, and possessed of an enormous ego – which at least insulated him against despair. Of course, there were costs: friendships, marriages. ‘Stanley Hubris’ took credit where little was due, and demanded total control of every project he was involved in, even if it wasn’t his.
So far, so typical. The entire American movie business seems built on the loose bricks of hustler stories, or Darwinian fights for survival; the survivors being those who get the proverbial lucky break. Young Stanley had courageously abandoned his first – a plush post at Look magazine – so perhaps he deserved the next: a young like-minded millionaire investor-producer, Joseph Harris.
His previous producer having died of a heart attack on a transatlantic flight (a useful break, if not lucky for all involved), Harris-Kubrick Pictures was born. And they were always pictures as much as movies. Always seductive to look at, still by still.
From here on, his story gets less typical – and, very soon, unique. Young Stanley elbows his way to the front of the hustling pack. He makes his first very good movie – Paths of Glory (1957) – with Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, a French officer in the trenches during World War I. The great (if tacked on at the last minute) closing scene in a tavern, as a captured German woman sings to the catcalling French troops, until their faces fill the screen with deeply etched character and changing emotions, predates the astonishing facial close-ups of Sergio Leone by a decade. In fact, the French troops were Munich cops, and the film was shot near Dachau concentration camp, in a bombed-out schloss, with the odd ex-Nazi in the crew.
The beautiful singer became Kubrick’s third and last wife, and the love of his life: Christiane Harlan. Meeting her family, prominent among whom was Veit Harlan, the notorious director of one of the worst anti-Semitic films of the Goebbels era, was a difficult experience for Kubrick. ‘I felt like Woody Allen looking like ten Jews.’
After a couple more years of scrounging and hustling, at poker as well as chess, the Kirk Douglas connection provided his biggest break: Kubrick became the youngest director ever entrusted with a major epic – Spartacus (1960) – and a shimmering A-list cast. I just wish he’d shot it in black and white.
Given that this thirty-ish upstart from the Bronx was suddenly directing Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Boyer, and Peter Ustinov, there were more than the usual fallings-out with the cast and crew. The vastly experienced cinematographer Russell Metty took exception to Kubrick’s resetting all his camera angles. ‘Get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane.’ It’s a wonder Kubrick didn’t claim Metty’s Oscar for Best Cinematography for himself, having effectively sidelined Metty for the duration of the shoot. Tony Curtis, another ‘Jew-boy’ from the Bronx, famously said, ‘Who do you have to fuck to get off this picture?’ but nevertheless forged a lifelong friendship with Kubrick.
The battle scenes were shot in Spain, using (another bizarre historical irony, this being a story about a revolt of slaves against tyranny) the fascist troops of General Franco.
Next, Kubrick tried to acquire the rights to Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago, planning to cast Kirk Douglas in the title role. Having Spartacus play the gentle doctor-poet might not have been one of his best ideas. A good fit for Komarovsky perhaps, but Rod Steiger made that role his unforgettable own.
Kubrick did manage to nab the other really famous Russian novelist of the time, paying Vladimir Nabokov an advance that was greater than the sum total of the novelist’s lifetime earnings to that point. Lolita, released in 1962, is Kubrick’s first truly great movie, the excellent Paths of Glory notwithstanding. His next, indisputably, was Dr Strangelove, in 1964.
Which is when I got my own first lucky break into the movies – albeit limited to the stalls. This is not entirely irrelevant, or self-indulgent; I should declare, or explain, my Kubrick bias. We never had a television, and I didn’t get to the pictures much as a child. But my teen years were the 1960s, and by sheer luck the three movies I fell hardest for during that formative decade were all Kubrick’s.
This might never have happened. It was a minor miracle that I got to see Dr Strangelove in 1966, at the tender age of fourteen. A few enlightened teachers at my country high school founded a weekly ‘Lyceum Club’ for senior students interested in the arts and politics. I was too young, but got in on the skirt-tails of my older girlfriend, most memorably on the sole movie night of the year. I was stunned. Thrilled. I had seen nothing like it before, although a subscription to Mad magazine at the age of thirteen perhaps primed my receptive brain.
role of Clare Quilty. For once, the control freak Kubrick had enough sense to give the actor his improvisational head. James Mason as Humbert plays an exquisitely mannered straight-man, until he memorably doesn’t.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) arrived in Adelaide later that same year. I saw it three times in a fortnight, even though it was in colour. In the end, because it was in colour. The black-and-white beauty of the earlier masterpieces came from Kubrick’s days as a photographer, and from countless Bronx Arthouse nights watching De Sica and Eisenstein and especially his hero, the German Jewish director Max (born Oppenheimer) Ophüls – but 2001 is preposterously beautiful in technicolour.
The biography spends a lot of time on this movie, which is fair
Lolita had been shot several years before, but had zero chance of a high-school screening. I saw it when I was seventeen, in my first year as a medical student. I had seen nothing like this – except perhaps for the many faces of Peter Sellers. It still seems as perfect as a movie can be, not least in its casting of the four main characters: a comic masterpiece, capable of swallowing laughter into pathos, then coughing the laughter back up again in a blink.
One fact I didn’t know: Errol Flynn requested a screen test for the role of Humbert. He also suggested his teenage girlfriend of the time as Lolita. Her mother wrote Kubrick a letter recommending her for the part: ‘She’s living it now.’
Hundreds of mothers pushed their daughters to audition, a different, if still typical kind of hustle. Anything to get into the movies. That the greatness of the film is different from the greatness of the book is partly down to Sellers, playing an expanded
enough – the preparations took years and an army of technicians. By now, Kubrick and clan had decamped, permanently, to the United Kingdom, a short drive from the Ealing studios. Scientific advisers visiting the vast sets from the United States liked to refer to it as ‘NASA West’. All of which helped fuel the rumour, after 1969, that it was Kubrick who had faked the moon landing.
Well, it had to be someone.
He was keen to make a film about Napoleon next, another epic biopic. As obsessive as ever, he read ‘hundreds of books’, scouted scores of locations, booked the entire standing army of Romania as extras. But studio tastes had downsized. He ended up adapting Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange instead. I liked it at the time, but it now seems dated, and rather silly. His Napoleon fallback epic was Barry Lyndon (1975), based on the Thackeray novel, to film which his giant armada had to invade Ireland, only to fall back to England, with Kubrick death-threatened by the IRA. Too many redcoats were marching around the emerald island from an era when it was completely under the
Gary Lockwood and Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)
British thumb.
I didn’t think much of Barry Lyndon at the time, but Abrams and Kolker make a good case for it, and I will watch it again, with humble hope in my heart. The Shining (1980) was a return to form, in, as usual, a completely different direction. The battle scenes of his Vietnam war movie, Full Metal Jacket (1987), were, astonishingly, shot in an abandoned London gasworks. Kubrick hated to travel.
I could write another ten thousand words on the stories behind these films and the others in this splendidly naked book. ‘Stories are a kind of miracle,’ Kubrick liked to say, and he was always searching for them. He thought of himself as a writer, and read potential ‘properties’ voraciously, from Brian Aldiss to Philip ‘Wroth’. All his movies are based on novels, or stories, however changed, rich, or strange, and his relationships with, and mistreatment of, his writers would make another, even longer, book. Likewise, his composers and music arrangers.
Which brings me to the movies he didn’t make. He met with John Lennon and Paul McCartney to discuss directing a musical version of Lord of the Rings, with a soundtrack by the Beatles (their idea!), but declined the offer and stole the music director of Apple music instead. Holy Hobbit, Boy Wonder – a close shave! Years-long preparation for a projected Holocaust movie had the rug tugged from under it by his close friend Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. For years he was obsessed with an AI movie about
a robot boy who comes to life – working title Pinocchio – until finally deciding that Spielberg was a better fit.
These various dead ends meant a lost decade before his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, appeared in 1999. He had nursed the Arthur Schnitzler novella Traumnovelle, on which it is based, all his life. No surprise there; novels by both Schnitzler and his fellow Jewish Austrian Stefan Zweig had been lifted onto the screen superbly by Max Ophüls. Our tag-team biographers make a good case for this much-maligned movie too. No surprise there either. Their earlier collaboration was a book called Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the making of his final film (2019). I watched it again last night. Twenty-five years back, I felt that Nicole Kidman and her then-husband Tom Cruise lacked chemistry, a fatal flaw in a film about the varieties of sexual chemistry – or sexual physics, more accurately. But maybe that’s the point, as with the formal, unsexy orgy. Kubrick died suddenly before applying his final editing touches, so we’ll never know. Either way, I’ve changed my opinion. It’s a much more intriguing – and of course beautiful – movie than I remembered.
One formative opinion hasn’t changed though: he would never again quite equal the three masterpieces of the 1960s, Lolita, Strangelove, and 2001 g
Peter Goldsworthy’s latest book is The Cancer Finishing School (2024).
On Being Shy
Shyness gives you a bouquet of weeds and tells you to exit quickly by the back door. Shyness shames you into presenting only a peepshow version of yourself. It tells you never to be bold, to never give yourself the box seat. The shy can’t perform
even to a light patter of rain let alone the doorbell’s call, a phone’s amplified ring. Shyness is terror’s co-star, the victim role that gets no one’s applause. Shyness has no safety curtain, it puts you backstage of yourself and you’re frightened even in the wings. Shyness gives you top billing but only in solo shows where you’re your own bumbling understudy. Shyness comes with a peanut gallery so you can self-mock. Shyness gives no prompts, no cues, makes you star in a dumb show,
tells you that even whispers will turn into a ruin of headlines. For the shy being in the background feels far too flamboyant, even a closet drama is too much of a pageant. The shy are always trying to find the dimmer. The shy are never asked for encores.
Judith Beveridge
Shakespeare’s Everest
A chamber King Lear from Bell Shakespeare
Ian Dickson
King Lear is the Everest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, looming over theatre companies, challenging them to make the perilous ascent. It is also the darkest. Hamlet may finish with almost as many bodies strewn around the stage, and Macbeth delves deep into malign forces unleashed by cravings for power, but with the former ending with the arrival of Fortinbras, Hamlet’s chosen successor, and the latter with the ascension of Malcolm, there is some sense of a positive outcome. Of the trio who survive at the end of King Lear, the faithful Kent walks away to die and the ineffectual Albany hands over the kingdom to Edgar. The play ends with the enigmatic and hardly encouraging remark: ‘The oldest have borne most: we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long.’
Over the years, there have been varying approaches to this daunting work. In an attempt to make it more palatable, the infamous 1681 version by Nahum Tate, which was performed for a century and a half, restored Lear to sanity and his throne, and contrived a love affair between Edgar and Cordelia. In the existentialist 1960s, Peter Brook and Paul Scofield accentuated the script’s nihilism, while in 2016 Glenda Jackson and Deborah Warner blurred genders in a triumphant production.
It is both the strength and the weakness of Peter Evans’s production for Bell Shakespeare that he eschews any contemporary relevance and gives us the play straight. As he says in his program notes: ‘Lear creates the circumstances for a power vacuum and chaos … A production doesn’t need to make these explicitly contemporary for an audience to find themselves reflected.’
Performed in the round in the company’s Nutshell theatre, which seats 240, this is a chamber Lear. Anna Tregloan has designed a gilt floor with a black disc at its centre. Looming above it is a gilded empyrean spiral. Props appear and disappear strictly as needed. Changes of scene are indicated by Benjamin Cisterne’s lighting. With a couple of exceptions, costumes are utilitarian black, enhanced by the odd cape.
The lack of clutter allows Evan’s fluent production to move rapidly – sometimes too rapidly. Important scenes flash past almost before one has absorbed them. But Evans presents the two
intertwined plots clearly. This reviewer was sitting near a couple who had obviously never before come in contact with the play; they reacted with surprise and horror as the grisly events unfolded. This pared-back physical production puts the focus firmly on the actors, with mixed results, but its intimacy particularly suits Robert Menzies’ Lear. As an actor, Menzies is about as far away from the old-style histrionics of a Donald Wolfit as it is possible to get. Rather than attempting to blow you out of the room, he draws you in. His Lear has held power for so long that he has no interest in making an impression, and he scurries on without pomp and ceremony, both scatty and determined. This is a man already disintegrating. His anger at Cordelia’s intransigence is just that: anger. Rage comes later when confronted by his other daughters, and his cursing of Goneril has a frightening intensity. Menzies is equal to Cisterne and sound designer Max Lyandvert’s storm. It is in the later scenes, as Lear discovers his humanity, that Menzies really comes into his own. His scene with the blinded Gloucester (an excellent James Lugton) blends humour and pathos as it should, but Menzies reaches his emotional peak with his howls over Cordelia’s corpse, even though he was denied Lear’s traditional entrance with the body.
Lugton’s Gloucester is a stolid courtier completely out of his depth in the changing circumstances. Darius Williams as Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, presents himself to us with a nicely sardonic version of the ‘Thou nature art my goddess’ speech, but he lacks the character’s cold malevolence and, like most Edmunds, finds it difficult to make the dying man’s sudden repentance convincing. Alex King, otherwise a fine Edgar, Gloucester’s noble son, is an unfortunate victim of cross-gender casting. This can work – it certainly does with Janine Watson’s sterling Kent – but as the text makes perfectly clear, Edgar as Mad Tom has to be naked in the storm scenes and all those references became meaningless when the subject is fully clothed.
Elsewhere, the casting was not so successful. Lizzie Schebesta as Goneril and Tamara Lee Bailey as Regan came across as petulant rather than evil. Melissa Kahraman’s fool was an improvement on her Cordelia. She got her laughs, but there was
no real connection between her and the king Cordelia loves and understands better than anyone.
Weaknesses in casting aside, the clarity of Evans’s production, buttressed by Menzies’ authoritative performance, meant that, by the performance’s end, the cumulative power of the play won through. g
Robert Menzies as King Lear (Brett Boardman)
Darius Williams as Edmund (Brett Boardman)
Andrew Ford
Backstage
Andrew Ford is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, and has won awards in all three capacities, including the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for his song cycle, Learning to Howl. His music has been played throughout Australia and in more than forty countries around the world. Since 1995 he has presented The Music Show each weekend on ABC Radio National. He is the author of eleven books, including The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (with Anni Heino). We review his new book, The Shortest History of Music, on page 56.
What was the first performance that made a deep impression on you?
Athol Fugard’s Dimetos at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1976, with Paul Scofield, Yvonne Bryceland, and Ben Kingsley. At the end, Dimetos (Scofield) has a monologue during which he begins to juggle and finally falls about laughing. I imagined making an opera from the play and many years later, when Fugard was in Sydney, asked his permission, which he granted. It hasn’t happened yet.
When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?
I’m not sure that wanting came into it. I began composing in my mid-teens, but up to the age of twenty-one my intention was to become a primary school teacher. I’d finished my music degree and was about to take up a place at a teachers’ college when I was encouraged to apply for a job running the music department at Bradford University – a technological university without a music department. There were two choirs and an orchestra to conduct, a concert series to run and time to compose. Primary school teaching still seems like the most important job in the world, though.
What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?
Royal Festival Hall, London, 1982. Maurizio Pollini playing Boulez’s Piano Sonata No. 2, from memory.
Name three performers you would like to work with.
Víkingur Ólafsson, Miriam Margolyes, and Taryn Fiebig. In 2020, Taryn was to have sung the title role in my opera Rembrandt’s Wife, for Opera Australia, its production postponed in the pandemic. Now, even if the production were to go ahead, it would be without Taryn, who died in 2021.
Do you have a favourite song?
It changes every day; but I have a favourite piece which hasn’t changed in fifty years, namely Britten’s Spring Symphony. It’s a choral symphony, setting a veritable anthology of English poetry, and one of the composer’s few genuinely optimistic works.
And your favourite play or opera?
I keep returning to The Tempest, not least as a source of texts or titles for my own pieces. Even on the page it has such a strong atmosphere. It’s hard to name a single opera, although Thomas Adès made a good fist of The Tempest.
And your favourite writer and favourite composer?
Today it’s Auden and Mozart.
How do you regard the audience?
Quizzically. I find myself wondering who they are.
W hat’s your favourite theatrical venue in Australia?
Probably the Belvoir St Theatre, because you’re so close you can’t help but feel part of it all.
What do you look for in arts critics?
Knowledge, insight, kindness, empathy.
Do you read your own reviews?
Yes, and it’s wonderful when a critic has really understood the work. It’s nothing to do with praise; at least one critic has written glowing reviews of my music and books while completely missing the point.
Money aside, what makes being an artist difficult –or wonderful – in Australia?
When I came here from England, forty years ago, there was suddenly no pressure to be in a stylistic camp. I felt free and still do.
What’s the single biggest thing governments could do for artists?
Ask us how they can best help. Which, in fairness, Tony Burke did.
W hat advice would you give an aspiring artist?
Don’t be in a rush.
W hat’s the best advice you have ever received?
‘Just use your ears, love.’ I was nineteen or twenty, studying composition at university, and the advice was from Michael Tippett, who visited the department for a week or so. As advice, in fact, it’s pretty awful, but I was enmeshed at the time in all manner of charts and musical systems, and Tippett’s words liberated me.
W hat’s your next project or performance?
I’m putting the finishing touches to I Sing the Birth, a Christmas sequence for treble voices and electric guitar commissioned by Luminescence Children’s Choir (Canberra), together with the Flanders Boys’ Choir, the Estonian TV Girls’ Choir, and Aquinas College Schola Cantorum (Perth). The words are by Ben Jonson, Christina Rossetti, Mark Tredinnick, and Judith Nangala Crispin (among others). I’m hopeful of getting to three of the performances, including those Flemish boys in Antwerp Cathedral a few days before Christmas. g
The Artful Dodger
A sumptuous new exhibition in Canberra
Roger Benjamin
I think that as a person Gauguin did a lot of dodgy things but as a painter he did a wonderful job. All the interesting work happened when he came to Polynesia, inspired by the Other.
Yuki Kihara, 2019
These words put the case for and against Paul Gauguin (18481903) in a nutshell. Kihara speaks with the authority of a Pasifika, a transgender Japanese-Samoan artist who wittily restaged two dozen Gauguin paintings as colour photographs in her Paradise Camp series. Kihara dressed and posed Fa’afafine – men living and dressing in the manner of women – and her work cements the iconic status of Gauguin’s ‘wonderful’ imagery. What were the ‘dodgy things’ Gauguin did? The list is long, from plagiarising texts in his own writings and appropriating Māori iconography, to more egregious acts, such as abandoning his Danish wife and five children, and living ‘in sin’ with teenage girls in far-distant Tahiti and the Marquesas.
sation, drawing on Gauguin’s letters to reveal the ugly misogynistic claims of a colonial settler 130 years ago. But the National Gallery, in its beautifully produced exhibition catalogue, addresses these issues directly. The feminist scholar Norma Broude, in her essay ‘Paul Gauguin in the Era of Cancel Culture’, introduces Australian readers to the postcolonial critique that, since Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1989), has revealed a problematic, middle-aged Gauguin as predatory cultural colonist. Yet Broude finds today’s ‘cancel culture’ version of events too simplistic. Like fellow essayist Nicholas Thomas (whose new book Gauguin and Polynesia is a must-read), she argues that Gauguin’s cohabitation with girls we would call minors needs to be seen in its historical setting. In that time and place, such relationships could be approved by Tahitian parents as beneficial, while Tahitian standards about sexuality differed markedly from today’s.
In the new Gauguin scholarship of Broude, Thomas, or Elizabeth Childs (all building on the legacy of Bengt Danielsson), we see the seriousness of Gauguin’s engagement with French Polynesia, where he spent ten years living and painting. Broude looks in detail at Gauguin’s grandmother, the pioneering feminist Flora Tristan, to reveal in Gauguin’s art and thought a validation of Polynesian matriarchy and sexual equality, as against the colonial Catholic mores which Gauguin opposed in word and deed. I would link these ideas to Stephen Eisenman’s controversial book Gauguin’s Skirt (1997), which investigated Polynesian sexuality and the ‘third sex’ of Fa’afafine or mahu, highlighting the artist’s own sexual ambiguity and the possibility that some adult figures in his paintings were posed by Fa’afafine.
The National Gallery of Australia has taken a risk in devoting a major retrospective (Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao, until 7 October 2024) to this bad man who produced great art. Sasha Grishin attempted a ‘pile-on’ in his reactive piece for The Conver-
What do Polynesian intellectuals today make of these largely Anglophone debates about sexual mores? The NGA helps answer the question, establishing a program to frame Gauguin in an indigenising, postcolonial context. New Polynesian art dominates a large open gallery before entry to the exhibition wing. Two vast walls and a floor are covered with a kaleidoscope of colour and imagery. Block-printed wall hangings by Cook Island man Numa Mackenzie are festooned with traditional weapons, photographs old and new, and anticolonial slogans (‘Landback!’). Vitrines contain Pasifika kitsch objects à la Destiny Deacon. This joyous but politically pointed profusion is the work of the ‘SaVĀ’ge K’lub’, a collective of contemporary artists led since 2010 by Rozanna Raymond, with a base in Auckland, but membership stretching across Te moana
Parahi te marae (The sacred mountain), 1892, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mr and Mrs Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee 1980 (courtesy of National Gallery of Australia)
nui (Pacific Ocean) to Tahiti and beyond.
The dance and song troupe O Tahiti E from French-speaking Tahiti chose to make tableaux vivants that in one case mimicked a key Gauguin picture used in NGA publicity. At the opening conference, two Tahitian women, brilliant academic essayists, were keen to discuss broader resonances. Vaiana Giraud was one: a Tahitienne who has done a doctorate on Gauguin’s writings. Miriama Bono, director of the prime cultural facility the Musée de Tahiti et des IÎes, affirmed that, beyond his value to tourism, Gauguin is of little interest to most Tahitians. She emphasised that not a single original painting by the artist exists in her country. Surely the time is right for the Musée d’Orsay to donate a couple of Gauguins to this new French Polynesian museum?
The exhibition itself is a fine and balanced presentation of Gauguin’s fascinating work. French curator Henri Loyrette handles the material with subtlety and flair. His long essay is beautifully written and begins with the naval surgeon Victor Segalen, who arrived in Tahiti just after the painter’s death, triggering thoughts on Gauguin’s engagement with colonial life, with Polynesian people, and with posterity. Yet Loyrette argues that Gauguin never separated himself from the Parisian scene. He lived in both worlds simultaneously, via the gallery of European art reproductions in his tropical studio, his letters home, and the constant need for remuneration. Despite chronic health problems and various addictions, Gauguin was an ambitious player who achieved recognition in France from progressives, including Edgar Degas (who amassed a big Gauguin collection), the critic Octave Mirbeau, the Symbolist poet Mallarmé, and the biographer Charles Morice. In this essay and the wall panels, Loyrette (in classic French manner) and the NGA curatorium steer clear of contentious biographical issues, as my colleague Tai Mitsuji has pointed out in his Guardian review.
The need to decolonise or indigenise this exhibition is also evident in the inclusion of Tahitian artefacts. This is familiar practice at the NGA, which has previously integrated contemporaneous First Nations artefacts into hangs of nineteenth-century Australian painting. The difference is that Gauguin, virtually for the first time in European art history, opened himself to the aesthetic inspiration of such objects. Gauguin’s World is replete with his timber carvings (influenced by his visit to the Māori wing of the Auckland Museum in 1895), modelled-clay figurines, and his biomorphic sculpture. These fired clay objects, some of them glazed, are strange amalgams of floral and animal shapes that began during Gauguin’s Brittany phase, and are indebted to the ancient Peruvian sculpture he first saw as a child growing up in Lima.
Another strength is the inclusion of Gauguin’s two suites of prints, the Café Volpini lithographic drawings on yellow paper (exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1889), and the powerful imagery of Gauguin’s woodcuts in hybrid indigenising style for his unpublished book Noa-Noa. The various carvings in timber – from patterned walking sticks and serving spoons to figural panels and statuettes – are in Gauguin’s trademark eclectic manner, inspired by an imaginarium that ran from Māori symbolism to the Buddhist friezes of Borobudur. It is no exaggeration to say that such sculpture, among the 227 works in his posthumous retrospective at the 1906 Salon d’Automne in Paris,
inspired a second generation (after his Pont-Aven followers) to Gauguinisme, beginning with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
The room of early works by the Impressionist Gauguin is a revelation. A Sunday painter and stockbroker who was laid off in the crash of 1884, Gauguin learned with alacrity at Camille Pissarro’s elbow. His sense of composition was always irreproachable, be it in the successive painting modes of Pissarro, Degas, Émile Bernard, and, above all, Paul Cézanne. Cézanne, whom Loyrette hardly mentions, said of the voyager Gauguin that ‘he’s pinched my “petite sensation” [Cézanne’s word for his unique way with the brush] and paraded it around all the steamboats’. Gauguin was an aesthetic bowerbird, but one who broke through each borrowed convention to excel finally in an art wholly his own. He composed with flat planes of brightly contrasting colour which summarised human form – whether naked or clothed – with a resounding gravity. His paintings of the figure are both refined and raw; intimate and unfiltered.
Across the seven rooms of this large exhibition, the logic of Loyrette the art historian is attuned to image-citations. He made efforts to borrow works never hung together before, like the two versions of boys wrestling on the grass at a Brittany weir, or the pair of still lifes with a Delacroix drawing on the wall behind. You can track motifs across woodcarving and prints to paintings – the gallery sightlines promote it. Loyrette also emphasises Gauguin’s borrowings from the precious art reproductions on the walls of his Polynesian studios: Gauguin’s sensibility lodged simultaneously in France and in Oceania.
Restless experiment is apparent across all media; all that’s missing are a few more major paintings. The murderous Russian invasion of Ukraine put paid to Loyrette’s plan to borrow from the extensive Shchukin and Morosov collection of Gauguins in Moscow (which I was fortunate to study in September 2019). The Orsay has loaned a core of pictures, but up to eight of them have visited these shores before, travelling to Sydney in 1994 or Canberra in 2009. The diligence and ambition of the curator (former director of both the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre) – coupled with travels by NGA Director Nick Mitzevich, Carol Henry from partner Art Exhibitions Australia, and Houston MFA’s Gary Tinterow – have resulted in a record sixty-five institutions and private collectors lending to Canberra.
This is the work – the travel to institutions, the pleading, and the face-to-face suasion (at which the golden-tongued Loyrette evidently excels) – that alone can guarantee a monographic show of intellectual coherence. The easier and less expensive curatorial option is the blockbuster sourced from one main collection, such as the recent Matisse or Kandinsky exhibitions held in Sydney.
At the end of the day, despite the odium, despite the brickbats, Paul Gauguin continues to command major exhibitions, and justifiably so. This is not just because of his undeniable historical significance or the conceptual irritant of the Gauguin controversies. It is because people continue to find the paintings in particular so beautiful, so surprising. That hero of symbolists , the poet Charles Baudelaire, wrote ‘le Beau est toujours bizarre’. Gauguin proves him right again and again. g
Roger Benjamin is an art historian and curator who teaches at the University of Sydney and writes on Bidjigal land.
Blood under the bridge
The contrast could hardly be more stark. Late last year, Red Stitch’s production of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Sarah Goodes, began life at the company’s eighty-seat theatre nestled in East St Kilda. It sold out, became the talk of the town, and attracted positive reviews. (Ben Brooker, reviewing it for ABR Arts, deemed Goodes’s production ‘markedly traditionalist, eschewing any peeling back of Albee’s text in the search for new meanings’.) Usually, that’s how things end. Now, enterprisingly and let us hope not for the last time, Red Stitch has mounted a revival in the CBD, at the grand old 800-seat Comedy Theatre. It is a welcome and audacious step.
Edward Albee, born in 1928, seems to have been famous and controversial right from the beginning. His transformation – from changeling to princely adoptee in the home of Reed and Frances Albee, from military cadet to drop-out, from Wunderkind to Broadway pariah, from iconoclastic scourge to recipient of a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996 – is one of the grand stories of American theatre.
Because he wrote excoriating and discomfiting plays, Albee was sometimes out of fashion, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, but late successes such as Three Tall Women (1991) and The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia (2002) won him further laurels and new audiences.
The gestation of Virginia Woolf is more familiar – legendary even – than that of most other modern plays, helped in part by the sensational title, famously borrowed from a line that Albee saw on a bar mirror in Greenwich village. Virginia Woolf was Albee’s first three-act play, but The Zoo Story (1960), a one-acter, had earned him renown, and a certain notoriety (the homophobic times, and Time magazine, did not help), and it ran for 582 performances.
Virginia Woolf opened at the Billy Rose Theatre on 13 October 1962 and ran for 664 performances before transferring to London, where Leonard Woolf saw and enjoyed it (Albee, always
punctilious, had written to Virginia Woolf’s widower, seeking permission to use her name in the title). Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen were the first George and Martha. Both won Tony Awards, as did the director, Alan Schneider. The work itself won the Tony Award for Best Play.
Warner Brothers, in a sweet irony, paid Albee $500,000 for the film rights, plus ten per cent of the gross – in 1963!
As Ben Brooker remarked, ‘Like moths, actors of a certain vintage are drawn to its bright flame.’ Bette Davis, whom Albee had in mind when he created Martha, was appalled when Ernest Lehman cast Elizabeth Taylor – ‘Miss Taylor, this beautiful, gorgeous young woman’ – for the film. Stage Marthas have included Diana Rigg, Colleen Dewhurst, and Kate Reid.
Celebrated Georges include Ben Gazzara, Bill Irwin, and actor-playwright Tracy Letts, whose unusually macho and menacing performance rightly won him the 2013 Tony Award. Almost unbelievably, Mike Nichols and Elaine May – legendary improvisatory satirists of the 1950s and early 1960s – reunited to play George and Martha in New Haven, in 1980.
Brooker reminds us in his review that Albee’s drama has fared well in Australia. The AusStage database lists sixty-five productions. John Sumner directed the Australian première in 1964, with Bunney Brook as Martha and Brian James as George. I first saw Virginia Woolf in 1982, with Robyn Nevin, Bruce Myles, James Laurie, and Genevieve Picot, directed by Roger Hodgman.
The Red Stitch revival features the original cast: Kat Stewart as Martha; David Whiteley as George; Emily Goddard as Honey; and Harvey Zielinski as Nick. On opening night they were phenomenally primed, as if it was their 664th performance. The only glitch was an audible splutter or two from the relatively unobtrusive amplification, but this was soon corrected.
The three-hour play was performed without cuts, unlike Mike Nichols’s celebrated 1966 film, which shaved an hour off the text, eliminating Martha’s first husband (the hunky lawnmower, soon clipped) and trimming Martha’s great aria in Act Three about their imaginary son.
The play is performed with two intervals even. Purists may miss the scene between George and Martha in Act Three, when Honey hears chimes and prompts George to conceive his filicidal plan to punish Martha for her indiscretion about ‘the blond-eyed, blue-haired bugger’, but we know that Albee decided to cut this scene in 2006.
All the profanities are there – even ‘Jesus H. Christ’, which opens the play (as Martha beholds the domestic dump that is their home at New Carthage). Considered blasphemous, it had to be sacrificed, so desperate were Jack Warner, Ernest Lehman, and Nichols to placate the censorious Catholics, as we learn from Philip Gefter’s informative new book, Cocktails with George and Martha: Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Ithaka). Nichols, in a masterstroke, took along Jacqueline Kennedy (whom he was dating at the time) to a clerical screening. At the end, Jackie, right on cue, purred ‘Jack would have loved this film’, and all was well.
The zingers are all there – too many of them to savour in one sitting. ‘Dashed hopes and good intentions.’ ‘I swear … if you existed, I’d divorce you.’ ‘You can’t afford to lose good liquor, not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary.’ ‘I said I was
A brilliant revival of Edward Albee’s classic Peter Rose
Kat Stewart as Martha (photograph by Eugene Hyland)
impressed, Martha … What do you want me to do, throw up?’
It is a feature of this faithful production that none of these artful and almost anti-Wildean witticisms is thrown away facilely or parodically. The language, the performances, each movement, each wink or glance, each sodden motive or realisation, are all deeply felt and lived. It’s a remarkable achievement with such a demanding text, one that could easily tip over into vaudeville or farce. Grudgingly or not, we are made to believe in this flawed, haunted, fractious quartet.
Central here – right at the meat of things, as it were – are George and Martha: ‘sad, sad’. Over the course of three hours and three acts (‘Fun and Games’, ‘Walpurgisnacht’, ‘The Exorcism’), we learn much about these endlessly sparring and interdependent college creations: Martha, the ‘liquor-ridden’ daughter of a New England college president in New Carthage; and George, her husband, the disappointed historian whose moment of departmental glory came during World War II, when many of his colleagues were away, only to return, none of them slain (‘Not one son-of-a-bitch got killed’ – surely the blackest moment in the play). Their rows, their endless verbal assaults – what they do to themselves and each other – dominate the play and demand tremendous vocal stamina and actorly intelligence from the two principals.
This, of course, is a famous study of a toxic marriage – Albee’s everlasting, bitter subject. We know that Albee, though only thirty-two when he wrote the play, had been in a long, vitriolic and alcoholic relationship with William Flanagan, a composer and music critic. Poet Richard Howard, who knew them at the time, said that Albee and Flanagan were ‘not pleasant together when they were drunk … there was a lot of jockeying for power in their relationship’. In certain circles they were known as the Sisters Grimm.
In a brilliant conceit at the start of this production, we meet George and Martha on the Juliet balcony to the left of the stage. They are on their way home after one of Daddy’s parties. Martha is rather wobbly. It’s two am after all, and the play won’t end until dawn.
Goodes is brilliantly served by Kat Stewart and David Whiteley, who give two of the finest stage performances this reviewer has ever seen. No one is spared; no nuance is ignored; no retort, however sotto voce, is lost. Whiteley is superb in the ‘Bergin’ speech, when George tells of a schoolboy friend who inadvertently killed both his parents and mispronounced ‘Bourbon’. Whiteley’s mastery of the long, complicated scene at the end, when George kills off the son and intones the Dies Irae, is profound. George, finally – not Martha, thrashing and wailing – is the ringmaster, may have been so, slyly, all along. His quiet song, at the end, as he comforts Martha, is tragic, beautiful.
Stewart is magnetic as Martha: skittish, flirty, vulgar, irate, kittenish. Her command of the wide stage is total, the physical comedy hilarious as Martha seduces and appals. Vocally, Stewart is unflagging, braying one moment then murmuring the next. Never was she better than in Act Three when she extols her missing husband (‘George, who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me – whom I revile, who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy’).
Albee is always political. He said the play was about the decline of America. Not for nothing are George and Martha named after the first couple of American democracy, as Albee made clear in an interview: ‘Indeed, I did name the two lead characters George and Martha because there is contained in the play … an attempt to examine the success or failure of American principles.’
(What, we wonder, would Albee, who died eight years ago, make of the misfit republic now? Perhaps he would go into musicals.)
It will be lost on few people that the play had its première three days before the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Armageddon came perilously close. Then, in Act Two, there is a further clue when George, bored by the circus, reads a book while Martha seduces Nick. The text he chooses, we recognise, is Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West: ‘And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must … eventually … fall.’
The two younger players are excellent. Harvey Zielinski’s Nick is suitably blank and attentive, and his innate cynicism shines through. Emily Goddard gives a bravura performance as the bouffant, bibulous Honey. Tremulous at first, high-pitched and rightly nervous in this terrifying company, she reveals great depths of bottled emotion as the long night wears on, especially in the dance scene, when she exhorts the murderous George (‘Violence, violence!’). Honey’s orgiastic dance to Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major almost brings down the house.
The set is apropos and versatile. Goodes says in the program notes that she and production designer Harriet Oxley ‘were keen to explore a Suburban Baroque influence – a space filled with textures, patterns and faded velvets’. The set is framed with proscenium curtains à la 1962. Matt Scott’s lighting design illuminates the curtains in primary colours to signal lurches in this relentlessly unstill drama. The bar, of course, is pivotal. Goodes and Oxley create an altar of the bar when George lights the candles and prepares to sacrifice their son following Martha’s indiscretion. This is done slowly, operatically.
The ease with which the four players sustain the energy, the drama, the baleful comedy is remarkable. There wasn’t a single longueur all night, nor a sign of boredom or restlessness from the opening-night audience. At the end, after George’s revelation and Martha’s collapse, there is a magnificent stillness – daringly extended by the actors. All of Martha’s illusions have been dashed, like those ‘good intentions’.
This must rate as one of the great opening nights in the history of Australian theatre. Apart from the fireworks, the bravura performances, the production subtly alters our sense, our appreciation, of this so familiar play’s greatness: its acuity, its sorry humanity, its radical satire, its wicked pleasurableness.
The revival surely marks a new chapter in Red Stitch’s admirable history. Now we can only hope for more Albee from this fully attuned actors’ ensemble – perhaps his subsequent masterpiece, A Delicate Balance (1966), with Kat Stewart as Clare (that other great mordant alcoholic) and David Whiteley as Tobias.
Next, though, Red Stitch should take this exemplary production to Broadway, where it would doubtless elicit the same grateful, exultant ovation it rightly drew on opening night. g
Musical challenges
A new view of the sounded art
Malcolm Gillies
AThe Shortest History of Music
by Andrew Ford Black Inc.
$27.99 pb, 240 pp
ndrew Ford is a musical polymath. On his website he identifies as a ‘composer, writer and broadcaster’. I suspect the Australian public knows him best as a broadcaster, given his three decades at the helm of the ABC’s Music Show. That broadcasting longevity does not diminish his continuing acclaim as a composer, as seen in the rousing première of his Red Dirt Hymns before a capacity Canberra Festival crowd on 2 May. Nor does it discount his run of hundreds of essays, and a dozen or so books. Some of those books are edited accumulations of his own press articles and reviews, often drawing on his well-researched Music Show interviews. But most of his books are devoted to particular musical passions: memory, harmony, noise, and, most repeatedly, song (David McCooey reviewed Ford and Anni Heino’s The Song Remains the Same [2019] in ABR, March 2020).
The Shortest History of Music is the fourteenth volume in Black Inc.’s Shortest series, with its snappy rubric of biblical origin, ‘Life is short; history is long’. Existing volumes in the series are about countries (India, China, Greece), continents (Europe), and social organisation (democracy, war, economics), though not overlooking David Baker’s summative 256-page Shortest History of the World (2023), covering 13.8 billion years. Following such volumes, Ford’s book presents both as more focused, looking at just one art form, but also, through strategic use of memorable quotes, short case studies, and personality cameos, as more genuinely encompassing of his topic. He searches for simple but profound generalisations about as many manifestations of our world’s music as his 240-page limit allows. Like an experienced jazz player, he knows how to swing his narrative, with delightful off-road lurches into unexpected or cheeky byways, or skilfully pivoting around events of a certain date (such as from Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone modernism to big-band swing, in the 1930s) to stress chronological coincidence. This highly readable, ‘shortest’ history contrasts with the ‘longest’ currently available, single-authored history of music, Richard Taruskin’s 4,272-page The Oxford History of Western Music (2005), which restricts itself mostly to the notated tradition of ‘classical’ music. By contrast, Ford celebrates the music ‘happening all around us all the time’, whether notated, instrumental, or oral, spontaneous or rehearsed, in infancy or old age, and recorded or just ‘vibrating in the memory’ (Shelley). With his Music Show background in music’s diversity, where he has now conducted more than six
thousand interviews, Ford is unafraid to speculate on a truly global scale – ‘It is probably true to say that West African rhythms and styles have had a greater effect on the world’s music than those of any other region’ – or to explain that ‘most of the world’s musical styles and forms are to some degree syncretic, and that instruments have travelled the globe’. Other important themes are woven, often subliminally, into the fabric of his text, such as the tension between valuations of progress, originality, and popularity in music’s varied reception, and his crisp rejection of the view that music is a ‘universal language’, unveiled in his first chapter’s first paragraph. He even reminds us later in the book of the no-music injunction of the Taliban, and its origins.
Ford’s five chapters unfold different perspectives on music: as (unnotated) tradition, as notation, as commodity ‘for sale’, as something ‘modern’, and, in more recent times, as recorded artefact. Each chapter has a loosely chronological arrangement, often starting in ancient times but always ending up at the present day. All chapters ultimately lead to his book’s brief epilogue, ‘What is Music?’, and its open-ended conclusion: ‘You never know how far your music – your “organised sound” – will go or for how long, or who it will reach. You also don’t know what your sound might mean to those who hear it next week or next century and, in their own minds – their own imaginations – make it theirs.’
To my mind, the most exploratory, candid, and least finessed of Ford’s chapters was his fourth: ‘Music and Modernism: Reinventing the Arts from 1150 to the Present’. Here he integrates many of his first three chapters’ themes, to highlight those musicians who, across the ages and various styles, were ‘consciously modern’, and indeed present ‘the shock of the new’, even today. Claudio Monteverdi, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Wagner, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Charlie Parker are among the musical modernists who ‘still pack a punch’. (Bach, Mozart, and Elgar are not modernist in this formulation, just more conservative in the manner of their innovations.) Ford observes that modernist music was ‘often jagged-edged’ and likens Louis Armstrong’s trumpet-playing of the 1920s to a ‘brash and jagged’ Pablo Picasso, ‘crackling with life’. It is curious, then, that Ford devotes hardly any of his modernist commentary to the music or musical practice of the twenty-first-century ‘present’, so pointedly mentioned in this and other chapter titles.
The Shortest History of Music is an unashamedly personal, and occasionally Australian, viewpoint on the sounded art and its employment. Ford’s Introduction begins with a Kalkadunga boy’s search with his father in 1987 for a suitable tree for making a didgeridoo. Ford speculates that this may have been a practice in Australia’s distant past, when other more documented musical practices were occurring in Europe or Asia. To frame the volume near the end of his Epilogue, he returns to that boy, William Barton, now a much-fêted performer and composer of Kalkadungu (2008), and celebrates the song that Barton, like so many of us, has carried within himself for many decades.
Whether in the shortest or the longest history of music, I find it compelling that neither Ford nor Taruskin writes a satisfactory ‘history’. But Ford does, in his Introduction, make a good attempt at explaining why that may be a fruitless exercise. The expectation of more or less continuous progress along a provable track of causation, already of questionable validity for a history of classical
Western music, ‘hardly holds at all’ for other slices of the world’s music, in his opinion. Even in the age of ubiquitous recordings, music still exists primarily in ‘an endless present tense’, indeed ‘reborn in each fresh performance’. Ford’s engaging book, with its up-to-the-minute ‘Further Reading’ list, is a worthy rival to
Realms of power
Life as performance
Paul Giles
RThe Performer:
Art, life, politics
by Richard Sennett
Allen Lane
$55 hb, 249 pp
ichard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.
This is an odd book, very interesting and thought-provoking in parts, but leaving the reader with a sense that Sennett may have bitten off more than he can chew. He deliberately distances himself from what he calls, with telling scare quotes, ‘the burgeoning academic field of “performance studies”’, on the grounds that he ‘wanted to think things out for myself’, with his primary goal being ‘to engage my reader, who also is probably no academic specialist’. But while his anecdotes and case studies are engaging, the obvious risk of this approach is a lack of clear definition and focus. The term ‘performance’ can cover any number of different activities, from ‘performance’ at work to theatrical acting or concert performance, and Sennett never quite clarifies the limits of his argument.
Nicholas Cook’s 143-page Music: A very short introduction (1998), for those who want their musical imaginings and prejudices to be challenged. g
Malcolm Gillies is a Canberra-based musicologist.
book about which Sennett is both illuminating and convincing. He is especially good on music, an area in which he has particular expertise, having trained to be a classical musician in his youth. He writes here authoritatively both about performance skills that have shaped the classical repertoire, with especially acute observations on Leonard Bernstein, and also about free forms of jazz, where the dynamics of spontaneous performance are deliberately designed to interrupt formally enclosed systems. He similarly has interesting things to say about the ostentatiously theatrical styles of Richard Wagner’s operas, which he links to the courtly worlds of eighteenth-century Versailles, where social graces and visual impressions counted for everything. Sennett had a chapter on ‘Man as Actor’ in what is probably his most famous book, The Fall of Public Man (1977), and the particular strength of his writing has always been its capacity to bring disparate fields into illuminating juxtaposition, so as to craft a lucid line of argument that cuts across both scholarly expertise and the public sphere.
This kind of discursive skill manifests itself in The Performer Sennett’s wide range of reference allows him to draw an illuminating contrast between ancient Greece, where the word for mask and face was the same (prosopon), and the fifteenth century, when Niccolò Machiavelli introduced a distinction between them. It has, of course, always been true that charisma of various kinds has carried public influence, and Sennett draws a nice comparison between Donald Trump and the wealthy Greek of ancient times, Cleon, who similarly posed as a ‘man of the people’. Observing how the fact that ‘Louis XIV danced amazingly well’ helped to ‘legitimate his aura as a charismatic figure’, Sennett infers from this that ‘in the realm of power, appearances matter more and more’.
Nevertheless, there are various topics addressed in this
On the other hand, there have been many influential figures throughout history who have deliberately resisted the allure of worldly performance on the grounds that such a quality could be considered superficial or even meretricious. William Gladstone, for example, performed his prime ministerial duties diligently without ever taking easily to the mass media of his time, and for Sennett to advance performance as a universal condition would appear questionable. He criticises the twelfth-century theologian John of Salisbury as ‘talking nonsense’ for despising ‘the theatre of this world’, with Sennett claiming that theatre ‘became in his time ever more important to the practice of religion’. But there were many different responses to the apparatus of religious ceremony in the twelfth century, and it was precisely such a dis-
Richard Sennett (courtesy of Penguin Random House)
placement of interior consciousness into ritualistic display that this twelfth-century monk was reacting against.
By attempting to cover so much ground, Sennett tends to abjure historical depth and to skate over too many issues. Yet he is very good on Inigo Jones’s construction of Covent Garden and the London Banqueting Hall in the 1620s, with urban architecture and its projection of illusory spaces being another area in which Sennett has special expertise. He also has many perceptive things to say about overlaps between public space and theatrical domains in New York, expressing a particular fondness for jazz clubs and other liminal zones where ‘the stage rejoins the street’. But his comments on literary figures such as Mary Shelley and Henry James are simplistic, with Sennett making James sound like a Sunday School teacher by claiming that the burden of his novels is that a ‘leap of faith involves committing to other people, even though you are scarred’.
There also seems to be a performative element to Sennett’s narrative itself, with the author not only making very brief allusions to key intellectual figures (Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Rorty), but also engaging in plentiful name-dropping as he mentions his personal associations with celebrated intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt and Roland Barthes (‘once Roland took me to a Japanese restaurant in Paris …’). There is also a structural contradiction here, for Sennett argues fiercely against the current fashion for ‘accessibility’ in art, which he understands, like the New York intellectual that (in part) he is, as a ‘cognomen for condescension’. He is particularly hostile to bureaucratic attempts to ‘pasteurize’ art, and he suggests forcefully that in trying to wrap art which is ‘unsettling’ in ‘tourist cellophane’, arts
The grey dress
Breaking through to life and change
Brenda Walker
SFor Life:
A memoir of living and dying –and flying by Ailsa Piper Allen & Unwin
$34.99 pb, 337 pp
hortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life , this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume
administrators are short-changing ‘the urban public’, who would prefer openness to ‘difficulty and dissonance’. Yet Sennett does not always follow his own advice in articulating complex questions around performance, which are sometimes levelled into what the author himself acknowledges, perhaps half guiltily, as a ‘too neat summary’.
Overall, this is an interesting work, with many good parts, but one that remains digressive and relatively unfocused. It is also, at some level, a book about ageing, not only in its attention to how elderly performers renew themselves, but also in what the author apologetically calls its ‘armchair psychoanalyzing (though why not?)’. This results in some tenuous hypothesising about how ‘late style’ involves the urge in old age ‘to repossess, to start again, to renew – by destroying’. Sennett cites here the model of Johannes Brahms, who, like other elderly artists, was eternally revising his musical pieces ‘in order to feel you are not over’.
Sennett himself is now eighty-one, and it is not difficult to see that he is implicitly presenting this work as an example of his own late style. In its combination of autobiography and cultural criticism, Sennett makes some brilliant connections and offers penetrating local insights. However, he might perhaps be better advised to consider making the next instalment of this series an autobiography tout court, since the personal material here carries more directness and traction than the rather flimsy conceptual framework that supports it. g
Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. His most recent book is The Planetary Clock (OUP, 2021).
of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.
For Life is bookended by two deaths, that of her husband, Peter Curtin, to whom Piper had been married for twenty-seven years, and the more recent death of her father, an endearing man who lives to a great age while largely consuming cigarettes and cornflakes. Both men are kind, astute: ‘men of few words, who love words’. The losses run deep. Peter’s death challenges Piper’s actual self-perception: ‘I had no idea if there even was a “me” without him.’ The memoir describes her movement from devastation to self-possession through the almost complete transformation of her life – a relocation from Melbourne to Sydney, a passion for ocean swimming and the new social connections that this brings, and the intense and thoughtful observation of the natural world. The act of writing is at the heart of her recovery; she composes her new, single self on the page, and in the process reveals a great deal about the way identity and recovery might function. The title, For Life, points in two directions: towards monogamy, but also towards vitality, regeneration, and a single life.
Piper is a writer, audio book reader, festival interviewer, and the author of a previous memoir, Sinning Across Spain (2017), an account of walking the Camino in the aftermath of her husband’s death, and a co-written book on friendship, The Attachment: Letters from a most unlikely friendship (2017). She was a successful actor, particularly in television. Her husband was a prolific stage,
film, and television actor. This public success is not on display in For Life, except when theatre, for example, might illuminate the central issue of loss and the self. We learn a little about Peter –his desire to leave Australia for France, his devotion to words and the dictionary, his breathlessness and low moods – but this is not a biography, and the memoir concerns Piper and Curtin as an intimate couple, and the aftermath of that intimacy.
Piper is constantly reaching for her absent companion, interrupting the narrative with an observation or an aside: ‘Notice that, Pete?’; ‘How appalled you’d have been by that, Pete’; ‘Bend or tend? What a difference a consonant makes, eh Pete?’ At one point she says ‘I seem to be writing you a letter. Can’t help myself.’ In the strange zone of irrationality that often accompanies bereavement, she questions her lost husband: ‘Where might you be? Can you be anything now?’; ‘Where are you, Peter?’; ‘How is it where you are?’ This is desperately sad. But it isn’t static. She learns a good deal from swimming, which she took up after Peter’s death. It steadies her breathing and releases her from gravity and misery. (It is impossible to swim in a grey dress.) We witness the development of her new identity, and the memoir is thoughtful about the limitations of coupledom. There are distortions of the self in such intense reciprocal love: ‘I fell for the Peter who had fallen for me and vice versa.’ In the end, there is acceptance, understanding, and gratitude, and a keen, life-preserving perception that keeps company with grief.
This perception is intensely metaphoric. The memoir opens with a scene of rescue: seahorses are being disentangled from a shark net that has been lifted to the surface of the ocean for repairs. Piper holds one in her hand, assessing whether it is a candidate for relocation to a safer habitat, while hungry gulls
Love’s aftermath
A memoir about what endures
Tracy Ellis
ILove, Death & Other Scenes
by Nova Weetman
University of Queensland Press
$34.99 pb, 279 pp
n his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was
watch from above. Seahorses are tiny and fascinating: they mate for life, dance with their partners, and the males incubate eggs. Their curved spines remind Piper of a significant structure of the brain: the hippocampus, which is the repository of memory and therefore the foundation of memoir. The vigour of the seahorse, its aquatic origin, its jeopardy and strangeness, becomes a metaphor for the act of remembering.
Birds, too, have complex metaphoric associations in For Life. Cockatoos are ‘sky-dancing’, or they are ‘sky-swimmers’. Death is ‘the winged thing’, or ‘the feathered predator’. The memoir throngs with birds – falcons, cockatoos, ravens, hawks, wrens, pigeons, magpies, pelicans, a kookaburra, gulls, currawongs, lorikeets, tawny frogmouths, and an osprey. When Piper’s father is dying, she murmurs Emily Dickinson’s ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’ to him. But the most significant birds are her companions during Covid lockdowns – the peregrine falcons at 367 Collins Street in Melbourne, visible on a webcam that displays their annual cycle of nesting and raising their young. Parental faithfulness and care are visible on camera, but Piper also notes the death of the least robust chick, and the sharp drop beside the nest: ‘Do they know they are on the edge of an abyss?’ The most significant avian association is with the act of writing the memoir. Chicks hatch in solitude, following a procedure which they cannot be aware of in advance. At one point, Piper finds herself tapping at her keyboard ‘like a falcon chick pipping at a shell’. Writing is her way of breaking through to life and change, to a new and previously unimaginable self. g
Brenda Walker is Emerita Professor of English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia.
needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.
Writers are usually looking for answers – writing to find out what they think or to reach a deeper understanding. They tend to be people whose curiosity overcomes their caution; ‘red pill’ people, who would rather know than not know.
In Love, Death & Other Scenes, Nova Weetman, author of several books for young readers, writes fresh from the loss of her partner of twenty-five years, playwright Aidan Fennessy, who died of prostate cancer in 2020, aged fifty-three. (The couple had two children together.) In each chapter, Weetman explores the stages and origins of her grief, from memories of how the pair met and her own past and upbringing, to the hard practicalities of medical procedures and moving house; downsizing and dealing with belongings left behind.
‘Grief is not chronological … It is random and episodic and doesn’t follow a pattern,’ writes Weetman. While her thoughts are organised into three acts, like one of Fennessy’s plays, the action is more backstage; it provides an insight into the messy lives of an artistic couple in inner Melbourne, dealing with children, Covid, and cancer. At the heart of the book is Fennessy’s illness, as he is first diagnosed and then succumbs, but the tragedy is folded into a love story, with warmth and humour, and a sense of their colourful lives before he died and the silence in the space left after.
The book is also a record of life in Melbourne during lockdown, the city that endured some of the toughest restrictions in the world. If Fennessy had been hospitalised, there would have been no visitors allowed, so Weetman cared for him at home, a period she describes as a ‘patchwork of oxycodone, chemo, pain and confusion’. There are reminders of the everyday hassles of Covid masks, check-ins, vaccination certificates, and the explanations required to venture beyond the ‘ring of steel’ around the city. When Fennessy’s body is sent to a regional funeral home, the family has to travel so that Weetman can see him one last time, and the children are eyed suspiciously as they op-shop in the unnamed country town. Later, when she is finally able to book a slot to swim at the local pool, it is sweet relief to be able to float, glide, and move with a sense of freedom again.
Weetman’s reflections are honest and unvarnished, but there is a tendency to skim the surface. It could be the practised restraint of writing for a younger audience or an unwillingness to consider deeper implications, protecting herself from thinking certain things, or her loved ones from reading them.
There is a skirting around sensitive subjects, like the tentative start to her relationship with Fennessy, where it is not salacious detail that’s missing but a sense of chemistry or desire. Other important information is introduced awkwardly and explained later. The first mention of Fennessy’s breakdown is slipped into the text like something incidental. Weetman later reveals that his total inability to function left her to manage alone with their children for a long time while he stayed elsewhere. In a compounding tragedy, he eventually recovers, gives up alcohol, and returns to the family home, only to be diagnosed with metastatic cancer three years later.
After Fennessy’s death, their daughter finds an unaddressed
Summoned by bells
Poetry’s auditory affordances
David McCooey
BTintinnabulum:
New poems by Judith Beveridge
Giramondo
$27 pb, 81 pp
ells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ –the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian
love letter. Weetman is sure it was meant for her, but misses an opportunity to delve into the inevitable insecurities, if not infidelities, in any long-term relationship. In the back and forth of the narrative, the thread is sometimes momentarily lost. Significant signposts, like the precise age of the children at given times throughout the ordeal, or the layout of the house with its upstairs kitchen, or exactly where Fennessy is when he is ‘in another city’, are sometimes obscured.
When Weetman does plumb the depths and find the answers beneath her questions, the words are powerful. In the chapter titled ‘Lasts’, she recalls their last outing together, and other ‘lasts’ that crept up on them as Fennessy’s condition deteriorated. Similarly effective are her words on his absence and the role the ‘other’ plays in our lives. ‘Aidan’s death has left me with hundreds of hours of unsaid words … I long for a witness. Someone to share moments with … I worry that I’m disappearing, becoming a person who never fully tells the truth.’
What is certain is a sense of the profound loss of Fennessy and the poignancy of his plays, such as The Architect, completed after his diagnosis, and The Heartbreak Choir, his final play, staged after his death. Also left is the love between the two writers, who gave each other permission to pursue their dreams with courage, tenacity and a strong work ethic. It is some kind of consolation when, at the end of the book, Weetman finds herself writing in a room in the Victorian State Library where some of her Young Adult books face a copy of The Heartbreak Choir, reassuring evidence of their efforts and their life together. g
Tracy Ellis lives in Sydney and works as an editor in digital and print media. She won the 2022 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize and the 2023 Calibre Essay Prize.
composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.
Pärt is not mentioned in Beveridge’s new book, but musical references, from the celestial to the earthly, are everywhere. The susurration of cicadas (in ‘Listening to Cicadas’) is – among other things – ‘all the accumulated cases of tinnitus suffered / by fans of AC/DC, Motörhead and Pearl Jam’. In one of numerous poems concerned with maritime themes, Beveridge refers to the ‘dubstep / of the surf’, while in ‘The Walk’, a creek ‘played over stones a tune / from a decrepit piano’.
That all of this is conventionally called ‘imagery’ illustrates the ‘ocularcentric’ nature of modern culture, whereby vision is ranked over the other bodily senses. Beveridge is indeed keenly visual, and her visual imagery is often stunning, but it has long been apparent that her work is primarily sonic. Like poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Les Murray, Beveridge is most taken by poetry’s auditory affordances.
This is not to say that her work is ‘merely’ formalist; her work is powerfully concerned with ethical matters, especially with regard to the interaction between humans and non-human animals, as well as humans and the environment. There are many poems here that praise such interactions, even if (or especially if) those interactions are the apparently passive ones of hearing
and looking. But there is much lamentation and rupture, too.
Both are most clearly seen in ‘Animals’, the first part of Tintinnabulum. The poems on elephants, vultures, horses, and so on add to Beveridge’s much-admired corpus of poems on animals, and they all employ her pronounced gift for metaphor and simile. Among these new animal poems, the small poetic essay on ‘The Leech’, in its intensity and wit, for me ranks among her best. But there is a pronounced darkness about this wit, and these opening poems reveal a profound darkness generally. ‘Animals in Our Suburb, 1960s’, for instance, concerns the ordinary traumas of ‘pets turning into pests’: ‘Every childhood / had a killing field: chickens running around without their heads, / drowned rabbits, drowned guinea pigs.’
In ‘Dead Possum’, such darkness reaches an overpowering pitch. The poet, doing away with the fly-blown carcass of a possum, is sickened by the noise of the fly-pack, which is likened to ‘the cursed whines of old blues harmonicas doing time / at the cross-roads, anthems for an apocalypse in which / I foresaw thousands and thousands of maggots / creaming, risotto-like, inside my own half-eaten head’. The musical analogue here seems more like death metal (were it not unlikely that a death metal band would come up with the inspired image of maggots as ‘risotto-like’) than whatever musical association the pastel colours of the book’s front cover deceptively suggest.
In the subsequent sections of Tintinnabulum , the darkness lifts, though an elegiac sensibility remains present. The second section, ‘Walking with the Poet’, which collects poems concerned with humans at work and at leisure, sounds this elegiac note most explicitly. There is a formal elegy for the late Australian poet Robert Adamson, and more generally elegiac poems, including two moving poems concerning the poet’s mother and son. Amid these elegiac notes, we find the traditionally consoling image of humans in profound communion with the natural world.
The poems in this section illustrate Beveridge’s love of the exotic and outré. ‘A King Sends a Delegation to Meet a Clan from the South’ is a brilliant pseudo-history that calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino at their most inventive. ‘Reading the Clouds’ (another list poem) shows an austere romanticism, again redolent of Borges, concerning language as a thing in itself, referring, for instance, to ‘Clouds that long to drop their Latin names for sweeter ones: / bridal veil, egret wing, water lily, snow goose, arctic swan’.
The idea of language as a plaything reaches its apotheosis in ‘The Bizarre Bazaar’, a homage to the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens. ‘The Bizarre Bazaar’ is a superb example of Beveridge’s skill with rhyme; the poem is threaded with Stevensonian words that rhyme with ‘bazaar’: ‘You can buy the oompah of a Bavarian band / and sell it to the cobbler sitting in a chair / spilling oranges and coffee down his pink peignoir’. Being familiar with Stevens’s Collected Poems, I loved recognising Beveridge’s artful borrowings. The note at the end of Tintinnabulum that gives chapter and verse of these (advertised) borrowings struck me as a tad redundant, but it is not surprising, I suppose, given current attitudes regarding the attribution of sources.
The final section of Tintinnabulum, ‘Choirwood’, returns to the natural world, but with a new sanguinity. Delight in the endless plurality of the world is the keynote here. As ‘The Light on Marrin Bay’ shows, delight in poetry’s aural condition is, if anything, amplified in this section. The poem begins with a flurry of sonic effects: ‘See this light’s unending glisk of spangly / wicks, micro-sparkles and flickery tinsel twists.’ The beautiful concluding poem, ‘Choirwood’, might be termed a nature poem, but such a designation is too banal for the almost-visionary intensity that this poem brings to the material world. Where the collection begins in darkness, it ends with a breathtakingly beautiful vision of dawn.
The third section, ‘The Bizarre Bazaar’, shows Beveridge at her most playful, programmatically pushing the limits of her medium. ‘Moon Poem’ brings together the most foundational of poetic functions (metaphor), the inaugural poetic form (catalogue, or list), and one of the most ancient rhetorical figures of speech (apostrophe, or address to an inanimate object). To choose the moon – that most hackneyed of poetic clichés – as the subject for such a poetic exercise is indeed audacious. Beveridge peels off winning image after image, like a card shark at a games table. ‘You’re a plague sore on darkness’, she writes of our lunar satellite; ‘You’re every ocean’s private disco ball.’
Like Arvo Pärt, Beveridge believes in her materials, using the most fundamental features of her medium to produce extraordinary effects. Certainly, she is not uninterested in the ethical and political realms that linguistic representation inevitably engages, but she is forever attuned to the magical, if not sacred, powers inherent in the sound of language, as well as its endless potential for analogy. I don’t need animal studies to tell me how much I love the vowel music of Beveridge’s description of an owl in ‘Two Houses’: ‘its pearl-ash and dusty-grey feathers made it look like a puff / of fog against the apricot blush of dusk’. Like bells, these words demand attention. g
David McCooey is a prize-winning poet, critic, and editor.
Judith Beveridge (courtesy of Giramondo)
Bridge over nothing
Reflections of an understated narrator
Theodore Ell
SGeorge Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays
by Subhash Jeireth Gazebo Books
$29.99 pb, 318 pp
ubhash Jaireth is both a writer and a geologist. This collection of essays draws inspiration from the international roaming his geological work has involved. Most of the essays explore memories of the Soviet Union, where he studied, or ancient landscapes in Australia, where he has lived and worked since the 1980s, with personal detours to India and Spain.
Jaireth’s writing is not merely an accessory to his scientific career, and not just because he studied literature as well as geology. Jaireth is a writer for the same reason he is a geologist: his chief interest is world-building. Whether reminiscing about the metro stations of Moscow that he knew as a student, or describing the mingling of eucalypt woodlands and suburbia in Canberra where
Jaireth is a writer for the same reason he is a geologist: his chief interest is world-building
he now lives, Jaireth’s instinct is to read, in intensive detail, the relationship of the physical environment to its historical-cultural legacies. In Jaireth’s world, any physical feature, be it a hillside or an avenue, is incomplete without its imprint on the imagination. These essays recount journeys through places Jaireth has known intimately. In the best passages, there is quiet drama in the struggle to reconcile the disarrangement of physical places, their cultural meanings, and what the author remembers (or thinks he remembers).
The key to understanding Jaireth’s outlook is the essay ‘Like a Stranger in Delhi’, concerning a visit to his boyhood home city after years away. Jaireth is unprepared for the changes that have all but swept away the Delhi he knew. Even a guidebook map proves confusing. The map ‘looks like a city’ but, Jaireth admits, ‘it does not match the geography I see in front of my eyes’. Nothing is as memory claims it should be, but then memory is hardly reliable. Just as Jaireth’s boyhood house has been demolished and erased from his imagined picture of the city, so he finds he cannot recall the face of an aunt who was with him at an otherwise vividly recalled moment, watching a military parade past the India Gate in Delhi. The monument still exists, but Jaireth’s connection to the place has vanished. ‘Cities live in us,’ Jaireth asserts in his essay on the architectural splendour of the Moscow metro and its uneasy status as a legacy of Stalin’s terror, but the essay on Delhi strikes the truer note,
in recognising the ‘fissures’ that separate the author from his own experience, possibly even from parts of his soul. In all these contradictions, an imagined topography – ‘imagined, not imaginary,’ Jaireth cautions – offers uncertain solace. For all the surprises and delights Jaireth records in describing his wanderings, he admits to feeling a ‘wearied foreigner’.
This realisation arises gently and unprompted amid reflections on artists who fell victim to Stalin, even as the glorious Moscow metro was constructed beneath their homes. Slipped in seemingly casually in the essay that dwells the least on Jaireth’s own life, it makes this scene one of the most affecting moments in the book, parts of which can feel laboured, as drawn-out recitations of facts and ruminations on abstract concepts let the emotional current drift off. There are many long quotations from historical and literary works which, however pertinent to the geographies in question, Jaireth does not always connect persuasively to his own storytelling, and which distract from his own voice. Jaireth is an understated narrator who makes his most compelling points either indirectly via the raising of suspicion, or at moments when, as in Moscow, voicing a suspicion outright is the last thing we expect. Many of the essays would have benefited from pruning, to bring these expository techniques into sharper relief.
Jaireth’s indirect style, at its best, ideally suits the unsettling, historically unfixed and often seemingly haunted places through which his memory moves. The essay which most intriguingly balances historical curiosity with personal experience is ‘The Dead Bridge of Sunil Sandhani’. The strange sight of a bridge in 1970s Leningrad that appears to cross nothing, since the canal beneath it has been filled in, becomes eerily paired in Jaireth’s mind with a mysterious chill that came over a friendship between himself, his Moscow roommate Sunil, and art student Olga. Jaireth ruminates over memories of Olga showing him and Sunil bridges in Leningrad, stories Sunil told of being born beneath a bridge during India and Pakistan’s partition in 1947, and records of British colonial bridges elsewhere in India. The more the images of bridges insist on being recalled, the more the narrative avoids admitting connections between them – and so it becomes disturbingly apparent that, on or near that Leningrad bridge, something unmentionable must have happened to darken those carefree days. Here, until the last moment, memory itself seems a bridge to nowhere.
Given Jaireth’s eye for potent detail, it is strange that the essay on George Orwell, the first in the book, should stumble over factual errors in its earliest passages. Orwell’s real middle name was Arthur, not Edward, as Jaireth has it, and there is an inexplicable claim that there are no goats in Animal Farm, when that work does feature a goat who shares her name with Orwell’s own goat, Muriel – and Jaireth mentions the real Muriel twice. Jaireth offers a cogent rereading of Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant’ from the point of view of the colonised Burmese, but he predicates it on his own admiration for Orwell’s commitment to accuracy and truth, a position such basic errors rather undermine. Slip-ups in drafting, perhaps, but it is regrettable they were not spotted in editing. Jaireth’s writing is the product of an erudite mind shaped by uncommon experience, and his work deserves more attentive handling. g
Theodore Ell’s memoir, Lebanon Days, was published in July.
Stories unknown
The Australian response to refugees
Seumas Spark
OThe Lucky Ones
by Melinda Ham
Affirm Press
$34.99 pb, 254 pp
n the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.
Those who oppose accepting large numbers of refugees into Australia often resort to talk of order and process. The idea that refugees might easily join an emigration queue and wait their turn is a persistent theme in political and public discourse. This book exposes that concept for the fiction it is. Most of the refugee stories told here involve common elements, one being the disorienting chaos that sudden changes in circumstance force on people. For instance, Ham writes about members of the Mandaean community of Iraq, who lived relatively stable lives under Saddam Hussein’s regime. After Allied forces invaded Iraq and Saddam was deposed, sectarian violence enveloped Iraq, and Mandaeans were attacked as infidels. Refugeedom often is conferred quickly and without warning, and it fosters desperation by robbing people of choice.
Ham follows the stories of refugees who have come to Australia at different times from different parts of the world. For example, readers are able to contrast and compare the stories of Maria and Wojciech, Poles who emigrated to Sydney in 1948, with that of Minh and Kasse, who were among thousands of ‘boat people’ who escaped Vietnam in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Other accounts are of refugees from Tibet, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. This range across period and place is one of the book’s strengths. Another is the decision to follow the individual stories from their beginning until the present day, which allows for consideration of the difficulties that confront refugees in building a life in a new country. In this telling, reaching Australia is a pivotal moment, but no triumph: always there is sadness about family and friends left behind, and trepidation about the challenges that await. As Ham makes
clear, the difficulties faced by refugees tend to endure far beyond their reaching a safe country. She and her informants are to be applauded for offering unvarnished accounts of the refugee’s lot rather than sanitised fodder about Australia as a generous land of milk and honey. Safe haven is a treasure, but never a panacea. When telling a story don’t put yourself in its way, a wise historian once remarked. Ham follows this principle, for the most part. The substance and importance of this book is in the stories, and wisely she privileges the voices of her informants. The language is clear and unadorned, enhancing the power and emotion of the different accounts.
Perhaps the one misstep is Ham’s offering something of her own background and experiences. This she does for context and to highlight the vicious contrasts that stem from something as inherently unfair as chance. She recognises that her privilege owes much to the happy accidents of her Canadian birth and white heritage. These passages about her own background and experiences are interesting, and the aim understandable, but are they necessary? The refugee stories she tells are so full and encompassing, emotionally and intellectually, that further context seems almost gratuitous. Could any Australian, including those opposed to humanitarian immigration, read these accounts and fail to recognise their own good fortune?
Fortune is a key theme of The Lucky Ones. The refugees of whom Ham writes are among the ‘lucky ones’ to whom the title refers. They were doubly lucky, in that they found safe haven in Australia, having managed to reach the country at all. Whatever the extent of their bravery and endurance, most attest that their path to Australia also owed something to good fortune. The case of Jeff and Lulu, political refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, offers an extraordinary example. Their Australian lives began when, at wit’s end, they told their story of persecution to a kindly stranger in Zambia. Unknown to them, their interlocutor was the Australian High Commissioner, who listened sympathetically and arranged help.
Ham achieves a deft balance between celebrating these stories and reiterating that most refugees, equally deserving of protection and new paths, know nothing of such good fortune. They remain in camps, shunned by governments, their stories unknown. Ham offers the analogy of a refugee lottery that produces a few winners and vast numbers of losers, the game manifestly and cruelly unfair. To this fundamental injustice we are party. Wealthy countries such as Australia have the capacity to do much more for people in peril, yet we choose otherwise. If this is selfish, it is also to ignore a duty, for the provision of safe haven to those in need is as much a moral expectation as an act of beneficence. The Malawian example, and many others before and since, show that.
Ham ends her book with an exhortation, urging her readers to help refugees. This exhortation is issued with the understanding that it is naïve to think that the Australian government will lead such efforts. If Australia is to adopt a fairer system of humanitarian migration, and remove the element of luck that bedevils refugee lives, concerned citizens will need to force that change. g
Seumas Spark is a historian employed at Monash University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society.
IFrom the Archive
On page 29, Diane Stubbings reviews The Echoes, Miles Franklin-winning Evie Wyld’s fourth novel. In the March 2020 issue, Amy Baillieu reviewed Wyld’s third novel, The Bass Rock, which she described as an impressive, bleak, defiant work of ‘controlled fury’ about violence against women. ‘Wyld’s provocative novel explores the myriad ways in which abuse can affect or abbreviate women’s lives,’ wrote Baillieu. The Bass Rock asked its reader whether, in Wyld’s words, ‘there’s no difference between these women and me, or you or your mother, or the lady in the tea shop. We’re just breezing in and out of the death zone.’ This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.
n a 2013 interview with British literary magazine Structo, Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld recalls lamenting to a writing tutor that she wanted to write a big action thriller, ‘something with Arnold Schwarzenegger and machine guns and blood and explosions’ but was always writing ‘really quiet little paragraphs about Dads’. These paragraphs evolved into her haunting début novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009). Wyld’s Miles Franklin Award-winning second novel, All the Birds, Singing (2013), was followed by a graphic memoir produced in collaboration with Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth (2015), detailing childhood summers spent on Wyld’s grandparents’ sugar cane farm and her shark fixation. The Bass Rock, her new novel, may not be a big action thriller either, but it is far from quiet and there is plenty of blood.
The novel takes place largely in North Berwick, site of Scotland’s first mass witch trials in the 1590s, and in view of the eponymous rock, once a prison and now a seabird sanctuary. It revolves around three separate women: Red-headed Sarah, accused of witchcraft in the early 1700s; Ruth (loosely inspired by Wyld’s paternal grandmother), who has just moved to North Berwick with her husband and his two young sons in the aftermath of World War II; and Ruth’s granddaughter Viv, who is staying in Ruth’s now-empty house in the present.
The Bass Rock expands on themes explored in Wyld’s previous novels: from the trauma of war and the intergenerational impact of violence, to her continued interest in food, mental illness, and the uncanny. Wyld’s skilful pacing, nuanced characterisation, astute observations, and rich sensory images will also be familiar.
Her descriptions are often vivid and disconcerting. A smell ‘scratches’ in ‘like a finger behind the eyeball’. A sleeping man’s hairy buttocks are like those of a ‘diseased bear’. A dying woman’s mad grief is likened to ‘birds sewn under the skin’, while another woman’s biceps stand out ‘like tangerines’.
Wyld also has a keen eye for details: from a carelessly abandoned sandwich to the evolution of an unsettling version of hide and seek. Some elements recur through the novel: among them dogs and wolves and foxes, pineapples, a small wooden box, packages of stewing steak, tickling, permutations of a pop song, ghosts and wolfmen, the pervasive smell of stinkhorn mushrooms, and – because this is Evie Wyld – at least one shark.
Wyld has a knack for the arresting opening. In this tense, gothic novel it is the discovery made by a child walking with her mother and dog on a Scottish beach While looking for cowries, the girl finds a woman’s body in a ‘bulging’ black suitcase.
The stump of a finger showing through the broken zip reminds the six-year-old of the ‘miniature plaster ham’ from her dolls’ house. As her mother drags her away, telling her not to look, the girl spots an eye through the pale fingers, ‘an eye that seemed to look back at me, that seemed to know something about me and to ask a question and give an answer’.
Violence against females has been a constant theme in Wyld’s work – from the murders and domestic abuse that occur on the periphery of After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, to the brutal treatment of Jake in All the Birds, Singing. Here it takes centre stage. In a powerful monologue raging against societal amnesia and femicide, free-spirited Maggie (a self-declared witch who befriends Viv) wonders, ‘What if all the women that have been killed by men through history were visible to us, all at once? If we could see them lying there.’
Bearing witness is clearly imperative to Wyld: in this novel she homes in on North Berwick in an attempt to conjure the shades of the women murdered and abused there over the centuries. Ruth, Viv, and Sarah’s compelling stories are punctuated by a series of brutal vignettes. Presented without headers or page numbers, the horrors they contain have a sense of timelessness. The cumulative effect can be overwhelming, while the final fragment offers heartbreaking insight into an earlier incident, bringing the story full circle.
Wyld’s provocative novel explores the myriad ways in which abuse can affect or abbreviate women’s lives. It could make a good fictional companion to recent works of non-fiction on the subject, including Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (2019). The violence is not only limited to women – Wyld touches on institutionalised abuse by clergy and boarding masters – but it is the spectrum of male violence against women that is central. In The Bass Rock, women are variously raped, murdered, abused, institutionalised, and objectified. Some are content or complicit in their circumscribed lives, others try to be, and others rebel. Many drink.
Thankfully, there are flashes of hope, warmth, humour, and catharsis. Female friendship is a balm and there are some kind, well-meaning male characters, but this is a dark, confronting book. The controlled fury at the bleak, defiant heart of this impressive novel is as relentless as the waves crashing against the Bass Rock, forcing the reader to bear witness and to accept that maybe ‘there’s no difference between these women and me, or you or your mother, or the lady in the tea shop. We’re just breezing in and out of the death zone.’ g
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