Australian Book Review, August 2021 issue, no. 434

*INC GST

Michael Dwyer Australian journalists in China Melinda Harvey Rachel Cusk’s new novel James Ley Lemon-squeezing criticism Benjamin Huf Cassandras and Covid Jolley Prize The shortlisted stories

Contested grounds

On Dark Emu’s view of pre-colonial history

by Stephen Bennetts

Advances The Jolley Prize shortlist

This year we received 1,428 entries for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – the same number submitted last year. Our judges – past winner Gregory Day, Monash University academic Melinda Harvey, and celebrated young exponent of the genre, Elizabeth Tan – have shortlisted three stories: ‘A Fall from Grace’

by John Richards (Queensland); ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ by Camilla Chaudhary (NSW)’, and ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’ by Lauren Sarazen (USA/France). The stories appear in this issue. We think you’ll agree it’s a stellar shortlist.

This year’s equal-record field came from thirty-six different countries, a testament to international interest in the Jolley Prize (and ABR). Writers contemplated themes and topics such as the climate crisis, grief, pandemics, internet culture, academia, art, and rural life across a range of genres, from satire to speculative fiction to literary realism – and, in the case of ‘A Fall from Grace’, historical fiction, all too rare in contemporary Australian short fiction.

Here are the judges’ comments on the three feature stories: ‘A Fall from Grace’ is a deliciously enigmatic story, rich in the overtones of the international canon – Balzac, Calvino, Borges. Set in pre-revolutionary rural France, a talented painter’s career receives an unforeseen jolt that simultaneously shadows his life and propels his work from realist proficiency to metaphysical greatness. The story brilliantly elides character with environment, capturing us via a delicately crafted blend of reportage, imagery, and atmosphere. Ultimately, the writer’s own image-making power fuses with the compelling narrative of the painter, giving us the thrill of historical fiction at its most immersive.

In ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’, Elizabeth is godmother to teenaged Julia, but actually it’s Julia’s younger sister, Asha, with whom Elizabeth feels the greater bond. One conversation ignites a peculiar obsession in Elizabeth, awakening her hitherto tepid godmotherly instincts. ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ is a delightful, nimble story; the characters bristle with life, and the dialogue is crisply rendered. The author deftly prevents Asha’s precocity from sliding into tweeness, and, although it becomes increasingly apparent that Elizabeth is making a little too much of Asha’s ‘seething inner brilliance’, the author depicts Elizabeth’s predicament with warmth, understanding, and humour.

In ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’, a woman named Caroline travels through Italy while conducting an online relationship with D, a man she met two weeks earlier. This story is written in effervescent sentences that capture the enthusiasm and fickleness of its narrator as well as of her continuous headlong movement. Also captured are the intensities of youthful romance, a state in which the imagination is irrepressible, even when it has little to go on. The story pokes gentle fun at the strange pull of a mediated life over real-world experiences: the pull is strong enough to have Caroline barely taking in the

prodigious beauty that surrounds her, such as the paintings of the Italian Renaissance in the Florence galleries or the palaces, piazzas, and canals of Venice.

Please join us on August 10 (6pm) for the Jolley Prize ceremony. The shortlisted authors will introduce and read from their stories. Then we will name the overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500. If you wish to attend, please email rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.

The shortlist was chosen from our most international longlist to date. The other eleven stories in contention at this level were: ‘What Happened on Djinn Island’ by Shastri Akella (USA); ‘A Dog’s Life’ by Dominic Amerena (Australia/ Greece); ‘The Funeral of Maria Luisa Rafaella Ciervo’ by Melinda Borysevicz (Italy); ‘The Memorial’ by David Cohen (Queensland); ‘Ghost’ by Daryl Li (Singapore); ‘Furniture’

by Jennifer Mills (SA); ‘Everything Bagel’ by Matthew Pitt (USA); ‘The Annex’ by Anthony Purdy (Canada); ‘Revisionist’ and ‘Sanitas Sanitatis’, both by Liza St James (USA); and ‘Ver Says’ by Laura Elizabeth Woollett (Victoria).

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

Our poetry prize, long named after one of Australia’s greatest poets, is on again for the eighteenth time, with total prize money of $10,000, of which the winner will receive $6,000. The judges this year are the poets Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR), Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani (recently named an ABR Rising Star). Poets have until October 4 to enter. See our website for full details.

Amanda Lohrey

Each month we ask our Open Page subject if artists are valued in our society. Rarely do they say yes. But Amanda Lohrey did in September 2020 (‘Yes, surprisingly so’). Well, Lohrey rose even higher in people’s esteem on July 15 when she won the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel The Labyrinth (Text Publishing). Lohrey, who receives $60,000, has been nominated before: Camille’s Bread (1996) and The Philosopher’s Doll (2005). She is only the second Tasmanian to win the vaunted prize. (Christopher Koch won in 1985, and then again in 1996. Richard Flanagan, oft-shortlisted, has never won it, as we all well know.)

The Labyrinth grapples with questions of guilt, denial, familial relationships, the (de)constructive power of art, and life’s many mazes. Reviewing the book for ABR, Morag Fraser described The Labyrinth as a narrative ‘so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs’.

[Advances continues on page 6] AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

1

Australian Book Review August 2021, no. 434

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) Declan Fry (2020) | Anders Villani (2021)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live.

Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia.

All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Image Pilbara, Western Australia (David Noton Photography/ Alamy)

Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments.

Letters and comments are subject to editing.

Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website.

Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Monash University Interns Gemma Grant Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

Image credits and information

Page 31: Locked bicycle on a Melbourne street, (Dinodia Photos/ Alamy) Page 61: Belinda Giblin as Winnie in Happy Days (photograph by Robert Catto/Red Line Productions)

ABR August 2021 LETTERS

6

Judith Bishop, James Jiang

INDIGENOUS STUDIES

7

Stephen Bennetts

Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe

CHINA

10

Michael Dwyer

The Truth About China by Bill Birtles The Last Correspondent by Michael Smith The Beijing Bureau, edited by Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts

PANDEMIC

12

Benjamin Huf

Doom by Niall Ferguson The Premonition by Michael Lewis

LITERARY STUDIES

13 15 16 17 58

James Ley Brenda Walker Brandon Chua Robert Phiddian Geordie Williamson

Along Heroic Lines by Christopher Ricks Life as Art, edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan Shakespeare and East Asia by Alexa Alice Joubin Alexander Pope in the Making by Joseph Hone Burning Man by Frances Wilson

MEMOIR AND BIOGRAPHY

20 21

Kate Crowcroft Alecia Simmonds

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying by Sarah Walker The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey by Julia Laite

ARCHITECTURE

23

Jim Davidson

After The Australian Ugliness, edited by Naomi Stead et al.

SOCIETY

24 26

Dominic Kelly Naama Grey-Smith

Full Circle by Scott Ludlam Where We Swim by Ingrid Horrocks

POLITICS

27

Samuel Watts

The Age of Acrimony by Jon Grinspan

POEMS

28 44 59

Joan Fleming John Kinsella Laurie Duggan

Every taxi driver in this city asks ‘Do you have children?’

Pastiche Eclogue with Randolph Stow’s ‘Ishmael’ Words

HISTORY

29 30

Elisabeth Holdsworth Seumas Spark

Smuggled by Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman Condemned by Graham Seal

JOLLEY PRIZE SHORTLIST

32 45 51

Camilla Chaudhary John Richards Lauren Sarazen

The Enemy, Asyndeton A Fall from Grace There Are No Stars Here, Either

39 40 41 42 43 49 55

Melinda Harvey Anthony Lynch Jay Daniel Thompson Shannon Burns Alice Whitmore Georgia White Alex Cothren

Second Place by Rachel Cusk Dark as Last Night by Tony Birch The Tribute by John Bryson The Other Half of You by Michael Mohammed Ahmad The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, edited by Margaret Jull Costa Animal by Lisa Taddeo Three experimental novels

50 60

John Kinsella Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Poet of the Month Open Page

56

Rose Lucas

Three evocative poetry collections

62 63 64 65 67

John Arnold Ian Dickson Julie Ewington Anne Rutherford Guy Webster

Pride of Place, edited by Alisa Bunbury Happy Days Hilma af Klint Playing with Sharks Mare of Easttown

68

Michael Shmith

The Boyds by Brenda Niall

FICTION

INTERVIEW POETRY ARTS

FROM THE ARCHIVE

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

3

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

ABR Patrons

The Australian Government has approved ABR as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR). All donations of $2 or more are tax deductible.

To discuss becoming an ABR Patron or donating to ABR, contact us by email: development@australianbookreview.com.au or by phone: (03) 9699 8822.

In recognition of our Patrons’ continuing generosity, ABR records multiple donations cumulatively. (ABR Patrons listing as at 22 July 2021)

Parnassian ($100,000 or more) Ian Dickson

Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999) Maria Myers AC Anonymous (1)

Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999) Blake Beckett Fund Morag Fraser AM Colin Golvan AM QC

Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999)

Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Professor Glyn Davis AC and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey Pauline Menz Ruth and Ralph Renard Kim Williams AM Anonymous (1)

Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999)

Emeritus Professor David Carment AM Margaret Plant Lady Potter AC CMRI Anonymous (1)

Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999)

Peter Allan Dr Neal Blewett AC Helen Brack Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) and Dr Grazia Gunn Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO Dr Alastair Jackson AM Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser Peter McMullin Allan Murray-Jones Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck David Poulton Peter Rose and Christopher Menz John Scully Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Anonymous (1)

Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999)

Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) and Sue Glenton Gillian Appleton Professor The Hon. Kevin Bell AM QC and Tricia Byrnes Dr Bernadette Brennan Des Cowley Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Helen Garner Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Professor Margaret Harris The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Dr Susan Lever OAM Don Meadows Susan Nathan Professor John Rickard Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Noel Turnbull Mary Vallentine AO Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Bret Walker AO SC Nicola Wass Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Anonymous (2)

Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)

Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation ( JRA Support Fund) Kate Baillieu Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Professor Paul Giles Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Tom Griffiths Mary Hoban Claudia Hyles OAM Dr Kerry James Dr Barbara Kamler Linsay and John Knight Professor John Langmore AM Pamela McLure Rod Morrison Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Robert Sessions AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Lisa Turner Dr Barbara Wall Jacki Weaver AO Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Anonymous (4)

Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499)

Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox Professor Dennis Altman AM Paul Anderson Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin John Bugg Peter Burch AM BM Joel Deane Robyn Dalton Jean Dunn Johanna Featherstone Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Roslyn Follett Steve Gome Professor Russell Goulbourne Professor Nick Haslam Dr Michael Henry AM Associate Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Professor Grace Karskens Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Muriel Mathers Felicity St John Moore Dr Brenda Niall AO Angela Nordlinger Jane Novak Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Diana and Helen O’Neil Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Estate of Dorothy Porter Mark Powell Emeritus Professor Roger Rees Libby Robin Stephen Robinson Professor David Rolph Dr Della Rowley (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Professor Lynette Russell AM

Emerita Professor Susan Sheridan and Emerita Professor Susan Magarey AM Michael Shmith Professor Janna Thompson Professor David Throsby and Dr Robin Hughes AO Dr Helen Tyzack Emeritus Professor James Walter Natalie Warren Ursula Whiteside Kyle Wilson Anonymous (6)

Symbolist ($500 to $999)

Damian and Sandra Abrahams Professor Michael Adams Lyle Allan Dr Georgina Arnott Professor Cassandra Atherton Douglas Batten Jean Bloomfield Raymond Bonner Professor Nicholas Brown Philip Brown and Penny Andrews Professor Kate Burridge Donata Carrazza Blanche Clark Megan Clement Alex Cothren Jim Davidson AM Jason Drewe Allan Driver Stuart Flavell Dr Anna Goldsworthy Dr Peter Goldsworthy AM Anne Grindrod Dilan Gunawardana Associate Professor Michael Halliwell Dr Benjamin Huf Dr Amanda Johnson Anthony Kane Robyn Lansdowne Kimberly and Julian McCarthy Professor Ronan McDonald Michael Macgeorge Peter Mares Dr Lyndon Megarrity Emeritus Professor Michael Morley Patricia Nethery Gillian Pauli Professor Anne Pender Jonathan W. de B. Persse Emeritus Professor Wilfrid Prest AM Dr Jan Richardson Ann Marie Ritchie Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Peter Stanford Dr Josephine Taylor Professor Rita Wilson Dr Diana and Mr John Wyndham Anonymous (2)

Realist ($250 to $499) Andrew Freeman FACS Jenny Fry Robyn Hewitt Barbara Hoad Penelope Johns Margaret Robson Kett Dr Lucy Neave Penelope Nelson Margaret Smith Anonymous (2)

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Thanks to our loyal and generous Patrons, we’re able to offer our twenty-first ABR Fellowship. This one, worth $10,000, is unthemed. We seek applications from published writers and commentators, however young. The chosen Fellow will, over the course of twelve months, contribute three substantial articles to the magazine. Applications close on September 1, and full details can be found on our website.

Timely, but timeless

Island magazine’s inaugural Nonfiction Prize, worth $3,000, was conceived amid 2020’s pandemic pandemonium, when Covid-19 seemed to be the only subject on people’s minds.

Curiously, Anna Spargo-Ryan, one of judges, said that she had ‘expected to reject Covid-19 stories out of hand. I thought we had heard all the stories the pandemic had to tell.’ Nonetheless, Megan Clement’s essay ‘In Quarantine’ was chosen from the

Eileen Chong

I think you have misunderstood the intention behind that sentence, which is not to impute this ‘naïvely expressivist approach’ to Eileen Chong herself but to certain readers of hers.

That paragraph begins with the critical position that I hoped the following sentences would challenge, or at least complicate: ‘A Thousand Crimson Blooms is written by a poet whose capac6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

Information galore

Interested in writing for ABR? If so, register for our free online information session on Thursday, August 12. We’re always looking for new reviewers, with diverse backgrounds and cultural interests. The ABR editors will be on hand to answer your questions and to advise how ABR works with its writers. The session will run for one hour. Numbers aren’t capped, but you will need to register and give us a sense of your interests and experience. To register your interest please email rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au by Wednesday, August 11.

Letters

Dear Editor, As the editor of Eileen Chong’s A Thousand Crimson Blooms (UQP, 2021), I became deeply acquainted with the book. As such, I cannot withhold my concern that the charge of a ‘naïvely expressivist approach [that] tends to narrow the emotional and imaginative range of work like Chong’s’ in James Jiang’s review (ABR, July 2021) overlooks important aspects of the book. I believe the key dynamics in Chong’s poetry are dialogic, not expressivist: resistance and connection is how I read them.

There is overt resistance to misogyny, racism, and other forms of violence. There is resistance to the grief of childlessness and the silence that meets miscarriage and women’s suffering from it. Resistance of another kind is present in the way that Chong’s lines linger on the physical and sensual textures of daily existence, such as meals eaten with a loved one. This temporal and descriptive slowness re-values such experiences in a manner analogous to certain films (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, say, or Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love). Chong reconnects to the past lives of language and image through her poetry’s engagement with etymology and the history of art.

While such an endeavour undeniably walks the knife-edge of repetition (‘self-glossing’) versus renewal, it matters for poetry to remember the lived knowledge of ancestors and elders. The loss would be ours if no one dared to take this risk.

Judith Bishop, Watsonia, Vic.

James Jiang replies:

300 or so entries. Spargo-Ryan described the essay as ‘a story about family, human connection and the barriers we will try to smash to be close to the people we love. It’s timely, but it’s timeless, too.’ ‘In Quarantine’ will appear in Island ’s July issue.

Megan Clement, who often writes for ABR, will be back next month with a Letter from Paris.

ity for eloquence might seem to stem from her intimacy with suffering’ [emphasis added]. The ‘naïvely expressivist approach’ is that which equates ‘eloquence’ with ‘suffering’ without any mediation. The point of the quotation that follows in the next sentence is to suggest that Chong pre-empts this mode of reception (Chong does not offer this dry dictum as a key to her own art, but rather uses it with reference to that of her ‘friendly technician’, who makes sculptures of ovaries). In the offending sentence, I had hoped that the phrase ‘like Chong’s’ would clarify the meaning, namely, that I am referring here to a way of reading her work rather than the poet’s own testimony about how she works. The intention was to save Chong’s poetry from one very narrow way of admiring it; there are other reasons for doing so – as I point out at the end of that paragraph and at the end of that section.

Nonetheless, I think it’s clear, however, that we value different sides of Chong’s poetics. Perhaps there’s disappointment that I hadn’t made more of Chong as a poet of ‘resistance’ (as the book’s blurbs invite us to). I imagine that there are plenty of other reviewers who will be more amenable on this front, and I am happy to leave that well-furrowed field to them.

You’ve provided a wonderfully eloquent defence of one way of reading and valuing Chong’s work, but can I suggest that being Chong’s editor might perhaps give this defence less rather than more weight. There’s a Chinese saying, ‘当局者迷, 旁观者清’ (dang ju zhe mi, pang guan zhe qing) that roughly translates as: ‘What’s bewildering to those at play is, to the bystanders, clear as day’.

Corrections

In From the Archive in the July 2021 issue, we inadvertently attributed the review to Alex Clark instead of Axel Clark, as was correctly noted on the contents page.

Indigenous Studies

Why settle for a mere farm?

Assessing Dark Emu’s version of Aboriginal history Stephen Bennetts

Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?

The Dark Emu debate

by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe

F

Melbourne University Press $34.99 pb, 288 pp

or anyone who has spent substantial time recording Aboriginal cultural traditions in remote areas of Australia with its most senior living knowledge holders, bestselling writer Bruce Pascoe’s view that Aboriginal people were agriculturalists has never rung true. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate – co-authored by veteran Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walshe – has already been welcomed by Aboriginal academics Hannah McGlade and Victoria Grieve-Williams, who reject Dark Emu’s hypothesis that their ancestors were farmers (like Pascoe himself ).

Sutton draws on more than fifty years of fieldwork experience with senior Aboriginal men and women in many areas of the Australian continent to test Dark Emu’s agriculturalist thesis. During the 1970s, Sutton did his own share of hunting and gathering as the only non-local person living with Wik people for months in the wetlands country north of the Kendall River in Cape York Peninsula ... All of our fat and protein came from hunting … My teachers were mainly people who had been born and raised in the bush, some to full adulthood. Apart from the practice of leaving yam stalks undisturbed while the tubers were removed, I never heard of or saw any older practices that could be even remotely described as horticulture, agriculture or farming in the common-sense way these terms are used.

Sutton also describes recording ‘many Aboriginal languages and learn[ing] to speak three by month after month sitting at the feet of teachers whose languages were still spoken, yet unwritten’.

He notes a plethora of words for agricultural terms in the two Torres Strait Islands languages, where Eddie Mabo’s people have long practised horticulture, yet (apart from English loan words) virtually no evidence of such terms in about forty dictionaries of Aboriginal languages he has consulted.

Aboriginal people in Cape York never took up their Melanesian neighbours’ agricultural practices, nor did people in the Northern Territory adopt those of the Macassans, who introduced a number of tree species during annual visits to the Top End. Indeed, there is extensive evidence of active resistance to agriculture by Aboriginal people. In a characteristic fieldwork gem, Sutton quotes senior Kuku Yalanji man Johnny Walker’s observation in the early 1980s that ‘Bama [Aboriginal people] know where to get mayi [vegetable food] already, why should we stay in one place and

have to hoe and bother with a farm!?’

Nincompoops on both the right and the left have produced equally shallow responses to Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? An unfortunate yet predictable toxic by-product of the book’s publication is that it will launch a thousand tedious Quadrant and Daily Telegraph diatribes by professional right-wing provocateurs like Andrew Bolt and NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham. In a similarly superficial response to this important historical debate inspired by Australia’s powerful anti-intellectual tradition, the Dark Emu controversy seems to have been represented by some culture warriors of the left as a contest between ‘stale old white academics’ and a plucky First Nations amateur who respects Aboriginal people (unlike them!) and who has overturned the racist myth of terra nullius (apparently single-handedly).

There is extensive evidence of active resistance to agriculture by Aboriginal people The political controversy surrounding the book has generated some public confusion, and it is important to clarify that Sutton and Walshe have had no part in the despicable ad hominem attacks on Bruce Pascoe launched by Bolt and others. Sutton himself is hardly a man of the right; he describes the British Empire as ‘the greatest kleptocracy in human history’ and is one of the unsung (non-Indigenous) heroes of the Aboriginal land rights movement, having served as an expert anthropologist on eighty-seven land claims since 1979. His influential account of the ‘post-classical’ transformation of Aboriginal land-holding systems has assisted many Aboriginal groups in longer settled areas of the continent to successfully argue for recognition of their property rights under native title law. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? has a scholarly and historical, not political, agenda; in the words of historian Tom Griffiths, its authors ‘pay Bruce Pascoe’s work the respect of a forensic analysis’.

Sutton and Walshe concede that, by popularising the work of earlier scholars, Dark Emu has stimulated renewed interest in Aboriginal history, environmental management and housing, and has been rightly critical of ‘the uninformed view that classical Aboriginal society consisted of constantly nomadic people who were not ecological agents, did not stay in one place for more than a few days and did not store resources’. Yet despite Dark Emu’s obvious merits in reviving interest in Australia’s Aboriginal history, the book is not a reliable guide to that history, and for Sutton, ‘its success as a narrative has been achieved in spite of its failure as an account of fact’.

Defenders of Dark Emu are apt to cite its use of nineteenth-century explorers’ journals as a kind of ‘smoking gun’ that supports the book’s claim that Aboriginal people practised agriculture. Yet these colonial outriders of the agricultural civilisation that was later to dispossess and shatter Aboriginal society interpreted what they saw using the European agriculturalist framework they were familiar with. These were ‘blow-ins’ who typically did not speak the language of the Aboriginal people they observed, and did not stay around for long enough to learn very much at all about their culture and society. Worse still, Sutton produces numerous examples where Dark Emu misquotes, misinAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

7

terprets, selectively quotes, or fails to reference these sources at all.

Pascoe relies on the explorers’ journals, while almost completely ignoring the evidence of Australia’s First Nations people themselves, as well as the important accounts of several non-Indigenous people like William Buckley, who spent thirty-two years living with Aboriginal people beyond the colonial frontier in Western Victoria. Dark Emu also largely ignores a huge body of work by anthropologists like Donald Thomson, Ursula McConnel, Ian Keen, Sutton himself and others, all of whom learned local Aboriginal languages and spent months or even years living with remote-area Aboriginal people while being mentored by, 1857 their senior knowledge holders (Sutton acknowledges fifty-nine such Aboriginal mentors in the appendix).

Nincompoops on both the right and the left have produced equally shallow responses to Farmers or Hunter-gatherers?

Sutton’s co-author, archaeologist Keryn Walshe, provides a two-chapter critique of evidence cited for Aboriginal people’s use of ‘aquaculture’ and agricultural implements. The Budj Bim and Brewarrina fish traps discussed in Dark Emu were certainly complex, yet they were also exceptional in scale: ‘Pascoe is prone to finding a localised or regional exception to a general continentwide pattern and then suggesting the exception was the norm.’

One of Dark Emu’s most disturbing features is its resurrection of the long-discredited ‘social evolutionist’ model of human development. In Sutton and Walshe’s analysis, Dark Emu presents a simplistic dichotomy between Aboriginal people as ‘agriculturalists who lived in permanent housing’ and a completely outdated notion of ‘hapless wandering’ by ‘mere hunter-gatherers’; ‘it is Pascoe who adds pejoratives such as “primitive”, “simple” and “mere” to the term “hunter-gatherer” … There seems to be an assumption that subsistence based on hunting and gathering is itself not complex. This is far from the truth.’ Sutton prefers the terms ‘complex hunter-gatherer’ or ‘hunter-gatherer-plus’ to describe the sophisticated ecological knowledge developed by Aboriginal people that allowed them to survive for millennia across a wide range of changing climatic zones in Australia: ‘they were ecological agents who worked with the environment, rather than against it. They frequently used slow burning fire to make their landscapes more liveable. However, they did not cut down bush to clear the land, plough and hoe the soil in preparation for

Animal Publics 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

planting or then sow stored seed or tubers or rootstock in gardens or fields … They had their own way. This should be cherished.’

In a notable instance of historical amnesia, some Dark Emu proponents seem to credit the book with undermining terra nullius (the spurious legal doctrine used to validate Aboriginal dispossession by the British Crown). Yet ‘Dark Emu’s claims to be debunking myths are unfounded’: the fact that Aboriginal huntergatherers could and still did have systems of land ownership was demonstrated by Australian anthropologists in the 1960s. A system of Aboriginal land tenure rights in the Northern Territory was later articulated by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner and recognised at law in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The legal doctrine of terra nullius was itself finally overturned by the High Court in the celebrated Mabo case in 1992; Aboriginal people’s property rights were recognised the following year in the Native Title Act 1993, and these same rights have since been reconfirmed in countless Federal Court native title determinations.

As I was writing this review, cost-cutting measures were announced at the University of Western Australia that would see the abolition of its Department of Anthropology, established in 1956

by Ronald Berndt, one of the leading figures in the development of Australian anthropology. Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? is in many ways a defence of this legacy. For Sutton, the uncritical acceptance of Dark Emu’s flawed version of Aboriginal history highlights the degree to which anthropology and ‘the authority of the academy has slipped’. Many of the discipline’s key figures like Elkin, Stanner, the Berndts, and others played a leading role in publicly challenging the racist dogmas of the time, and since then, ‘Australian anthropologists’ activism in support of Indigenous causes has only increased’. Like Robert Manne, many of these anthropological scholars felt obliged as public intellectuals to address a wider audience outside the academy, as in Stanner’s electrifying 1968 Boyer lectures After the Dreaming. Yet today, Sutton and Marcia Langton are perhaps the lone exemplars of this earlier tradition of the anthropologist as public intellectual.

Did Australian anthropology retreat to an ivory tower during its ‘postmodern turn’ in the 1980s, and lose the ability to engage a broader audience in the way Dark Emu, for all its flaws, has clearly done so powerfully? Perhaps. g Stephen Bennetts is a Perth-based writer and anthropologist who has worked on Aboriginal heritage, land claim, and native title matters in remote areas of Australia since 1994.

New ideas in animal studies from Australia and around the world.

THIS IS WHAT SHAKESPEARE SHOULD BE T HE S Y DNE Y MORNING HE R A L D

B Y W IL L I A M SH A KE SP E A RE DIRE C T OR P E T ER E VA NS

S Y DNE Y OP ER A HO U S E A R T S C EN T RE MEL B O URNE C A NBERR A T HE AT RE C EN T RE F R OM A U G - O C T AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

BOOK NOW BELL SHAKESPE ARE.COM.AU

9

China

Border crossings

The allure of China for Australian journalists Michael Dwyer

I

t has become a rite of passage for foreign correspondents returning home from a stint in China to pen a memoir recounting their experiences. All too often, the story begins with the said reporter crossing into mainland China at Lo Wu, having just spent time enjoying the bright lights of Hong Kong. Clearly, the Lo Wu railway station holds a certain allure for wandering Australian journalists.

Grumbling about the heat and humidity, the intrepid correspondents take their last few steps towards the border with a degree of trepidation and exhilaration. The old wrought-iron bridge that spans the divide between Lo Wu and Shum Chum is a distance of only about one hundred paces, but many correspondents have described the experience as something akin to landing on a new planet.

While a reasonable number of Australian journalists travelled to the country when it was the Republic of China (1912-49) and subsequently wrote about their experiences (Rhodes Farmer’s Shanghai Harvest [1945] is a notable example), the more interesting memoirs are probably those that date from the decades after Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, after which only a trickle of Western reporters were allowed to visit the country, under strict supervision from officious Chinese authorities.

Lisa Hobbs, Suzanne Baker, and Frederick Nossal – three Australian reporters who managed to visit communist China in the 1950s and 1960s – were captivated by the aura of Lo Wu. Hobbs, an experienced Australian journalist living and working in San Francisco, felt that she was about to enter ‘another world’ as she approached the Lo Wu border crossing. In 1965, Hobbs became the first female reporter from an American newspaper to visit mainland China since 1949. Hobbs, who published I Saw Red China in 1966, was able to use her Australian passport to overcome restrictions that applied to US journalists wanting to visit China.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Paul Raffaele, who became the first Australian journalist to be accredited by the People’s Republic of China when he opened the public broadcaster’s first bureau in Peking in October 1973, said he was nervous about being cut off from the ‘familiar outside world’. Baker, a television producer who was the first Australian woman to win an Academy Award, wrote in The Bulletin in March 1966 that she was about to ‘break through the bamboo curtain’.

10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Nossal, who said he felt ‘jaunty’ as he walked from Lo Wu to Shum Chum, described the small mainland village in his book Dateline Peking (1962) as ‘rather grim’. In 1959, Nossal, a thirtyone-year-old journalist from the Melbourne Herald, opened the first Western newspaper bureau in China since Mao’s victory.

While Nossal was opening an office for Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, his stories were run by his old Melbourne paper.

Suffering from ‘dry-mouth tension’, Kirwan Ward and Paul Rigby from the Daily News in Perth wrote in Willow Pattern Walkabout (1959) that crossing the rusting old railway bridge was a step ‘as startling as the one Lewis Carroll’s Alice made that drowsy summer afternoon when she stepped through the looking-glass’. Ward was a mainstay of the Daily News in Perth; his daily column,‘Peepshow’, ran from 1946 until 1974. Rigby was a Walkleywinning cartoonist.

Back on the train and leaving Lo Wu behind, travelling in reserved seats draped with white antimacassars, the journalists got their first look at the ‘real’ China. The paddy fields sweeping past the train’s windows were a hundred shades of green, while loudspeakers on the trains crackled with patriotic songs. Baker thought the train ride to Peking felt like being in a Cecil B. DeMille extravaganza. Raffaele reckoned he felt like a character in a John le Carré novel.

Wilfred Burchett approached his 1951 Lo Wu border crossing with the reverence of a quasi-religious pilgrimage. Burchett, who had previously reported from China for the London Daily Express in the early 1940s, was impressed that the ‘chaos and filth’ of the past had been replaced with ‘spotlessly clean’ railway carriages and ‘friendly, efficient service’. In his autobiographical At the Barricades (1981), Burchett said his first impressions of communist China remained valid for the rest of his lengthy trip.

Apart from the much-maligned Burchett, the first Australian journalist to report from communist China was probably Reg Leonard from the Melbourne Herald, who wrote a series of six features for The New York Times published in August 1956. The NYT ran two of these stories on its front page, including one based on a ninety-minute interview with China’s charismatic premier, Zhou Enlai.

Australian journalists have not been alone in writing up their Lo Wu reminiscences: there is a rich history of similar books written by American and European reporters who were keen to add their stories to this China-memoir oeuvre. Nor are such tomes limited to journalists, with missionaries, scientists, business people, and fellow-travelling cadres lining up to explain to readers the mystique of an awakening China.

Memoirs of China, with their shiny red covers, continue to appear, although the mystique of Lo Wu has long gone. Most new correspondents no longer start their Chinese odyssey by taking the slow train north from Lo Wu, with the point of entry now more likely to be gleaming new airports in metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai.

T

hree new Australian books provide a modern take on this venerable genre. Their publication was largely predicated on Beijing’s decision in September 2020 to eject the correspondents of the ABC and the Australian Financial Review (AFR), leaving the Australian media without an on-the-ground pres-

ence in China for the first time since diplomatic relations between the two sides were established in 1972.

Bill Birtles from the ABC and Michael Smith from the AFR have completed their memoirs with alacrity, as have Trevor Watkins and Melissa Roberts, who have co-edited the third of these three new volumes. All four journalists have more than a passing knowledge of China. Birtles, author of The Truth About China: Propaganda, patriotism and the search for answers (Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 310 pp), had studied Mandarin and previously worked for the government-run Xinhua news agency in 2010, while Smith was a reporter for the Hong Kong Standard in 1997, when the former British colony was handed over to Beijing. The husband-and-wife team of Watkins and Roberts was in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.

Birtles and Smith both launch their narratives with accounts of the cloak-and-dagger operations conducted by Australian diplomats to spirit the two journalists out of the country. The Chinese government’s effort to expel them was hardly a surprise; Beijing has a long history of deporting journalists for writing what it regards as ‘unfair and false reports’.

Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government was determined to expel NYT correspondent Hallett Abend from China in 1931, while Robert P. Martin of the United Press received the same treatment in 1939. Expulsion of foreign journalists continued through the Mao Zedong era. As many as twenty foreign journalists were thrown out of China in 2020, including two other Australians: Chris Buckley from the NYT and Philip Wen from the Wall Street Journal.

The twenty-five texts included in Watson and Roberts’s The Beijing Bureau: 25 Australian correspondents reporting China’s rise (Hardie Grant Books, $32.99 pb, 303 pp) are understandably skewed towards those with ABC authorship, given the breadth of the national carrier’s coverage of China over the past five decades. In terms of readability, the most accessible pieces are those that personalise their narrative. Jane Hutcheon and Helene Chung both have compelling personal stories to tell about their Chinese heritage.

Prominent in all three books is the frustration that goes with being a foreign correspondent in authoritarian China, then and now. Correspondents write of midnight visits to hotel rooms by Chinese police and other security officials, followed by hours of interrogation and the ubiquitous signed statements admitting their guilt. Phones are bugged; journalists need permission to venture outside Beijing and have little choice but to participate in ‘showcase’ tours and ‘sanitised’ trips.

Smith’s book is pessimistically titled The Last Correspondent: Dispatches from the frontline of Xi’s new China (Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 322 pp), which is surely a premature judgement on China’s intentions with respect to Australian journalists working in the country. Smith, Watkins, and Roberts give the false impression that Australian media interest in China only became serious after diplomatic relations were established. Smith does his own newspaper a disservice by stating that it had only had a sixteen-year presence in China from 2004, when in fact AFR correspondents have been reporting on Chinese affairs from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei since the mid-1980s.

It should also be remembered that serious Australian newspaper coverage of China did not start in 1949, as is suggested by

Watkins and Roberts, but rather goes back to the first newspaper published in Australia in March 1803, which included a story about Irish convict escapees convinced that China was within walking distance from the penal colony.

It has become a rite of passage for foreign correspondents returning home from a stint in China to pen a memoir recounting their experience Throughout the nineteenth century, the Australian colonial press maintained a strong interest in China. In 1841, The Sydney Morning Herald sent a correspondent to Amoy for a story about Chinese ‘coolie’ labour. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of Australian journalists travelled to China to report on the awakening Asian giant. With bylines still not in use in Victorian-era newspapers, what were then known as ‘special correspondents’ became drawcards for newspapers like The Argus in Melbourne, which boasted among its staff writers James Hingston and John Stanley James (the ‘Vagabond’).

Two Australian journalists – John Wallace from the SMH and George Watkin Wynne from the rival Telegraph – reported on the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1899–1901, although most of the fighting was over by the time that they arrived. Banjo Paterson was also sent to China to report on the Boxer revolt, but arrived too late to cover the conflict. Paterson did at least secure an interview with the Geelong-born George ‘Chinese’ Morrison, who had become the first Western reporter to be based in Peking when he was appointed as correspondent for the Times of London in 1897. Morrison served as Peking bureau chief until 1912, when he resigned to become a political adviser to the infant Chinese republican government. There are serious question marks about the veracity of Morrison’s journalism and his political acumen; he was an accomplished self-promoter.

William Donald, a near contemporary of Morrison, also worked on newspapers in Hong Kong and Shanghai before becoming an adviser to Sun Yat-sen. The Lithgow-born teetotaller, who later worked for Kuomintang generalissimo Chiang Kaishek and his wife, Madam Soong Mei-ling, was described in a November 1946 obituary in the NYT as a ‘fabled’ old China hand ‘who had more influence on Chinese leaders than any other Occidental’.

China has been mesmerising Australian journalists since the colonial settlement of the early 1800s, notwithstanding the latest round of Beijing’s preferred ‘tit-for-tat’ public diplomacy.

With Xi Jinping moving to solidify his position as the country’s new paramount leader, Beijing will no doubt continue to harass and expel those it thinks are acting against China’s sovereign interests. But as Bill Birtles, Michael Smith, and other journalists will attest, China is such a giving news story that the Western press has little choice but to go back for more. g Michael Dwyer is an associate member of the Centre for Media History and a PhD student at Macquarie University. He was the Australian Financial Review’s China correspondent from 2000 to 2003 and foreign editor from 2012 to 2016. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

11

Pandemic

Unheeded prophecies Cassandras in the age of Covid Benjamin Huf

Doom: The politics of catastrophe

by Niall Ferguson Allen Lane $35 pb, 486 pp

The Premonition: A pandemic story

O

by Michael Lewis Allen Lane $49.99 hb, 319 pp

ne of the disconcerting aspects of this pandemic is that there was no shortage of warnings. For decades, virologists foresaw the coincidence of urbanisation, human proximity with animals, climate change, and globalisation as ideal conditions for spreading deadly pathogens. Science journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague (Laurie Garrett) and Spillover (David Quammen), whose conclusions were amplified by TED-talking billionaires. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and swine flu were further clues. Yet come January 2020, authorities worldwide were slow, indecisive, and ill-prepared.

In this sense, Covid-19 has the makings of a classical tragedy: not mere misfortune but a sequence of unheeded prophecies, unknowing collusion with calamity and disorientation when required to act. Niall Ferguson’s Doom and Michael Lewis’s The Premonition – two chronicles of the pandemic likely to dominate bestseller lists for some time – deal with such tragedy in spades. But Ferguson, among the world’s most visible and contentious historians, and Lewis, an unrivalled raconteur of Hollywood-ready financial, sporting, and political intrigue (Moneyball, The Big Short), also deliver well-established tropes and takeaways. Tragedy is neither author’s default genre, which leaves the makings of the pandemic only partially explained.

Doom is offered as a ‘general history of catastrophe’ that situates ‘our disaster’ in ‘proper perspective’. The book achieves both more and less than this. Beginning his career as a financial historian, Ferguson has amassed much attention writing sweeping venerations of British imperialism, Western civilisation, and the American empire. His last book, The Tower and the Square (2017), was an eclectic take on how networks shape human civilisations. Doom widens the canvas to a size both awesome and mind-boggling.

For Ferguson, disasters are often tragedies, prophesied by Cassandras who can neither persuade a sceptical chorus nor save the king from doom. The problem is that humans are bad at comprehending catastrophe. We rebuild cities where an earthquake strikes, as short-termism and forgetfulness blind us to how disaster-prone the world really is. Moreover, he adds, humans obsess over the wrong kind of destruction. Millennialist doomsayers, including today’s ‘prophets of catastrophic climate change’ and cyclical theorists of boom and bust, detract from what makes disasters disastrous: they are unpredictable, complex, and involve mass ‘excess death’, not total obliteration.

Uncertainty and complexity are the recurring themes that 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

make this history ‘general’. Ferguson gallivants from volcano eruptions in ancient Rome, earthquakes in the Wei River Valley and Lisbon, the Black Death and Spanish Flu, famines in Bengal, Ireland, and Russia, the Somme, and, finally, to Covid-19 to make his case. It goes something like this: disasters follow a random statistical distribution but are more frequent than is usually appreciated. The extent of catastrophe is determined by human-made networks that transmit, and then are destroyed by, disaster. As such, even natural disasters are ‘man-made’.

Networked catastrophes limit the capacity of modern science to mitigate disasters, but also the blame attributable to any one individual. Finally, there is a ‘fractal geometry of disaster’, whereby smaller mishaps – Titanic, Challenger, Chernobyl – magnify the properties of larger ones, so failures by ‘middle management’ are generally most significant.

This final observation provides Ferguson with his explanation of Covid-19. While networks of air travel and nursing homes spread the virus, and populist leaders blundered, it was incompetent public health bureaucracies that turned risk into calamity.

Doom is broad-brushed, empirically formidable, disciplinedefying, and not wholly convincing. The ‘politics’ of catastrophe promised in the subtitle is thinly elaborated, and there are no criteria to distinguish the ‘colossal’ catastrophes that interest Ferguson (why great wars but not colonialism and slavery?).

Authored in secluded Montana after Ferguson spent early 2020 jetsetting (and potentially ‘superspreading’), Doom often reads like a series of Boy’s Own-inspired whims threaded together with his favourite themes, written to satisfy his ‘intense preoccupation’ with the pandemic.

That said, it makes for wonderful reading. The scope is breathtaking, as is the handling of the latest in cliodynamics, network theory, and epidemiology. If Ferguson’s aim is to place Covid-19 in the epic panorama of pandemic-like human devastation, Doom is a success. Yet, as is characteristic of Ferguson’s grand, cocksure narratives, there is an agenda. While the author’s downplaying of climate change is maddeningly simplistic, Doom presses for a different perspective on the next unpredictable disaster. In the final pages, Ferguson himself morphs into a Cassandra, suggesting that the pandemic’s biggest fallout will be geopolitical crisis, perhaps of nuclear proportions. While the hapless bureaucratic response to Covid-19 might further illustrate American decline (a topic that has long interested Ferguson), Doom argues the pandemic has weakened both the United States and China, further entrenching their ‘Cold War’, which, Ferguson hopes, will jolt US complacency. Echoing his conclusions from Colossus (2002), Civilisation (2011), and The Great Degeneration (2012), Ferguson envisages the United States resurging as the empire the world still needs, swatting Chinese communists to one side and threats of a surveillance totalitarianism to the other. This is all serious stuff, again prosecuted with a bit too much enthusiasm.

Michael Lewis is not so bombastic. But he does like Cassandras. Where The Big Short spotlighted investors who identified the subprime implosion and made fortunes when no one listened, The Premonition tells of the public-health officials who warned of the pandemic but were ignored by authorities.

In his previous book, The Fifth Risk (2018), Lewis also posed as a Cassandra. That book depicted the vast US bureaucracy as man-

Literary Studies aging the world’s biggest risk portfolio, which is constantly placed under strain as every new White House administration makes presidential appointees replacing the top posts across government.

With Donald Trump caring little for that process, Lewis dreaded a meltdown. While Covid-19 was not the disaster Lewis expected, The Premonition is a sequel to The Fifth Risk’s exploration of the consequences of politicising public administration.

The book follows a small cast of experts who, in the early 2000s, rediscovered the efficacy of social distancing in halting the spread of pathogens, before foreseeing Covid-19 hitting the United States and developing testing and genome sequence technologies to beat it. At every turn they are thwarted by publichealth authorities and the ‘medical-industrial complex’.

Lewis’s trick in conveying the dramas of contemporary America is finding remarkable characters that personify a moment in unique ways. The star here is Charity Dean, the decisive, razor-sharp public-health official from Santa Barbara who rises from obscurity to advise the Californian governor and White House officials. Dean also bucks Lewis’s penchant for telling stories about hyper-smart, masculinist Masters of the Universe – Tom Wolfe being Lewis’s literary hero.

Yet the institutional villains are the real story, particularly the guarded and cautious Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The once-admired and still-prestigious CDC provides guidance to the US network of local health officials. But in early 2020, discarding advice from Dean and others, the CDC downplayed the threat of the virus, prohibited testing passengers returning from Wuhan, and, once the crisis was upon them, distributed faulty testing kits. Dean was baffled: ‘Why doesn’t the US have the institutions to save itself ?’

Unlike Ferguson, who also faults the CDC, Lewis ventures at the end of The Premonition to answer this question. The tale is revelatory. During a novel influenza scare in 1976, the CDC, appreciating the tragedy of having to act, recommended a massive vaccine rollout. But the virus never took off and the vaccine killed fifty people. Old hands say this was when the CDC became more cautious and more closely monitored by the White House. The CDC directorship was converted from a merit-based civil servant to a White House-pleasing presidential appointee. Political expediency replaced civic bravery.

Lewis does not explain that, in the 1980s, Congress also legislated for the CDC to receive private funding, aligning public health with drug companies’ interests. Across the board, budgeting was privileged over expertise and governmental capacity translated into market efficiency. However, these details are not the kind of stories Lewis tells. The Premonition ends with Charity Dean moving from public health into medical consultancy to better leverage the health system. Lewis treats this positively: the United States has the talent, properly utilised, to beat pandemics. Lewis’s heroes are inevitably romantic, not tragic: weary and depleted from American crises, but ultimately vindicated if not stronger.

Meanwhile, one suspects that Niall Ferguson, with his fixation on US decline and heroic revival in the face of Thucydidean danger, is less a Cassandra than a loud voice in a dangerously hawkish chorus. g Benjamin Huf is a Melbourne-based historian.

Niche content

The lemon-squeezing school of criticism James Ley

Along Heroic Lines

by Christopher Ricks

T

Oxford University Press $44.99 hb, 339 pp

he first essay in Christopher Ricks’s Along Heroic Lines is the text of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, an honorary post he held from 2004 to 2009.

He takes as his subject the formal distinction between poetry and prose. If one is going to be a professor of poetry, the least one can do is arrive at a satisfactory definition of one’s object of study. To this end, Ricks summons to the witness stand an august procession of English poets and critics – Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, W.H. Auden, A.C. Bradley – and considers their authoritative pronouncements on the matter, only to arrive at the inconvenient conclusion that a strict line of demarcation is difficult to sustain.

There is something a little impish about using the occasion of his acceptance of such a prestigious post to chip away at the idea that poetry can or should be regarded as inherently superior to other modes of literary expression. Ricks’s aim is certainly not to denigrate the artistry of the poet (no one could accuse him of that), but rather to place the prose writer on a more equal footing.

He notes that the finest prose can be every bit as memorable, euphonious, rhythmically precise, and rich in implication as a successful poem. And he makes a point of extending his defence of the prose writer to his own genre: the least glamorous, least loved, least likely to be considered ‘creative’, and most misunderstood genre of them all: literary criticism. ‘What I’d like to know,’ he writes with wry indignation, ‘is why, since Tennyson and I work in the same medium – language, in a word – why it’s always me giving a talk about him and never him giving a talk about me.’

Ricks is one of the world’s leading T.S. Eliot scholars and an old-school close reader. His critical practice is a version of what Eliot called ‘lemon-squeezer’ criticism, which seeks to ‘extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning’. The essays in Along Heroic Lines are full of finical dissections of phrases and lines of verse. The etymologies of individual words are consulted, buried allusions and connotations are excavated, and multiple shades of meaning are thereby revealed. Even offhand or parenthetical observations and seemingly innocuous linguistic stopgaps do not escape Ricks’s attention, recognising as he does the vulnerabilities that are exposed in those moments when authors feel the need to signal their confidence (‘surely’, ‘of course’) or their uncertainty (‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’).

As a critical method, this exacting approach has some notable virtues. At its best, it is a way of engaging with a piece AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

13

of writing on its own terms, acknowledging that its technical devil is not necessarily in the details or the quality of the prose, as intricacies generate the aesthetic experience that is an intrinsic such, but in structure and flow. The essays in Along Heroic Lines are part of its meaning. It is a way of honouring the fact that much full of interesting observations, but they are not light on their feet. of the interest and, indeed, the evident delight that Ricks takes They tend to be organised around a theme, rather than pursuing in literature is a function of its specificity, its ability to generate a clear line of argument. They proceed associatively, tracing links that flash of insight, make unexpected connections, skew one’s and sometimes obscure references, catching literary echoes across centuries. Their details accrue rather than cohere. As a result, they perspective so that reality appears in a new light.

The flipside of this approach is the wood-for-trees problem. combine an academic fastidiousness with a sprawling quality that makes it hard to imagine anThere are invariably multiple levels yone who lacks the requisite on which any art work is meanspecialist interest reading ingful. Yes, it can be fascinating to them for amusement. There examine the surface of a pointillist are only so many lemons one painting with a magnifying glass, can squeeze before one starts but at some point it is advisable to to feel the need for a stiff gin step back and take in the whole imand tonic. age. Ricks, perhaps, does not really To some extent, this is want an answer to his Tennyson a consequence of the fact question, but at least part of that that Along Heroic Lines is an answer must be that a studious, odds-and-sods collection of thirty-page discussion of Dryden’s previously published articles, use of the heroic triplet (to take rounded out with only a few but one example) is what is known new essays. That it is a loose these days as ‘niche content’. One of assemblage is suggested by the chief problems any critic faces its notional unifying theme, is how to make the analysis that is indicated by the title. The an essential part of his task live and ‘heroic line’ was the term breathe as an independent piece of favoured by Johnson for the writing, how to avoid becoming iambic pentameter, which, of the tedious person who insists on course, has an importance in explaining in minute detail things English poetry akin to the that are meant be experienced didactylic hexameter in ancient rectly. In a manifesto-like passage Greek and the alexandrine in in which he defines criticism as French. Ricks follows John‘the art of noticing things that son in preferring the term the rest of us may well not have because it has a less technical noticed’, Ricks points out that air that admits the natural this imperative requires a certain flexibility of the language. tact, since the critic ‘must neither Throughout these essays, he state nor neglect the obvious. makes a point of noticing the Whether something is obvious may recurrence of the heroic line not be obvious.’

Christopher Ricks at the London Review of Books Bookshop in 2010 in supposedly unpoetic conRicks negotiates this problem (Roger Parkes/Alamy) texts (Mailer’s jiving prose, in Along Heroic Lines with varying degrees of success. He is an excellent noticer who likes nothing the letters of Eliot and Johnson), arguing that ‘it is crucial not to more than diving into the innumerable rabbit holes literature suppose that poetry is a matter of rhythm but prose is not’. The presents. The pleasure he takes in the wit of his subjects – a open-ended commitment of the literary critic, in other words, is motley assortment that includes Eliot, Byron, Henry James, to the subtle music of language itself, irrespective of genre. The Samuel Beckett, and Norman Mailer – is reflected in his prose, critic’s scholarly and technical knowledge is ultimately a form which is enlivened by his own wordplay and a donnish sense of of aesthetic appreciation, which holds out the possibility of a humour. W.B. Yeats, he notes in a distinctly Johnsonian vein, was wider understanding. ‘Criticism,’ Ricks argues, ‘is not a service ‘particularly anxious … to give credit where credit is due, namely industry but a service art, one that begins with the asking of cruto himself ’. An essay on anagrams provides an occasion to observe cial questions, a necessary (not a sufficient) condition of seizing that ‘Tony Blair MP’ can be rearranged into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’. crucial answers.’ g Elsewhere, Ricks is tickled to recall the obituary of an obscure man of letters, who ‘had several wives, some of them his own’.

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne.

For all his playfulness and erudition, Ricks can be an indif- A former Editor of Sydney Review of Books, he has been a regular ferent essayist. When it comes to critical essays, in particular, the contributor to ABR since 2003.

14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Literary Studies

‘Alien of exceptional ability’ Recalling Hazel Rowley ten years after her death Brenda Walker

Life as Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley edited by Della Rowley and Lynn Buchanan

T

Miegunyah Press $34.99 pb, 255 pp

he biographer Hazel Rowley enjoyed the fact that her green card – permitting her to work in America – classified her as an ‘Alien of exceptional ability’. This is close to perfect: her own biography in a few words. If not exactly an alien, she was usefully and often shrewdly awry in a variety of situations: in the academic world of the 1990s, in tense Parisian literary circles, and in the fraught environment of American race relations.

It helped that she was Australian, and a relative outsider. The people she sought information from were less likely to categorise her and more inclined to talk. Her books – the major biographies of Christina Stead (1993) and Richard Wright (2001), Tête-à-tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2005), and Franklin and Eleanor: An extraordinary marriage (2010) – are certainly evidence of exceptional ability, as well as obsession and tenacity.

Rowley was scheduled to appear at the Perth Writers Festival in 2011. I had hoped to hear her speaking with Andrew O’Hagan, Rodney Hall, and Peter Rose. She died unexpectedly in New York a few days before she was due to appear. The news swept through the festival. It was difficult to believe. A poet read a tribute to her under the trees in a beautiful courtyard at the university where the festival was held. He seemed stunned, and so did the audience. Her books were exceptional, and there should have been so many more. Now, ten years after her death, her sister Della Rowley and her friend Lynn Buchanan have edited Life as Art: The biographical writing of Hazel Rowley. The book is warmly introduced by Drusilla Modjeska, who in the 1980s was a fellow ‘eager young feminist’ discussing with Rowley the prickliness of the famous older women they had (separately) interviewed: Beauvoir and Stead.

Modjeska calls them ‘magisterial and perplexing’, but they didn’t entirely perplex Hazel. Modjeska questioned Stead about her decision to leave Australia when she was twenty-five. Stead was not much help, but Rowley’s biography gave Modjeska some understanding of this extreme move.

Life as Art has seven sections, all informatively introduced.

The first two – ‘Writing Biography’ and ‘Research Trips and Personal Connections’ – contain essays, talks, and journal entries.

Successive sections concern her subjects: Stead, Wright, Beauvoir and Sartre, and the Roosevelts. An afterword has journal entries sketching, in part, an idea for a new book about Brooklyn: ‘I love Stead’s idea that a city is an ocean of story. A light comes on in an apartment, and you know that there’s a story there. You open

this or that door; from your subway window you see people in a passing train: there’s a story there.’ The final piece is an interview published in ABR just weeks before her death. She is asked what her favourite word is and she replies: ‘Courage.’ There are stories everywhere, but stories are not always straightforward and some take courage to investigate and to set down, as the section on Wright demonstrates. ‘I haven’t come here to live in white America: I want to live in real America,’ she writes, and the America that emerges from her work on Wright is devastating.

Rowley lived through a period of idealism and social agitation: ‘My generation came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s, a time of revolutionary change and hope.’ The disappointments came later, especially in the 1990s. Rowley dryly describes how she once pitied Beauvoir because she ‘had done so much to inspire the women’s movement and would not be alive to see what I took for granted my own generation would see: a complete transformation of society … and true equality between the sexes’. Beauvoir would have had to live a very long life to witness these things; furthermore, her own prestige had fluctuated. In 1980, when Deirdre Bair approached her publisher with a proposal to write a biography of Beauvoir, she was criticised for ‘request[ing] funding for an “over the hill French woman”’. Bair changed publishers and wrote a bestseller. A few decades after Bair’s unfortunate experience, HarperCollins, publisher of Tête-à-tête, was so accommodating that they brought out alternative versions in different countries to allow for variations in copyright legislation.

(This is the kind of useful information that Life as Art provides.)

Beauvoir is not above reproach, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being dismissive of her now; Modjeska calls her ‘one of the great pillars on which feminism stands’.

Rowley’s books are like highly finished canvases, and the great joy of Life as Art is the view it gives us of the underpainting.

She had a clear idea of the value of biography at a time when literary criticism was uninterested in ‘the author’. Her respect for her subjects and her conviction that their lives supplied wider historical and personal insights carried her through the daunting period of research and writing. She calls her books ‘voyages, risky voyages, involving a great deal of passion on my part’. She internalises her work. Writing biographies has changed her, made her a ‘better person’: ‘The training you acquire as a biographer makes you far less interested in judging people; the challenge is to understand them.’ Her attitude is indispensable. Biographies can be particularly frustrating for the writer. People are often unreliable, they forget and they embellish; some are capricious.

The subjects themselves – Stead in particular – are not easy to fathom. But the rewards are extraordinary. ‘I have stepped beyond the horizons of my own life,’ writes Rowley. She has taken us with her, in book after book.

In 1999, the biographer Claire Tomalin published Several Strangers, a collection of her reviews, prefaced by a frank autobiographical essay where she writes about the ‘several strangers who went by my name’. We are all sequential and plural, more than one person in the course of our lives. How wonderful it would have been to read Hazel Rowley’s books well into her old age, to follow all her changes. Life as Art reminds us of the measure of our loss. g Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor of English at UWA. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

15

Literary Studies

The Bard in East Asia

assumed to possess cultural ownership of Shakespeare, as well as of importing the bard as an emblem of Western modernity to Exploring the world of non-anglophone Shakespeare viewers within Asia. Asian Shakespeares, for Joubin, inevitably raise questions over the impact that a global modernity has had Brandon Chua on local cultures; the terms that enable and constrain intercultural exchange; and the norms that govern how Asia is represented on an anglicised world stage.

Of the intimidatingly long list of productions that Joubin cites, only a handful of adaptations are selected for extended analysis. Joubin’s tour of Asian Shakespeares opens in Japan, which Joubin regards as the first major Shakespearean site in East Asia, Shakespeare and East Asia with the Western canon having circulated among Japanese and

by Alexa Alice Joubin foreign students from Korea and China since the early twentieth Oxford University Press century. The first chapter surveys the Shakespearean adaptations £16.99 pb, 272 pp of Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Ninagawa, paying close attention hakespeare and East Asia is one of the latest titles released to their versions of Macbeth. Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood should in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series. Edited by Stanley be familiar to most intermediate students of Shakespeare, and Wells and Peter Holland, the Oxford University Press se- Joubin gives a compelling description of it, through a close ries is pitched at the elusive general reader who is seeking a prim- comparison with Ninagawa’s much-toured stage production er on one of the many topics proliferating within the bustling of Macbeth. Joubin’s comparative reading foregrounds the ways industry of Shakespeare studies. Written by one of the direc- in which Shakespeare comes to serve as a catalyst for postwar tors of the MIT Global Shakespeares Archive, this book invites Japanese directors to revive certain local and traditional performreaders to think about the significance ance practices for a modern audience far of Shakespeare’s continuing influence removed from these theatrical histories. on cultural production in the Far East, A second chapter deals with how Shakeand how Asian adaptations of his corpus speare is used to negotiate national and participate in creating a contested image personal identities in the Sinosphere, of Asia for audiences both in the region and features a compelling account and in the anglophone West. Assembling of Anthony Chan’s One Husband Too a varied body of cinematic and theatrical Many, a film from pre-handover Hong reworkings of Shakespeare from counKong’s golden age of slapstick comedy, tries like Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, about a local director’s quixotic attempts Hong Kong, and Singapore, Joubin tells to stage Romeo and Juliet in the contesta story about Asian Shakespeares that is ed spaces of the British colony. Another also a story about how a particular region chapter dwells on Korean cinema’s has negotiated the imperatives of globaliblending of theatrical traditions with sation and the tacit anglicising effects of elements from a youth-dominated mass global culture. culture, including a fascinating account Joubin deliberately avoids a narrow of how gender norms are negotiated focus on a particular national tradition or through this blend in Lee Joon-ik’s a single language, sacrificing the cohesHamletian The King and the Clown. The iveness that a study of, say, Japanese Shakefinal chapter deals with multilingualism Production of Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood speares, would have provided. Instead, (Kumonosu-jō), 1956. (Wikimedia Commons) in Asian diasporas and the elevation of Joubin proposes a comparative regional English as a marker of progressive moapproach, assembling a varied body of works from multiple dernity, with a reading of Chee Kong Cheah’s film Chicken Rice locales, cultures, and languages. Joubin’s approach does risk a War, which retells the story of the clash between the Capulets complacent assumption of continuity and correspondence be- and the Montagues as one between an anglophone modernity tween the three dominant core cultures of East Asia. As Joubin and various non-English linguistic identities in multi-ethnic herself acknowledges, the idea of the region as inherently global Singapore. and intercultural could be seen as an uncritical endorsement of an The book contains many more accounts of productions ‘Asian century’ that reduces the region to the interests of finance not mentioned here, although this reader did wish for a more markets. Joubin’s central premise, however, that disparate Asian detailed justification of what texts were included. A study like this adaptations of Shakespeare share common ground in that they will inevitably have to make exclusions, but the terms on which all stage collective anxieties around processes of globalisation, is they are made could be further elaborated, especially given this a compelling one. It brings cohesion to her analyses of a varied book’s potential conferring of new life on these productions in body of films and theatre productions that bear the dual burden the markets of tertiary study. The inclusion of Singapore within of representing Asia back to an anglophone audience frequently ‘East Asia’, for instance, risks taking the city-state’s belonging

S

16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

in the Sinophone world for granted and downplaying its contested efforts in establishing a national identity inclusive of its sizeable non-Chinese minorities. The exclusion of other SouthEast Asian Shakespeares (though Chicken Rice War’s director was born in Penang), especially given high-profile productions like Shakespeare Must Die from Thailand and Sintang Dalisay (a Filipino reimagining of Romeo and Juliet in a Muslim community), misses the opportunity to critique claims of Singapore’s exemplary representative status in South East Asia made on its behalf by the interests of global financial services. A few mistakes need correction: Otway’s Venice Preserved dates from 1682, not 1796, which is the publication date of a much later print edition, and the lead character Audrey in Chicken Rice War is played by May Yee Lum, rather than May Yee Lam.

Joubin ultimately provides a compelling initiation for those seeking a journey into the world of non-anglophone Shakespeares. Asia, where ongoing political, cultural, and economic contestations continue to reshape definitions of the global, will no doubt continue to use Shakespeare to express new self-images to its inhabitants and the rest of the world. The forms of cultural diplomacy between Asia and the rest of the world that the Bard both enables and constrains should be the topic of further study, for which Alexa Alice Joubin provides an accessible entry. g Brandon Chua, a PhD from the University of Melbourne, teaches in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include eighteenth-century drama and Shakespearean adaptations. ❖

Literary Studies

‘This long disease, my life’ A deep dive into the archives Robert Phiddian

Alexander Pope in the Making

by Joseph Hone

I

Oxford University Press £60 hb, 234 pp

f you are looking for the perfect command of voice, Alexander Pope is your poet. It is not just desiccated eighteenthcentury rationalists who say this, my Keats-scholar friend Will Christie thinks so too. This is despite the fact that there is zero negative capability in Pope, ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. His ironies are precise riddles to be sprung, his judgements instant aphorisms. Pope writes exactly what he means, and it lands exactly on target.

Take Pope’s former friend, Joseph Addison. He may have transformed the literary essay in English with the Spectator ; he may have risen from relative obscurity to be secretary of state under George I; he may have ruled literary London for two decades. All this is as chaff before one of Pope’s most clinical couplets: ‘Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer’ (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot). It has been hopeless triage for Addison’s reputation ever since. Perhaps one could admire a proper villain, but so sneaking an Iago can never recover. Any basic primer in poetry will tell you never to repeat a word where you might vary it, but Pope’s ‘leer, sneer, sneer’ riff defies that rule with lethal force. He claims earlier in Arbuthnot, his autobiographical epistle of 1735, that he cannot help it: Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

Dipt me in ink, my parents’ or my own?

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.

Poor Alexander, cursed with the original sin (‘my parents’ or my own’) of genius in poetry! Even as a baby, he ‘lisp’d in numbers’. It would be ridiculous vanity if he could not demonstrate its truth in the poise and energy of every line. When Grace Kelly avers in High Society, ‘I’m sensational, everybody says so’, it only works because she palpably is. Thus also for Pope. He was subject to various stigmas – a Catholic born in the year of the Glorious Revolution (1688), with his tiny frame and tubercular spine held up by prostheses throughout ‘this long disease, my life’. In poetry he could demonstrate his vigour as one fated to be a literary Achilles, dipped in ink rather than the Styx, by a muse mother rather than Thetis. Only supreme performance vindicates such vanity, and you are only ever as good as your next couplet, but Pope was very, very good.

He wrote nothing serious except in heroic couplets. That looks like a restriction until you experience the tonal range of what Pope can do with those twenty or so syllables. We’ve seen the easy, personal tone in Arbuthnot, capable of being tinged with venom – this was his Horatian voice. From there you can go up to the full Wagnerian symphony and choir of the Dunciad ’s conclusion: Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All.

or to the pastoral serenity of Windsor Forest: Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain, Here earth and water seem to strive again, Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d, But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d.

Then there is the orientalist parody in Belinda’s powder room in the Rape of the Lock: AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

17

This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.

The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, Transform’d to Combs, the speckled, and the white.

Here files of Pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.

(Rape of the Lock, I, 133–38)

There is a prize for any first-time reader who saw ivory and tortoise-shell combs immediately, rather than some bizarre tortophant out of a bestiary. And you can bet your life that rows and doux were a perfect rhyme as they spoke it in the days of Queen Anne.

Pope writes exactly what he means, and it lands exactly on target Pope only wrote verse for the page, and assures us that ‘The Play’rs and I are, luckily, no friends’ (Arbuthnot, 60), but he could also catch theatrical dialogue as surely as Congreve or Wycherley. In his Epilogue to the Satires (1738), where he explores the motivations of a satirist, he has this glittering exchange between himself (P) and a straight-man friend (F) about who is fair game for naming: P. The pois’ning Dame – F. You mean – P. I don’t. F. You do.

P. See, now I keep the Secret, and not you!

The bribing Stateman – F. Hold, too high you go.

P. The brib’d Elector – F. There you stoop too low.

P. I fain would please you, if I knew with what; Tell me, which Knave is lawful Game, which not?

One wonders where a former attorney-general or a Victoria Cross winner might fit in this bickering calculus today. Too high or too low?

The sharp-eyed reader will no doubt be wondering why this so-called review is yet to mention the book it is supposed to be about. The problem is that Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making is a work of scholarship and, as such, fails to give a living reason why general poetry readers might seek to interest themselves in Pope as a writer. It is a very good work of scholarship that sets out to paint a highly political version of the young Pope’s formation as a covert or cultural Jacobite in the time of Queen Anne, before he became better known as a Hanoverian satirist.

Hone’s promise is to investigate ‘Pope’s early engagement and collaboration with a group of largely forgotten but unexpectedly subversive poets’. He gets there by performing a deep dive into the archives and it is fascinating enough, if you already have a deep and scholarly interest in Pope’s life and literary reputation.

If you are not immersed in the academic criticism of eighteenth-century poetry and culture but remain interested in Pope, then there are two things worth knowing about Hone’s findings.

The interesting thing is that early modern poetry (approximately 1550–1750) has been reimagined such that the circulation of manuscript within coteries is just as important as poems’ appearance in print before some sort of proto-public. The late, 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

great Harold Love at Monash was one of the main pioneers of this approach, working on writing from the last decades of the seventeenth century. Hone now adds the young Pope (before his translation of Homer established him both financially and as the dominant English poet) to this world of manuscript circulation, where meaning depended on who was reading which copies of poems and in what contexts. Consequently, his early pastoral poem Windsor Forest (1713) belongs more to a Catholic and Stuart-loyalist community rather than to the whole, mostly Protestant, nation of Britain.

The dull thing is Hone’s indulgence in the eighteenth-century scholars’ version of the culture wars, the Jacobite question. Should the house of Hanover rule to maintain the Protestant Succession, as Whigs maintained? Or should there be a return to the true Stuart line, as Tories wished?

Hone thinks Pope was really more of a Jacobite than late twentieth-century scholars like Reuben A. Brower, Maynard Mack, and even Pat Rogers were willing to imagine. While I am largely convinced on the facts as led, it’s a debate only a scholar could love. It also shows the obsessive reach of twenty-first-century politicisation. The Jacobite alternative was a live question in 1714 as Queen Anne was ailing, and it remains a significant set of issues for British political history. I just fear that we are universalising our current obsession with cultural politics when we make it the main game for literary and cultural history Microanalysis of Pope’s manuscripts and their paths of circulation allows for better reading of these historically distant but alluring poems. By contrast, the obsessive attempt to X-ray poems for political affiliations that speak to the eternal battle between conservatives and progressives is tedious. You don’t need to diagnose Pope as a Jacobite to notice that he has a lot of broadly conservative loyalties and only a handful of progressive ‘get out of jail free’ cards for the modern reader. Hone takes a couple of those cards away; if you think to read Pope for affirmation of good political morality, then look elsewhere. If, however, you care for the music of English poetry or the snap of ironic wit, and don’t mind being challenged to disagree with a supremely confident rhetorician, read on.

By 1738, Pope was enraged by Sir Robert Walpole’s Britain as a cultural, political, and economic entity. So he proclaimed the need to write quickly in these riddling couplets: Vice with such Giant strides comes on amain, Invention strives to be before in vain; Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong, Some rising Genius sins up to my Song.

(Epilogue to the Satires, 6–9)

Whatever a satirist presents as caricature and exaggeration soon becomes reportage. The riddle is satisfying to spring, and the irony in ‘rising Genius’ glitters. Who cares whether Pope was reactionary enough to toast the king over the water when he could come up with something that is still so handy to think and feel with in the age of Robodebt? g Robert Phiddian, Professor of English at Flinders University, is especially interested in political satire, parody, and humour.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

19

Essays

Closer

Chaos and coming of age Kate Crowcroft

The First Time I Thought I Was Dying

by Sarah Walker

I

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 224 pp

n The First Time I Thought I Was Dying, the photographer– artist Sarah Walker brings into focus ideas about anxiety, control, bodily functions, and the uses of breached boundaries. The essays of this book are personal, and readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere.

They document rites of passage: the first time Walker viewed her vulva in a hand-mirror, pulling the wet lips apart to see them stretch. The first time she held a cock, lithe and twitching. Žižek makes a cameo on shame and its antithesis in comedy. Blistex, Hubba Bubba, and the beep test (used to quantify fitness in children and the military) are pinpoints in the vibrant constellations of her coming-of-age memories. These parts of her story thrum, and nuanced moments of growth and individuation follow. Her mother’s stern, anatomical deep-dives into sexual education: ‘This is the closest that two people can get to each other.’ And the voice in Walker’s head: Surely there must be closer.

The collection opens with the lies of the camera and the filtered images that form the mainstay of social media content.

Walker takes a position as a professional photographer and speaks to the ethics of her work in a digital ecosystem that seeks to dissolve tensions between the real and the fantastical. She notes the vanishing point of a wrinkle; the partnered men who see her self-portraits and message her to assess her willingness; how Stalin edited out party members. ‘To control the image is to control history.’ An eating disorder serves an early agenda: ‘the world might be chaos … but I would run a tight ship’. At times, Walker slips from view inside her own lens: ‘Every drug story is boring’; ‘The weight dropped etc etc. Plateaued etc etc.

I doubled down etc etc. You know this story. You’ve heard it before.’ Fortunately, these obfuscations are rare.

The difficulty of the subject matter speaks to the book’s core thematic: abject unravelling and the lessons held therein. The essays endorse a Rilkean ‘let everything happen to you’ mode of being in the world. Early forays into gym membership, ‘wandering like a displaced ghost between the bewildering machines’, make way for the university years, where she ‘gorged on sex and food with the fervour of the starved’.

The forms of beauty celebrated here are unconventional, and the book is remarkable for that. Walker sees the ostensibly ugly anew. This is part of the methodology that underpins her work as a practising artist: the angles shift flexibly, and while they re20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

main anchored in the quotidian, the takes are different. Having squeezed a pimple, its ‘taunting white nub on the swollen red skin, creamy and perfect, like a glazed donut’, she emerges from the bathroom. Her father’s jovial asides offset the lyric mood as from the wings: ‘Was it a mirror splatterer?’ A lovely list of activities usually considered revolting are given air-time in the service of disarming shame. These include getting hair out of a shower drain, farting in enclosed spaces and enjoying the smell, and closely inspecting different bodily fluids. ‘Where there is no frankness, there is danger.’ Well, quite.

Readers of confessional non-fiction will delight in their tone: equal parts jocose and sincere A diagnosis of generalised anxiety disorder anchors the overarching ‘sense of impending doom’ – a clinical metric – that appears in many of Walker’s reflections, particularly around thresholds or boundary points (the West Gate Bridge looms large). Statistics appear and serve to showcase and place Walker’s struggle within a broader framework: one in ten Australians take anti-depressants daily, ‘one of the highest rates in the world’. A self-realisation is offered, one that she has ignored her entire life: ‘I’m scared, all the time. Of everything and nothing.’ The beep test of early years runs through the piece as metaphor: the quantification of frantic efforts in a capitalist society; the heart itself on the line.

The essay ‘Inside Out’ addresses self-harming behaviour and its potential psychological groundings. Walker tries it out ‘in my apartment in Prahran … to understand the appeal’. This upmarket exercise in experiential empathy foregrounds her place at the hospital frontline for her friend, where Walker is transfixed by the viscous flesh spilling out of its skin envelope. ‘I made her show me.’ The desire to see is unyielding. ‘I was almost disappointed when the ED doctor sewed it up.’ This essay sets out to test the relationships between agency and responsibility, and it documents the need to find alternative modes for self-definition. She chronicles research into self-harming behaviour that speaks to both sides of the equation: its risks, and the felt rewards for those who choose to open their skin. Her offerings are placed without judgement. For Walker, scars are ultimately development worksites, testaments to the healing and resilience of body and mind.

In her movements between the macro and micro of the subject matter, Walker holds the camera and turns the lens one final time. The essay ‘Contested Breath’ (first published in ABR in June–July 2020) closes the book and depicts the unexpected death of her mother against the backdrop of an unfolding pandemic. The strangeness that attends a loved one’s departure from life (digital residues; watching a body burn) places a poignant resolution on the collection’s overarching concern: our inability to control our bodies or the course of things, and the uneasy beauty of that final truth. g Kate Crowcroft is a writer, cultural historian, and poet. She received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge where she won numerous awards for criticism and poetry.

True Crime

The fertile fact

An absorbing history in the round Alecia Simmonds

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A true story of sex, crime and the meaning of justice

by Julia Laite

M

Profile Books $34.99 hb, 424 pp

using upon the art of biography, Virginia Woolf bemoaned the constraints that facts imposed on imagination. It is the most ‘restricted’ of all arts, she wrote, limited by ‘friends, letters and documents’. Yet these very restrictions can inspire creativity. Good biographers don’t just accumulate facts; they give us, in Woolf ’s words, ‘the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders’. Biography, done well, Woolf concluded, does ‘more to stimulate the imagination than any poet or novelist save the greatest’. By this definition, Julia Laite is indeed a superb biographer.

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey is history at its most rigorous and imaginative. Laite provides an insightful account of the regulation of sex trafficking in the early twentieth century and an enthralling encounter with some of the people involved in one of its more salacious episodes. Laite has described her book as a ‘polyphonic history’ or ‘history in the round’. Each chapter provides the life story of a character involved in Lydia Harvey’s case, moving from Lydia, the victim of trafficking, to the police officer, the journalist, the social worker, the two traffickers, and, finally, Lydia’s family. None of these characters left behind any diaries or letters, yet Laite manages to create a fertile inner world for each person, resulting in a history book that often reads more like a novel, and that challenges the clichés of villains, victims, and heroic rescuers that dominate writing on sex trafficking.

The book begins with sixteen-year-old Lydia as she moves from her home in Oamaru in New Zealand to Wellington, to the glittering streets of Buenos Aires, to the grime of London.

This is not, however, a story of a cosmopolitan adventuress in the age of steam, but an examination of what mobility looks like for someone whose movements are compelled by poverty, trickery, state coercion, and a woman’s audacity to dream of something better. Like so many other poor women in regional areas at this time, Lydia first moved to the city to work as a domestic servant, and then as a shop assistant in a photography studio. While living in a boarding house, Lydia met Italian migrant Antonio Carvelli, a man of fascinating manners and a waxed, twirled moustache, who encouraged her to accompany him to Buenos Aires to work in the city’s burgeoning sex trade. On her arrival, Lydia inhabited a nightly world of pawing men, rundown apartments, police raids, and disease. When she contracted gonorrhoea, a decision was made by her traffickers to leave Argentina for London. Chapter One ends with Lydia – ill, emaciated, unwashed, and unpaid

– meeting a police officer in Piccadilly who presents her with an image of Carvelli. By confessing that she knew him, Lydia triggered the series of events – police reports, an appearance as a star witness at a trafficking trial in the Old Bailey, and the rescue efforts of social workers – that led to Laite’s finding her record in the Metropolitan Police files.

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey is history at its most rigorous and imaginative It would have been easy for Lydia’s file to have been incorporated into a history of sex trafficking in the early twentieth century, a period when modern, international conceptions of trafficking were being codified in law. In different hands, Lydia might have suffered yet another disappearance, this time a historiographic vanishing into a sweeping social history. I have no doubt that such a book would have been worthwhile. Like the book that Laite ended up writing, it would have explored the relationship between women’s licit and illicit labour – how an unliveable wage and physically arduous conditions fed into women’s decisions to enter sex work. Lydia might have been a small case study of the gendered and racialised discourses that circulated around the anti-trafficking movement (victims must be white, passive, and sexually innocent, and predators must be non-Anglo-Saxon). Or Lydia’s story could have demonstrated how a problem that was framed in the press as being about women’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation was enshrined in law as a problem of crime, the regulation of mobile labour and policing of women’s sexuality at national borders. As I write this, I find myself alternating between ‘was’ and ‘is’ because most of what this history illuminates continues to be a problem today.

What is exceptional about this book is that these general themes are explored through the people’s actual experiences. Laite moves deftly between internal and external conditions. How does Laite give her historical actors psychological complexity while staying true to the historical record? ‘In the places where I cannot know or even glimpse what happened or why,’ Laite tells us at the beginning of the book, ‘I have carefully deployed the historian’s tool of “maybe”, “perhaps” and “must have”.’ A good example of this is the moment when Lydia arrives in Uruguay: How did Lydia Harvey feel as she walked down the gangplank onto that foreign shore? Was her sense of adventure running high, her heart racing with excitement? Or had the gravity of what she’d done begun to set in, amid the swirl of strange faces and unknown languages in Montevideo’s old and overcrowded port? ... Chorus girls looked for theatre managers’ representatives, farmhands sought out the men that the ranger had sent, domestic servants scanned the crowd nervously for their new mistresses.

Here, the disciplined use of historical imagination allows us both to see and feel the world as Lydia might have, and to place Lydia within wider historical processes. Through serial questioning, Lydia is given affect and emotion. Does her heart race with excitement or, alternatively, thud with dread? Seeing the world through Lydia’s eyes also gives us a double vision of history – AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

21

ve t

alia

e taken a ‘ja, we can’ dent of foreign policy, force participation ogress in these areas asing prosperity and

ANDRE W SCOT T and ROD CAMPBELL

at

E di t e d b y

n, Finland, Denmark, ey provide to overcome ot Australian and Nordic n; roaches to help Australia h a nmentally responsible timism, new ideas and a

NORDIC E DG E

‘Encourage your local MP to read it’ FIONA STANLEY

N O R D I C E DG E

ning taxes. Progress a ave become subject to of culture wars, and have e any progress without

THE

THE

N O R D I C E DG E

e

with him in Buenos Aires. Historical imagination here extends to the senses – silk stockings feel like butter, and knee-high boots sparkle with polish – and this sensuous enchantment is as much a reason why Lydia boarded the steamer with her traffickers as the absence of any alternative decently paid work available to women.

Inspired by scholarship from the ‘new materialism’, Laite's focus on the vibrancy of objects upsets the subject/object dichotomy at the heart of Enlightenment thought and shows the power that things have over us. But Laite does not stop there, reconciling What is exceptional about this book is that this approach with the old materialism of Marxist analysis.

A sexed labour market, low wages for migrants, or 68-hour weeks these general themes are explored through for domestic servants mean that this early twentieth-century the people’s actual experiences world of abundance was beyond the reach of the poor. It is an analysis that helps to make sense of the decisions made by both The characters also come to life through an attention to the people who trafficked and the victims of trafficking. your local MP to read it’ FIONA STANLEYHistorians, for too long, have only permitted the bourgeoisie material culture.‘Encourage Laite takes seriously the things that things say.

Alive during the transition from a nineteenth-century society of to have inner lives – a diary and personal correspondence have producers to a twentieth-century society of consumers, Laite’s been prerequisites for interiority. Yet as Laite demonstrates, characters use the new world of commodities for self-fashioning, there are other ways of doing history: restrained speculation, to distinguish themselves from the crowd. As Warren Susman thick description, a focus on material culture. They offer voice has argued, this new version of subjectivity or self was unmoored and agency to those usually defined by mute passivity. Weaving from nineteenth-century notions of 'character' – with its empha- together micro- and macro-history, as well as local, national, and sis on obedience to moral and social norms – and aimed instead global forces, Julia Laite’s book is, in Virginia Woolf ’s words, a masterwork of the ‘creative fact’. g for self-gratification and self-fulfilment through consumption.

‘What must it have felt like to slip on the clothing they had given her, and to feel the soft, light fabric of crêpe de Chine or chiffon Alecia Simmonds is a Senior Lecturer in Law at UTS and the against a skin that was used to wool and cotton?’ Laite asks in a author of Wild Man (Affirm Press, 2015). Her next book, Courtscene where Carvelli is attempting to entice Lydia away to work ing: A history of love and law in Australia, will be published in 2022.

THE

s

chorus girls, farmhands, and domestic servants were part of the clamour of the docks, but they were also a cadre of exploited migrant labour. Lydia was saved because sex trafficking, with its gendered messages about the dangers of women leaving their sphere and the need for border control, was an easy crime for early twentieth-century society to rally around. But in this scene we have all the other forms of migrant abuse that were and still are socially sanctioned.

NORDIC E DG E

THE

Policy Possibilities for Australia ANDRE W S COT T and ROD CAMPBELL

An authoritative study of An illuminating glimpse How the Nordic approach pre-colonial Australia that can shape Australia's future into the scientific response dismantles and reframes to the COVID-19 for the better popular narratives of First pandemic from Australia's Edited by ralia Institute. An ANDREW SCOTT & Nations land management most prominent 'insider' 25 ANDRE W SCOT T and ROD CAMPBELL ch focuses on mining, ROD CAMPBELL and food production g Basin.

Deakin University, c Policy Centre and 762-5 Positive Policy Example of

E di t e d b y

5/5/21 1:38 pm

AVAILABLE NOW

Policy Possibilities for Australia

22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

ISBN 978-0-522-87762-5

CHRISTINE BALL

PETER DOHERTY

noff; Tom Swann; Margot PETER SUTTON & Fleming; Richie Merzian; KERYN WALSHE and Anna Eriksson, with a

’s policy direction that PUBLISHING

The historical biography of Joseph Clover and the invention of anaesthesia

Edited by

mup.com.au

Architecture

Robin Boyd as trampoline Revisiting The Australian Ugliness Jim Davidson

After The Australian Ugliness edited by Naomi Stead et al.

R

Thames & Hudson $90 hb, 128 pp

was a preference for veneer, for obscuring honest materials. Much was only skin-deep. ‘This is a country,’ wrote Boyd tellingly, ‘of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.’

Australians seemed to have a timidity about fully living here, something which good design and appropriate architecture could help to change. Boyd was not implacably anti-suburban as such: for some years he ran The Age Small Homes Service. There his aim was a very modernist one: providing Australians with a simple, direct way of building ‘true to structure and form without ornament’, displaying ‘modest, well-designed spaces free of visual and conceptual clutter’.

How do the judgements of the 1960 text stand up today? To determine this, the four editors – Naomi Stead, Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin, and Megan Patty – have dished up a sumptuous banquet of postmodernity. Each chapter starts with a quote from Boyd (often illustrated by Oslo Davis) and is separated from the others by a succession of contemporary photographs by David Wadelton, showing how the targets of Boyd’s concerns have gone on reproducing themselves. The book, the editors explain, ‘seeks to provide new perspectives on an old idea, and the multiplicity

obin Boyd was that rare thing, an architect more famous for a book than for his buildings.

The Australian Ugliness, first published in 1960, was widely read when it appeared, and for quite some time after – the Penguin editions alone sold nearly 100,000 copies. It was entertaining, satirical, and, with its unwavering judgements, played to the then prevailing yearning for sophistication. Together with Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), it can be seen as a seminal critique of Australia in the 1960s, as the country was groping towards a fuller nationhood. The twenty or so contributors to the present book, After The Australian Ugliness (the ‘After’ is underlined on the front cover), variously assess Boyd’s classic text and take it as a point of departure.

As is well known, Robin Boyd came from a distinguished family. Arthur Boyd, the most famous of a number of notable painters and potters, was a cousin; the novelist Martin Boyd an uncle. The latter’s novels (eclipsed now) once enjoyed a considerable following, both here and abroad. They were often concerned with tracing the dilemma of upper-class Australians who never felt quite at home either in England or Australia. So Robin Boyd’s background and instincts were notably patrician, while his focus – after exposure to America and meetings with celebrated architects – was much more local.

‘Austerica’ is what Boyd saw when he returned. The aspiration was to American modernity, but a two-year lag in transmission The Black Dolphin Motel, Merimbula, New South Wales, designed by Robin Boyd, 1961 (photograph by was customary and seemed just about right.

Mark Strizic. Copyright the estate of Mark Strizic, Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria) Boyd dismissed Surfers Paradise as ‘a poor man’s Miami’. More ubiquitous was a soulless suburbia, nicely characterised here by Naomi Stead as ‘a beige and heterogeneity of its voices, its point of view, is intentionally purgatory’. No wonder: Boyd pointed to the contempt in which in contrast with the original’. ‘Monumental’, they declare it; ‘hard indigenous vegetation was held, there being an almost universal to assimilate’. desire to eradicate it domestically – ‘a psychopathic pioneering After The Australian Ugliness is very much of our time – the attitude to the landscape’, he termed it. In its place was the tri- opening piece is by an Indigenous woman, Alison Page. A dozen umphalism of ‘featurism’, the singling out of particular aspects other women are among the contributors, with seven men (one of a building to make a greater impact. At the same time, there openly gay). They are drawn largely from universities, though AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

23

Society not broadly, and public galleries. There seem to be no practising architects, but there are a number of writers and artists. Their respective approaches vary enormously, from the erudition of Harriet Edquist and the fluency of Peter McNeil (writing about Boyd and fashion), to an artist’s manifesto, and a not particularly illuminating email conversation which seems to be about resisting reading Boyd.

Creative ways to make trouble A former senator’s new activism Dominic Kelly

Robin Boyd was that rare thing, an architect more famous for a book than for his buildings Generally, the perspectives they bring are sharp and informative. In many respects, Robin Boyd’s book is obsolete. Indeed, the word ‘ugly’ itself has largely been absent from professional planning literature for the past half century. Meanwhile, Eugenia Lim explains that she wants her work as an artist to ‘reflect back a vision of this country that is cacophonous, plural and intersectional – the ugly and the beautiful in coexistence, without hierarchy’.

This is a world away from Boyd’s conception of an ordered world, epitomised in the Black Dolphin Motel he designed for Merimbula. That double-storey building, in its eagerness to avoid the vulgar, is a marriage of frontier-colonial and modernism: the clientele would probably have preferred something more glitzy.

There have been many changes since Boyd wrote. The overhanging wires he railed against are these days (in new suburbs) often placed underground, and there has been a greater appreciation of indigenous flora (partly with the rise of landscape gardening). But housing estates increasingly look the same, as larger dwellings have come to occupy nearly all of their suburban block. Meanwhile, cars have taken over the streets where children once played. (In 1971, fifty-seven per cent of children in New South Wales walked to school; that figure has been more than halved since.) And Boyd’s diagnosis of ‘arborophobia’ (hatred of indigenous trees) can seem tepid compared with the flattening of the landscape that now regularly occurs around supermarkets and the like to provide parking spaces. As Boyd remarked, ‘there is nothing stagnant about ugliness’.

The point made throughout the collection is that ‘ugliness’ is not simply an aesthetic question. In fairness, nor was it for Boyd: good design, instead of being seen as surplus to requirements, should be regarded as enabling, subtly shaping people’s lives for the better. But today the broader issues are far more urgent, and the contributors frequently point to them. Architecturally, there is the appalling shoddiness apparent now in the construction of many residential towers, while questions of public housing and the runaway housing market become ever more pressing, given growing economic inequality and social polarisation. Then there are more fundamental challenges. Australia is due for a reset, if our institutions are to fully respond to the multicultural society we have become. But climate change is first on the list, not only because of its overwhelming importance. Increasingly, it will call for imaginative architectural responses. g Jim Davidson’s book Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland will appear in 2022.

24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Full Circle: A search for the world that comes next

by Scott Ludlam

A

Black Inc. $34.99 pb, 362 pp

mid the daily dramas and momentous impact of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it’s easy to forget that, just four years ago, Australia was enduring a very different – and much less serious – kind of political crisis. In July 2017, the Australian Greens’ Scott Ludlam resigned from the Senate, having been advised that his failure to renounce his long-dormant New Zealand citizenship meant that he was a dual citizen, and in breach of section 44 of the Constitution. This kicked off a farcical procession of resignations, High Court referrals, by-elections, and countbacks. This ultimately resulted in fifteen MHRs and senators from across the political spectrum being ruled ineligible to sit in the federal parliament.

Of this cohort, Ludlam was among the four who chose not to recontest his seat, deciding in the days following his resignation that nine years in the Senate had worn him down more than enough, and that ‘there are many other creative ways to make trouble’. One way he has attempted to continue his activism is through his writing, with essays and commentaries in such publications as The Monthly, the Guardian, and Crikey. Engaging with big ideas in playful yet intellectually serious ways, Ludlam has shown himself to be an impressive writer and thinker. These qualities are now also on display in his long-form début, Full Circle: A search for the world that comes next.

It would have been easy for Ludlam to write a conventional political memoir, full of slightly elevated gossip and name-dropping of parliamentary colleagues either admired or detested. These books tend to dominate the headlines for a few days, perhaps a week if they’re especially juicy, sell a few thousand extra copies as a result, and then drift off to their inevitable resting places: the overburdened shelves of the nation’s op shops. Ludlam, in seeming recognition of the worthlessness of such memoirs, has rejected the form. Apart from a brief lament about the shameful vote to repeal the carbon tax in 2014, there is little reminiscing about his time in parliament. What Ludlam has chosen to write is far more ambitious, although his ambition at times detracts from the book’s literary qualities. There is simply too much going on in Full Circle for it to form a cohesive whole.

The giveaway is in the structure. The book is made up of seventy-six short vignettes, most of them three to four pages long.

They cover an enormous array of topics and themes, some more successfully than others. Many have the unfortunate feel of unmediated blog posts rather than carefully constructed book chapters.

Ludlam is most engaging when he speaks from direct experience, whether about his travels around the world or his many years of riding the highs and lows of activism – the euphoria of unlikely victories against the might of the financial and political establishment, as well as the deflating meetings at which he is the only person to turn up. Less interesting are his diversions into a variety of systems and theories that he thinks might help explain the predicaments we find ourselves in. Ludlam also sprinkles throughout the book his retelling of the deep geological history of Earth, from its formation 4.5 billion years ago to the present.

Here he seems to be embracing his inner nerd, but there is little value for readers not expecting a work of popular science. It adds nothing to the general narrative, and contributes to the feeling that the book drags on for about one hundred pages too many.

Engaging with big ideas in playful yet intellectually serious ways, Ludlam has shown himself to be an impressive writer and thinker Full Circle begins with Ludlam facing the brunt of the 2019–20 bushfire crisis from his home on the south coast of New South Wales. He seethes with anger as he describes the political bastardry that has led us to this point. ‘A bloc of transnational resource sector investors,’ he writes, ‘control the ministerial wing of parliament and hold absolute majorities in both chambers. One of our major political parties is wholly owned, the other is divided, traumatised and compliant.’ Ludlam returns to the horrific scenes of the bushfires throughout the book, an effective device that keeps reminding the reader that the climate crisis is playing out just as predicted, despite what the deniers keep trying to tell us. Extremes are becoming commonplace. ‘These are climate fires, with the fingerprints of the resources sector all over them.’

When Prime Minister Scott Morrison finally comes to the realisation that his tone-deaf response to the bushfire crisis is a threat to his prime ministership, his response is to pump out some political advertising and seek donations to … the Liberal Party.

‘Somewhere in my back-brain, a fuse blows,’ writes Ludlam. ‘I’ve never been this angry in my whole life.’ But he doesn’t let this justified contempt for Morrison distract him from the bigger picture: the fact that resources industry plutocrats have gamed our politics, with their minions moving seamlessly between corporate, public service, lobbying, and media roles. As venal as the prime minister is, ‘while we’re watching him, mocking him with spicy memes on social media, we’ve taken our eyes off the people who wrote the legislation he just introduced into the House of Representatives’.

The most enjoyable and enlightening chapters of Full Circle

are those in which Ludlam relates stories from his extensive travels abroad. No less than fifteen visits are referred to: Lebanon, Mongolia, India, Brazil, Ghana, South Africa, France, the United Kingdom, Israel–Palestine, Bangladesh, Japan, the United States, Germany, Kenya, and Papua New Guinea. Ludlam uses these trips to effectively contextualise Australia’s political problems, especially with regard to resources. His discussion of Mongolia, which went through an enormous expansion of its mining sector following the collapse of the Soviet Union, is particularly striking. ‘No prime minister has served a full term in Mongolia since 2004,’ he writes. ‘Mining investors publicly destroyed a government over a mining tax, then took ownership of both major political parties.

A green insurgency simmers at the margins, its potential as yet unrealised. Rising temperatures and a bruising drought are reshaping landscapes and economies, silently pushing things towards a place of no return.’ Sound familiar?

We are good at self-obsession in Australia – one only has to step back and take a broader view of our handling of Covid-19 to see that. So it’s always useful to be reminded that the challenges we face are not unique, and that Australia is not a singularly flawed or stupid country, as many on the left would have us believe. But confronting the challenges will be impossible if we let the most parasitic and nihilistic elements in our society continue to hold sway. Like his former leader Bob Brown, Scott

Scott Ludlam ( Jean-Paul Horré)

Ludlam has a remarkable ability to offer hope amid the gloom.

His book is a call to arms for those who believe that the world cannot continue to function as it does now. g Dominic Kelly is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. He is the author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2019).

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

25

Society

Shifting currents

Finding our place on a watery planet Naama Grey-Smith

Where We Swim: Explorations of nature, travel and family

by Ingrid Horrocks

W

University of Queensland Press $32.99 pb, 224 pp

here We Swim takes the broad view on each component of its title: the ‘where’, the ‘we’, the ‘swim’. Wellingtonbased author Ingrid Horrocks explains that her original idea – to record a series of solo swims – was transformed when she realised such deliberate solitary excursions were ‘bracketed moments held deep within lives’ and that their contrivance ‘felt too close to the act of an explorer, or an old-school nature writer’.

Instead, Horrocks was drawn to an approach that ‘challenged narratives about travel (and life) as a great self-directed voyage out, an experiment in the discovery of the self ... Things turned out to be a lot messier.’ She embraced a less literal exploration of swimming, one where her many identities could find expression.

The result is engaging and layered.

The book opens and closes with swims spanning three years in Aotearoa New Zealand. Between them are visits to rivers, pools, and beaches around the globe, from the Peruvian Amazon jungle to the Sonoran Desert in the United States. Embedded within each story are the narrator’s layers of memory, as well as some luminous literary discussions. In addition to two short concluding pieces, the book features fifteen essays, thoughtfully and effectively arranged into six sections. Their shrewd arrangement supports the making of a collection whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Horrocks’s previous publications include a travel memoir, a book on women wanderers of the Romantic period, and an anthology about place. In Where We Swim, she explores mobility and emplacement with equal verve. She articulates a multiple belonging that reminded me of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ – global citizenship not as a substitute for local identity but as its complement.

Family relationships ground and shape Horrocks’s sense of her place in the world: we meet her partner and twin daughters, with whom she travels, her overseas brothers, whose divergent lives she visits, and her ageing parents and in-laws. But amid moments of joy, ecological concern looms. For Horrocks, ‘the feel of the planet was shifting, and along with it, my always provisional sense of what it means to be alive in the world, as a grown-up daughter, a sister, a partner, a mother, and human animal living alongside other animals’.

The essay ‘The Whale’ is a particularly meaningful exploration of the human relationship with the ‘non-human animal world’. It follows the arrival of a southern right whale in Wellington Harbour 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

during Matariki, the Māori New Year. For Horrocks, the whale’s visit raises questions about ‘ways to inhabit this place as Pākehā’ and the importance of recognising Indigenous perspectives.

Each essay comes with its own set of preoccupations, with the narrator gently but insistently unpacking the complexity of her experiences. In the Amazon, it is the exploitation of native animals for the benefit of tourists – an issue inseparable from the inequality of global wealth distribution: ‘high-wire ziplines and boat rides and caiman feedings [were] all carefully orchestrated to give the feeling of experiencing danger up close, while just a jolt away, out of sight, there was real danger, real loss’. In an Arizona hotel spa, under ‘their own piece of rented sky’, it is the disjuncture between how we live and how we ought to live. Horrocks contrasts the changes we know are necessary for a sustainable future with the inertia of our pre-programmed existence. Horrocks probes our reluctance to act. Why, despite our knowledge, haven’t we been changing? What will it take to make us change? In Perth, a visit to Rio Tinto Naturescape – a playground conceived, according to its website, in response to the question: ‘How can we expect children to care for something they have never experienced?’ – is juxtaposed with the Extinction Rebellion protest Horrocks’s family pass to get to the playground.

In Sussex, Horrocks excels in evoking a sense of interconnectedness through the spatio-temporal aspects of place-memory.

She draws on the writing of eighteenth-century poet and novelist Charlotte Smith, whose work is ‘not so different from twenty-first-century writing about place by writers like Robert Macfarlane and Kathleen Jamie’. Here, fossils of seashells on cliff tops tell ‘of a porousness between places and times and people, as well as between any moment in one’s life and any other’. For Smith, ultimately, ‘any place is at once local and global, defined not by its boundaries but by its links to elsewhere’.

With the climate crisis underscored in Where We Swim, and air travel a condition for four of its six sections, a topic I missed in its pages was flygskam (Swedish for ‘flight shame’). Experts cite air travel as the most carbon-intensive activity an individual can undertake, so a discussion of flying as a travel mode feels pertinent to a work that combines travel writing with nature writing. It is mentioned briefly in the final pages: ‘Every time I heard someone in Europe or North America announcing they will no longer fly so as to avoid the carbon emissions, I thought of the distance between here and there.’ Because the narrator is intelligent and thoughtful, her concern for the planet profound, and her powers of inquiry significant, this reader (who shares her global outlook and an intercontinental family) hoped for a fuller exploration. (Of course, Covid-19 has made it irrelevant, for now.

Horrocks observes: ‘It is seeming possible that the age of diasporic family connected by cheap ocean-crossing travels may be over.’)

Horrocks’s generous, searching narration makes for excellent company over the course of two hundred pages. By incorporating the ‘messier’ lives within which her swimming takes place, she has created in Where We Swim a work of wondrous depth, as she dives ‘out into the future of my life, of my children, and of this watery planet’. g Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle, Western Australia.

Politics

Impassioned and violent

A panoramic view of a largely misunderstood era Samuel Watts

The Age of Acrimony: How Americans fought to fix their democracy, 1865–1915

by Jon Grinspan

W

Bloomsbury $64.99 hb, 382 pp

illiam Darrah Kelley – a Republican congressman from Philadelphia – stood at the front of a stage in Mobile, Alabama, watching as a group of men pushed and shoved their way through the audience towards him.

It was May 1867, Radical Reconstruction was underway, and Southern cities like Mobile were just beginning a revolutionary expansion and contraction of racial equality and democracy.

The Reconstruction Acts, passed by Congress that year, granted formerly enslaved men the right to vote and to run for office in the former Confederate states. Northern Republicans streamed into cities across the South in 1867, speaking to both Black and white, to the inspired and hostile – registering Black voters and strengthening the already strong links between African Americans and the party.

Some four thousand Mobilians had come to the Old Courthouse steps that night to watch ‘Judge’ Kelley speak about civil rights and Reconstruction. Kelley stared down at the gang of men who had begun to taunt and heckle him. Kelley – thin, tall, and light on his feet – could stride across a stage and project his deep, grumbly voice in concert halls and open fields. Kelley’s skill on the stump was matched by his passion for data and facts that elevated his rhetoric and even impressed his enemies, some of the time. The approaching men were there to humiliate and frighten Kelley. They yelled, ‘Take him down! Put him down!’ to which Kelley, leaning over the makeshift stage, replied: ‘I tell you that you can not put me down … I am not afraid of being put down.’ Then the shooting started. Kelley dived behind the speaker’s table, as no fewer than sixty-five bullets were fired in his direction. Chaos ensued, the crowd scattered, and Kelley was rescued by two Black Mobilians, who quickly escorted him back to his hotel. Two men were killed, and many more injured in the shooting.

Jon Grinspan’s captivating new account of American politics in the mid to late nineteenth century is rich with examples like this that highlight the impassioned and violent business that was democracy in the post-Civil War era. Focusing on William Kelley and his daughter Florence Kelley, Grinspan traces what he identifies as a forgotten yet crucial political dynasty in American politics. Kelley, who came from nothing, worked his way up from apprenticing as a watchmaker when he was a child to making speeches as a young man and joining first the Democratic then the Republican party. He was independent to a fault, publicly attack-

ing what he saw as the Republicans’ increasing disregard for the working poor from the 1870s onwards, all the while campaigning for African American civil rights and women’s suffrage. Kelley was particularly devoted to Florence, fostering in her a passion for social justice that would stay with her for life. She would inherit her father’s intelligence and drive, studying at Cornell before leaving the United States to take up graduate studies at the University of Zurich, where she would plunge herself into revolutionary politics, corresponding often with Friedrich Engels. As Florence grew, her politics mellowed, yet she never stopped working. She became an active social reformer, the first female factory inspector, an anti-child labour activist, and a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

One of this book’s many strengths is its ability to recreate the loving and occasionally strained relationship between father and daughter from the letters they wrote to each other. This approach allows the reader to see the Kelleys and their advocacy in a less heroic and more complex light. For example, although Grinspan attributes the death of Reconstruction not to politicians but rather to the moral ambivalence of millions of white voters across the country, he highlights how Kelley betrayed Black Americans by giving up completely on the cause of Reconstruction less than a decade after he had defended it in Mobile.

The Age of Acrimony is not a family biography, but rather presents a panoramic view of a largely misunderstood era of American politics and public life. At the centre of this study, Grinspan places William and Florence Kelley – two close family members whose battles to improve American democracy would highlight a major shift in the nature of American politics and public life. While the political fever that captivated and inspired Americans for the two decades after the end of the Civil War would often lead to brutal violence, intimidation, partisanship, and corruption, it also meant mass voter participation, particularly among African Americans, poor whites, and recent immigrants.

Progressive-era reformists like Florence would push through reforms that undoubtedly made American democracy fairer, yet, Grinspan argues, they also suppressed participation – particularly among non-white and immigrant populations – replacing the power of the masses and the rollicking political campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s with the power of wealthy élites and an increasingly powerful executive branch.

Grinspan’s study is, to some extent, a thoughtful defence of a mass political culture that inspired many to believe they could remake American democracy through partisanship and parades – one that is often only considered in terms of the violence it inspired or its failure to realise the lofty goals of Reconstruction.

Grinspan is, however, unflinching in his portrayal of the ugliness of campaign politics in this era, when the nation was deeply divided and elections, as in 1876 or 1884, were decided by the smallest of margins and produced a deep-seated bitterness, one that may be familiar to contemporary readers. Progressive-era reforms helped soothe this bitterness and set the tone for a more restrained model of democracy, where participation was reduced to the voting booth and popular culture was increasingly disconnected from electoral politics. Some may find fault with the breadth of this argument, while others (like myself ) may want more detail about other factors that separated partisan politics AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

27

from popular culture – what of technology, consumerism, or the Confederate mythology? Yet, Grinspan’s deep engagement with his sources and his ability to immerse the reader in a rich world of politics, street theatre, and violence, all the while tracing a compelling argument about the shifting nature of politics and populism, is both enjoyable and persuasive.

Grinspan rightly avoids allusions to politics in the present, focusing instead on evoking a social and political world that is often profoundly foreign to contemporary audiences. If there is one lesson about the contemporary era that the author hopes to instil in the reader, it is that the political 'normalcy' that Donald Trump so effectively disrupted in 2016 – with its accepted conventions and behavioural restraints – has not always been normal.

Violence and disorder have characterised American democracy throughout history, and while the intrusion of hyper-partisan politics into everyday life and culture may feel novel, it is actually a return to an earlier political norm. In highlighting the violence and corruption of the nineteenth century and emphasising the increasing distance between politics and ordinary Americans (and the growth of Jim Crow) in the twentieth century, Grinspan thus warns against nostalgia. Making America great again seems impossible, making it great perhaps not. g Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History and a teaching assistant in both History and Politics at the University of Melbourne.

Every taxi driver in this city asks ‘Do you have children?’

1. Yes When I scooped fists of never-garden dirt into the song-hole,

I never felt more able.

When these wrists start to ache without pause from the carrying,

why, I will wrap them in a bandage.

The warmest moment of the inside body caves a little,

so I cease with its filling.

All collapsings want is a little distraction. All yearnings want

is a lifelong job.

2. No The baby won’t be carried in by a bird, and a bird

can’t carry her out.

Give this refusal the head of a heron and it will have

its patron saint.

The unlearned part in the play might be winged. Some paces,

she plunges her beak down.

She will look as if she is hunting through the water’s glass,

but she is breaking her reflection.

Joan Fleming

Joan Fleming’s most recent collection is Failed Love Poems (2015).

28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

History

The other side of the story The smuggler as humanitarian Elisabeth Holdsworth

Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia

by Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman

P

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 204 pp

rofessors Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman are descended from Jews impacted by the Holocaust. No surprise then that in the introductory sentences of this work they remind us that the first people smuggler was probably Moses. Throughout the Jewish year, we study this colossus, who may or may not have existed, as he leads the Hebrews out of Pharaoh’s bondage into the desert toward a promised land. For much of the past two thousand years, Jews have relied on people smugglers as they were shunted from country to country. In Smuggled: An illegal history of journeys to Australia, Balint and Kalman detach the people smuggler from the politicised, malign tropes surrounding this activity and present firsthand accounts from some of those who were smuggled and from the smugglers themselves.

Consider the case of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese career diplomat stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1939. Together with the honorary Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, he issued documentation to Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania to travel via the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then to Kobe, or, in Zwartendijk’s case, to the Dutch Caribbean islands. Sugihara’s masters ordered him to stop, but even as he prepared to leave for his next posting in Berlin in 1940, he continued to issue some ten thousand visas. Ho Feng-Shan, Chinese consul in Vienna, is also thought to have issued some four thousand visas. Sugihara, Zwartendijk, and Ho, bless them, were people smugglers.

In 1950, British and Australian intelligence informed Australian immigration officials that ‘a Jewish refugee racket’ was operating out of Vienna and Sydney. These Jewish people smugglers, assisted by Jewish welfare agencies, helped Holocaust survivors to travel to Australia by means of landing permits that were intended to sponsor friends or relatives. One intelligence officer reported that these Jews were most likely communists and ‘café inhabitants’. That these undesirables were also concentration camp survivors whose countries had disappeared in the postwar turmoil was not considered. Australian officials were cautioned not to accept Jews. According to one officer, Harold Grant, suitable migrants were the kinds of people Australians could ‘consort with on Bondi Beach’.

Hungarian-born sports journalist Les Murray, originally László Ürge and later known as ‘Mr Football’, arrived in Australia in 1956 after a torturous journey with his family that involved the services of people traffickers. Murray, who died in 2017, didn’t like the latter term or ‘people smugglers’. He maintained that

his family could not have survived without having paid people to lead them to safety in Austria. In 2011, Murray returned to Hungary to seek out the man who, he believed, had saved his life. He wanted to have a beer with him and acknowledge his heroism. Sadly, the gentleman had died, but Murray spent happy hours with the man’s son, who knew nothing of his father’s activities in 1956–57.

The stories of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ are compelling and awful. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the one million Vietnamese who had been employed by the former South Vietnamese Government in a civil or military capacity during the period 1962–72 – especially ethnic Chinese and Amerasians – were targeted by the incoming communist government. They were re-educated, de-urbanised, and displaced to New Economic Zones, or summarily executed. Some two million Vietnamese took to the seas in boats often no bigger than bathtubs. Estimates of those who died doing so range from a hundred thousand to one million. The new government was an efficient people smuggling organisation, that collaborated with crime syndicates to charge former South Vietnamese citizens many thousands for government-sponsored escapes/expulsions, which often ended in a watery grave.

Carina Hoang’s father, a former chief of a military police department in the South Vietnamese government, was imprisoned by the new regime for thirteen years without trial or sentence. The people smugglers who helped Carina and her family to escape on the fourth attempt were ethnic-Chinese targeted by the communists for ethnic cleansing. Carina calls her smuggler ‘my saviour’. Fifteen years later, Hoang was finally reunited with her parents in the United States. She now lives in Australia and is still in loving contact with ‘Uncle Dao’.

In 2001, a boat called the Olong or SIEV IV sank in the Timor Sea. The vessel became pivotal in the Howard government’s ‘Children Overboard Affair’, a spectacularly successful strategy in the ongoing effort to demonise asylum seekers. Nahar Sobbi, a Mandaean escaping persecution in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and her four children survived this journey and were interned on Manus Island, where they were only ever referred to by number. The family were eventually recognised as genuine asylum seekers and now live in Australia pursuing successful, productive lives.

Throughout Smuggled, Balint and Kalman allow these stories to be told by distinctive, compelling voices. Disturbingly, we can only hear from people who survived. Those who were ‘turned back’ or deported simply disappear. In a concluding chapter to this book, Behrouz Boochani points out that there are no studies to determine what happened to this cohort.

The common thread that unites all these accounts is that of the asylum seeker fleeing their country in fear for their life and those of their relations. At the time of writing, according to the UN Refugee Agency, 82.4 million forcibly displaced people are currently in desperate need of a Moses and a land, any land, in which to reside in safety. The people smuggler they employ may be unscrupulous, part of an organised crime gang, a saviour, or more likely an entity that combines all of these attributes; like the refugee, there is no tidy description that fits all. g Elisabeth Holdsworth won the 2007 Calibre Essay Prize.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

29

History

‘The impassable gulph’ Stories of transportation Seumas Spark

Condemned: The transported men, women and children who built Britain’s empire

by Graham Seal

T

Yale University Press $24.95 pb, 295 pp

he convict Thomas Brooks was transported to Sydney in 1818. He had been sentenced to seven years but would serve twenty-seven, with stints in some of Australia’s most brutal penal settlements. His life became a cycle of escape attempts, recapture, and punishment. Each grab for freedom made his chains heavier, the floggings ever more severe. Eventually the penal system broke him, his spirit and will to escape crushed.

When Brooks was finally released, he went bush, content to live in a humpy, drink, and ponder his past. He wondered how Britain could see fit to abolish slavery and yet maintain the convict system. ‘For our slavery there was no balm. Those who believed in the freedom of men had cast us out; and those who were incapable of reflection must have seen the impassable gulph between the stains of our bondage and the free position of honest liberty.’

In this lively history of transportation, Graham Seal shows how such hypocrisy was at the heart of the British imperial project. Britain built an empire based on transporting, and sometimes trafficking, human cargo to its colonies. Children were snatched from British streets and dispatched throughout the empire as forced labourers, their bodies sold into bondage by agents of the state in pursuit of profit. Historians have long discussed the iniquities on which empires are built, and in this sense Condemned makes no radical claim. The fresh material and thoughts are in the detail. I imagine that non-specialists in particular will find much in this book that is new. I certainly did.

Seal is careful to delineate between transportation and the even greater evils of chattel slavery – he uses the terms with precision – but the similarities between the systems are made clear. If the first purpose of transportation was to remove criminals and other unwanted people from Britain, its second and probably more important function was to deliver labour for imperial gain. Transportation served economic as well as social imperatives. As Seal notes, the histories of transportation and slavery sometimes touched. His focus on the imperial trade in human bodies leads to a discussion of ‘blackbirding’, a system in which Pacific Islanders were captured and forced to work in Australia. Blackbirding he describes as ‘an amalgam of indentured labour, transportation and slavery’.

Scott ‘no slavery in Australia’ Morrison would do well to take note.

Seal’s aim was to write a history of transportation that focuses on people rather than systems, and he has done so with verve. For all the misery described in this book, it’s a rollicking read. Seal has 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

mined letters, diaries, and songs for personal and intimate stories: as might be expected from a co-editor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore (1993), this is bottom-up history. Sometimes these tales are little more than fragments, a snippet here or there of a life, but together they tell vividly of transportation as a pernicious instrument of the British state, dependent on the subjugation of individuals. Seal suggests that prisoner reform was never the main reason for transportation. What reckoning could come from years of vicious punishment and servitude, especially for good people who had been driven by hunger or other despair to commit a petty crime? Seal has sought to rescue the details of people’s lives from a system that rendered them anonymous.

The first half of Condemned explains the origins of the transportation system, with a focus on the movement of bodies from Britain to the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the late eighteenth century, the body trade across the Atlantic had slowed, not least because the economics had changed: the empire’s biggest labour market had left the imperial fold. With the newly independent United States no longer a viable destination for Britain’s unwanted, and other colonies deemed unsuitable, London’s attention turned to Australia. The Australian story is told in the second half of the book. The two halves are well connected, with Seal explaining how transportation to the Americas, the Caribbean and beyond shaped the Australian experience.

Initially, the Australian section of the book, while fascinating, feels familiar. Most Australians have some knowledge of the country’s convict days. Tales of the colonial settlement at Sydney, and of brutalities committed in Van Diemen’s Land and at other sites of punishment, are part of the curricula taught in schools and repeated in national discourse. Where Seal departs from the expected is in extending his history to recent times. From the nineteenth century until the 1980s, orphaned and unaccompanied British children, mostly from deprived backgrounds, were dispatched across the empire, including to Australia, by charities and churches working in concert with governments. While Seal acknowledges that these schemes often meant well, many children suffered horribly. Boys and girls were put to work rather than schooled, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse were common. Seal puts the case that these schemes were adapted versions of the transportation project Britain had practised for centuries. That this argument never seems forced is evidence of a carefully constructed and well-written narrative.

Discussion of child migration schemes leads Seal to another connection between past and present. On the final page, he writes of a perverse twist of history by which Australians have come to apply ‘the old techniques of empire transportation’ to refugees and asylum seekers. He sees clear parallels between colonial transportation and the various forms of Australia’s ‘Pacific Solution’.

There are differences in the mechanics – refugees and asylum seekers transport themselves across the seas, then are banished to ‘bondage’ – but the calculated cruelty is the same. These systems function by hurting people, deliberately. For its last page alone, Graham Seal’s book is worth the price. g Seumas Spark is a historian employed at Monash University.

He and two colleagues are working on a history of the Dunera and Queen Mary internees.

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

31

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The Enemy, Asyndeton

by Camilla Chaudhary

S

he’d offered to lay the table (‘Oh no’) or make a salad (‘It’s basically out of a bag’). What she could do, said Amy, was track down That Child, ‘somewhere down the garden.

It’s terribly overgrown.’ Borrow my boots if you like, she called at Elizabeth’s departing back.

The child, when found, was in a dead apple tree, not dangerously high, but in a controlled dangling.

‘You better not come any closer,’ said the child, a girl. ‘I might kick you in the head.’

It was a fair assessment of their relative positions. Any closer and Elizabeth’s head would have been in danger.

‘Not on purpose.’

‘Oh, I see. That’s all right then. What are you doing up there?’

‘Looking, really.’ Then, as if adding much-needed clarity, ‘Looking out for things.’

‘Birds? Squirrels?’

‘For an enemy.’

‘An enemy?’

‘Yes. Asyndeton.’

‘Asyndeton?’ queried the godmother (not this child’s godmother). ‘What – I mean, who? A person called Asyndeton?’

‘He’s the enemy,’ the child repeated patiently. ‘Why, have you heard of him?’

‘Yes,’ she said, wondering why not this child entrusted to her, why the difficult, older one? ‘Where did you?’

‘From Julia. She told me. Julius Caesar came and saw and conquered him.’

‘Julia?’

‘She tells me things.’

‘Of course.’

‘What do you mean, of course?’

‘Just, I suppose, it’s good that you and Julia talk. About this sort of thing, I mean … not all sisters do.’

‘Who doesn’t’ – the child looked fit to burst – ‘like to talk about enemies? Though Julia only talks. She doesn’t come up here.’

‘No?’ ‘Her enemies are on the bus.’

‘Ah, the bus. But not Asyndeton?’

32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

‘He doesn’t go on the bus!’ The child’s look accused her of imbecility. ‘Anyway, it’s not a normal bus.’

‘No. Of course. It would be difficult.’

‘What would?’

‘For Asyndeton. On the bus.’

‘He doesn’t go on buses, I told you.’

She had misjudged, she realised, poked too hard at the mesh of the child’s dazzling world. The child gave her a brief, despairing look but let it pass.

‘Before, he used to be called Kraker. That was a girl enemy though. Then Alexander, which was quite good but not sly.’

‘And now he’s Asyndeton? An excellent choice.’

No enemy, she was certain, had a finer name.

Elizabeth glanced around the garden: long and ragged, a few faded, blousy roses still hanging on. Lots of dandelions. Blackberry brambles somewhere, surely. A fence that announced, rather pointlessly, the boundary between the garden and the more overgrown grass. It was, she guessed, what Amy and Raj were proudest of about their home, Much Chuttering being more overspill suburb than true village these days. The house itself was only mid-war. But the straggle of garden looked almost the real thing.

‘Listen, I was meant to tell you it’s lunchtime.’

Sighing, ‘I bet it’s chicken.’

‘I think you’re right. It smelled a lot like roast chicken.’

‘It’s local chicken. We always have local chicken when visitors come.’

At lunchtime, Julia, the designated godchild, descended and permitted Elizabeth a kiss. Coaxed to held forth on her schoolwork, she did for a good five minutes, on the antics of the Bolsheviks, of whom she seemed a harsh judge – they tried her patience with their infighting – then, as if she’d given them more than any reasonable person could expect, Julia retreated into her slump.

Elizabeth, who wanted to like her but was new to fifteen-yearolds and hadn’t read the latest research, smiled and said the history

department at Birmingham was excellent if Julia would like to visit. Julia, head bent, ate a chicken wing (local, Amy assured them) and stabbed at the more difficult salad leaves.

The apple crumble was excellent and united them in praise.

‘Made with the apples from the tree?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘What? Oh, that tree. No, it’s long past fruit, sadly.’

‘Good for other things, though,’ said Elizabeth, with a sidelong smile at the younger child.

‘Oh?’ ‘For watching enemies.’

The family, including the child, all looked at her as if she’d gone mad. Nobody spoke. Amy scratched her soft freckled arm.

Then, finally, Raj said, ‘It’ll have to come down one of these days.’

• At her desk in the department on Monday, Elizabeth ate the blackberries Amy had insisted on her taking home in a plastic tub. They’d gathered them on Sunday morning. Dorothy Finch, the sixtyish psychologist who headed the Youth Research Unit and specialised in risky behaviours, happened to stop by and spotted the blackberries.

‘Good weekend?’

‘Very. I visited my goddaughter,’ Elizabeth said, trying the phrase for fit.

‘How nice,’ said Dorothy, with clear suspicion that she should only now reveal such homely proclivities. ‘I didn’t know you had one.’

‘Oh yes. It’s been a while now, years.’ A stupid thing to say – a godchild wasn’t something you took up, like yoga. ‘Her mother and I were friends at university. I try to get there once a month.’

Over the coming weeks, the autumn deepened and Elizabeth made a point of dropping her goddaughter, casually, into conversation. She even attempted a mention during a discussion of Dorothy’s current research (vandalism on public transport), but it didn’t seem very related to Asha and Julia and she backtracked before they were in any way implicated. On Thursday she did what she’d been intending to do all week: she went to the campus bookshop and chose presents for both girls. The exercise took her entire lunch hour and left her hungry but satisfied.

Tales of Norsemen for Asha and a book token for Julia, who was more problematic. She placed her purchase on the desk ready for packaging in a jiffy bag. ‘For my goddaughter,’ she said casually to anyone who paused to give it a glance.

People, departmental people, began to respond to her differently. At first, she stuck to dropping mentions of Asha once or twice each week, and then almost daily. It was amazing how easily she could be introduced into the conversation! But then it occurred to her that her colleagues with families had discovered this long ago. There was almost no discussion that could not be hijacked and bent to accommodate their offspring, who were uniformly brilliant, though modest, young people, triumphing weekly in netball, cello, debating, and cross-country. To listen you would think the whole of childhood was a giant amphitheatre hosting a series of contests into which these offspring were thrust.

October, Elizabeth recalled, was when Asha’s birthday fell.

She began to check regularly for an email or text from Amy inviting her to Much Chuttering for the celebrations. Since the children were no longer very young, the routine invitations to birthdays had dried up, but she had a feeling the child would want her there this time. Before the apple tree visit, Elizabeth would often return baffled from her forays to Much Chuttering, for all that Amy tried to include her. She’d been consulted on her views on ovens (AGA versus range), on private schools versus the local village one, and the Suzuki method versus traditional violin tuition. And felt more outside the fold than ever.

Now though, casting her mind back to previous visits, Elizabeth saw them all in a fond haze, Amy and Raj and the girls.

There had been a weekend of shifting clouds and sunbursts three or four years back, when Elizabeth could have done with the extra time to mark exam papers, but honouring her promise, she’d taken the train to Moreton-in-the-Marsh where Amy and the girls had met her. They had only just moved into Sycamore Cottage, and Amy admitted in the car it was a bit of a state.

‘You’ll see. High gloss and fitted carpets. My mother approves, which says it all.’ In time, they would make improvements, take the shine off, the carpets up, and replace the kitchen units with mismatched freestanding cupboards. Turn it into the home they saw themselves suiting. Let the garden grow out …

• Saturday brought rain, and Elizabeth took down the box of photographs she kept in the top of the wardrobe. Inside were pictures of the girls’ naming ceremonies (secular, god-free – Amy and Raj being from non-practising Christian and Muslim backgrounds).

Amy had been faithful at following up family gatherings with a few well-chosen photographs, by email these days.

In the first packet, Julia’s naming, fifteen years ago, Elizabeth herself looked, she thought, not fully formed, almost foetal.

She had been still in her twenties, her hair unnecessarily large somehow. But even at the second naming ceremony, Asha’s, to which they’d invited her as de facto family, hadn’t they given her the baby to hold too …? (Who was the actual godparent?

One of Raj’s old friends?) Yes, there it was! She was holding the newborn Asha comfortably in one arm. The other was looped around Julia’s shoulders at her side, the expression on the girl’s slight, bony face caught in a split second of anguished excitement giving her a freakish appearance, all jawbones and teeth.

Elizabeth couldn’t recall Julia ever looking that animated in real life. Funny that they’d asked her to hold the baby instead of the godparent designate. Had Amy sensed it too, the connection between them? Hadn’t it, when she thought about it, always been there? Memories of Asha began to resurface. There was a time she’d climbed into Elizabeth’s pull-out bed and asked if she might draw on her face, and hadn’t there been a fascination with worms or insects …?

• Tales of Norsemen was still on Elizabeth’s desk. Until she knew for certain whether she was going for the birthday weekend, she deferred the decision over posting it.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

33

‘Branching out?’ enquired Darius Seemly, stopping by her desk, picking up the Tales.

‘Just something for my goddaughter,’ she said, not looking away from her screen, which was difficult because the mere mention of the child excited her.

The consensus in the department was that people found her aloof. This Elizabeth had been told by Darius Seemly, the twice-divorced Chair of Sociology, at a drinks reception for a visiting American scholar at the start of last term. To a certain type of man, however, she was highly attractive, he’d assured her.

This type, it turned out, included him. Previously, she’d rebuffed his advances, but now, when he commented on the book, she allowed the conversation to be drawn out. The following day he emailed asking if she was going to a screening being held in the Bowen Centre. We might grab a drink after, he suggested. A whole evening in which the talk would turn to their personal lives; she would have his attention. His was a concentrated attention that, when focused on you, made you feel like the single object worthy of real interest in his world. And his was a large world – he was eminent in social attitudes and voting polls, youth and social exclusion – or was it urban morphology and transport?

It was a few things.

‘Give me half an hour on the number 50 bus between Hedgecomb and Digbeth and I’ll give you the outcome of the election,’ Darius had famously said, years earlier. By observation and overhearing he claimed he could discern the political mood of the electorate. (The route was important, the number 50 being an uninhibited bus that wandered through leafy bohemian well-heeled Moseley, through Kings Heath, on the up and finding its edge, before making nonchalantly for its grittier inner-city neighbours.) The claim reached significant ears and made Darius’s name. He was invited to talk to policy units. He became an authority on radical fieldwork, on ethnography, on social attitudes, on bus routes. He was rumoured to be a regular at Downing Street.

After the seminar, Darius drove them to a wine bar on the other side of the campus. He had two adult children whom he talked about with a casual boastfulness. One was a postgrad in philosophy (‘wasted – she was born to boss people about’), the other, a boy, was a management consultant. In return, she told him about Asha and Julia, her weekends with them in Much Chuttering, in broad, cheerful brushstrokes, glossing over the girls’ actual names and ages. It was possible that one Platonic composite godchild

emerged; Elizabeth fleetingly saw her take shape and hoped that she wasn’t as off-putting as the department children. When it came to the part about the tree, she hesitated. No, she was not ready. Another time.

‘Elizabeth,’ he said, placing his hand on hers, ‘this evening has come as a surprise to me. Such a rich life you lead. Would you like to read my paper for the Stockholm conference? Make some comments?’

‘Of course,’ she said dreamily. ‘Darius, did you ever climb trees?’

Later that night, alone, a horrible thought: what if the child had outgrown the tree, outgrown her enemy? She knew children went through stages and grew out of things. So fast, though?

She tried to recall Julia’s stages. Nothing sprang to mind. One continuous stage. Nothing about Julia’s childhood had been as memorable; she certainly hadn’t talked about the Bolsheviks when she was seven.

When by the following Friday no invitation had come from Much Chuttering, Elizabeth called Amy. Amy said Julia was bogged down with her GCSE coursework. She didn’t offer much about Asha, made some weary-sounding comments about the child blocking the sink and trying to poison herself with Borax, without sounding too worried. There was something Elizabeth very much wanted to discuss with Amy. A future weekend at Much Chuttering she imagined where, after a couple of glasses of wine, children in bed, she might turn the conversation to what arrangements the couple had put in place in case of their sudden deaths. But that could never be truly tactful, could it, over the phone?

For now, it was enough for Elizabeth to relive Asha in the tree.

The Enemy, Asyndeton. It synchronised perfectly to the rhythm of the train. One evening on the way home from the campus, just before the clocks went back, a woman sitting opposite looked at her strangely as she edged out of her seat at Bournville Station.

Elizabeth guessed she’d been mouthing the phrase to herself and felt her face flush.

Darius invited her to dinner. Then there was a lunch and a visit to an exhibition. Darius Seemly liked to talk, about his work, his ex-wives, his personal theories about the education system, and future of work; occasionally about his children. And she would let him. In return, he would listen, with that attentive manner that seemed twice distilled. (She wondered, did he retain much of what she’d said?) There was an economy here that she was banking on. Other women, she thought, strike bargains.

The debut collection by multi-award winning poet

Damen O’Brien

ANIMALS WITH HUMAN VOICES RECENT WORK PRESS recentworkpress.com

“O’Brien has the skill of a seasoned master, yet this is his first volume. I am awestruck by the depth of his thinking, by his content, his ability to make each poem light up singular, necessary truths.”

Judith Beveridge

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

My price is freedom to talk about a child in a tree. Though she still wasn’t quite ready for the tree.

After the exhibition they had a glass of wine. Darius was giving a paper at a conference next month in Nottingham. ‘Make a weekend of it, I thought. Go walking in the Peaks. You look like a woman who’d own a decent pair of hiking boots.’

Elizabeth hesitated. Late October. ‘I might be away that weekend. At my goddaughter’s.’

But despite her phone calls and emails and even postcards, no invitation appeared from Much Chuttering. Perhaps arrangements were being left till last minute. Amy liked spontaneity, or the appearance of it. They must have taken for granted that Elizabeth would be free. She usually was.

So she went to the Dales with Darius Seemly. At the cottage there was an old spinning-wheel, a stack of board games, and a pod espresso machine. They lined their hiking boots up in the porch. Dressing-gowns hung side by side on the bedroom door.

It all seemed quite sudden, the miniaturised domesticity of cooking together, discovering there was no mustard, figuring out the boiler settings. Over breakfast a shyness crept over Elizabeth and occasional stabs of self-loathing for noticing Darius’s repetitions, his unnecessary throat-clearing before launching into the most ordinary observation. Why had she come here to be horrible to the man who’d expertly poached eggs and was offering to make proper coffee on the stove (he’d poured the pod offerings down the sink in disgust)? She knew she had less colour than his usual women. Why pretend? By Sunday she longed for the sanctuary of her flat, the camouflage of its dull furniture and faded rugs and familiar sounds – its space. She headed off Darius’s suggestion of a seven-mile walk, suggesting they browse in the nearby town where there was bound to be a bookshop or two. She wanted to buy a present for her goddaughter. ‘Ah, the young bibliophile,’ said Darius, not unkindly. ‘Finished with the Norsemen, has she?’

She couldn’t bear him to misunderstand Asha. But the tree?

Must it be sacrificed, offered up as entertainment? Memory came to her aid. She told him instead of the greyish day in Much Chuttering. Amy had left her with the girls while she went to Sainsbury’s. Julia assented to baking fairy cakes, an operation undertaken without joy or spillage, then took herself off outside.

She’d found the girls beyond an overgrown rosebush, Asha in wellingtons, a seaside bucket in her grasp. ‘Catching caterpillars.’

‘Oh. D’you like caterpillars?’ Stonily: ‘Not really.’ ‘Then why are you catching them?’ ‘Because they turn into butterflies.’ ‘And you like butterflies, do you?’ ‘No, I don’t. They’ve got wings and legs.’

‘Why are you hunting for them, then?’ A look almost of disbelief: ‘Because they turn from caterpillars.’ The child crouched, pointing at a greyish butterfly. Later, Elizabeth understood; it was the transformation itself that had fixated Asha.

One night she woke from an exhausting dream in which they were at the check-in desk at an airport, she and Asha. She had chopped down the apple tree and packed it in pieces in her carry-on bag – something to do with Brexit – and Asha was very upset. The dream went on relentlessly, without resolution. In the morning she had to call Much Chuttering. When she heard the child’s voice in the background, Elizabeth cut across what Amy was saying.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship Worth $10,000

We seek applications for the 2021 ABR Patrons’ Fellowship. Worth $10,000, the Fellowship is open to published Australian writers, critics, and commentators.

The Fellow will contribute three substantial articles over the course of twelve months.The ABR Fellowships, generously funded by our Patrons, are intended to assist fine Australian writers and to advance the magazine’s long-form journalism.

Applications close 1 September 2021.

Previous Fellows

Michael Aiken Elisabeth Holdsworth Marguerite Johnson Patrick Allington Alan Atkinson Philip Jones Rachel Buchanan Jennifer Lindsay Shannon Burns James McNamara Stephen Orr Danielle Clode Felicity Plunkett Helen Ennis Andrew Fuhrmann Hessom Razavi Kerryn Goldsworthy Beejay Silcox Ashley Hay Ruth Starke See our website for conditions and guidelines: australianbookreview.com.au AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

35

‘Oh, Amy, put me on to Asha a minute.’

‘Hello?’

‘Asha! It’s Elizabeth. Liz. I had a dream about you last night, you and your tree.’

‘Oh, I’m not allowed up there anymore. It’s too prongy.

It could snap and that would be that.’

Amy reclaimed the phone. ‘What on earth was she telling you?’

Asha had become very interested in the wives of Henry VIII, Amy said. ‘She can recite them all with dates and heads.’

‘Amy – Asha’s birthday?’

‘Asha’s? What about it?’

‘You hadn’t … forgotten then?’

‘Forgotten?’ Amy laughed. ‘How would I forget my own child’s birthday? It’s not for ages.’

‘But I was looking at her naming pictures. They say October.’

‘They were October, but she was three months old then! Asha’s a July baby. Don’t worry, you can make it up to her next year.

Did I tell you about Julia’s ankle?’

‘No, but we haven’t finished with Asha and Henry VIII.’ A sigh. ‘I think it’s the wives as much as Henry. I mean, she’s quite a morbid child. Her imagination …’

‘Oh, Amy, it’s so much more than that!’ Imagination was such a misdiagnosis of the seething inner brilliance of the child, which her mother seemed incapable of perceiving. ‘Asha has something quite rare. You must see that.’

‘You think so?’ Amy lowered her voice. ‘Because between us, she’s not doing all that well at school. We’re not sure it’s the right environment for her. I don’t know. Julia thrived there; it’s very good. And it has special needs, not that Asha’s that. But we wondered, maybe ADHD or something. Raj thinks we should get her a pet. She doesn’t make a lot of friends. Anyway, tell me about this professor of yours. Raj says he’s one of those media intellectuals? Something to do with voting on buses? You must bring him down next time …’

Re-examining the photograph later, Elizabeth saw that only someone very unused to the stages of infancy could have mistaken a three-month old for a newborn.

• The craft section of the bookshop was a disappointment. Something constructive instead of ruining things, Amy had suggested for Asha. Paint your own teapot, piggy bank, sew your own purse?

A kit for making pom-pom animals, wool and full instructions included, was the least offensive thing on offer. The finished articles were depicted on the front. Asha would probably prefer a kit for making moderately dangerous explosives to these sickly concoctions, but there was no such item for sale. Because she couldn’t face the defeat of leaving empty-handed, Elizabeth bought the pom-pom kit. There was just a chance Asha would see the absurdity and find it entertaining. A slim chance.

Darius was due to arrive, and she would rather die than let him see her slopping dish cloths, emptying the bin, and scraping around.

(How, she wondered, did people like Amy and Raj manage to 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

maintain any semblance of a personal, intimate life if they were subject to the sight of one another daily engaged in such things?)

But in the middle of chopping carrots, the knife slipped and cut her finger, and when Darius arrived, she was patching herself up with a plaster.

‘That knife’s blunt. I should get you a proper set,’ said Darius.

‘Here, let me do it.’

She took olives and hummus out of the fridge and spooned some into a dish.

‘Remind me and I’ll show you how to make your own hummus,’ he murmured. ‘It’s very simple. Far superior.’

‘No, don’t please,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t mind mediocrity.

I like the convenience of it, in food anyway.’

He smiled. ‘Well, how about you let me take you out for a steak? You look like you could do with one. It will be convenient, I can’t promise mediocre. I know a good place nearby, actually.’

It was while they were at the restaurant that inspiration struck her.

Among Elizabeth’s books were two first editions, a rare, illustrated edition of The Characters of Theophrastus and an ancient copy of Alice in Wonderland that an elderly aunt had passed down to her as a child. Asha would like these, she felt. She would leave them to her in her will. Alice in particular was probably worth a lot.

Taking herself off to the Ladies, she googled it. A near-identical copy was priced at £380 on eBay! But why wait? The act of giving could be done now, this very evening. She declined more wine or dessert, suggested they call it a night, hoping Darius would drop her at the door. He didn’t; he sauntered in after her and set about making coffee. While he was in the kitchen, she took her Cross pen and before she could stop herself, wrote inside the book, To my goddaughter. Pause. Asha, she added, then signed and dated it. One day they would find it and decide she’d lost her mind young.

Darius flipped the cover back and forth, his eyes on her. ‘Why are you bequeathing your belongings? You’re in good nick, aren’t you, nothing worrying you?’

‘Please don’t flip the corners like that, you’ll ruin it. It’s worth four hundred pounds.’

‘Lucky little bookworm. I don’t think you ever mentioned her name before. Asha.’

It was said. With Asha’s name out in the open, she could no longer contain herself.

‘She has a friend. Well, no. He’s her enemy, actually.’ She paused, took a breath, and launched. ‘She watches him from a tree. You’ll never guess what he’s called …’

Several minutes later, when Elizabeth had finished, Darius nodded.

‘She doesn’t sound like any young person I’ve come across.’

‘Asha’s a child, not a young person,’ Elizabeth snapped. ‘And please don’t say she has a marvellous imagination either. It’s who she is, not some … some childish quirk. Why are you looking at me like that, Darius?’

‘Sometimes I wonder, Elizabeth ...’ Darius began calmly, infuriatingly equably.

He didn’t need to finish the sentence. There would be a discreet conversation, Elizabeth foresaw, possibly over coffee on

campus, or an email in which he confided that people expected a great deal of him; it was a lot to live up to and he was sorry but it was almost certainly for the best. And that would be that.

Later that evening, alone, Elizabeth called Amy, only to be intercepted by Asha. It was after ten, late for the child to be awake.

‘How are you, Asha?’

‘Controversial,’ said Asha, briskly. ‘I’m getting guinea pigs.’

Amy took the phone off the child (‘Go away please’), listened while Elizabeth explained that she would be coming to Much Chuttering alone that weekend.

‘Oh, well, you can have your usual bed. (‘I know you’re under the table’) And to be honest, he sounded a bit old for you. If you … you know. Might want kids. Though we’ve probably put you off.’

‘Ah, well. Yes and no.’

‘That sounds like a discussion for the weekend. Jesus, that child.’

• Since she had ruined Alice with her inscription, the pom-pom kit would have to be reconsidered. But it had not improved on second inspection. In fact, the thought of handing it to Asha paralysed her. It would ingratiate her with Amy perhaps, but earn Asha’s rightful contempt.

Not with any great hopes of the weekend ahead, and emptyhanded, Elizabeth boarded the train on Saturday morning. It lunged past scrappy fields that looked unclaimed, unfarmed, the hinterland between city and countryside. Elizabeth took it all in. Ponies with shaggy coats. A burnt-out car. A pram. What chain of events had put them there? Some people’s lives were so manifestly physical, so unlike hers, culminating in wrecks and ponies and abandoned buggies in hedgerows. She wasn’t even equal to chopping carrots or bringing her goddaughter a present.

It began to seem that she had a lot of catching up to do in terms of physical living. Would it come in a concentrated burst – a cataclysmic accident perhaps? She’d made a precautionary survey of the carriage already. Two youngish men, one with earphones, and an elderly man, smartly dressed, with a mild reflective expression that probably came from having witnessed unthinkable atrocities in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. If it comes, the crash, it’s you and me, she’d decided. He’d be the one she’d risk life and limb to save.

In the event, she didn’t have to save anyone because they arrived at Much Chuttering without incident, a minute early.

Crossing the carpark, she spied only one face, Amy’s, through the windscreen of the SUV. The perpetually worried expression morphed into a bright smile for her benefit, Elizabeth noticed, with a rush of fondness for her old friend. Asha lying across the backseat, suddenly sat bolt upright and bellowed, ‘Surprise! We thought you’d be late so we’d get hot chocolate. Can we anyway?’

‘There’s been a mix-up,’ said Amy. ‘My fault. One of Raj’s old university friends is coming. I thought we’d put him off till next weekend, but apparently he can’t be put off. He’ll have to have the sofa.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He’s separating.’

‘Like an egg?’ Asha piped up. ‘Can people do that?’

‘Not like an egg, Asha, don’t be ridiculous. He’s a person.’

‘He used to be an egg, then.’ Asha, undeterred. ‘Imagine how gross if you actually separated a person!’

Amy rolled her eyes at Elizabeth. Poor Amy, she thought.

Asha wears her out. And now an unexpectedly separating man.

And I am not a very easy guest either, always turning up alone, at the wrong intervals, offering myself awkwardly, secretly attached to the wrong child.

Asha draped herself over the seatback, her sharp chin digging into Elizabeth’s shoulder. ‘Guess what. We’ve got an industrial staple gun.’

‘That sounds pretty serious, Asha. What’s it for?’

‘The hutch! We’re making it this afternoon. We’re making Sachin the egg-person do the dangerous bits.’

Elizabeth did not recall any mention of a carpenter among their circle of friends.

Sachin arrived after lunch. Elizabeth saw him climb out of his car; a long man, his overcoat encasing him like a shell, lending him a hermit-like appearance. He swung a duffle bag out with a downcast grace. But before he got as far as the front door, Raj intercepted him and dragged him round the back of the house and set him to work on the hutch. Ragged, yelled instructions (Asha’s) reached Elizabeth from the patio, interspersed with the firing power-tool. ‘Hold the chicken wire in place!’ ‘Staple onto the top corner!’ ‘Pull the trigger!’ ‘Now the top-left corner ...!’ ‘Fire!’

Julia, whose hair had turned pink, appeared noiselessly and stood next to Elizabeth at the kitchen window. The duffle bag sat on a wooden chair outside, socks and a bottle of Head & Shoulders cascading out.

‘Is he a carpenter? An odd-job man?’ A passing saint?

‘Something to do with IT,’ said Julia. Then, a touch acidly, ‘How come they didn’t rope you in?’ And trudged back upstairs, her expression signalling she was not to be further engaged.

Elizabeth was, on balance, grateful to have been overlooked.

Oncoming darkness brought them inside. Raj, Amy, and Asha became absorbed in defrosting chicken curry, drying duvet covers, and thumping spare pillows to test for feathers (Elizabeth was allergic). Sachin had shed neither his coat nor his duffle bag when Raj called through from the kitchen, ‘You’ll have to come and help yourselves to wine. And generally sort yourselves out, won’t you?’

And so it was only fleetingly, wheeling back round to the kitchen, that Sachin paused to say, ‘Right then, red or white?

I’m Sachin, by the way.’

‘Elizabeth. Liz.’ ‘I think I’ve met you before, haven’t I?’ He smiled and his tired, kind face lit up. ‘Oh yes, I remember. The christening thing – the naming do – for Asha. Weren’t you the godmother?’ g Camilla Chaudhary was born in the United Kingdom to British and Pakistani parents. After graduating from Cambridge University, she worked briefly as a literary publicist in London before moving into social policy research. She started writing fiction while her children were young and has just completed a second novel, Notes on a Jilting. She currently lives in Sydney with her husband and three children and continues to combine her career in research with writing. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

37

Writing that matters, wherever you go.

Read ABR across all your devices with a print and/or digital subscription.

We also offer a digital facsimile of the print edition.

Subscribers also have full access to our unique digital archive going back to 1978.

If you’re not a subscriber, join us today.

We have subscription packages for all needs.

Digital

Print + Digital

$10 • one month $40 • six months $70 • one year

$50 • 25 and under $90 • one year $175 • two years

38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Need assistance setting up your digital access? Contact us at business@australianbookreview.com.au or (03) 9699 8822

Fiction

Fever pitch

A return to familiar themes Melinda Harvey

Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

I

Faber $27.99 pb, 207 pp

n Second Place, the narrator, M, reminisces about the time she invited the artist L to stay on her remote property ‘on the marsh’.

Fifteen years earlier in Paris, a painting of L’s on a poster advertising a major retrospective of his art had spoken to M of ‘absolute freedom’. She was then ‘a young mother on the brink of rebellion’. The night before she had allowed a famous writer – ‘an egotist, permanently drunk on his own importance’ – to string her along and then dump her unceremoniously once he decided she wasn’t worth the risk. Viewing L’s paintings in the gallery the next morning, M had felt herself ‘falling out of the frame’ of her own life and ‘became distinct from it’.

Readers of the Outline trilogy (2014–18) will recognise in M’s story the silhouette of another story: one told by a creative writing student named Jane to the narrator, Faye, among the dust sheets of a gruelling home renovation in Transit (2016). There is an encounter with a self-absorbed male photographer who leads her on, and then there is an encounter with art – in Jane’s case, with the paintings of the American artist Marsden Hartley – that detonates, in the wake of arousal and rejection, ‘a complete personal revolution’.

Much of Rachel Cusk’s eleventh novel, Second Place, has the feeling of a new house furnished with old furniture. Cusk’s familiar theme is evident: it might be summed up as the problems self-actualisation presents, given the multitude of real and imagined obstacles, especially those contrived by the people we love, or should love. Played out by a smaller ensemble of characters in the claustrophobic environment of two adjacent houses in an isolated location, however, this novel reaches a more fevered pitch. Familiar, too, is the manner of Second Place’s telling. The Outline trilogy is structured as a series of reported conversations between Faye, who resembles Cusk herself, and a revolving door of people – often male, foreign, and strangers – whom she meets everywhere, from planes to writers’ festivals. Second Place is also explicitly a conversation, albeit in written form. M addresses her narrative about her interactions with L to an interlocutor called Jeffers, who never comes into focus but whose name is invoked 124 times throughout the novel.

Who Jeffers is exactly is explained by the author’s note at the end of the book. Here, Cusk acknowledges her novel’s ‘debt’ to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1932), a memoir that was written with the stated purpose of effecting a belated introduction between the American poet Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence, whom Luhan claims to have ‘willed’ to her ranch in New Mexico in the years before his death in 1930. The word ‘debt’ doesn’t go nearly

far enough to describe the kind of borrowings Cusk makes from Lorenzo in Taos. The most arresting scenes in the novel have their precursors in Luhan’s memoir, sometimes down to the level of the individual sentence. Even M’s overuse of exclamation marks, so jarring given the usual equipoise of Cusk’s prose, turns out to be another idiosyncratic feature of Luhan’s book.

There are some conspicuous differences: L is more Lucian Freud than D.H. Lawrence, and his companion Brett – ravishing, expensive, adrift – is more Lady Brett Ashley from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises than Dorothy Brett, whose own time on the ranch in Taos, if Luhan is to be believed, was spent intruding on every conversation Lawrence was involved in with her enormous hearing trumpet. Cusk’s tighter reconfiguration of the constellation of characters in Lorenzo in Taos does not alter the fact that Second Place replicates its deeper drama: in Luhan’s words, the ‘tides and currents that comprise the relationships between people’, and in particular the ‘mysterious effluvium’ or ‘spiritual union’ that exists when artist meets appreciator.

Arguably, Cusk has been drawing on neglected modernists for models since the Outline trilogy. Its self-effacing, passive narrator would appear to be a trick learned from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin: leave a void where the main character should be and, counter-intuitively, ingratiation with the reader follows. It has proved a handy remedy for an author who has struggled to suppress a note of superciliousness in her writing, and thus has tended to stir up hostility in response. With the Outline trilogy, Cusk at last achieved both critical acclaim and a devoted readership. But the question remains: why Mabel Dodge Luhan and why Lorenzo in Taos?

One answer can be found in the story of Luhan herself, a woman of raging curiosity and huge energy who, nonetheless, could only envision herself as an enabler and not a creator.

In Lorenzo in Taos, Luhan writes movingly of her inability to ventilate her impressions of the world – a ‘Leyden Jar charged to the brim’ that might ‘destroy’ her – and her desire to ‘mother’ Lawrence’s writing by gifting them to him for ‘translation’. In Second Place, M wants L to capture the marshes as she sees them in his painting in order to make her real to herself. Both women’s wills, though strong, must be directed through others to achieve fruition. Taking second place is, they accept, a woman’s lot.

The Lawrence connection brings into focus something that has been true about Cusk all along: that human relations in her books are, despite the gentility of her typical surfaces, violent struggles of life and death. There is no personal interaction – not even the most intimate ones, such as that of a parent and a child – that does not entail some exercising of power, and therefore some need to submit or resist. Luhan and Lawrence were, above all, people who could and did change. Nothing in their origins could have predicted their destinations: geographically, ideologically, psychically. Second Place, ultimately, might be understood as a celebration of this intrepidity for radical change. It is the type of change that is central to the marsh’s ineffability: ‘I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years,’ writes M to L, ‘and it’s never looked like the same place twice’. In channelling Luhan and Lawrence, Cusk is willing herself to embrace yet another change; as M acknowledges, change may be desired but it’s impossible to effect on our own. g Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in English at Monash University.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

39

Fiction

Carrying our stories Tony Birch’s new short fiction Anthony Lynch

Dark as Last Night

by Tony Birch

‘A

University of Queensland Press $29.99 pb, 219 pp

nd what is wrong with sad stories? The world is always sad.’ So advises Little Red, the aged, marginalised, knowing female character in the title story of Tony Birch’s latest short fiction collection. As in Birch’s previous works, Dark as Last Night contains an abundance of sad stories, but with grief and trauma ameliorated by the main protagonist’s affection for at least one other character, be it a family member or neighbour.

All these stories are either set in, or recall, the past (mostly the early 1970s) – a past invariably marked by hardship. We read of tough streets, poverty, kids going without, neighbourhood gangs, and, again and again, the abusive and/or absent father. But we also read of sibling love, resilient mothers and grandmothers, and neighbours, equally impoverished yet resourceful and wise.

So ubiquitous are these settings that much of Birch’s impressive oeuvre seems to embody one core story: the tough upbringing.

Hardship, inequality, prejudice, and poverty don’t simply reside in the past, of course – these problems remain, exacerbated by a federal government that provides mining magnates with one-on-one meetings and welfare recipients with Robodebt. Yet even today, our literature often bears witness to an Australia still longing, nostalgically, for Depressiontype stories of penury, palpable trauma, and hard-bitten but ‘colourful’ characters, of whom it might be said: they don’t make ’em like that anymore. It’s as if the routines, joys, and grinding boredom of contemporary middle and outer suburbia are insufficient to engage a largely middle-class readership – or, for that matter, authorship. Life in the mortgage belt – of long commutes, reality television, ‘screen time’, and passable home delivery – rarely cuts the mustard.

First Nations people, clearly, have long known, and continue to know, poverty, inequality, and hardship. Through pervading intergenerational trauma, the past inevitably, and necessarily, invests itself in the present. Birch, a First Nations man brought up in Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs before they became hip, has known more than his fair share of trauma, and he brings this experience tellingly to Dark as Last Night. A girl takes refuge from her violent father in the ramshackle home of an ostracised but kindly neighbour (the aforementioned title story); a man must see to the remains of his unloving, and unloved, father (‘Probate’); a child longs despairingly to help set up the annual school Christmas manger, overseen by a priest who has his own motivations (‘The Manger’); a brother and his nurse sister maintain

40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

a vigil by their dying grandmother, a member of the Stolen Generations (‘Together’).

Throughout these strong stories, as in Birch’s novels and three previous story collections, we are reminded of the centrality of family. Life is difficult. The father, with all his failings, may be pivotal or peripheral, but women endure, as do sibling allegiances.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Birch writes of how three stories – ‘After Life’, ‘Bicycle Thieves’, and ‘Lemonade’ – are dedicated to (and, one might guess, partly based on) his younger brother Wayne, who died in 2018. Each offers a tender portrait of brotherly love. The first and third of these are set in the present day, in the wake of the younger brother’s death, though ‘Lemonade’ poignantly recalls a childhood past, when the narrator believes he once failed his trusting sibling; his regret lingers. ‘Bicycle Thieves’, a tour-de-force portrayal of sibling loyalty and motherly love, is a raw depiction of what might variously be longed for, granted, and taken away. Each of these stories sees one brother protectively, imperfectly, standing by his vulnerable younger brother: doing what must be done, even after death. Aspects of this faltering yet enduring sibling loyalty, invoking an Australia of the past, recalls a classic of half a century earlier: George Johnston’s My Brother Jack.

Sibling allegiance is not, however, only in the realm of only men and boys. In ‘Flight’, a touching companion story to ‘Bicycle Thieves’, it’s an older sister who protects her younger brother, intervening physically when a kite he has been gifted (with all its intimations of heaven-bound freedom) is stolen by a neighbourhood gang.

Death looms large in, though doesn’t overwhelm, this collection. Both ‘Probate’ and ‘The Death of Michael McGuire’ feature put-upon narrators reluctantly agreeing to oversee the affairs of no-gooders facing death. The latter story, a mildly comic genre piece, features a petty criminal awaiting his near-certain execution after skimming the profits of a crime syndicate. More soberly but affectingly, in ‘Bobby Moses’ the eponymous character – an Elder and member of the Stolen Generations – visits his home country as he nears the end of his life and strikes up an unlikely but welcome camaraderie with a local police officer.

White authority figures often loom as threat, but are generally more than one-dimensional. In ‘Bobby Moses’ and, to some extent, ‘Dark as Last Night’, individual police officers extend a measure of insight and sympathy. In ‘The Librarian’, the title character proffers physical, emotional, and intellectual refuge to a school student.

These vivid, empathetic realist stories, untouched by postmodernism, make few demands on the reader in regard to style, plot, or character motivation. (As one small example, three pages in, it would be enough to tell us the character is ‘shaking’ without adding ‘with fear’.) Some flirt with twee endings. But they are stories that stay with us: powerful evocations of how the past bears down on the present – in particular, of how women survive, and children carry their experiences into adulthood. As Little Red advises: ‘Women. Children. We carry our stories with us.’ g Anthony Lynch’s books include the short story collection Redfin and the poetry collection Night Train.

Fiction

Monsters

A Hitchcockian crime début Jay Daniel Thompson

The Tribute

by John Byron

T

Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 415 pp

he Tribute begins with a corpse. And not just any corpse.

This body is discovered in a Sydney terrace house with its organs removed. One detective describes the crime as ‘butchery’, and that’s an understatement. This murder is the work of Stephen Porter, a deceptively bland chap who uses his bank job to secure the schedules and addresses of victims. These victims are then dissected as ‘tributes’ to the Fabrica, a collection of sixteenth-century anatomy books.

The crimes are investigated by David Murphy, a boozy detective who is haunted by the mysterious death of his father (also a policeman) years earlier. The action gathers pace when Murphy engages his art historian sister, Joanna, to assist in the investigation. Joanna is familiar with the Fabrica, and her employer thinks that her participation in the case will be an excellent bit of knowledge transfer. Murphy also involves his wife, Sylvia, in the hunt for the enigmatic executioner. Suddenly, several lives are in great jeopardy, and the question of who the actual bad guy is becomes unsettlingly opaque.

The Tribute crackles with a tension that is relieved by some well-timed dashes of black humour. The first of these appears in the author’s bio, when we learn that John Byron ‘went to medical school for a time before leaving in the interest of the public safety’. This anecdote takes on a new resonance in the final pages.

The novel is written with a cinematic clarity; this reviewer could picture the events unfolding on a screen. Sydney, brought to life, plays a pivotal role in the novel, which shifts from the plush mansions of Double Bay to grungy outer-suburban offices, as the killer hunts his prey.

Fittingly, given the vivid prose, there are references to the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock. The director’s beloved term ‘McGuffin’ is deployed, and there’s a nod to Dial M for Murder (1954). The book’s conflation of food and death is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972). Thankfully, the reader is spared a shower scene.

There are some truly nauseating moments, which are to be expected given the nature of the crimes being represented.

Fortunately, these crimes are not depicted voyeuristically, nor are they glamourised. They are as bizarre as they are despicable; unbelievable and unbelievably repulsive.

Throughout the book, Byron shows a flair for character development. This is nowhere more evident than in the depictions of Murphy and Porter as different sides of the same, sordid coin.

Murphy’s ‘cruel, seething anger’ and violent thoughts amplify as Porter’s spree continues; indeed, by the closing pages, the only thing separating the two men is that Porter is willing to put into practice what his policeman hunter can only contemplate.

Further, the Murphy–Porter stand-off provides a perceptive commentary on masculinity and misogyny. Murphy is a case study; he’s paranoid that Sylvia has been unfaithful, and describes the domestic violence service she consults as ‘typical anti-male feminist victim bullshit’. There are no such outbursts from Porter, who rarely discriminates between men and women when it comes to killing, and whose crimes are driven less by hatred of women than by a twisted reverence for the anatomy texts.

Indeed, Porter embodies a masculinity that is just as dangerous as Murphy’s, but that is more childish in nature. The killer describes one victim as a ‘fiend’ and ‘monster’, and Fabrica’s author as ‘the Master’. There is the sense of a boy trapped in a man’s body, navigating a world that resembles a pop culture-constructed reverie.

The reference to one of the victims as a ‘monster’ is particularly ironic, given the killer’s own deeds.

Refreshingly, The Tribute avoids psychologising about Porter’s motives. Reflecting on media reportage of his crimes, the killer abhors the ‘facile, sly, bigoted association between homosexuality and sadism’ (he appears to be heterosexual). Very little is known about his background, aside from a uniquely interdisciplinary education that assists him in his pursuits.

Also, the novel implicitly rejects a causal relationship between Porter’s crimes and his relationship with his mother. That rejection is itself a sly reference to Hitchcock’s notoriously mother-blaming Psycho (1960). Porter is as ‘odd but oddly forgettable’ as Norman Bates, but with none of the secrets that lay in Bates’s fruit cellar.

The chief female characters are well rounded and assertive; they stand their ground in an environment infused with blokey, retrograde sexual politics. The relationship between Joanna and Sylvia is sensitively rendered and moving. The women are united by the confidence they have in each other, as well as by their awareness of Murphy’s dark side. This joint awareness deepens as the book progresses.

That said, the Joanna–Sylvia relationship could have been developed. Similarly, Joanna’s dalliance with a female detective could have been elaborated on; it feels tacked on. Some details are not entirely believable. For instance, Porter’s office seems quieter and more isolated than the buzzing call centre that a person in his line of work might be expected to occupy. A scene where Murphy wakes from slumber, rightly sensing the killer’s location, seemed like the kind of swift, unimaginative way to move a plot on that one might expect from a Hollywood thriller. This moment is brief, but detracts from the text’s originality.

The Tribute was shortlisted for the Victoria Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2019. That is unsurprising. The novel heralds the emergence of a promising literary talent, and could easily be transformed into a film, one that critics might well describe as ‘Hitchcockian’. g Jay Daniel Thompson is a Lecturer in Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

41

Fiction

Bani’s story

Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s new novel Shannon Burns

The Other Half of You

by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

B

Hachette Australia $32.99 pb, 339 pp

ani Adam returns as the narrator–protagonist of Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Other Half of You, a sequel to his two previous books. The most recent one, The Lebs (2018), gave us the story of Bani’s teenage years at Punchbowl Boys’ High School: the trials of a Lebanese Muslim boy in a majority Lebanese Muslim community nestled inside the larger, diverse territories of Western Sydney, in post-‘War on Terror’ Australia. The Other Half of You is an account of Bani’s late teens and early twenties, and of an inner conflict between religious, cultural, and romantic pieties.

The Lebs left considerable room for readers to register ironic self-awareness and comedic intent, but The Other Half of You is not so open-ended. Bani’s story is related to his child as family history and a form of paternal wisdom. It employs a How I Met Your Mother-style structure for the first two-thirds, and the narrating Bani is largely sympathetic to his younger self. This form of narration, combined with heightened prose inspired by the great literary love stories – Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Layla and Majnun – pushes the novel in the direction of sincerity. Though playful and irreverent at times, it is primarily a story of a ‘star-crossed love’ constrained by circumstance.

Bani lives with his parents while attending university (he is the first in his family to do so), and he stays with them into his early twenties, diligently saving money while working in the family shop. His father has promised to buy him a ‘McMansion’ after marriage, as long as he does what is expected of him. Bani spends his evenings reading and training (he is a boxer), but is troubled by his future prospects. Since he is unwilling or unable to challenge his father’s authority and thereby risk squandering the securities that conformity promises, he is destined to marry a fellow Alawite Muslim and submit to the cultural traditions or ‘scripts’ that are dominant in his community.

This is particularly distressing because Bani is in love with a young Lebanese Christian woman. The romance remains chaste, but Bani calls her every two hours (‘I needed to know she was safe’). When she goes to the cinema without him, Bani phones her twenty-six times. This demonstrates an unpromising level of obsession verging on possessiveness, but there is no clear sign that the older, narrating Bani is aware of this. A similar pattern is repeated throughout: behaviour that seems designed to demonstrate Bani’s heightened sensitivity and romantic devotion has the effect of suggesting that he is unwell.

42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

When Bani learns that a prospective Alawite wife, Zainab, has lost her father and financial security, he feels a sudden desire to ‘care’ for her. He wanted to be her protector, Bani tells us, yet he is enraged when Zainab asks him to reject her so she can be with her Australian boyfriend: ‘I wanted to puke in Zainab Abdullah’s face, not for dishonouring the memory of her father ... but for using me.’ One moment he is willing to sacrifice his own interests to rescue a vulnerable person, the next he is repulsed by her request for such a sacrifice.

There are numerous opportunities to register satirical intent in such a novel – for the author or narrator to signal that his protagonist’s inconstancy, deluded self-image, and extreme responses to mild difficulties are an important focus of the story – but that doesn’t happen.

The most telling demonstration of Bani’s character centres on a poem and two sandwiches. First, he introduces us to ‘Bani Adam’ (or ‘Son of Man’), a poem written by the thirteenth-century Persian writer Saadi Shirazi. The poem argues that attentiveness to other people’s suffering is humanising, and that whoever fails to recognise that suffering thereby loses their humanity. Soon after, Bani’s new wife, Fatima, makes him an uninspired sandwich. He feels sorry for her, assuming that even sandwich-making is beyond her limited capacities. But when he sees that she has prepared a far superior sandwich for herself, Bani feels as though he has been ‘punched in the face’. He then describes Fatima watching Friends while delighting in her snack, unaware of his anguish: ‘She chewed and laughed and chewed and laughed and chewed and laughed, the name of the human unretained ’ [my italics].

Because Fatima has taken more care preparing her sandwich than his, she loses her humanity in Bani’s eyes. This is a frequent rhetorical manoeuvre in The Other Half of You: small events are bizarrely amplified. The strategy is well suited to comedy, but Ahmad conjures something closer to melodrama.

Bani inherits a fidelity to authenticity from his father, who is a ‘real man’ and a ‘real Arab’ because he fulfils the prescribed religious and familial duties, but Bani transfers this concern with ‘realness’ into other domains. For him, there is such a thing as a real Western Sydney voice, which is sometimes mimicked or ‘stolen’ by others, like his former English teacher, who published an award-winning Young Adult novel. Unlike her, Bani is a real product of Western Sydney, who speaks with the authority of local experience, yet his markers of authenticity are unfailingly cartoonish: racist and sexist language, alongside a fondness for McDonald’s and KFC. Bani’s passion for fast food takes on deep significance.

His message to the eventual mother of his child is: If you can’t respect my love of KFC, which is connected to my upbringing, you can’t love me. Bani is not ready to put away childish things, so he transforms them into sacred markers of identity and asks that they be recognised as such. The reiterated link between fast food and authenticity would produce a clear, undercutting irony in a different kind of novel – signalling that Bani’s notion of ‘realness’ is the conceptual equivalent of cheap, mass-produced comfort food – but The Other Half of You embraces its schlock unironically. g Shannon Burns is a former ABR Fellow.

Fiction

‘Really fine flowers’ An anthology of Spanish cuentos Alice Whitmore

The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories edited by Margaret Jull Costa

O

Penguin Classics $55 hb, 400 pp

ne of my favourite characterisations of the short story comes, unsurprisingly, from Jorge Luis Borges. In a 1982 interview with Fernando Sorrentino, Borges attributes the short story’s strength to its economy; to its muscular form, trimmed of all fat. A three-hundred-page novel, he says, ‘necessarily contains a certain amount of padding, pages whose only purpose is to connect one part of the novel to the other. In a short story, on the other hand, it is possible for everything to be essential, or more or less essential, or – at the very least – to appear to be essential.’ One might say the same about a good anthology: there is no space for filler, no room for error; every story must be essential, or – at the very least – must appear to be essential.

The task of curating an anthology of Spanish short stories is an unimaginably daunting one that, in this instance, fell to award-winning British translator Margaret Jull Costa. There are few people better equipped to tackle such an ambitious project; working from both Spanish and Portuguese, Jull Costa has translated the likes of Fernando Pessoa, Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Ramón del Valle-Inclán. And yet, in Jull Costa’s words, the selection process ‘was both a delight and a torment’. How does one begin to distil fourteen decades of literature, across four distinct languages, into four hundred pages?

In her brief introduction to the collection, Jull Costa admits that omissions were unavoidable (notably, Cervantes Prize-winner Juan Goytisolo and Nobel Prize-winner Camilo José Cela).

Such omissions must be forgiven; rather than seeing this book as a prescription for essential reading, one would be wise to regard it as a generous posy of stories hand-picked by a single translator. As Jull Costa writes: ‘An anthology, etymologically speaking, is a gathering or collection of flowers, and in this anthology my aim has been to gather a collection of really fine flowers.’

In her reaping, Jull Costa claims to have prioritised stories that had not previously been translated into English, or that she felt ‘would benefit from a fresh translation’. Framing the collection in this way seems to have resulted in a greater concentration of obscure, minor works. (Valle-Inclán’s story ‘Malpocada’, for instance, was wrested from deep within a 1920 edition of the author’s Complete Works; it doesn’t appear to have been published since.) As a result, the book feels less like a literary authority – a role suggested, I would venture, by the Penguin imprimatur – than a bookcase of curios.

This vast and dissimilar collection of cuentos (short stories) is organised more or less chronologically, beginning with nine-

teenth-century Spanish realist Benito Pérez Galdós and concluding with thirty-three-year-old Basque novelist Aixa de la Cruz.

The collection includes stories by some of the twentieth century’s greatest Catalan writers (Mercè Rodoreda, Josep Pla), a number of lesser-known Galician writers (Álvaro Cunqueiro, Eduardo Blanco Amor, Manuel Rivas), and a handful of contemporary Basque authors writing in Euskara (Bernardo Atxaga, Karmele Jaio, Harkaitz Cano, Eider Rodríguez). There are plenty of big names scattered throughout: Miguel de Unamuno, Javier Marías, Ana María Matute, Azorín, and Clarín.

True to Jull Costa’s desire to be broadly representative, the book is equally diverse in its treatment of genre; Teresa Solana’s dark-humoured crime fiction sits cheek by jowl with Javier Cercas’s micro-memoir ‘Against Optimism’. The stories also vary wildly in length; some, such as Pérez Galdós’s ‘The Novel on the Tram’, are fleshy enough to get comfortable in, while others are almost photographic, barely filling two pages. The effect is one of randomness: these are stories gathered together on the thin pretext of their shared ‘Spanishness’, a concept that, at the end of it all, one is no closer to understanding. Despite the brief author biographies crammed into the footnotes of each story, there is a disorienting lack of context: grim war tales and snippets of nostalgia seem to float in a timeless ether, lacking a dedicated introduction to tether them to history.

That said, I should confess: I was given fair warning. In her introduction, Jull Costa cautions against devouring this collection too quickly, she advises readers to treat it like ‘a box of chocolates; savour and ponder each story one or, at most, two at a time’.

Constrained by my duties as a reviewer, I ignored her, and consumed this book at a dizzying speed (which, coincidentally, is also how I tend to approach chocolate). No surprise, then, that I was left with a headache at the end of it. Before tackling such a hefty opponent, I might also have considered Julio Cortázar’s famous words: ‘The novel wins by points; the short story wins by knockout.’

Some of the stories in this anthology are knockouts. Rodoreda’s ‘Like Silk’ gleams like a jewel, and de la Cruz’s horror piece on new motherhood, ‘True Milk’, is a wonderfully macabre finale. Some, such as Cristina Fernández Cubas’s ‘A Fresh Start’, are perfect exemplars of the short story form, though not by coincidence – Fernández Cubas is widely recognised as one of Spain’s finest short story writers, and has authored seven acclaimed collections since the 1980s. In this collection, however, she is an exception; most of the stories gathered here were written not by masters of the short story form but by novelists.

Since Don Quixote tilted at the windmills of La Mancha, the novel has reigned supreme in the realm of Peninsular Spanish letters; indeed, the novel remains Spain’s greatest and most enduring contribution to world literature. Spain also has a rich dramatic history – borne out in the work of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and, later, Federico García Lorca – and a deep poetic tradition, from the Mozarabic love poetry of the tenth century to el Cantar de mío Cid (the earliest surviving monument of Castilian literature) to the ballads or romances of the fifteenth century.

The history of the cuento is less illustrious, or perhaps simply less clearly defined. Jull Costa attempts to trace its beginnings back to ‘the Arab tradition of storytelling’ (which, like any oral tradition, is a rather nebulous starting point), then to the Siglo de Oro novel AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

43

Lazarillo de Tormes, a historically important work – it pioneered an entirely new literary genre: the picaresque novel – that has only tenuous ties to the short story form.

Cervantes’s 1613 work Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Tales), based on the structure of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, is thought to be the earliest example of novelas (or novelle: short stories after the Italian manner) in Spanish.The short story as we know it, however, blossomed relatively late in Spain. When the form did eventually take off in the late nineteenth century, it was adopted mainly by novelists – Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Clarín – and was always, inevitably, overshadowed by the novel.

In Latin America, in contrast, the cuento soared to new heights in the twentieth century, surpassing even the novel, in some estimations, as the defining form of the region’s canon. Writers like Borges, Lispector, Rulfo, and Cortázar (among many others) were at their best in the short story form, and their legacy continues with the work of contemporary writers like Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enríquez. No such short story boom took

place back on the Iberian Peninsula; in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, poetry, theatre, and the novel resurged in new forms (poesía social, tremendismo, Lorca’s posthumous ‘teatro imposible’), but the short story remained, and remains, somewhat marginal.

It stands to reason, then, that a new book of Spanish short stories must be less an excavation of essential literary works than a convenient repackaging of Spanish fiction – one aimed, perhaps, at a modern readership that would baulk at the idea of reading fifty classic Spanish novels, or plays, or books of poetry. One of the short story’s many strengths is its generosity, its ability to show us an entire world without demanding much in return; or, as Borges put it, ‘to contain everything a novel contains, but without fatiguing the reader’. In that sense, this anthology serves its purpose. Some of the stories it holds are even worth revisiting; it’s to be hoped that many of them will inspire curiosity. Just be sure to consume them in moderation. g Alice Whitemore’s translation of Mariana Dimópulos’s Imminence was awarded the 2021 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize.

Pastiche Eclogue with Randolph Stow’s ‘Ishmael’ When Ishmael escaped from the closed Bible on the dresser with family names that were only tangentially yours, you looked to the emergency site for inclemency and found fire was rapidly approaching via dire easterlies that actually start from the south and over the stretch of time just inside a zone sharply bend west to gather inner heat, saying, I love as much as your weight of extracted moisture, the soupçons of winnowings, the haunted maps you foist on the chart table, showing demarcations and claims, these accumulations of original sin, these town halls, these favoured venues for worship, that unholy rearrangement of desert and salt lakes into surveys and peggings, into trenches and bores – the resources of ground-penetrating radar and satellite clusters, the red blooms waxen and outside the martial governance, the big-wheeled machinery, the conveyor belts, a taste of Antarctic melt this far into the ‘permissions’, into the tapers that set light to your fury, your love a gesture of protest in floodlit country ignoring you.

John Kinsella’s most recent collection is Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021) 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

John Kinsella

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

A Fall from Grace

by John Richards

O

ne interpretation of the facts is that Jean-Michel Houvrée produced his most arresting art only after he had died.

Born in 1694 in Ariège-sur-Mentouin, a village a few kilometres north of Carcassone, to a moderately prosperous inn-owner and his wife, he was brought up a Catholic but embraced Jansenism in his early twenties. He was educated at the local village school until the age of fourteen: an indifferent scholar in the classroom, he was an avid student of the natural world. He was a good boy, obedient to his parents, kind to his friends, open to the loving grace of God. He had big feet, thick black hair, dark brown eyes, a shy smile. Any free time he had after assisting his father in the inn, he would wander the sun-baked lanes and fields carrying cheese and home-baked bread in his bag, beneath a sky colour-washed fresh each day by his Creator.

To Jean-Michel, nature was a thin veil through which the divinity of God could be glimpsed and, if you unfurled your senses, touched. A field of corn stalks rilling in the wind as if stroked by an invisible hand. A ball of maggots frothing in the sunken stomach of a wolf-savaged ewe. Olive tree branches bowing in ceaseless supplication to the breeze. Cloud bellies roasted red by the charcoal-hot earth at dusk. All these things the boy saw, imbibed, and thought upon. And then he began to draw them.

But it was not the case that the Creator, his Creator, supported his fleshy hand in Her invisible one and guided his fingers. But nor could it be said that the patterns of expressive and sinuous lines, the deft and sympathetic shadings, were his own renderings of that which he saw in the material world. Instead, it was as if they were copied by him from a master sketch which had already faithfully reproduced their divine and therefore true character, a celestial blueprint to which he alone had access, he alone could see in his spirit’s eye.

His parents came across drawings left lying around. The abandoned well in the field next to the parish church, haunted by the ghosts of those who had used it down the centuries; Francine Moutard, his young cousin, her head to one side, gazing softly, indulgently at the kittens she cuddled in her arms but with the whisper of something else – contempt perhaps – hovering on her lips; the split-second stare over his shoulder of a male osprey – and this time there was an unmistakable superiority in the bird’s black-button glare. An untutored but instant appreciation by

his parents of the boy’s gift. The inn served a main road and was busy with those who had occasion to travel in those days: grain and cloth merchants, farmers’ agents, tax collectors, travelling salesmen. His father made enquiries of those who passed through and was given the name of a local painter living in the next town who was getting on in years and might require an apprentice.

The next Monday, a warm wind tugging at their hats and travelling cloaks, Jean-Michel and his father rode over to see the painter.

Mathieu Géroux was desperately busy, inundated with orders from the local bourgeoisie for family portraits, religious scenes, and landscapes. But cataracts were crawling slowly over his eyes; his hands and wrists stiffening with arthritis as if made of papiermâché, drying in the sun. Barely looking at the boy’s drawings, he hired him on the spot to start there and then and Jean-Michel said goodbye to his father and started as the old painter’s assistant.

Mathieu lived and worked alone. The boy slept on blankets in the corner of the old painter’s barn-like studio. When, a couple of years later, Mathieu’s legs became too unsteady to climb stairs, his bed was moved to the studio and Jean-Michel slept on a mattress in the vacated bedroom. The painter kept the boy busy: he rose at dawn, swept the studio, milked the goat, fetched the bread and eggs, and prepared the porridge before the painter arose. During winter, he had to relight the stove in the studio.

At first, he was confined to painting backgrounds: the smoky burgundy backdrop to a portrait of the local bishop, the sunlit benchtop for the still life of summer fruits, the blue undulating hills behind the family scene of Madonna and Child, the commissioner of the painting kneeling in attendance. But as soon as his talent became clear, he was invited to paint the hand-held prayer book, the burnished platter, as well, until, before long, he had gravitated to including the subject of the painting itself, where he demonstrated such an intuitive understanding allied with such technical mastery (the stubble speckling the episcopal jowls; the precisely reticulated thorax of the peach-gorging fruit fly) that Mathieu would stare at the finished work with wonder in his milky eyes. Within a couple of years, without any formal acknowledgement or ceremony, their positions were reversed: Mathieu met the patrons and delivered the finished work of art, but the boy prepared the charcoal outline and executed the most complex and demanding elements of each work, relegating the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

45

old painter to those parts of the final picture which the eye passed over without seeing or absorbing.

Word spread of the high quality of work coming from Mathieu Géroux’s studio, although the more informed among his clientele correctly attributed this to Mathieu’s young apprentice rather than to the old painter himself. As the fame of the Géroux studio rippled across the south of France, its products began to change hands for a value in excess of that paid for their creation.

When Mathieu died from consumption nine years after the boy had come to live with him, Jean-Michel, now twenty-four, had become the son the painter never had; if he inherited, under the old painter’s will, his name and property (the cottage across the yard from the studio had been replaced by a double-fronted stoneclad villa with gardens and an orchard), the prosperous business run from the studio was already in effect his. By this time, the household retained a small group of servants, a couple of young women for the kitchen and the house, and an older man for the grounds. Jean-Michel remained unmarried, however. He worked long hours, starting at dawn and continuing long into the night, the oil lamp at the unshuttered studio window a solitary light twinkling in the vast darkness, as though a star had fallen from the heavens and landed in the black folds of earth. But no matter the number of commissions demanding his attention, he walked the countryside for an hour each day whatever the season or weather, welcomed visits from his mother (his father having died shortly after he left home), and each Sunday worshipped at St Pierre’s.

If asked, he would have said he was no more than, but also no less than, an involuntary instrument through which the Creator’s presence in each particle (it was too soon to think in terms of atoms) of Her Creation was captured and celebrated. He would not have accepted, or even understood, the romantic idea of an artist as someone who partook of a self-motivated, self-idealised human act of creation.

The old painter had been of the Jansenist persuasion: his Bible never strayed far from a copy of Jansen’s Augustinus. It had been axiomatic to Mathieu that although life was a gift given to all, divine grace must be a gift given to less than all. How many had received the gift of faith he had not been in a position to speculate, but one could not insist on the right to be saved any more than one could insist on possessing the artistic ability of a Jean-Michel.

Towards the end of his days, Mathieu had joined a group of parishioners drawn from the better-educated sort who met at one another’s dwellings to read and discuss the New Testament through the prism of Jansenist theology. The meetings were not secret, but they were not advertised, and attendance was by invitation only.

Jean-Michel had accompanied him to these meetings, and after the old painter’s death he continued to attend. He spoke less at the gatherings than Mathieu had done but listened more. On the evening when it was his turn to host, one of the young women closed the shutters in the front parlour, drew the curtains, and lit the oil lamps before the guests assembled. Bread, cheese, and wine were served and, once the theological conversation had commenced, the parsing of the Gospel of St John and the First Letter of St Paul to the Corinthians continued long into the night.

One evening in July 1725, when Jean-Michel was thirty-one, he was returning home from such an evening, held at the château of a wealthy neighbour, a merchant who lived a few kilometres 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

from his house. A warm breeze, spiced with lavender and thyme, stroked the trees and shrubs as his horse followed a track painted luminescent by the moon. The horse had been unsettled from the start, swinging its head from side to side as if to shake off an invisible hand on its head. About thirty minutes into the journey, as Jean-Michel was passing through a stand of oak trees, a colony of bats exploded from the branches above his head and to his right and with a flurry of high-pitched clicks and leathery flaps swept across the path in front of the horse, causing it to snort and rear on its hind legs and throw Jean-Michel to the ground where he hit his head on a tree root. At dawn the following day, noticing the horse had not been stabled the previous evening, the groundsman set off along the path to the merchant’s house.

About halfway there, he found Jean-Michel lying unconscious on the ground, barely breathing, a shallow crater of shattered bone and grayish-purple tissue denting the back of his head. There was no sign of his horse.

A cart was fetched, and Jean-Michel laid on blankets in the back and accompanied on his journey home by the groundsman, the physician and his servant, and the cart’s owner, each of whom walked with one hand on the cart to try and steady its juddering progress along the stony ground, to alleviate if only to that small extent the discomfort and physical indignity of the injured painter. When the party reached the house of Jean-Michel, the body was placed in the front parlour and the physician told the assembled servants that the artist was no longer breathing and that he would contact the priest.

So much is agreed history, pieced together from public registries, accounts found in personal diaries, the personal recollections of witnesses, and informed and sympathetic supposition. We can say: this much was known of the life of Jean-Michel Houvrée.

What follows is more uncertain: facts are contested, and interpretations disputed.

Eighteenth-century French parochial records are singularly unreliable, but there are no local records of Jean-Michel’s death in 1725. There is no evidence of a funeral service being held around that time, either. Instead, a Monsieur Houvrée (no first name given) is recorded in the annals of the local parish as dying from pneumonia in 1756 (although again there is no record of a requiem mass or other religious service being held to commemorate the death).

In early eighteenth-century France, the keeping of records of commercial transactions was not common; the footprint a moderately wealthy member of the bourgeoisie would leave in local records was inevitably fragmentary. From the scarce records that survived, however, in 1725, it appeared as if Jean-Michel disappeared from the social intercourse of his community: no further record of attendance at church or participation in the Jansenist discussion groups existed; no further record of him purchasing charcoal, vellum, pigments, or varnish from his usual suppliers survived. So far as we know, no further visits were made to the local tailor, physician, or barber, and no requisitions made from his vintner or butcher. Indeed, there is no evidence that anyone ever saw Jean-Michel Houvrée in person again after 20 July 1725.

Finally, most tellingly for those who would argue that the painter was seriously physically incapacitated or even died on that date, there are no more entries, whether sketches or text, after that

date in those of his notebooks and journals which have come down to us. The last known entry which has survived is dated 18 July 1725, a couple of days before he was thrown from his horse.

Tales which were seed-planted in the mulch of village gossip and speculation took root and over time grew into a popular mythology that formed part of the culture and history of a region, of a country. There are accounts of sketches for portraits only taking place at night, the subject sitting at one end of the studio, illuminated by a phalanx of candles, the rest of the studio in darkness through which a phantom-like, cloaked figure could be intermittently discerned. After an hour or so, the servant who had shown the person to his or her seat would return and see that person out. Commissions were no longer made in person, only in writing by way of letter left at Monsieur Houvrée’s residence; completed works were left in the parlour to be picked up, without meeting or sight of the artist. Of course, it is difficult to know how much credence should be given to such accounts; how much is grounded in fact, how much embellished by imaginative fancy.

The evidence that Jean-Michel survived the consequences of the fall and in a state of health that allowed him to continue working really lies in the extraordinary series of paintings which were produced in the decade or so after 1725 and which are believed to have been produced by him. The so-called peintures étonnantes (Amazing Pictures) constitute a collection of portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and religious pictures which, though ostensibly conventional in theme and execution, contain strange, bizarre, and wondrous objects, elements, and images placed alongside or embedded within the ordinary and quotidian. As one art historian later commented, it is as if the nightmarish, hallucinogenic creatures of the world of Hieronymous Bosch had invaded and taken occupation of the calm, ordered world of Vermeer; what is most striking about the peintures étonnantes is the cool, forensic blending of the fantastical and the formal.

The features of the tax collector in Portrait of Monsieur Fregier are those of a prosperous, humane, middle-aged tax collector, and the painter has captured the weary self-knowledge in his eyes.

He has also captured a long, black, sinuous tongue, forked at its tip, lolling from Fregier’s half-open mouth.

In Visit of the Magi, the traditional gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh proffered by the kings have been replaced by a meticulously delineated sleeping bat, a pinkish-grey object veined with red threads about the length of a forearm subsequently identified by veterinary anatomists as a skinned fox, and a nacreous, cloaklike object, draped over two extended arms, seemingly gelatinous in texture, which has appeared to more than one marine biologist to be a dead jellyfish. There is no hint of awareness of the incongruous nature of their offerings in the reverential gaze of the regal visitors.

It is common to include butterflies, wasps, flies, and snails in still lifes of flowers (see, for example, the floral still lifes of the Dutch artist Balthasar van der Ast (1593/94–1657) which are festooned with a veritable cornucopia of insects). But Still Life with a Bowl of Flowers is dominated by a giant beetle, bigger than a human head, drawn in microscopic detail, squatting centre stage in front of the fruit bowl. Interestingly, entomologists have been unable to identify the exact species of beetle in the painting, and expert opinion is divided on whether the artist made a mistake

The ABR Podcast Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some of our recent episodes.

Bruce Pascoe

Stephen Bennetts

Hilma af Klint Julie Ewington

Yoo-rook Justice Commission Paul Muldoon

Richard Flanagan James Boyce

‘Bunker’ – a story Josephine Rowe

Francis Webb

Ian Dickson and John Hawke

Israel and Palestine Ilana Snyder

Recovery Ten poets

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

47

in painting the beetle or conjured its features out of his imagination or whether the beetle was represented accurately but in the intervening years had become extinct.

Perhaps the most famous peinture étonnante is the most unnerving: The Investiture of Dr Regonard, now in the Louvre.

Doctor Regonard stands looking out of the canvas at the viewer with a level gaze, resplendent in blue velvet frockcoat, cream linen breeches, and gold buckled shoes, caught in a shaft of cool daylight from windows to his right. Behind him and to his left is a full-length mirror in which the back of the doctor is reflected. He is blocking the light from the window, so the back of his frockcoat and his breeches and stockings are in shadow.

But as your eyes adjust to the gloom, there at the bottom of the mirror, on either side of his legs, facing out of the mirror, squats a naked homunculus with eyes like black marbles, pointed nose and wide, lipless mouth, grinning at the viewer, its arms wrapped around the leg nearest to it. In an instant your eyes switch back to Doctor Regonard before the mirror: did you miss them the first time you looked? But no, the imp-like creatures are not there; they can be seen only in the shadows of the reflection, their eyes fixed on you. You look again at the doctor’s face to see whether it betrays any consciousness of these malevolent entities, seen only in the mirror hugging his legs. This time you think you perceive a tightness to the set of his mouth; what seemed like calmness in the eyes now seems like deadness, and you realise there is no animating spark, no twinkle of light deep in these eyes; they are dark tunnels with utter blackness at their end.

The overwhelming consensus currently in place among art historians and scholars is that the peintures étonnantes were indeed painted by Jean-Michel Houvrée. This consensus was first established by the publication in 1882 of Charles Gilliment’s biography of the painter, which argued convincingly that there are continuities of technique, of tint and colouration, even of brush stroke, between the peintures étonnantes and Houvrée’s earlier work that transcend any divergences in style or subject matter.

The fact that no sketches or outlines for any of these works of art were found among Jean-Michel’s papers was ignored, as was the fact that entirely different pigments, oils, and varnish were deployed by the artist in these paintings from those used in any of his previous works. (On this last point, it is worth noting that, to this day, art historians who specialise in historical painting techniques and materials have not been able to trace where the pigments and oils used by Houvrée in these works of art were sourced – see Susan Manzer’s masterly survey of this topic in ‘Questions concerning the origins of materials used in the peintures étonnantes of Jean-Michel Houvrée’ from a symposium on Historical Painting Techniques, Materials and Studio Practice held at the University of Neymoller, the Netherlands, 18–20 September 1989.)

It is true that the otherworldly, occult, and extraordinary elements of the peintures étonnantes constitute a radical departure in terms of subject matter from Houvrée’s previous paintings: but they constitute a significant break from most art of that time. It is tempting to exaggerate those facets which speak of a modern, even post-modern, sensibility, or which presuppose an ironic, knowing detachment on his part. But equally, there is no denying that sense of a mind awakened to a new consciousness 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

of the discombobulation to be afforded by the radical reordering of reality and the introduction of images which convey pain and despair just as much as they speak of a deracinated jeu d’esprit.

The appreciation of these striking paintings has been transformed in recent years by the publication in 1999 of Professor Aiden Cumber’s A Fall from Grace: The altered visions and living nightmares of the peintures étonnantes of Jean-Michel Houvrée. His argument is that when Jean-Michel fell from his horse in July 1725, he incurred a traumatic brain injury to his occipital lobe, that part of the brain which is responsible for visual perception and visuospatial coordination. Consequently, the way Houvrée experienced reality visually, and the way he formulated visual representations, was profoundly altered. This accounts for the strange, exotic, or incongruous objects and the disjointed sense of perspective which thereafter are prominent features of his work.

According to Cumber, these ‘altered visions’ (as he termed them) were entirely involuntary in origin and Houvrée had no control over them: once they had formed in his mind, he simply had to incorporate them in his paintings the best way he could.

Cumber’s thesis is that this should not be seen as a deficit: the fall did not cause any diminution of Houvrée’s ability as an artist. Rather, it enhanced Jean-Michel’s artistic repertoire and expanded his mental faculties, in the same way mescaline and LSD would do for later generations of artists. This explanation has persuaded some more than others, but whatever the explanation for the radical departure in Jean-Michel’s artistic vision, it clearly did not come without some cost to the painter, as the solitary, reclusive, and shadowy life he adopted after his injury suggests.

Whatever the truth about Jean-Michel Houvrée’s life and art after his fall, we may perhaps give him the last word as expressed in the final work he is believed to have painted. Portrait of the Artist Sitting at a Table is the only self-portrait Jean-Michel Houvrée is believed to have produced. It has been tentatively dated as 1754 when the painter was sixty. An even, limpid light floods the picture. He sits on the left of a round table facing the viewer, dressed in nondescript black clothes, his eyes disconcertingly looking up at something out of the picture, just above the viewer’s head. The eyes are caught at the exact moment they have flicked up, and this has an extraordinary effect on the viewer; the natural response is to involuntarily look up to see what has caught the painter’s eye. Whatever it is delights him; the eyes are suffused with a gentle, joyous humour. The face is expressionless, so this effect is achieved solely by capturing a look in the eyes: a stunning technical accomplishment. His hand rests palm up on the table, as if ready to hold the hand of whoever is going to sit next to him at the table. For the seat on the other side of the table is empty. Except that looking at the way Jean-Michel leans in, the way his hand is held out, more than one viewer has had the curious sensation that there is someone already sitting in the chair next to Jean-Michel, holding his hand, perhaps also looking up at what has caught his eye. g John Richards has previously lived in Manchester, London, and Singapore. He now lives in Brisbane with his wife and four children. In a previous life he was a lawyer. ‘A Fall from Grace’ is his first published work of fiction. He is writing more short stories and a novel. ❖

Fiction

Women of a certain rage Lisa Taddeo’s scorching first novel Georgia White

Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

I

Bloomsbury Circus $32.99 pb, 321 pp

n the prologue to her first book, Three Women (2019), a work of non-fiction exploring the structures and expressions of desire, Lisa Taddeo writes that she had not initially intended to focus on women. ‘I thought I’d be drawn to the stories of men.

Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.’ It was not until she began interviewing her subjects that she noticed that, while the stories of men all seemed to adhere to the same pattern, women’s stories were tantalisingly oblique; when a woman spoke of desiring a man, it was almost never (or never just) the man himself that she wanted. At first, the question that Three Women poses is: Why do these women desire the men that they do? But the further Taddeo delves inside the lives of her case studies (Maggie, the abused teenager; Lina, the woman in a loveless marriage; Sloane, the pariah of her community), the more the question becomes: Why, after everything that men have done to them, do women continue to desire men at all?

Three Women tries to be disinterested, not always successfully.

As Lauren Oyler observed in her review for the New Yorker, Taddeo seems to be mostly invested in the stories of white, heterosexual women, and her fondness for reporting in third-person limited means that it is not always clear who is speaking. When desire assumes a particularly distinctive form in Three Women, Oyler notes, it is hard to tell if it is the subject who is speaking in this way, or if it is an interpretative flourish by the author who is parsing her.

But fiction absolves what non-fiction cannot; a novelist need not concern herself with being exhaustive or detached. In Animal, her first novel, Taddeo immerses herself in the single-mindedness that is permitted in first-person storytelling, and the results are scorching. Whereas Three Women made sex out to be an obfuscation, a diversion rather than a solution to women’s desires, Animal treats intercourse as tantamount to war. Taddeo’s narrator, Joan, is a woman of a certain rage, the Other Woman to more than one married man, and her narrative is less a stream of consciousness than a feverish journey through white-water rapids. Reader, beware of the rocks.

The novel begins with the death of Joan’s boss and long-term sexual partner, Vic, who shoots himself inside a restaurant where Joan is having dinner with another man. In the wake of his suicide, Joan leaves New York and heads for California, with the vague intention of tracking down a person from her past. She takes up

residence among a community of fellow truants and misfits in the Santa Monica Mountains, where she meets and befriends the object of her search (for her part, the woman, like the reader, seems ignorant of hers and Joan’s shared history). The teenaged daughter of Vic is also on the move, threatening to harm Joan for her role in her father’s death.

While these events are unfolding, Joan continues to return to the major events of her life: the beginning of her and Vic’s relationship (‘Smart older men will have a way of crawling up your leg. It won’t feel seedy at first and it might seem like it was your idea’); a traumatic event that transpired when Joan was ten; and a multitude of other sexual or sexualised encounters from adolescence to adulthood. We also gather, early on, that Joan is not delivering a soliloquy: her occasional slips into the imperative and bouts of confessional tenderness make it clear she is addressing a child, either real or hypothetical. ‘If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depraved is the one I would use,’ Joan tells her listener. Throughout her narrative, Joan remains undecided as to whether ‘depraved’ best describes who she is or what has happened to her; whether she must be sorry for anything or if the world should feel sorry for her.

If Joan is depraved, she is in ways that only women can be.

She is the femme fatale equipped with consciousness, for whom sex is a drug that brings no pleasure, who sees herself through the eyes of the men who would rape her. Unsentimental and unscrupulous, she denies her maternal instinct even as it is staring her in the face. Like most anti-heroines, if she lies or steals or kills, she does so only because she is desperate and traumatised.

Her depravity stems, in part, from maternal failure: she has no mother left to heal her, and she does not yet have a child to love.

Reduced to its parts, Animal seems like it might be revisiting tired or familiar territory. What sets Joan apart is the exquisite cruelty of her gaze and the forcefulness of her character. She is a highly erratic narrator (in the novel’s final pages, we learn exactly why). With each new sentence, she darts between present and past, emotion and observation, the most vulnerable of longings and the sharpest of barbs.

In Three Women, Taddeo sought to demonstrate that, even if patriarchy relegates women’s stories to certain scripts (the Lolita, the housewife, the whore), there is still ‘complexity and beauty and violence’ to be found in the lives of women trapped within those scripts. The same proves to be true in Animal, a triumph of a novel, sublime in its sensitivity and ruthlessness. g Georgia White is a PhD student of Monash University.

Stay in the loop.

Sign up to our newsletters online and receive the latest ABR content straight to your inbox australianbookreview.com.au/about/abr-newsletters

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

49

Interview

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His most recent publications include the novel Lucida Intervalla (UWA Publishing 2018), Open Door (UWA Publishing, 2018), and Supervivid Depastoralism (Vagabond, 2021). His poetry collections have won a variety of awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Christopher Brennan Award for Poetry. His volumes of stories include Crow’s Breath (Transit Lounge, 2015), Anarchy in the Avon Valley (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. With Tracy Ryan he is the co-editor of The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry (2017). He lives with his family in the Western Australian wheatbelt.

Which poets have most influenced you?

I was making a list of poets I feel indebted to the other day, and it ended up too long to get a grip on! This list is, believe it or not, selective: Blake, Shelley, Wang Wei, Milton, Judith Wright, Dante, Du Fu, Hardy, Akhmatova, Dickinson, Hart Crane, C. J. Brennan, Philip Sidney, Virgil, Wordsworth, Keats, Langston Hughes, Homer, Li Bai, Whitman, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Jack Davis, Randolph Stow, Michael Dransfield, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, J. H. Prynne, Dorothy Hewett, Fay Zwicky, Aimé Césaire – and especially Emily Brontë. I am essentially and necessarily affected by the work of my longterm partner, Tracy Ryan, whose movement between languages has had a profound effect on the way I hear and read poetry.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

These are inseparable ‘qualities’. In fact, the desire to write and the act of writing seem almost fused.

What prompts a new poem?

Exposure to the physical world made figurative through reflection and interaction. I am very driven by ecological and human rights concerns, so that way of considering the world is always active, but being immersed in an ‘experience’ necessarily prompts a poem.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

I am very flexible – I often work ‘in the field’ and quite literally ‘see’ words on a ‘screen’ inside my head as they come, and often speak the poems as I am walking or doing things outside. I can work at a typewriter for long stretches!

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

It varies vastly and often depends on the ‘nature’ of the poem. If I am working with ‘form’, a poem inevitably goes through quite a few drafts that are about sorting technical issues. However, since I visualise and speak poems as they form, there’s a whole ‘pre-draft’ process that takes place. Looking at the typescript 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

(Tracy Ryan)

Poet of the Month with John Kinsella

of my most recent book of poems, I would say each one went through the ‘mental’ visualising process, then ‘on the page’ notes, then a typed version that is then hand-corrected, and then typed into a Word document that invariably goes through changes and versions (from minor to major) over a period of time.

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

Dante – there’s no choice. He just compels me and gets me arguing about pretty well everything.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

C.J. Brennan’s Poems (1913).

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

A few like minds, a few contesting minds, and, for me, a lot of ‘nature’.

What have you learned from reviews of your work?

I’ve had many ‘kinds’ of reviews over the years. Some I’ve learnt from, some I’ve thought about for years, wondering through them how to read my own work; others I’ve felt were gifts insofar as they lifted from being ‘about’ my work to being about poetry and all those things around poetry I so value. Others I’ve felt scorched by without learning anything much, while yet others I have read with interest while feeling they were about another person’s writing.

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

Emily Brontë’s complete poems.

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

‘No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere’ (Emily Brontë).

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

Yes and no – often in ways a poet doesn’t expect, but also more often not in the ways a poet might hope. g

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

There Are No Stars Here, Either

by Lauren Sarazen

D

likes my photograph, the one of me in the 1940s shorts and tight T-shirt, the one I posted to the internet just so that he would see. He watches my story – watches as I make my way through Italian museums, drink Campari, buy a straw hat with a grosgrain band. It is peak summer. It is Italy.

It is forty degrees.

I have to tell you: I hold four tenets to be true. I still believe in trains that run on time, in the solemn power of dandelion wishes, that ripe heirloom tomatoes are the embodiment of the sensual life, and that you shouldn’t use people. Hold fast, and the compass will point true north.

Two weeks ago we were in Margate, my best friend and I. The tomatoes were too young, slices of flavourless sponge on my tongue. The first sign. Bedford, Caroline, I’d told him when he’d asked. Vendeuse, unfortunately; Gallerist, ideally; Paris. There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. He was slicked back hair and bad grammar, ardent eyes and snakebites – oh, far too many snakebites – but there was something there. I’d felt it, sharp and true. When he came to find us, his smiles were angled at her. It’s fine, I said. I understand, I said. I don’t want to compete, I said. She shrugged.

It rained off and on – English summer, English seaside.

Lying in bed at night, I heard the gulls screaming outside my window. In the afternoons, I walked the beach. Wind-whipped, I cuffed my trouser-legs and sat on the sand, salty and shivery in the weak sun. I tried to take pleasure in finding translucent sea glass, half-buried, in watching my footprints dissolve when the waves came in frothy. In the evenings, we jived in anonymous rooms. I wore a turtleneck sweater, and my lipstick didn’t budge.

She wore her feelings lightly, chiffon layers stripped off day by day. Coeur d’artichaut. We thought that would be the end of it.

I drifted along behind her towards the next one, and the next one after that. The band was hot, and the dance floor was full.

I glanced over at her, but she was busy spinning.

He stood there, just there, beside me, both bashful and brash as he snaked an arm around my waist. His fingers played my hip like a guitar, tapping and shifting along with the melody. I didn’t

feel like shouting over the music so I smiled, and he smiled back.

It didn’t take much. He said the right things. They were simple and sweet. For once I felt seen. A plant thrust suddenly into the sun after weeks of darkened rooms. I’ve been thinking about changing my ticket, he whispered.

Let’s get two things straight from the start: No one is falling in love with anyone. No one is changing their life. I whispered to my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Hold these as truths, and you can do whatever you like. It felt extraordinarily civilised.

It felt like Peggy Guggenheim. But those were just words, and when he looked at me, they didn’t make much sense anymore.

I couldn’t help myself. I tumbled. I fell. Margate, Paris, Darwin.

No, not Darwin. A tiny town. You have to zoom in. There. These too were just words, points on a map. The internet effaces distance, up to a point. The internet reduces us to words, too. Words only hold power if you let them. Now I wait for words, sweat trickling down my back, licking dribbling gelato, red lipstick bleeding out into miniature tributaries at the edges of my mouth. Now the trains run late. An omen.

D: Whatchu doin?

D: Hows ur day? :) C: My heart stopped looking at a Titian today. Mission Michelangelo later, though not really sure if I want to bother D: Whats that?

C: Hmm? D: Mission michaelangelo?

There seems to be so much explaining, and all of it mundane.

I feel stupid retracing my steps, cracking open my sentences.

Nuance is lost. I can see the bottom of the pond.

C: Going to see more art D: thats nice :) C: You know, I really do like talking to you, but I can absolutely stop D: overthinking! Xx AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

51

This is chemical, Rosie texts me. She is in Vancouver. She is on set. She is up at five, sitting on a folding chair in the half-light.

It’s powerful and it’s lovely and it’s very real, but this is a short story, not a novel, she writes. When you’re apart, there’s nothing there.

That was Adrian. I woke up one morning and it made no sense.

Find a nice Italian. Someone with curly hair.

She’s right, but I make excuses. I wait eagerly for those texts, heart jumping despite each juvenile U, each sentence lacking proper engagement. He asks after me. He tells me nothing. When he starts spelling out the word instead of the letter – a tacky reminder of what this really is – I start to think I have a shot.

I couldn’t possibly. You’re allowed to want more, I tell myself.

Je suis fou de vous, Michel Polnareff croons through my earbuds, my limbs, my bones. It is peak summer. You’re allowed.

C: How’s things?

It’s the morning there, now. He’s seen it. There is no reply.

Restless, I shuffle into my shoes, and take a walk down to the Duomo. When I sit on a stone bench, the heat settles into my bones. In the night, the cathedral shines. The marble frontice gleams against the night sky, pale ivory, pine green, dusky pink.

In the night, I can tolerate looking up, taking in its contours.

Ghiberti’s gates glowing against a sky blacker and more velvety than Paris. There are no stars here, either, but it feels like there could be. Vendetta city, baby, but it’s a Saturday night and the streets have that muffled Monday quality. Any remnant of Medici feeling’s been sucked dry from the marrow and replaced with an injection of synthetic consumerism. It’s not what I thought it would be, this Renaissance Disneyland. As a city, Florence feels parochial and out of context. I keep looking for movie theatres and gyms, sure signs of local life.

Still no reply. I hit the corner bar, the one with the overpriced menu and sprawling terrace. It’s the only thing open this late.

Directly facing the monument, there are misters attached to the edges of the faded, coral awning so I know it’s going to be bad.

The waitress is distracted and slow. She only has two tables, so she leans over the bar. She is giggling with the bartender, her hair wild where it emerges, untamable, from the teeth of a plastic claw clip. I wait and smile when she comes, order a Spritz and snap a photo. Spritz o’clock, I caption. He sees it.

In the mornings, I go to museums – the Uffizi, the Accademia, the Bargello. I soak up paintings, so many paintings, until they all begin to swim together – medieval gold leaf panels; pained, anaemic Christs; anonymous Renaissance men; long-dead women with lustrous skin and perfect, golden hair. The Americans jostle loudly behind me, pushing their way forward to snap a photo – no flash! – and the Japanese wait in silence, juggling selfie sticks.

Abroad, we are all reduced to cliché. Abroad, we are most and least ourselves.

On the terrace café at the Uffizi, I spend too much money on a caffè shakerato. A family of five spends half an hour shouting mundanities at the table next to mine, and leaves their trash all over the table. They have come all the way from St Paul to see the Dah Vinseee – that’s how the Italians say it, right? Grandma Alice needs to lie down; Joshua is on one, then two, then he is whining and his mother is hauling him towards the toilets by his ear.

52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

When they are all gone, I tidy up the detritus. The bin is only a few paces away. The servers don’t notice. Maybe they’re used to it.

Maybe I am overly cautious.

A docent in a crisp, white shirt, and black cigarette pants tells me to take the long exit, not to miss the Caravaggio. Her skin is tanned to a gleaming gingerbread, teeth bleached American white.

When she gestures, she jingles – she is dripping in silver necklaces, bangles from wrist to elbow. I hesitate for a moment, wishing I could take her picture. Then she frowns, a crease floating down between her eyebrows. In my head, I snap the picture and keep moving.

I do see the Caravaggios, though I don’t take to the dark canvases the world so loves. My taste is flawed. I have no time for Michelangelo. Ghosting through the galleries, I imagine which items I’d spirit away to my private collection. This, not that.

Bedford Jeune, I tell myself. Maybe not Guggenheim money, but Guggenheim spirit. The best pictures are tucked away near the exit on the ground floor. They aren’t the most famous. They are the ones people rush past, oversaturated and hangry, towards the cafes at the edges of Piazza della Signoria. They are not the ones the people come to see. They are not the ones Peggy would buy, either. I stand before The Three Graces, a small, square canvas in a gilt frame. Hung along with several other female nudes, it’s easily my favorite grouping. There’s nothing memorable here. There are no crowds, no plexiglas. Here, I am alone. I assign more value to these three girls dancing in the dark than to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo. ‘Il Poppi’, the museum’s label reads.

C: Did you mean those things?

D: What things? bout u?

I pause. Is it reticence or disregard? I do not want to play this game.

C: Just be kind to me D: Don’t worry you’re overthinking xx

At the Bargello, I overhear the guard explaining that the facility used to be a prison. I cast an eye over the vaulted ceilings, painted with crests and gold leaf fleur-de-lis. The rooms are wide and long with massive, stone fireplaces. There are no signs of cells or iron or cryptic prison graffiti carved into the walls.

I decide it must have been a prison in the same vein as Château de Vincennes – a one-time gentleman’s penitentiary. No, it was the headquarters of the police, the internet tells me. The internet is precise: executions, plots, and siege. Now, the courtyard is adorned with marble nudes. A naked stare for a naked body. Here, there is no one to look back at me, see my looking, and draw conclusions. The stone is luminous in the indirect light: smooth marble curves, delicate bones and veins in the hands, chiselled abdomens leading towards nests of curls at the groin, the rounded stomachs of the women, their generous breasts and wide thighs, the shell of an ear, blind pupilless eyes. I would have been the feminine ideal in the Middle Ages, a voice behind me says. Her tone is jocular, but I’m attuned to the hint of bitter almonds, that ache. For so long it’s been my own. But that was then, and this is now.

D: How are you? ;) C: Tired. Couldn’t sleep. I was a bit distracted D: Oh were u … ;) ;) were u being naughty?

C: Could have been the canicule. Could have been fantasising about being fingered by some musician I met. We’ll never know D: Oh damn thats hot!!

He begins to type. He stops. He starts. He stops.

D: ... making you cum hard with just my fingers …

I wait for him to continue. He doesn’t, and I put the phone away.

I have run out of words that feel safe to say. For the first time, my mind is full of writhing images that need reining in: fingers, lips, twining limbs. I think about writing it all down, no holds barred, something just for me – the kind of language that would make me wary of how I held the pages on the train. I imagine him reading it, half-hard, wanting me.

C: What are you thinking here?

C: Tell me. I’ve been so open with you

Another boy, one from long ago, likes six of my photos in a row. I feel the likes come in, phone buzzing against my thigh. He is not the only one. I have lost twenty-four kilos since I last posted a picture of myself on the internet. I remain the same person; they reveal their shallow depths. Do they think I have amnesia?

I’ve lost weight, not my mind. D does not reply. I take a savage bite out of my focaccia. Cool Girls don’t eat bread. Cool Girls run the game. Cool Girls are impervious to feeling. I am not a Cool Girl.

I write to my best friend. I tell her about paintings. I tell her about my heart. I think it’s time to give up and just enjoy bread, I say. What’s the point if this just leads to feeling this way? Listen, she replies. I talked to him. It’s just what I’ve been telling you.

He’s a mess. He can’t keep up with you, so stop eating bread, she writes. Pick another one. You can’t stop now.

On the last day, I walk to the Palazzo Pitti. Disappointment gnaws, vicious, at my heart. The inside of the palazzo is gold-gilt dazzling and I try to focus on it. Every room is the same. The air-conditioning units are wheezy. Outside, the Boboli Gardens are bleached bone. I stagger up the gravel incline, trying to keep to the sliver of shade along the right-hand side of the path. Grit catches in my sandals and I kick up a cloud of dust even when I try to pick up and place my feet precisely. I give it up when I realise there’s little difference. At the top of the incline, there is a statue of a god, stabbing a triton downwards into the water.

A fountain, presumably. I peer into its depths. The water is a murky mosquito trap. The grass is dead.

Outside the windows, Italian countryside comes and goes in flashes. Vineyards. Lake Garda. Industrial parks. Vineyards again.

The man beside me jockeys for control of the shared armrest.

His polo stretches taut over the pregnant curve of his stomach.

I finally let him have it, lean my cheek against the window and close my eyes. I feel the sunlight on my face through the glass.

I can’t stop wanting, so I dig this hole deeper.

C: Venice soon, on the train. Whatcha up to?

D: Watching tv in bed :) C: What show?

D: That 70s show C: Love!

I wait for something, anything, but he doesn’t continue. The train slows down, and the scrub and the low, boxy houses give way to the lagoon on either side of us. For a moment, he is gone. It’s like Summertime, and I smile to remember Katharine Hepburn leaning out the window with her Kodak camera. You can’t open them now, the windows, but soon enough I am there – same bustle, less style, more tack, until the city bursts into panoramic glory right in front of me and my heart lets loose this pent-up sigh, as if it had spent the last three years clenched. It is always like this, Venice.

The vaporetto at Ferrovia is heaving. Tourists and their suitcases spill out of the waiting area. I walk the eighteen minutes to the apartment instead, hauling my bag over picturesque bridges and across the sunbaked campos. When I arrive, I haul myself up four flights of narrow stairs into another humid, sticky apartment. My host shows me how to light the stove, hands me my keys, and then he is gone. I slick on red lipstick and take to the streets.

I walk fast, faster than is necessary. In Piazza San Marco, I say a silent hello to the pigeons, to the basilica, to the stonewinged lions, to Caffé Florian. I follow the yellow signs directing me through campos and down narrow alleys until I am almost running – running – across Ponte dell’Accademia. Everywhere I look, riots of oleander burst bright and seductive, like insidious jasmine, over stone walls. I rest my hands on the gorgeous glass hunks welded into the gates of Peggy Guggenheim’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Cracked white marble steps lead down into blue-green canals. Sienna and mustard villas. Splintering front doors open directly onto the lip of the canal. Glossy, woodpanelled water taxis. Aperol at every table, the brightest tangerine. Even the street lamps have pink glass. Venise est un poème.

When I finally come to rest on the steps of Salute, the sky is streaked pink and purple and that deep, resonant blue, and I feel like weeping. I am aesthetically full. I am too much or too little.

There is no in-between.

Days pass. I attempt to change course, revise my focus. I sit on the terrace with tea, writing in my exercise book until lightning appears on the horizon. I am teaching myself Italian. Diario di viaggio. Cronache illustrate. Andiamo. Eccolo. Ciao. I can say useless pretty things, and un tavolo per uno, per favore; sto cercando piazza San Marco; Dov’e la toilette? I rewatch Summertime, wonder if calling a waiter carbonari is the Italian version of calling out garçon at a Parisian café – a hard no. I google it. Carbonari – an informal network of revolutionaries; a secret society; the charcoal makers.

No, there’s no b: cameriere. Giusto. The moths flutter around the screen of my laptop, and after half an hour or so fat drops land on the backs of my hands where they move over the page, crunching conjugations. I call it a night, crawl under the covers, turn out the light. Tomorrow, Peggy, I tell myself. Tomorrow.

Riding the vaporetto, I lean over the railing, face into the wind. A water taxi – Ya Ya emblazoned across its stern – almost AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

53

collides with us. Our driver is yelling, arms flying. The driver of the taxi is turned around, tossing it back at us, boat full speed ahead. No one is looking where they are going, not even the gondolas bobbing at the edges of the canal. Waiting for certain collision, I am disappointed. Venetians have perfected the fine art of controlled chaos. At the Accademia, I disembark. The narrow alleys are less crowded here. Here, I can breathe. Direzione Peggy Guggenheim. The courtyard is empty, and I buy a ticket from a smiley, young American girl who asks me where I’m from. I say France, and refuse to elaborate when she frowns.

Stepping through the doors, I am restored. I am here. Glossy terrazzo floors: pink, white, grey. Paintings, large and small, on every wall. On the Beach, Arc of Petals, The Empire of Light – Picasso, Calder, Magritte – the canal just beyond, peeking through the wrought iron doors. In this museum, I take my time. It takes stories to turn the key. I read the names of the paintings, and appreciate the ones who use their words. The Sun in Its Jewel Case. Windows Open Simultaneously. Very Rare Picture on Earth.

Sad Young Man on a Train.

C: I’ll regret this tomorrow, but why don’t you come to Paris?

I don’t have too much going this summer. Come. It would be lovely to see you D: I could ... I don’t have work at the moment …

I wait. He waits. I don’t encourage him further. He needs to choose.

He needs to decide.

D: Don’t regret anything xx

So how’s it going with D, my best friend asks. Six days now without a word, I explain. She cannot understand why this is so hard for me when it comes so easily for her. I want to liquefy and seep into the cracks between the tiles. I want to slink into the canal and become a creature of the lagoon. I require a convent, now.

Just pick another one, she says. Peter likes you. Hook up with Peter.

I worry about you sometimes. You’re gonna end up a man-hating feminist lol.

I am a man-hating feminist, I want to say. I am the gorgon you fear. But I compartmentalise, like I always do. I put the phone away, resist the urge to drop it into the canal – plunk – like a stone, lean back against the white marble façade of Peggy’s palazzo. Boats glide past. Taxis, vaporetti, gondolas, service boats hauling office supplies, letters, groceries in large cardboard boxes.

I do not want to start crying, so of course I do. I smile sardonically at the girl taking selfies across the terrace. I shrug as if to say, sunscreen, hey, whatcha gonna do? This is infatuation, but I have travelled that shallow track before. No, something feels different here. A click in the lock. I close my eyes and think back to when our eyes met across the room; when we talked about life and what we wanted from it; when we danced to the wrong song in our room, close, so close, his hand in mine.

But we are not there and he is somewhere and I am on Peggy’s terrace on the Grand Canal and there is a girl taking five million selfies in front of me with the aid of her selfie stick. I am grateful, for once. I will not be asked to assist. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

itself, Peggy said. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.

I spy a dandelion waving in the wind, its stubborn roots between two paving stones. I pluck it. I blow. The tufts refuse to fly when I direct my breath with precision. An omen. A sign. I book an opera ticket. At La Fenice, when the lights dim down and we make our way to our boxes, eggshell blue, I allow a man to brush against me in the crush. When he finds me again, I let him buy me a drink at intermission. Then another, afterwards at Caffè Florian, until we are floating on a sea of accordion and strings and expensive Negronis. Sexual exorcism, I think. Deaden the palate. Then start again. This man is Argentinian. He has a name I can’t recall even five minutes later, and when he asks me to go home with him, I say yes. I do not want this man. I do not want to fuck, but I want to stop feeling. In his room, the air is close and his tongue tastes sour, but Peggy, I think. I start as I mean to go on.

I have an irrepressible taste for destruction. It only takes knowing I shouldn’t to prompt me to hit send. Burn the bridges, and let it be extreme. The faster the better. Do it now! Disappoint me, I’m begging you. Leave me for dead on read. Break my heart before breakfast so I can tell myself I told you so; you were not allowed – I knew he would all along. A large part of my heart longs to be the heroine of a tragedy – the best love stories end badly – so sober, drunk, I look for holes in all the pretty things he said, hold them up to the sun, tug and test the fibers. But this isn’t a love story. Not yet. Maybe never. Maybe this is just more of the same. We’ve opened the bottle, but need to let it breathe.

So I don’t. I use him, or we use each other. When he is asleep, I sneak out. I do not leave a trace. I do not leave my number. I do not feel bad. On this night, I am someone else.

Weaving along the narrow lanes towards my apartment, I text D – drunk, effusive, honest. I set the bridge on fire. There can be no trace of it, not after this. Not even the piers, alone and absurd, sticking up out of the earth. Les mauvais mots vont me libérer.

In the morning, he has seen it. For a half-second, regret, for now it really ends. He is the easy breezy kind, but he is not honest.

A door has been shut. He is no longer someone I should keep talking to, but I do. Oh, how I do. This is how it works. I run myself into the ground.

I go down to the galleries. I take pictures, so many pictures.

I see one I like. The canvas is large, much too large for my studio apartment. Colours streak across the square. The details are exquisite. The artist captures the light just right, but turns the world upside down. I google her name. She is young, just starting out, but she has made it here, to this gallery with its modern, sharp angles and cool, expensive receptionist. Her eyes, defiant, stare out of a full moon face. I hand over my credit card. Just like that.

Ship it to Paris, I tell the man. How much? g Lauren Sarazen is a writer who currently lives in Paris, France.

Originally from Southern California, she graduated from Chapman University with a BFA in Creative Writing and received her MA in Literature from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her words have appeared in Hobart, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The London Magazine, The Washington Post, Vice, Elle, Air Mail, and more. ❖

Fiction

Elevator pitches Three experimental novels Alex Cothren

W

riters seeking publication are often advised to have an ‘elevator pitch’ ready. These succinct book-hooks are designed to jag a trapped publisher in the wink between a lift door closing and reopening. Has this insane tactic ever actually worked? No idea. But it’s fun to imagine the CEO of Big Sales Books, on their way up to another corner-office day of tallying cricket memoir profits, blindsided by three of the looniest elevator pitches imaginable. A novel narrated by Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles! A faux political memoir about a prime minister and his shark vendetta! An academic satire cum historical mystery mashup told largely through the – wait, wait, wait! – footnotes of a PhD thesis! That CEO will probably take the stairs next time, but kudos to the independent publishers who saw the potential in these experimental works and their début authors. Whatever the path of weird Australian writing, long may it find its way to these pages.

Of these three works, the central premise of Angela O’Keeffe’s first novel, Night Blue (Transit Lounge, $27.99 pb, 144 pp), sounds most bonkers. The story’s first half is told from the point of view of Blue Poles, a 1952 painting by the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. The novel begins at Blue Poles’s birth, the cigarette-puffing Pollock peering at our inanimate hero with ‘a gaze that sought me as one seeks a horizon’. The painting is later shipped off to Canberra, a controversial $1.3 million purchase by the then-unbuilt Australian National Gallery. Thus, we are privy to a close-up of Gough Whitlam and ‘his lustrous hair’, as well as the sea of everyday Australians who come to express their disgust at the painting’s cost: ‘they’d come not to discover what they thought of me but to prove what they’d already decided’.

This front-row tour of historical figures and events is fun, but Blue Poles is itself a rather dull tour guide, ‘a witness rather than an active participant’ in the narrative. Once affixed to the wall of the gallery, it subsists on the mental debris of passers-by: ‘thought floated and sometimes became snagged in me’. At times, Pollock’s memories also bubble to the surface, ranging from ‘the shadow of an ash tree from his Arizona childhood’ to Pollock’s abuse of his wife, the painter Lee Krasner. But these flashes are not enough to flesh out either Pollock or his creation. Unlike the garrulous fossils of Chris Flynn’s Mammoth (2020), the paintings do not interact with one another when night falls, so there is no way to know how Blue Poles’s airy voice distinguishes it from, say, The Death of Constable Scanlon.

The momentum returns in the novel’s more conventional

second half, which is narrated by Alyssa, an Australian writer pondering the timely question of whether art can ever be, or ever should be, separated from artist. Adrift in New York after a research trip mishap, Alyssa feverishly mixes her abhorrence for Pollock with misgivings about a stale marriage and ‘the child that never was’. As with Abstract Expressionism, feeling usurps meaning in the story’s resolution. In a final image, Pollock is shown studying a ‘stone that words could not reach’; perhaps the same is true for Blue Poles.

Michael Burrows’s début, Where the Line Breaks (Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 218 pp), also features dual narrators, although both are human this time. The first is Alan Lewis, a young Australian soldier who leaves Perth and his new fiancée to become caught up in the gears of World War I. The second is Matthew Denton, also from Perth, but living in London a century later while he writes his PhD thesis on the Unknown Digger, an anonymous soldier–poet who, Matthew argues, is none other than deceased war hero Alan Lewis. Matthew’s half of the story is told entirely through the chapters of his dissertation.

Scholarly analysis of Alan’s life and, potential, art appears in the main body of the text, while descriptions of Matthew’s personal unravelling worm their way into the footnotes.

Each strand of the novel succeeds in its own way. The war sections eschew History Channel exposition dumps in favour of transporting details, such as the Gallipoli wind screaming through a bullet wound, ‘playing Collopy’s body like an instrument’.

The dissertation’s intricate weaving of real and fabricated sources recalls Ryan O’Neill’s superb Their Brilliant Careers (2016).

I had to ask Google for a reality check on more than one occasion (Ginger Mick: somehow real!). The unexpected ribaldry of the footnotes seems to burst this illusion at first, with dry book citations bizarrely giving way to Matthew’s reminiscences of a backpacker ‘jerking me off in the hostel bedroom’. But as the cause of this deranged oversharing gradually becomes apparent, these asides coalesce into a satire set ‘in the dangerous unknown of the academic world’.

There is no doubt, however, that Alan’s struggles eclipse Matthew’s. While the former cradles a dying friend, the latter whinges about putting up wallpaper: ‘my own personal Lone Pine’. The back and forth between them should be a tonal mess, but it works because both characters are, regardless of the gravity of their situations, just people: fallible, hypocritical, self-serving.

While Burrows keeps mum on the true identity of the Unknown Digger until the last, the book’s central joke is that Matthew assumes only perfect heroes, ‘whose actions are astonishing enough to accommodate the artistic genius within’, can write poetry in the first place. If that were true, humanity wouldn’t have a single verse to its name.

In the time it takes others to deliver their elevator pitch, Martin McKenzie-Murray’s first novel, The Speechwriter (Scribe, $29.99 pb, 240 pp), has already told a hundred jokes. This rapidfire political satire recalls Paul Beatty and Armando Iannucci, even if it doesn’t quite fillet its targets with the same precision as those two modern masters. The story is told via the memoirs of Toby Beaverbrook, tracing his rise from Winston Churchillobsessed child prodigy to speechwriter for the prime minister.

When his dreams of being ‘a balladeer for our national project’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

55

are curdled by repeated instructions to ‘assemble some pap on ingenuity’, Toby embarks on a wild pre-election experiment that results in bizarre rants about sharks and water polo.

McKenzie-Murray, a former speechwriter himself, aptly apes the gibberish of political jargon: ‘we’ve reviewed the consensus and will entwine some unorthodoxy’. But the satire here has long been lapped by reality. Sure, the PM’s description of sharks as ‘terrorists … with gills’ is strange, but have you heard the one about injecting bleach? Furthermore, considering that Donald Trump is on his third term in this alternate reality, why would Toby be surprised that unhinged rhetoric leads to poll bumps: ‘people saw PolSpeak as a virus, and insanity looked like its cure’. Toby may despise his boss’s former ‘dull and wonkish dependability’, but in 2021 that sounds like a cold soda in hell.

There is plenty else here, however, that McKenzie-Murray nails to the wall. Sky News: ‘thoughts that would have otherwise been scrawled in faeces upon white walls were now beamed to airport lounges across the nation’. The Canberra boys-club: ‘If I snap a bra, that’s me telling you I love your work.’ Modern art: ‘canvas soaked in blood and Japanese mayonnaise’. Some of the best humour is also the silliest, such as a digression on Dr. Seuss’s ill-fated career as a crime reporter. But even with all the sentient PlayStations, cow fellatio scandals, and Don Bradman porn parodies, there’s a sense that The Speechwriter is playing catch-up to the actual weirdness of the present moment. Aren’t we all? g Alex Cothren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University.

Poetry

Unpredictive chemistry The bloodbeat of evocative language Rose Lucas

M

aria Takolander’s fourth book of poetry, Trigger Warning (University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 100 pp), is a sharp and arresting collection, fierce in its emotions and determination to make language do the hard work of speaking that which hovers at the edge of articulation. This is a poetics that traces everywhere the lurking presence of the disruptive – in domestic life, in global crises, even in our most intimate experiences. Takolander’s courageous poetry becomes both a landscape in which to inscribe what is unbearable and a sphere in which it might be, at least partially, managed.

The first section references a range of American poets, borrowing from their confessional poetics to take the reader, powerfully and abruptly, into dark personal territories. As the poet’s husband is wheeled ‘from emergency to theatre’, we experience her shock at the visceral malfunction of the beloved’s body: My voice is daemonic.

Your larynx contracts at its sound;

a moan emerges like a ghoul.

You blindly raise your arms, as if possessed by a dream,

batting at the tube clogging your throat, and at your chest

where the sternum was sawn apart

to get to your heart, cowering like a child

in its enclave of bone.

56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

This confronting experience also ‘triggers’ the speaker into spirals of previous trauma, the ‘pestilence’ of childhood nights controlled by her father: ‘My fear cried out, but my body could not run. / When I came to, it was in a room bruised by stars.’

The haunting nature of this kind of trauma is again alluded to in the Plath-inspired poem ‘Daddy’, where the speaker has become her father’s ‘nocturnal godling, / cut from the flesh of his groin, spilling myself like waste’. It is a triggering that recurs at moments of crisis and fear, and it leads to the re-emergence of depression, paralysis, even dissociation.

Even in poems of the domestic world, Takolander identifies the persistence of darkness: the curtains whose nylon cord is ‘looped like a noose’; the baby monitor that is ‘Valium-white’; the pot plant ‘serene as plastic’. In the section ‘Outside’, the poet plays more overtly with form in her attempts to wrestle with the identifiable threats of the external world. The sequence ‘Haiku for the Anthropocene’ uses both the stanzaic brevity of that form and plant names from the Botanical Gardens in an attempt to map the poles of night and daylight, what is beautiful and what is threatening. Other poems, such as ‘Scenes from a Documentary’, literally tip the text sideways, using the disconcerting disruption of layout, as well as the inclusion of symbols, as placeholders for the surfeit, the onerous burdens that the poems carry, whether it be climate change, sinkholes, radiation, or dementia.

The collection’s final prose poem, ‘On Happiness’, makes explicit the crucial question concerning the relationship between poetic art and suffering. When the poet writes, ‘she herself wondered if language was invented for the sole purpose of expressing pain’, we are given a retrospective key to the entire collection, witnessing Takolander’s impressive capacity to wield language’s almost shamanistic role of eliciting hidden suffering together with the identification of an equally persistent possibility of ‘happiness’.

Despite the grim spaces inhabited in these poems, happiness is nevertheless repeatedly sought – in the margins, in the catharses, in the sequencing and crafting of these poetic words.

Rare Bird (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 76 pp), James Lucas’s début collection, demonstrates craft refined to an impressive fluency and polish. These are poems that foreground the discipline of craft, reminding us of the ways

in which poetic forms – both conventional and experimental, tight and loose – can offer a structure in which a poet might explore, push at the edges, move off into uncharted territory.

With their delight in sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, these poems find new ways of housing experience within the architecture of existing forms.

The subject matter of the poems is lively and full of the colour of contemporary life – from art, to parenting, the modern city, cricket, the specificity of place, and the exchanges of perception.

The recurring questions of what is looked at, who is doing the looking, and what meanings are made through this dynamic thread through these different poems.

In ‘At Western Plains’, Lucas uses the repetitions and circulatory nature of the villanelle to examine the question of cross-species ‘looking’ and the extent to which it might lead to either radical recognition or a colonising gaze: When siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground an air-tight pouch vibrates beneath each chin.

Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound … and crowd the moat three deep as vain apes bound to stand guard every hour of the sun when siamang gibbons sing to hold their ground.

Upright primates gather, marvel at the sound.

In ‘Jazz’, the poet riffs on the more crystalline and open style of William Carlos Williams in order to accommodate the exploratory voices of music. Lines of poetry here offer a kind of improvisation on the juxtaposition of image and idea – and the production of art that flows from it: a flying sax converses with a sedentary piano, feeling for a quickness under pressure then ascending flights of basement stairs without a landing

The collection’s title poem, ‘Rare Bird’, references the art of John Wolseley, whose work is also used in the cover image.

Wolseley’s watercolours, often overlaid with sketchings of charcoal or graphite, evoke the delicacy of Australian landscape and birds. Lucas echoes this visual style with the poem’s ekphrastic searching for the ‘vagrant thought’ that will provide certainty amid the ephemera of perception. The regular metrics of this poem that pull the reader forward are undercut by enjambments that drop us into a flux of uncertainty – as elusive as the rare bird itself, glimpsed in the scrub: A vagrant thought to which I cannot fix a word speaks of the soul – too big a stretch? – of search

through properties, blind chases where I catch a bar of red, white brow or whistled note … a vagrant meditation without close (that bird I thought I saw being long gone)

Peter Kirkpatrick’s third collection, The Hard Word (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 91 pp), is the work of a poet, academic, and teacher who has long pursued language’s capacity to illuminate human experience. Sometimes this is done through the shadowing of voices and styles from the literary past, bringing them at least partially into a contemporary cadence.

This can be seen in the nod to Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti: ‘Should I bring her flowers, or will this weather do? / Whatever. Let’s give spring a big, warm welcome / as she unpacks her catwalk glamour’; or the humorous ventriloquising of Donne in the salacious poem ‘Lucking It’: O lucky soap… shortly to go above, below, within her sturdy grip; to slip and dip between the gaps, or feel her probing grope: O lucky, lucky soap.

There are also some powerful insights into the dynamics of the classroom, the moments when a student’s words can make ‘the heavy weight of hours lift, / just like a sudden drawing up of blinds’. For those of us committed to words and their mercurial capacity to broaden the perceptions of others, it’s exciting to see this ‘unpredictive chemistry of teaching’ brought so thoughtfully into the spotlight of poetic consideration.

Perhaps Kirkpatrick’s most powerful work is in relation to the visceral experience of love – that always ‘hard word’. While there are poems of heady sensuality, it is the more reflective poems of mature love that carry the most emotional heft. As Kirkpatrick writes in ‘The Bad News’, although ‘my silk has turned to flannelette, / my floating hair to thinning thatch’, the gift of love seems nevertheless to endure, whether by intention or accident.

The half-sleep connection of the long-lovers evokes a poignancy beyond the overt displays of language: Shifting in sleep you sigh, slide your arm away, uncouple us but take my hand and draw me round: refolding, so, our doubled bloodbeat, breath.

And all the years we’ve known each other, lose and nightly find each other return to this – return to this refolding of ourselves in darkness ...

For all his poems of cleverness, Kirkpatrick’s collection pivots on such a moment of bodily and emotional connection, drawn quietly into the bloodbeat of evocative language. g Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

57

Literary Studies

Nearer to the sun

Accelerant on the Lawrentian bonfire Geordie Williamson

Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence

by Frances Wilson

W

Bloomsbury $49.99 hb, 512 pp

hy ‘burning man’? Because in this immense, obsessive, studiously unkempt work, the biographer brings accelerant to the raging bonfire that is D.H. Lawrence’s reputation and pours it with pyromaniacal glee. Frances Wilson’s new life of the writer stands athwart the accumulated crimes of which Lawrence stands accused – his obstreperousness, his intense and absurd hatreds, his dubious politics, the physical and metaphysical violence he committed against women – and demands a halt to the trial.

‘Being loyal to Lawrence,’ writes Wilson, ‘especially as a woman, has always required some explanation, so here is mine’: I liked his fierce certainties: his belief in the novel as ‘the one bright book in life’, his belief in himself as right and the rest of us as wrong, his insistence that the unconscious was an organ like the liver; I liked the fact that his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world ...

‘I like his solidarity with the instincts,’ she concludes, ‘his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings.’

Note the Lawrentian drag Wilson wears in these lines. The certitude, the hurtling progress, the repetitions, pile-ons, and runons, the paradoxes and bathetic swivels. She did the same thing with Thomas de Quincey in Guilty Thing (2016), borrowing from that Romantic essayist his exquisitely addled, circumlocutory style to shape her own: arguing at the time that, though there had been several fine biographies of de Quincey, there had never been a Dequinceyan one.

Wilson is also fascinating for the way she reads her subjects in spatial terms. In de Quincey’s case, the biographer was interested in the architectonic aspects of his writing: the way houses and streets provided the venues for his restless, haunted imagination to roam. For Lawrence, the life and career are read on a vertical instead of horizontal axis: a journey from subterranean seams beneath the English midlands – where in 1885 David Herbert Lawrence was born, the son of a miner – to the high country of New Mexico, his last and only settled home, where his cremated 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

ashes were, according to Wilson, possibly lost, scattered, mixed with cement, or eaten by his wife and lovers.

A Dante-esque progress, then: ascent from Inferno to Paradiso: from the hell of Europe in World War I to the bright, clean air of the New World. Though, as with the Florentine’s great poem, it’s the infernal sections that readers prefer. In that spirit, Wilson concentrates on the decade, from 1915 to 1925, when Lawrence enjoyed his most brilliant creative efflorescence, as well as his most intense personal battles.

Frances Wilson’s new life of the writer stands athwart the accumulated crimes of which D.H. Lawrence stands accused and demands a halt to the trial Burning Man opens with Lawrence, aged thirty, in the literal midst of a dark wood: London’s Hampstead Heath, where he is living with his German wife, Frieda, since the outbreak of hostilities. At night, war Zeppelins hover over the couple as searchlights strafe the sky. A man of Lawrence’s sensitivity could not remain unmoved by the historical mise en scène. He viewed it as the bursting of a cosmos – as part of Milton’s war in heaven.

Wilson sketches a deft and acute picture of the moment. As the staid, settled, self-satisfied perfection of the pre-war world was being blasted in the trenches of France and elsewhere, a new world was coming into being – and Lawrence, Wilson argues, was its slender, bearded prophet. Like Percy Shelley, he was a vegetarian, sexually anarchistic, a hellraiser who was ‘lethal to women’.

Unlike Shelley, he was a modern in his resistance to form – in his belief that reality had no shape and was merely a series of accidents, a form of picaresque. With Walt Whitman, Lawrence saw the self not as an accumulation of inherited traits, but as the site of auto-revelation.

Having followed the couple to wartime Cornwall, Wilson introduces us to the perverse, impassioned tenor of their relationship (‘What was increasingly apparent about the Lawrences’ marriage is that it was a piece of theatre, performed before an audience … [while] other men might beat their wives in private and perform their affection in public, Lawrence beat his wife in public and was affectionate when he thought no one was looking’) and to the vivid cast of bohemians and aristocrats who made up their set.

Wilson is at her best in the thicket of social relations that marked Britain during the war and Europe in the conflict’s wake.

Something in the order of seventeen memoirs about Lawrence appeared in the years immediately after the writer’s death, and this density of autobiographical detail allows Wilson to generate hologram-like recall of certain moments: brief affairs, for instance, described not just from the perspective of each lover, but from their respective partners, as well as adjacent friends or enemies.

Such was the incestuous and back-biting nature of this Anglo milieu, it’s a relief to see Lawrence and Frieda escape it for the sun and sea of Southern Europe. Wilson is splendid on the expansions and ecstasies vouchsafed to Lawrence by this new freedom:

Lawrence finally left England on 13 November 1919, the fourth anniversary of the destruction of The Rainbow and the year that saw the births of the German Nazi Party, the Italian Fascist Party and the Irish Free State … Through the window of the train the snow on the Downs hung like a shroud, and from the stern of the boat from Folkestone to Boulogne, England looked like ‘a grey, dreary grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with her dead grey cliffs, and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above’.

‘He was flying south for winter,’ writes Wilson. ‘Like Aristotle, Lawrence believed that moving south was moving up, nearer to the sun.’

Wilson traces that ascent in interesting ways. She addresses his novels, stories, poems, and criticism with Lawrence’s own brand of defiant pith (‘“Comes over one an absolute necessity to move”: Sea and Sardinia has the finest opening line of any travel book’), and quotes him in ways that show him in the best possible light: The language of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, said W.H. Auden, is so transparent that we forget the poet is there: we simply see what Lawrence sees. But Birds, Beasts and Flowers also reminds us of what Lawrence was like when he was there, in the form of his better self, walking through the woods and meadows, noting that wet almond trees look like iron sticking out of the earth and that young cyclamens prick up their ears when they wake, ‘like delicate very-young greyhound bitches’.

But Wilson does not resile for a second from putting the boot in as the years go on and Lawrence the shouter, mad and misogynist, begins to crowd out the nature-loving, sun-worshipping forest Pan. However much this may be a narrative of ascension, Lawrence’s reactionary hysteria is more present in the latter years – partly in his lustreless progress through Ceylon, Australia, and the South Pacific; and particularly in his sojourns in New Mexico, rubbing shoulders with stage Indians and white saviours, with their drugs and free love and proto-New Age claptrap – and Wilson dutifully acknowledges it. Though she does play one trump card, referring to the inexorable advance of Lawrence’s tuberculosis, when she quotes the father of the playwright John Mortimer: ‘I’m always angry when I’m dying.’

Like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the shadow of D.H. Lawrence (1997), Burning Man is a meta-biography of the kind that can only be pulled off when the more measured and punctilious lives of Lawrence have already been written. It takes the form of an infinitely extended riff, fascinated by those books in the Lawrence canon (bar Kangaroo, which is passed over almost completely) that are less known or regarded, and intrigued by those characters in Lawrence’s orbit who have been overlooked.

The result is a brilliant, convoluted, mannerist approach – lovely on the page, often thrilling in its daring – that perhaps honours the spirit of Lawrence more than it does the biographical letter. g Geordie Williamson is the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).

Words

a poem is a house into which words are inserted permeable, vapour or rain altering the light outside a movement before the movement of trees a lens on those branches words drop into the street onto the floor of imagination a sky contains all this, the jigsaw of a baroque painting things tending outward at angles held together for a moment space between the leaves vivid, darkness cast down on the earth a row of books lit up in shifting reflections it might be calligraphy or it might be somebody, a figure deciphered from advancing ground absorbed back into it a kind of writing it might be a mud wall or a window a day to move into as the lines advance carrying the writer along, shapes of buildings behind trees, part yellow, part drab green, denote a suburb one autumn in another city where I gathered random notes to rescue a poem from the weight of import

Laurie Duggan

Laurie Duggan’s most recent collection is Homer Street (2020) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

59

Open Page with Laura Elizabeth Woollett

(Scribe)

Interview

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016) and Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018). She was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and is a 2020–22 Marten Bequest Scholar for Prose. The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021) is her latest novel.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Malta. My mum’s side of the family is Maltese, and I’ve been wanting to return as an adult after visiting as a child. I’d like to set a novel there, someday.

What’s your idea of hell?

exceptions. When I was fifteen, I read my dad’s copy of The Beach (1996) by Alex Garland. It was the movie tie-in edition, with Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, which is probably why I picked it up. I remember having this feeling of absolute shock after finishing it, then buying a notebook and announcing on the first page that I was going to be a writer.

Being stuck in an unmoving train after a long workday on zero sleep, wearing dry, scratched contacts and a sweaty polyester shirt, while nearby someone eats tomato-and-onion canned tuna with a loud, wet mouth, and someone else plays Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ on tinny speakers on repeat, and my bladder is ready to burst.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Hard work, especially when it’s unpaid. While there is a time and place for hard work, I don’t think it’s inherently more virtuous than play, or rest, or dreaming.

What’s your favourite film?

The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

And your favourite book?

The Collector (1963) by John Fowles.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg – and by ‘dine’, I mean serve them poison, redistribute their wealth, then take myself out for gelato.

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

‘Brewery’ – I can’t pronounce it without choking on my own tongue. I’d be happy to replace it with ‘brauhaus’.

Who is your favourite author?

Dame Iris Murdoch; she’s my cat’s namesake, and my cat is the best. I haven’t actually read Murdoch in years, and her books kind of blur together in my memory, but I love their plottiness, and the way she handles big themes (sex, death, religion, ego) with a sense of absurdity. Also, I admire how prolific she was, and how she was writing from her youth until old age, with Alzheimer’s disease.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Barbara Covett from Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (2003).

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Playfulness.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I spent my early teens thinking reading was uncool, with a few 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

I went through a brief but hardcore Ayn Rand phase when I was about sixteen, to the point of shoehorning Rand quotes into an English essay and getting ‘???’ comments from my teacher.

Casefile for chills and sleep-aid. Just the Gist for laughs.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Capitalism, and everything that comes with it – lack of time and money, thinking about myself and my art as a ‘commodity’, competing with my peers for limited resources, the squickiness of self-promotion, generalised anxiety.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

The qualities I rate most are diligence and open-mindedness.

I’ve had some critical reviews that have made me go, ‘ouch … but fair call’, since the reviewer has made a genuine attempt to engage with the text and my intentions.

How do you find working with editors?

It’s a privilege to be read at all, so working with editors and having them pay close attention to what I’m doing (or attempting to do) is wonderful.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They’re a mixed bag, and I have mixed thoughts. Some of my best experiences have been at regional festivals. One of my worst experiences was at a big-city festival, where a panel about ‘Strong Female Characters’ turned into a discussion about domestic violence. There seems to be a trend with major festivals to value issues-based discussions over craft or imagination. I hate the expectation that artists need to be public intellectuals or moral authorities, or that panels need to resemble an episode of Q&A to be interesting.

Are artists valued in our society?

Mythologised, yes. Patronised, yes. Valued? Hard no.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a collection of thirteen interconnected short stories, mostly about girls and women from my hometown (Perth), trying to escape Perth. g

Category

A R T S AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

61

Arts

Shared interests

Russell and Mabel Grimwade’s legacy John Arnold

Pride of Place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection edited by Alisa Bunbury

P

The Miegunyah Press/Potter Museum of Art $59.95 hb, 282 pp

ride of Place describes in detail a selection of the outstanding collection of Australian books, paintings, photographs, and prints that Russell and Mabel Grimwade donated to the University of Melbourne.The main focus is on Russell, but they were clearly a team with shared interests in Australian native trees and plants and the European history of Australia.

Russell Grimwade was born in 1879, less than fifty years after Europeans first settled in what was to become Victoria. His father was one half of the highly successful chemical and drug company Felton and Grimwade, formed in 1867. (The other half was the donor of the bequest that bears his name and which has so enriched the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria.)

Grimwade attended Melbourne Grammar and then studied science at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1901. In October 1909, he married Mabel Kelly, always known as ‘Mab’.

A year later, he bought Miegunyah in Armadale as a wedding present for his wife. At Miegunyah and their country property near Hastings, they planted notable gardens.

In addition to managing with his two brothers the expanding family businesses, Russell Grimwade’s talents and other interests were wide. He served on numerous educational and cultural committees, travelled widely, and was a skilful amateur photographer.

An early conservationist, he campaigned for the preservation of Australian forests. Using native timbers, he was a skilled woodworker and cabinetmaker. His home workshop became a crutch factory during World War II, producing more than 3,000 pairs based on an improved design by Grimwade.

Knighted in 1952, Grimwade died in 1955. Mab lived on at Miegunyah until her own death in 1973. The childless couple had decided to leave their Australiana collection, Miegunyah, and a substantial endowment to the University of Melbourne. Russell had hoped that the Armadale house would become the home of Melbourne University Press, complete with its own printery.

This proved not to be feasible, and when the university found it was unable to both maintain and use the house effectively, a court order allowed it to be sold in 1987, with the funds being added to the Miegunyah bequest.

Paying tribute to the spirit of the Grimwades’ wishes, part of the funds from the sale were used by Melbourne University Press to establish its Miegunyah imprint. The funding support allows the Miegunyah titles to be produced at a higher quality than normal publishing dictates would allow.

62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Pride of Place is no. 193 in the second series of Miegunyah publications. It is a beautifully produced coffee-table book with an abundance of full-page colour and black-and-white illustrations and even some fold-outs, including one of the Grimwades’ most notable paintings, William Strutt’s Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 (1887). Seventy-six items are described in five sections: ‘Southern Seas’; ‘The First Colonies’; ‘Besides the Birrarung’; ‘Crossing Country’; and ‘Botany and Benefits’. In addition to editing the book, Alisa Bunbury, curator of the Grimwade Collection, provides an introduction to the two donors and their collection. She also wrote almost half of the entries, with the others being by some thirtyeight contributors, many with links to Melbourne University.

The book can be read in two ways. It can be dipped into for the illustrations. But the accompanying text places the described items in the context of their time and considers how they can be read, used, and interpreted by historians and scholars today. This is particularly so in relation to Country and the images featuring the First Australians. This is one of the strengths of the book. One looks at a particular print or drawing, reads the accompanying text, and then looks at the image again with a more critical and understanding eye.

One major artefact that was not part of the Miegunyah donation to the University of Melbourne but that is rightly discussed in Pride of Place was Grimwade’s gift of Captain Cook’s Cottage to the people of Victoria, as part of the state’s centenary celebrations in 1934. Chris Healy gives a succinct account of this generous and, in today’s context, extraordinary gift. The question that is surely asked by people today when they see the quaint building in the Fitzroy Gardens is: why is it there? Those with a basic historical knowledge would know that Cook’s links to Victoria were minimal. In addition, his association with the cottage was equally tangential. It was his parents’ home, and it is unknown whether Cook ever visited them there.

So why did Russell Grimwade buy the cottage, have it dismantled brick by brick with each one carefully numbered, ship them to all to Victoria, and then organise for the cottage to be re-erected in the Fitzroy Gardens as Cooks’ Cottage? The reasons have to do with Grimwade’s collecting philosophy, his civicminded philanthropy, and the general public consensus on what a historical monument was, something that is much contested today. Grimwade’s Australiana collection was based on the concept of the progress of European settlement in Australia and the documentary record of that progress. His books, many described here, included Cook’s journals of his three voyages, accounts of European discoveries, exploration, and settlement of the Australian continent, and most nineteenth-century accounts of the new colony of Victoria. Grimwade was also a proud Victorian and one suspects that he did not want the cottage to end up in New South Wales, whose sesquicentenary was only four years away.

Born into wealth, the Grimwades lived a luxurious life by any standards, but they were also generous benefactors contributing their money, time, and influence to numerous Melbourne cultural and educational institutions. This book pays them due tribute.

And with its subsidised price through the Miegunyah Fund, it is both a bargain and an ideal gift. g John Arnold is an Affiliate in the Monash Arts Faculty.

Theatre

‘What’s the idea of you?’

Samuel Beckett’s absurdist masterpiece Ian Dickson

Willie – played by Lex Marinos as a series of grunts, groans and the occasional word uttered to the surprise and delight of Winnie – with brisk efficiency, directing him in and out of his hole. But she also depends on him to alleviate her loneliness, and Giblin’s eyes fill with panic when he doesn’t respond.

For Winnie it is only by projecting a relentless façade of happiness that she can keep despair at bay

Happy Days (Robert Catto)

T

owards the end of the first act of Happy Days, Samuel Beckett spells out clearly the question that is at the heart of his work and that of the playwrights loosely grouped under the title ‘absurdist’. His protagonist, Winnie, buried up to her waist in earth, is describing the conversation of a couple who, wandering by, have caught sight of her. The man turns to his female companion. ‘What’s she doing? he says – What’s the idea? he says – stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground – coarse fellow – What does it mean? he says – What’s it meant to mean? … Do you hear me? he says – I do, she says, God help me … And you, she says, what’s the idea of you, what are you meant to mean?’

For Winnie, immured in her mound of dirt, it is only by projecting a relentless façade of happiness that she can keep despair at bay. She clings to her routines, brushing her teeth, taking her medicine, rummaging in her bag, and ending the day with a song in an attempt to create some structure in the void. In his monograph on Marcel Proust (1931), Beckett writes ‘habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment’, and for Winnie it is what stops her from using the pistol that keeps rising to the surface of her bag.

At one level, Happy Days, first performed in 1961, can be viewed as a portrait of a marriage. Marriage was much on Beckett’s mind. While writing it, he had finally married his long-term partner Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. For various reasons, the wedding needed to take place in England, and Beckett had to maintain residence there for two weeks. It was during this time, in a hotel in Folkestone, that much of Happy Days was written.

It is this sense of a long-term relationship, one that Winnie both depends on and resents, that comes across strongly in Craig Baldwin’s production at the Old Fitz. Belinda Giblin’s Winnie is every inch, both the visible ones and the invisible ones, a Sydney Eastern Suburbs matron. One can imagine that at one stage her garden parties were exemplary and her dinners flawless, with perfectly judged seating arrangements. She treats her husband,

At the play’s opening, as the piercing bell summons her to ‘another heavenly day’, Giblin is all chirpy ebullience, deciphering the script on her toothbrush, taking her medicine, and attempting to remember favourite quotations, the fragments shored against her ruins. With her clipped delivery she avoids the temptation that Beckett’s rhythms offer to chant the play. (Peggy Ashcroft, for one, practically sang the whole piece.) The fear of abandonment, of physical and mental decay, seeps through the exuberance.

At a deeper level there is the acknowledgment of the pointlessness of existence: the question of what to do ‘between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep’. Giblin always keeps us aware of the effort it takes for Winnie to convince herself that things are for the best, which makes the occasions when she can no longer do so more powerful. There are moments, such as when Winnie almost breaks down remembering a compliment Willie made her after a party, that verge on the misty-eyed, but Giblin treats them with a truthful straightforwardness that robs them of any sentimentality.

By the second act, with Winnie now buried up to her neck, both the mood and the lighting have darkened, Baldwin having ignored Beckett’s instructions that the play should be performed in glaring brightness. Giblin makes Winnie’s little sayings and homilies more frantic, less convincing. There is now a touch of bitterness. When Willie at last comes around to the front of the mound and into her vision, she greets him with an irony verging on contempt. In some productions, as Willie vainly attempts to climb the heap, it is not certain whether he is attempting to reach Winnie or the gun. But here the lighting is so dark that the weapon is invisible, and Baldwin makes it clear that Willie is attempting a last rapprochement. Although Winnie has just sung the sugary Merry Widow waltz, the icy look Giblin bestows on him as the play ends is not promising.

Just in case the message hasn’t got across, Baldwin and his set designer, Charles Davis have backed the mound with a faded poster of an idyllic beach and a slogan ‘resort there’s nothing like it’, the word ‘nothing’ prominent in bright yellow.

Red Line productions and The Old Fitz are doing well by Samuel Beckett. Krapp’s Last Tape, seen in 2019, was anchored by a magnificent performance from Jonathan Biggins. Belinda Giblin’s Winnie is also one for the ages. g Happy Days was performed at the Old Fitz Theatre in June–July 2021.

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

63

Art

Contemporary fable The phenomenon of Hilma af Klint Julie Ewington

Installation view of the Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (photograph by Jenni Carter © AGNSW)

H

ilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings attracted steady crowds at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) before the recent lockdown. Perhaps enthusiasm is too ebullient a word for the pervading mood of reverence, but clearly Hilma af Klint’s newly minted reputation has preceded her. The humming scrutiny is silenced in the famous double-height space of Andrew Anderson’s 1972 building: ten enormous abstract paintings, each more than three metres high, surround viewers in an installation not unlike the temple that the artist originally planned for them. Remarkably, The Ten Largest were painted in 1907, part of The Paintings for the Temple project between 1906 and 1915 that eventually comprised 193 paintings. This ambition and scale were not seen anywhere else at that time: the phenomenon that is af Klint is rewriting the history of modern art.

So who is Hilma af Klint? A Swedish painter descended from a distinguished naval dynasty, she lived between 1862 and 1944, was highly educated, and enjoyed success with conventional portraits and landscapes. But she also made a huge body of abstract paintings that was almost entirely unknown until recent decades.

That obscurity was her choice: disappointed by the reception for her abstractions, af Klint noted in her will that the world was not ready for her work, stipulating it should be hidden away until twenty years after her death. Now, more than seventy years later, af Klint is an international art superstar, whose time has most definitely come. Fortuitously, Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings was secured for Australia by a prescient decision in 2017 by Melbourne curator Sue Cramer – previously at Heide Museum of Modern Art, now independent – to investigate mounting an exhibition here.

And what a splendid show it is: successive rooms present groups of af Klint’s work, from early botanical studies to works from her ten-year collaboration (from 1896) with The Five, a group of women exploring spiritualism through prayers, séances, and automatic drawing, through to later notebooks and intimate watercolours from the last twenty years of her life. The exhibition 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

centres on the innovations of The Paintings for the Temple, hybrid experimental works prompted by spirits that spoke to af Klint and led her to harness a wealth of learning: scientific observation, Theosophy, the ideas of American architect Claude Fayette Bragdon suggesting that architectural form was derived from nature, Buddhism, and, perhaps most importantly, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. Despite being a woman of her times – this mélange of science and spiritualism was one productive symptom of the intellectual and social changes of that turbulent époque – af Klint arrived at a singular and entirely beguiling vision.

The Ten Largest, for example, revel in a gradual progression from childhood to old age that is expressed at first in deeper colours, then in lighter tones; the insistent, delicate colours – pinks, lilacs, yellows – are in tempera, its chalky surface absorbing the light. It helps to know that af Klint designated blue as female and yellow as masculine; that pink for her was the colour of spiritual love, red of sensuous love. We see floral and vegetal forms, and spirals suggesting evolution towards the spiritual plane. (The hermaphroditic snail is honoured here, since it embodies both female and male.) Some of this we intuit, some we can learn, but these esoteric paintings remained something of a mystery even to af Klint herself, who later spent years examining and codifying them. In the end, it is the passionate affirmation of life and energy that really counts here.

The exhibition is impeccable: the luminous paintings, with their synthetic imageries and fragments of text and diagrams, are supported by excellent texts, including the artist’s diary entries.

After the astonishing experience of The Ten Largest, one proceeds to The Swan, another extensive series presenting black and white swans as complementary pairs that eventually suggest harmony, sometimes rendered figuratively but also in radically simplified diagrams of exceptional beauty: The Swan No 17 is as pristine as any 1960s colour-field painting. But Cramer also does justice to later works that are less easily assimilated to established art-historical narratives: her inclusion of forty-two watercolours from af Klint’s last twenty years is particularly perceptive. Small in scale, most of these intimate, flowing, wet-on-wet works have never been shown before; their modesty attests to af Klint’s continuing spiritual and artistic enquiry in old age. (Apparently the spirits asked for larger works, but rheumatism prevented af Klint from complying.)

Af Klint’s story is a kind of contemporary fable. Talented, visionary, and dedicated, she originally appeared to us cloaked in mystery: a radical independent following her own course. (Should we expect a biopic soon, perhaps starring Alicia Vikander?)

Af Klint’s paintings were almost unknown until the important exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 in Los Angeles in 1986; the first scholarship on her work, the monograph by Åke Fant (now translated), only appeared in Swedish in 1989; and as Patricia Fullerton’s fabulous memoir (ABR, July 2021) reveals, two paintings by af Klint appeared in 1997 in Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination at the National Gallery of Victoria, as part of af Klint’s gradual path to recognition.

More recently, the authoritative 2013 retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the show at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2016, and especially the record-breaking 2018 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its more than half a

million visitors, have made af Klint a contemporary sensation.

Now we know af Klint was well informed about modern art.

She travelled to view art in European museums and was au courant with intellectual and scientific developments in that extraordinary time. We know that the largest paintings were probably inspired by church murals, and wall-sized Swedish interior folk paintings on fabric, and that like many other women, as Cramer points out, af Klint found autonomy, and eventually her own voice, through appealing to mediums. For af Klint’s emergence has stimulated a veritable effervescence of publications – books accompanying major exhibitions, a catalogue raisonné in what will eventually be seven volumes, and the authoritative biography

by German writer Julia Voss that will appear in English in the coming year. The AGNSW’s handsome book, with excellent colour and readable typeface, makes a fine contribution to this expanding body of research, with thoughtful essays by Cramer and Nicholas Chambers from AGNSW, both long-standing scholars of modern abstraction. Voss explores af Klint’s (ultimately fruitless) attempt to effect societal change through her art during her lifetime. Jennifer Higgie contributes an astute account of gender in af Klint’s historical reception, particularly the gen-

dered prejudice against her being a medium. A sparkling essay from Adam Lister of City Gallery Wellington (the exhibition’s New Zealand venue) considers af Klint’s transformative impact on contemporary culture, especially her occult feminism, as an international phenomenon.

Yet after all this, Hilma af Klint’s work remains elusive. Back at the AGNSW, one enters into the strange beauty of these glorious paintings: The Secret Paintings are an ‘ecstatic experience’, as Cramer puts it. Immersive, sensual, this gorgeous installation seems to have arrived, unheralded but complete, with messages from the past. And as very few things now astonish us – or so we think – this exhibition is a particular gift. g Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings is at AGNSW, Sydney until 19 September 2021. Hilma af Klint: The Secret Paintings, edited

by Sue Cramer, is published by AGNSW and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi in association with Heide Museum of Modern Art ($45 hb, 256 pp).

Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.

Film

Such pretty teeth, dear

The tension between thrills and conservation Anne Rutherford

Valerie Taylor underwater wearing a chain mail suit being bitten on the arm by a shark in 1982 (Ron and Valerie Taylor)

A

ny film about shark conservation faces a dilemma: how to de-sensationalise an animal whose cinematic charisma relies on the combination of thrill and fear. What reels us in as viewers is the excitement of an up-close, full-frontal encounter with a dangerous predator. Film scholar Tom Gunning talks about this as ‘lust for the eyes’, when an image ‘rushes forward to meet the viewer’, provoking ‘a complicated sort of excitement bordering on terror’.

The tension between the appeal of this thrilling footage and an attempt to build more knowledge of, and respect for, the crea-

ture is common to all shark films that are not just sharksploitation.

In Sally Aitken’s documentary Playing With Sharks: The Valerie Taylor Story (Madman), this conflict is palpable in the juxtaposition of riveting shark footage with more quotidian interviews with Australian diver Valerie Taylor, as she says, matter of factly, that sharks are not that dangerous. Our eyes devour the images that fire up our emotional brains, the more rational talking heads trailing a distant second best.

A tribute to Taylor, Playing with Sharks brings together archival footage from seventy years of ground-breaking underwater cinematography (produced by Valerie and husband, Ron) and contemporary interviews with Valerie, who, at eighty-five, after seventy years as a diver, scientific researcher, and advocate for marine conservation, is still diving with bull sharks.

Dancing around the relationship between danger, fear, and familiarity is stock in trade for shark cinematography, and spectacular shark footage was the currency the Taylors traded in.

Valerie has said that television shows wanted drama and wouldn’t buy any footage other than ‘dangerous marine creatures’ – and the Taylors delivered. Sharks are photogenic from any angle, but the money shot of shark photography is the point of view shot straight into the open jaws of a great white shark, the frame of the image serrated by rows of jagged teeth. Add a moving camera and a fearless cinematographer and you have a ‘submarine with teeth’ accelerating up ‘like a freight train coming out of the mist’. In Blue Water White Death (1971), directed by Peter Gimbel and James Lipscomb, there is astonishing footage of the Taylors in a dive cage in Port Lincoln, South Australia, with a great white repeatedly barging the cage, teeth first, trying to bite through the bars. Entangled in a rope, it thrashes the full force of its enormous body against the aluminium cage with the divers dangling helplessly inside. This adrenaline-pumping footage does AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

65

not make its way into Playing With Sharks, perhaps because of its fish to a huge great white (‘a very sweet shark’) and patting the potential to exacerbate shark phobia, but it led Steven Spielberg shark’s head as it swims away. At this moment in the film, the to contract the couple to capture all the footage of great white question inevitably arises: is this woman stark raving mad? This is sharks for Jaws (1975). Jaws provoked mass terror among swim- a moment of great doubt for the viewer: is she a reliable witness? mers, and the Taylors deeply regretted the full-scale slaughter of Great whites have been known to jump nearly three metres out sharks that ensued. of the water, and it is hard to compute the gaping abyss between The first time Valerie and Ron decided to leave the protection Taylor’s fearless behaviour and the shark’s lethal reputation. And of a cage to film among a hundred oceanic whitetip sharks in a yet, Taylor has dived with and studied sharks for seventy years; feeding frenzy, Valerie thought, ‘Now we die … never for a second her knowledge is up close and personal, and marine scientists did I think of not dying.’ The oceanic whitetip is responsible for and peers like David Attenborough hold her in high esteem more human fatalities than all other sharks put together, but because of her contribution to scientific research into shark the pair watched the hunting behaviour of the whitetips closely behaviour. Marine biologist Jeremiah Sullivan says that, in the and realised that, before biting their all-male diving world of the 1950s prey, they would approach and bump and 1960s, Valerie was the only one it a few times. They figured that if who was never afraid. She says, ‘Fear they bumped back hard they could is not part of my nature.’ establish themselves with the pack Taylor is a passionate and inand the sharks would respect them fluential advocate for marine conand leave them alone. In Blue Water servation, but to listen to her saying White Death, as they swim out of sharks are not that dangerous, to see the cage – Valerie armed with just a her treating them like pets, leaves me stick and Ron holding a cumbersome hanging on a hook, wanting a more underwater camera – huge sharks interventionist style of documentary, circle, charge in repeatedly and then an interlocutor who would tease abruptly turn and shoot off as they out some of her more confronting encounter the unexpected resistance statements. This would make her adof their intended prey. As the camera, vocacy for shark conservation more freed from its rigid grounding in the convincing. Valerie can navigate this cage, spins around with the pack we carnivorous world because of a lifeexperience with it the magnificent, time spent studying shark behaviour streamlined movement of these and learning the differences between sleek, seamless turbines slicing sharks. When I go in the water, I go through the water: this sublime footin as a naïve intruder. age fires up mirror neurons, so that For anyone who, like me, is an we feel the movement resonate in our ocean swimmer, sharks are the busiown bodies, as if we too are gliding ness end of the conservation debate: effortlessly through the water. we have skin in the game. I know The Taylors were also the first ever that, as an apex predator, sharks are to dive with great white sharks witha vital part of marine ecosystems, out a cage. With Ron on the camera and can admire and respect them most of the time, it was Valerie who as a perfectly evolved machine, but Valerie and Ron Taylor framed by a shark skeleton got close to the sharks. As she says, this is my rational brain thinking.

(Valerie and Ron Taylor) ‘If there was a blonde girl in a bikini Sharks use their teeth as mechanswimming among sharks,well,that was oreceptors – they feel with their a seller, so that’s what we did.’ She was often trivialised by com- teeth in their infamous bite-and-spit technique. The image of mentators who focused on her long blonde hair and hot-pink diver Rodney Fox after he was ‘felt’ by a great white, his torso wetsuit, but when the Taylors decided to challenge the received gouged along its entire length with deep puncture marks and scientific wisdom that sharks tore through their prey with the his abdomen gaping open with organs exposed, sears its way crush strength of their jaws, it was Valerie who donned a chain- into my emotional memory more profoundly than any rational mail suit, strapped tuna to her arm, and dived in among oceanic discussion about shark conservation, triggering my amygdala blue sharks until eventually one bit on her arm. She came out and short-circuiting my frontal lobes. To learn to coexist with of the encounter completely unscathed, proving that the shark sharks, to keep my prefrontal cortex fully engaged, I need more ripped apart its prey with a side-to-side sawing motion rather knowledge and strategies for survival. Playing With Sharks left than with crush pressure – a hell of a hypothesis to test by trial and me with many unanswered questions, wanting more. g error.

‘See how he smiles,’ Taylor says of a great white. We watch Anne Rutherford is a film critic and Adjunct Associate Professor her stand on a narrow platform at water level, handfeeding at Western Sydney University.

66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

Streaming

Reckoning with the costs Dulling the spectacle of disclosure Guy Webster

W

Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown

hile watching HBO’s new whodunnit series Mare of Easttown, I was reminded of another crime-fiction drama, The Sopranos (1999–2007). When Marianne ‘Mare’ Sheehan (Kate Winslet) arrives early for a therapy session in the series’ fourth episode, I thought of Tony Soprano sitting down for the first of many similar appointments with his therapist, Dr Melfi. Reclining in a chair, Tony offered a lesson in obfuscation. While we knew he was lying when he told Dr Melfi that he worked as a ‘Waste Management Consultant’, he still withheld tantalising secrets from us.

In Mare’s first therapy session, director Craig Zobel substitutes for the clinical mise en scène of Dr Melfi’s New Jersey office a brightly lit room brimming with the urban ambience of Easttown’s morning traffic. Likewise, writer Brad Ingelsby replaces Tony Soprano’s mysterious aloofness with dialogue that favours an honest and calm transparency. Unlike Tony, Mare does not value the keeping of secrets: she does not hide the fact that her son committed suicide two years earlier or that her marriage broke down as a result. She seems reluctant to overstate these misfortunes by treating them as secrets needing to be withheld.

What she conceals is how the events have affected her. Mare of Easttown hinges on this approach to concealment. Characters in the show have secrets, but Ingelsby is interested in dulling the spectacle of exposing them. For a show that is ostensibly a whodunnit, such an approach has interesting repercussions for the genre’s characteristic investment in mystery and secret-keeping.

In many ways, Mare of Easttown resembles HBO’s other recent successes, True Detective (2014–), Sharp Objects (2018), and Big Little Lies (2017–19). Winslet’s Mare is a small-town detective investigating the murder of teenage mother, Erin McMenamin. Like the town of Wind Gap in Sharp Objects, or Vermilion Parish in True Detective, Easttown gives a sombre first impression. Stationary shots of tightly packed houses, empty streets lined in sleet, and a freezing river introduce us to a blue-collar town nestled in Delaware County (‘Delco’ to its residents). It is easy to view these frigid exteriors and Gothic scenes (beautifully captured by cinematographer Ben Richardson) as the perfect setting for any number of macabre mysteries. Certainly, these unplumbed depths exist, but Easttown is a hard place in which to keep a secret.

Moments into the series, a scream sounds from a closed

window. Soon after, Mare is in the cluttered home of Easttown resident, Mrs Carroll (a delightful Phyllis Somerville), fielding questions about a mysterious prowler seen stalking her back garden. The two characters wander through Mrs Carroll’s home while she tells Mare of the ferret-looking intruder, her cat-loving sister, and an article in the Tribune she simply must read. Their interaction is wryly humorous, and the camera stays tight on their faces in a way that betrays warmth and intimacy, despite the freezing Pennsylvanian weather. Like many scenes in Mare of Easttown, this opening shows us a community leader bearing, with thinly veiled impatience but durable empathy, the responsibilities that come with caring for the people of Easttown – all the while drawing deeply from her vape. While we do not forget about the mysterious prowler or that piercing scream, the scene’s casual mood and Mrs. Carroll’s comic garrulity dampen any sense of foreboding we might have had. From all sides, the scene understates (perhaps even undercuts) its mysteries and our impulse to solve them. It reveals what the series prioritises instead – its characters.

Like Mrs Carroll, many characters favour a brand of comical volubility that makes it difficult to imagine them hiding anything from anyone. They will say what they think, what they did, and why it matters – should you ask them. Ingelsby’s dialogue does not favour sub-text. His characters are not laden with ambiguity.

While talkativeness is often used to diffuse a sense of mystery, characters who are less extroverted maintain an understatedly frank demeanour that serves the same purpose.

When Mare’s mother, Helen Fahey ( Jean Smart), tearfully admits to mistreating Mare as a child, she does so in the middle of a restaurant with minimal underscoring to counter the chaotic ambience of the surrounding dinner rush. Likewise, when Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters) admits to lying about having solved a previous investigation, a close-up loads the revelation with pathos. Tension in the series rarely comes from the discovery of a secret, but from reckoning with the cost of keeping it.

‘I hope what [viewers] take away at the end of the show isn’t the mystery,’ Ingelsby remarked in a recent interview with Indie Wire’s Ben Travers. ‘I hope what they leave with is that they got to spend time with [Mare] and her family.’ To an extent, Mare’s family includes the wider community of Easttown. Key to the success of Winslet’s stand-out performance, Jean Smart’s wry turn as Fahey, and Jean Nicholson’s affecting portrayal of Mare’s friend Lori Ross, is the way in which each is treated as part of a collective. These stars do not steal the spotlight; they sit within an equally strong ensemble cast to deepen our sense of and connection to the community as a whole.

‘Don’t expect any big hallelujah moment,’ Mare warns her therapist early in her first session. Facing the camera in a tight frame, she might as well have been offering us the same warning.

Discovering the tragedies in Mare’s past was never the point of these sessions. Likewise, when we finally learn the identity of the murderer, it is not the revelation that matters but rather its repercussions for Easttown. We end the series, once again, with this community – reeling in the wake of the revelation, all the while resenting the fact that the mystery was solved at all. g Guy Webster is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW AUGUST 2021

67

Biography

From the Archive

Armed with memorable neologisms such as ‘featurism’ and ‘arborophobia’, Robin Boyd (1919–79) mercilessly diagnosed the cultural pathologies behind the blight of mid-century Australian architecture and urban planning in The Australian Ugliness (1960). As Brenda Niall’s The Boyds: A family biography (2002) suggests, Boyd’s deeply rooted sense that buildings might have an ennobling effect on civic life could be seen as an idealism stemming from the architectural privileges of his own patrician background. Michael Shmith reviewed Niall’s biography in the April 2002 issue. In this extract, he notes the felicities of organising a biography around a series of homes, each one providing an extraordinary family with a crucible for the imagination. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

T

he leitmotif of the family home enables Niall to place a complex cast of characters as if in a setting that shows each of them to maximum advantage, without resorting to a strict chronology or any sense of artificial placement in an unwieldy narrative. It also brings its own symmetry, permitting us to see the family as a series of residents, in their own lives and times, but also as part of a wider perspective in which a basic location is fixed against a shifting tenancy. This allows for judgments that prove, in the end, similarities of habit that might otherwise go unnoticed. Thus the Boyds’ ‘nostalgic impulse to redeem the past’ links the generation of W.A.C. à Beckett (the son of Victoria’s first Chief Justice, Sir William, and who married Emma, the daughter of John Mills) with those of Martin Boyd (the son of the mid-generation Minnie à Beckett and Arthur Merric Boyd) and the sculptor Guy Boyd (grandson of Minnie and Arthur, and of the same generation as the more recent Arthur and Robin, who were cousins). This also explains the spirit of place that dominated, and, no doubt, still dominates, the Boyds’ way of life, and is best summarised in W.A.C.’s quotation from Horace’s Odes for his family motto: Immemor Sepulchri Struis Domos: ‘Forgetful of the tomb, you build houses.’

Niall makes the early generations come to life, not just through the sometimes sketchy records of their life and times, but out of where they happened to live, their travels, and their emerging artistry. An invaluable resource is Emma à Beckett’s diaries, which allow Niall to colour in the sometimes sketchy early family life of the 1880s, and W.A.C.’s purchase of his ancestral home, Penleigh House, in England.

There were less grand houses, too. Think of Merric and Doris Boyd’s Murrumbeena compound, Open Country, with its rudimentary accommodation, in-laws either side, and housewives who complained, every Monday, that black specks from Merric’s kiln were spoiling their washing. This was the world into which Arthur Boyd was born in 1920, the first of the five ‘different’ children of the district, with hand-me-down clothing but speaking in the modulated tones of an upper-class background and living in a home where Anna Pavlova would come to sit for Merric. How their neighbours must have talked …

Thus we steal effortlessly from one generation to the next: mindful also of hand-me-down habits and attitudes. In 1933, thirteen-year-old Arthur, already a fine painter and longing to escape from school, wanted to be a comedian: ‘I had an idea that if you were a clown you could get away with being yourself in private. I thought it might be easier, or at least possible, to deal 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW AU G U S T 2021

with the world if you could make people laugh.’ No doubt he did, but thank goodness he persevered with art.

Niall’s survey of Arthur Boyd and his cousin, the architect and writer Robin, place these two great cultural figures in a new light at a time when re-evaluation is important to understanding the contribution each made in his respective field. Martin, too, we need to know again, and also to reread his novels in a more contemporary light. Robin (son of Penleigh and Edith Boyd) was a fine architect and extraordinarily gifted writer, whose views were sardonic, yet superb. His searing description of Castle Towers, in Marne Street, South Yarra (‘It is as though a giant garbage tin had been shaken over Melbourne for about a decade,’ it began) earned him a writ; the settlement, an apology, was set by Robin in Gothic type: the last word. Niall puts him neatly in perspective, as a Boyd, but also as a craftsman, commentator, and public intellectual who died far too soon and whose books should be reprinted without further delay.

Cousin Arthur, more celebrated and who died only three years ago, also receives the space he deserves. This is not a technical book, nor hagiographic; yet one can see how clearly Arthur’s approach to painting arose from his childhood and family background and traditions. Niall does not neglect, at any stage of her work, the importance of the women in the family. For example, Arthur’s wife, Yvonne, was her husband’s secretary, protector, amanuensis: in the words of a friend, ‘the perfect artist’s wife – and nice as well’. But, without her, and the other Boyd wives, the family would not have been the same.

Perhaps the home of all Boyd homes is at Bundanon, whose properties house the ultimate Boyd museum, containing family memorabilia, furniture, and Merric’s ‘little earthenware figure of Arthur at the age of three’. It is, says Niall, not a museum but a family house, with ‘a certain unplanned disorder’. Moreover, ‘There’s not a blank wall anywhere’. Which is what one could say of Niall’s own crowded canvas, peopled by the members of a great Australian artistic family long overdue for such a work. This is a history that highlights one family, but, in the process, brings alive their times and why or how ‘the Boyd painting gene’ passed its way down the line. Its scholarship lies in its research, interpretation, and, finally, its absolutely clear readability, where opinions are neither gratuitous nor ambitious but essential to overall enlightenment. With Niall as guide, the Boyds, past, present, and future, could not have had a better biographer. This publication, handsomely produced with many illustrations, does them all proud. g