Australian Book Review, December 2018, no. 407 by Australian Book Review

ARC debacle

ABR, like many of our colleagues and partners in the academic community, was appalled to learn of former Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s veto of eleven Australian Research Council grants, an intervention that only came to light on October 25 because of dogged work at the Senate Estimates hearings, initiated by Labor Senator Kim Carr. Once again, only the humanities were targeted. This ministerial intervention (unusual but not unprecedented) upsets the rigorous peer-review process that underpins the ARC grant-making process. A group of respected and enquiring researchers have been publicly humiliated as not being worthy of some fatuous pub test. Now their colleagues in the higher education community are threatened with a ‘national interest’ test that seems likely to complicate and politicise this already exhaustive, timeconsuming annual process. We invited Professor Joy Damousi – President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities – to comment. Her article on page 19 is followed by shorter statements from some of her senior colleagues around the country.

Alison Lester wins $60,000 Melbourne Prize

Alison Lester has become the first children’s author to win the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Last month she was named the winner of the 2018 Prize, which is worth $60,000. Lester has been riveting children for more than thirty years; she has published about twenty-five books.

Lester was chosen from a formidable shortlist comprising Tony Birch, Gideon Haigh, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright. Maria Tumarkin was chosen as the winner of the Best Writing Award for her non-fiction work Axiomatic, published by Brow Books. This enterprising new independent publisher also saw another of its writers pick up the Readings Residency Award, with Jamie Marina Lau announced as winner for her first book, Pink Mountain on Locust Island.

Prizes galore

Poets don’t have long to enter the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, worth a total of $8,500. It closes on 3 December. Essayists have longer: the Calibre Essay Prize (worth $7,500) doesn’t close until 15 January 2018. Meanwhile, we look forward to announcing details of the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in the next issue.

Plentiful Poetry

Several contributors to our Book of the Year feature remark on the large number of estimable poetry collections published in 2018. Elsewhere, we review four of them, including David Malouf ’s An Open Book (UQP) and Les Murray’s Collected Poems (Black Inc.), both of which are nominated by several critics. Our special feature also carries a tribute to Dorothy Porter, fondly remembered by her countless readers and by this magazine (she wrote for us from 1992 to 2008). Dorothy died on 10 December 2008, aged only fifty-

four. In the following issue, Advances remarked that she was a kind of diva of Australian poetry. Dot’s divadom is secure: she’s still read, and circulating, and missed. We’re delighted to publish a brief memoir of Dorothy Porter by her long-time partner, Andrea Goldsmith (page 50).

Film tickets

This month, thanks to Palace Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, winner of the Best Director prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.To be in the running please email Grace Chang at business @australianbookreview.com.au.

Office closure

We’re all taking a short break after this busy and transformative year. The office will close from December 24 to 28, reopening on Monday, December 31. Thanks, meanwhile, to our subscribers, readers, partners, board members, editorial advisers, and volunteers. It’s been another remarkable year for private donations: we are most grateful to all our Patrons. Without your continuing support the magazine would, of necessity, be a smaller and less ambitious entity. Particular thanks to the 300 or so critics and writers who have published with us this year – 93 of them wholly new to the magazine. Finally, my personal thanks to Amy Baillieu, Grace Chang, Christopher Menz, and Jack Callil – the tiny cohort that keeps this magazine humming. Ed.

A D VA N C E S

Thanking 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 NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

2 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

December 2018

Glyn Davis Zora Simic Joy Damousi Margaret Gardner et al. Rémy Davison Michelle de Kretser et al. Suzanne Falkiner Peter Goldsworthy Judith Bishop

Letters

Catriona Jackson, Mark Gibson, Gabriella Coslovich, Kim Farleigh

63 65

Essays

Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson (eds): Dangerous Ideas about Mothers Felicity Plunkett Graeme Davison (ed.): Hugh Stretton Tom Griffiths Amit Chaudhuri: The Origins of Dislike Robert Dessaix John Pickrell (ed.): The Best Australian Science Writing 2018 Paul Humphries

14 25 55

48 50

Memoir

Marion May Campbell: The Man on the Mantelpiece Francesca Sasnaitis 15

54 66

Classics

Fiction

History

Agnès Poirier: Left Bank Gemma Betros Colin G. Calloway: The Indian World of George Washington Josh Specht Adam Wakeling: Stern Justice Michael Sexton

Poetry

Paul Kane: A Passing Bell David McCooey ‘A tribute to Dorothy Porter’ Andrea Goldsmith Michael Hofmann: One Lark, One Horse Philip Mead

Interviews

Poet of the Month Kevin Brophy Open Page Anne Summers

Environment

Homer, translated by Emily Wilson: The Odyssey Homer, translated by Peter Green: The Iliad Marguerite Johnson 16 A.S. Patrić: The Butcherbird Stories Susan Sheridan Jock Serong: Preservation James Bradley Aviva Tuffield (ed.): Best Summer Stories Anthony Lynch Barbara Kingsolver: Unsheltered Nicole Abadee

David Marr reflects on Australia Two influential Australian feminists A covert attack on academic freedom ‘The heart of our culture’ Saving private capital Books of the Year Toni Jordan’s new novel Les Murray as maverick angel Doubling and dividedness in Malouf ’s poetry

9 12 19 20 27 29 38 44 47

37 39 41 42

Andrew C. Scott: Burning Planet Billy Griffiths

Psychology

Tim Parks: Out of My Head Nick Haslam

Education 61

Poems

Carolyn Rasmussen: Shifting the Boundaries Kate Murphy

From the ABR Archive

Anthony Lawrence 40 Dorothy Porter 51 Michael Hofmann 53

Dorothy Porter: Wild Surmise Stephanie Trigg

ABR Arts

Ian Dickson Maggie Haining Dennis Altman Tim Byrne Michael Shmith Peter Tregear

68 69 70 71 73 74

A Cheery Soul Hedda Boy Erased Twelfth Night Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Michael Halliwell: National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera CONTENTS

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The damage is twofold

Dear Editor, There is nothing good to be said about the news that eleven humanities grants, recommended via rigorous peer review, were vetoed in secret by former Education Minister Simon Birmingham. What makes it worse is that all eleven were humanities projects. Let us remember that humanities only gets around ten per cent of Australian Research Council grants anyway. Quite apart from the good work that won’t get done and the talent that will leave our shores (at least one scholar whose early career grant was vetoed has gone overseas), the damage is twofold: the knock to public faith in expert review caused when it is politicised; and real career damage for those targeted (at least one scholar’s promotion was slowed as a direct consequence). So what can we do? We can condemn this veto with a strong and united voice, and we did: all thirtynine Vice-Chancellors stood up with the rest of the sector. At the same time, we must explain clearly why research matters and why peer review is rigorous and fair. No one thinks it is acceptable for the Sports Minister to choose the Olympic team, for instance. Most of all, we mustn’t lose heart. Catriona Jackson,Chief Executive of Universities Australia Beginning on page 20, thirteen of Catriona Jackson’s senior colleagues in the higher education sector comment on the federal governments intervention in the ARC process. Ed.

Talking value

Dear Editor, Gabriella Coslovich credits Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett with launching a ‘much-needed public debate’, opening a discussion ‘we sorely need to have’ (review of What Matters? Talking value in Australian culture, ABR, November 2018). Strangely, however, she shows little interest in the actual suggestions they have to make. This seems to follow a common pattern. It is not difficult to find nod6 DECEMBER 2018

Letters

ding assent to the idea that we need to learn again to value art and culture in qualitative terms – to reverse the tendency, as Coslovich puts it, to frame them ‘wholly through the lens of economic benefit’. But when anyone attempts the difficult work of proposing alternatives, they are too often met with perplexity and indifference. Most such attempts are ‘quirky’, as Coslovich describes What Matters? They are working against the grain of dominant ways of thinking. They are experimental, exploratory, struggling to find ways to engage with existing institutions and processes while refusing the heavily metricised accounting frameworks that have come to govern them. They lack the assurance and sophistication that belong to wellestablished paradigms. The shortcoming on which Coslovich chooses to skewer What Matters? is language – that perennial alibi for refusing to extend sympathy into difficult terrain. Good writing is a theme introduced by Meyrick, Phiddian, and Barnett themselves. While criticising an over-reliance on numbers in accounting around arts and culture, they draw on Don Watson’s Death Sentence to criticise also the bureaucratic language that attends it. Yet for Coslovich, their own book has examples of poor writing. This is a piece of easy pointscoring that misses the specificity of Watson’s arguments. Watson does not merely tut-tut about ugly expressions or unfortunate turns of phrase. He identifies a very particular kind of ugliness associated with the takeover of public discourse by abstract managerialism. The writing in What Matters? is about as far from this as it is possible to get. For those prepared to read more openly and receptively, What Matters? has more to offer than Coslovich’s review suggests. It does not merely ask the right questions: it has important suggestions to make about how we might recover values-based conversations about art and culture. ‘Quirky’ it may be, but this, currently, is where attempts at developing values-based

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

approaches are. If we care about the larger objective, we must be prepared to put this aside and engage. Mark Gibson, Caulfield East, Vic.

Gabriella Coslovich replies:

When a book’s main focus is on proposing a clearer and more vital way to talk and write about the value of the arts, one that goes beyond the reductive use of metrics, it is reasonable for a reviewer to consider the clarity of the book’s own communication, particularly when the authors make a big deal about intelligibility, as these authors do. They repeatedly refer to the sins of ‘bullshit language’; they state that ‘language matters’ and refer to language as ‘our most important tool for thinking and living together’. Yes, new ways of thinking are ‘experimental’ and ‘exploratory’, but they can be communicated with clarity. Unfortunately, What Matters? lapses at times into obscure language that frustrates genuine attempts to engage with the authors’ arguments. In spirit, the book rejects the ugliness of ‘abstract managerialism’; in words, not always.

Spot on

Dear Editor, I’m not surprised that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought that Anshel Pfeffer would produce a ‘cartoon character’ in his biography of Bibi (ABR, November 2018). Anyone who calls Netanyahu an ‘intellectual’ clearly must be the favourite to win the Cartoon Character Biography Prize. Louise Adler got it spot on: although she didn’t say so directly, I can imagine her asking: How can anyone who consistently sells robbery and murder to a gullible electorate be an intellectual? Perhaps being an intellectual these days (in an increasingly extreme-right-wing environment) implies the capacity to think how to get others not to think? Anyone who writes a largely accurate biography of Netanyahu is certainly courageous. And so is someone who tells the truth while reviewing that book. Kim Farleigh (online comment)

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Australian Book Review | December 2018, no. 407 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 | Fax: (03) 9699 8803 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au Cover design Judy Green Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Advertising Media Kit available from our website Contact Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and website comments. All letters and online comments are edited before publication in the magazine. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification. letters@australianbookreview.com.au Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is the first time that he or she has appeared in the magazine. ABR Arts Ratings are out of five stars () with half stars denoted by the  symbol. December issue lodged with Australia Post on November 28.

Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Andrea Goldsmith, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Gub McNicoll (Observership Program) ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) Editorial Advisers Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Fiona Gruber, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Julian Meyrick, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Media Progressive PR and Publicity: Darren Saffin – darren@progressivepr.com.au or (03) 9696 6417 Volunteers Caroline Bailey, Margaret Robson Kett, John Scully, Annie Toller 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.

This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program. 8 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘I know my country now’ David Marr reflects on Australia

Glyn Davis MY COUNTRY David Marr

Black Inc., $39.99 hb, 400 pp, 9781760640804

here was excitement. David Marr, newly appointed editor of the National Times at just thirty-three, had agreed to speak with politics students on campus. Volunteers were dispatched to buy the obligatory felafel and cheese, plastic cups, and cask wine, and at 3 pm the famous journalist arrived to address a small but enthusiastic group of undergraduates. We were not disappointed. Stories of Whitlam and Fraser, speculation about the October 1980 federal poll, at the time only weeks away, encouragement for anyone considering journalism as a career. We noticed the legal turn of phrase from a man who worked only a single day as a solicitor before he turned to writing. He said little about himself, much about the times. I left impressed at the breadth and insight. A lifetime later, My Country fills in the blanks, the decades as a political journalist and commentator. This generous collection, more than five hundred pages of text, draws together Marr’s writings from 1974 to late 2018. There are occasional extracts from books and Quarterly Essays, but much of the material is short-form journalism, extracts from a long career with the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, more recent pieces from the Guardian, speeches, and obituaries. The material conveys Marr’s preoccupations: politics first; speculation about the Australian character; the experience of a gay man from the violence of the first Mardi Gras to weeping at the marriage equality referendum. There is literature, much on his beloved Sydney, biographical studies, sidelines into architecture, and those legal interests first glimpsed in a Besser-brick seminar room at the University of New South Wales. This time we learn something about the person. His origins in the ‘sheltered Protestant North Shore of Sydney’,

doubts about faith from his school years, an early marriage and its eventual dissolution, the long process of coming out, life with a partner. The death of parents is movingly recounted, the links to family underscored, with the chilling observation that we all die in character. Sadly, there is less on student years or intellectual formation. Six years at university were not wasted, Marr assures us, because ‘university offers us dead ends to explore, to discover what we are, certainly, but also to find out what we are not’. Marr realised quickly he was not a practising lawyer, and moved instead to journalism – early years on The Bulletin, immersion in that now largely vanished world of newsrooms and reporters, compositors and editors, the years hosting Media Watch. Personal revelation, it turns out, is incidental to the concern of the volume. The focus is captured in the book title – a continuous if discursive speculation on what it means to be Australian. So we learn that Australians ‘muddle through, hoping and trusting’. We are neither talented at great gestures nor impressed by abstractions such as justice and liberty. Sometimes tolerant, even passive, we put up with our leaders. When we behave well, suggests Marr, we can demonstrate a commitment to fairness and good sense. The asides on the Australian character often illuminate some key failings. We see ourselves as compassionate but treat asylum seekers appallingly. We are easy going but fail to be angry when small children suffer. We laugh at institutions but tolerate their cruelty. Marr can be wry or mocking, gentle in unexpected places, yet angry at moralists who impose views on the wider society. Marr is a man who loves Australians and grieves when we disappoint. This is most evident when talking about race. As Marr REVIEW OF THE MONTH

CHIC AGO WHY LEARN HISTORY (WHEN IT’S ALREADY ON YOUR PHONE)

BITTEN BY THE BLUES

The Alligator Records Story Bruce Iglauer and Patrick A. Roberts

Sam Wineburg

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HEARING BEETHOVEN

“A fascinating look at one of the great independent record labels, and producers, of our time. For blues fans, this one has teeth.” —Library Journal

A YEAR WITH NATURE

A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery Robin Wallace

An Almanac Marty Crump

“A detailed, erudite study of the effect of deafness on Beethoven’s music and character, that is also a deeply personal account of Wallace’s late wife’s experience of deafness.”—Harvey Sachs, author of The Ninth

“What a quiet gem: an artful presentation of science and history that manages to beguile and amuse on every page.”—Booklist

With Illustrations by Bronwyn McIvor

THE DAILY CHARLES DICKENS

A Year of Quotes Charles Dickens

SEX ON THE KITCHEN TABLE

Edited and with a Foreword by James R. Kincaid

The Romance of Plants and Your Food Norman C. Ellstrand

Never Pecksniffian or Gradgrindish, this daily dose of Dickens crystallizes the novelist’s agile humor and his reformist zeal alike. This is a book to accompany you through the best of times and the worst of times.

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 10 DECEMBER 2018

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Footprint Books. Go to www.footprint.com.au to order.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

argues, ‘the issue of race – immigrant and Aboriginal – has hardly ever been off the political agenda’. An extended excursion into the Federation debate of February 1898 suggests a nation formed from fear of uncontrolled Chinese migration. Despite several chapters on Pauline Hanson – Kabuki with red hair, says Marr – his most passionate text is focused on John Howard and race issues. He pays tributes to Howard’s formidable political skills while decrying the consequences. In parliament, Howard was ‘a truly formidable debater but his great skill fail[ed] him when complex moral issues [were] at stake’. Given the time spanned by the book, John Howard looms large. Marr believes the long-serving prime minister ‘put a shaft into the core of this country, and up came race’. Howard is a ‘genius of sorts’ because he has no illusions: he sees Australians as they really are. In turn, ‘Howard never surprises. He’s always himself.’ Howard could speak to the electorate about identity, tracking alongside Hanson without needing to adopt her crude slogans. It is an assessment that Howard would contest, and Marr acknowledges his views in an extended article on faith and race. Blaming leaders does not exonerate others. ‘Racism,’ concludes Marr, ‘is so subtle that no white Australian can really claim to be untouched by that mix of shame, boredom and fear that has marked white response to black from the start.’ Though Marr travels through the book, from Christmas Island to Hill End, his world is Sydney. He revels at times in the corruption, the bright sights, and the gaucheness of ‘the irresistible city’, one of the richest places on earth, a global centre without a hinterland. A city that loves winners, its glorious harbour a symbol of good fortune. Marr can rage about the inequities of his hometown, but ‘no other city here could be so exciting, so funny and alive’. Sydney can be whatever we want it to be – reinvention accompanied by ‘massed fireworks and a good dose of amnesia’. Like many Sydneysiders, David Marr enjoys a scandal. There are literary controversies and court cases. Harry Seidler sues cartoonist Patrick Cook, Peter Costello sues Bob Ellis, and Chris Kenny pursues the ABC. We dwell on Chris Mitchell and the Order of Lenin, and savour moral panic over Bill Henson’s photographs. There is censorship to explore, Andrew Bolt to embarrass, and cash for comment with John Laws and Alan Jones (a ‘very Sydney tale’ we learn). Then there are people. Portraits abound. There are vignettes on the death of Ben Chifley, the women in John Kerr’s life, the funeral of Gough Whitlam, John Howard’s father, the rise of John Gorton, Kim Beazley’s 2001 election campaign. Over decades, Marr has honed his biographical skills. Here are fine portraits of Robert Dessaix, David Malouf, Robert Manne, and the long widowhood of Manoly Lascaris. Because this is primarily a collection of journalism, we miss some significant, longer biographies by Marr. We learn about his interaction with Patrick White but see nothing from one of Australia’s finest literary biographies, Marr’s Patrick White: A life (1991). There are fragments only from

the early portrait of Sir Garfield Barwick. Instead, the volume focuses on political encounters. Marr likes to be face to face with his subjects, often using a single moment to illuminate something larger about a person and their context. This can be compelling, as when Marr interviews Arne Rinnan, captain of the Tampa. How does Australia look to a man who rescued 438 distressed people at sea only to be prevented from landing them? Relying on brief encounters can also misfire. Perhaps Bill Shorten was not available for interview, but it was hard to glean much about him from a long extract on factional politics in the Victorian ALP. The material on Kevin Rudd, much cited when Rudd was deposed as prime minister, sees Marr provoke anger and then describe it as core to Rudd’s character. Well, maybe, but likely not. Rosebud may be more plausible in film than in life. Alongside biography are substantive articles on an impressive range of topics. Marr tests the origins of prejudice against homosexuality and the political struggle for gay rights in the United States and Australia. These longer pieces often demonstrate detailed research to make a wider point. A description of a war memorial designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens traces continuities in Australian treatment of visionary architects, from Walter Burley Griffin to Jørn Utzon. Australia is illuminated from different angles in writing about filmmaker Stanley Hayes, the 1967 referendum and its aftermath, the imprisonment of Dr Mohamed Haneef, corruption at the Australian Wheat Board, and, powerfully, the abuse of the young in Jewish and Catholic institutions exposed by a Royal Commission. A collection of works drawn over forty-five years will always present challenges of coherence. Marr acknowledges he has trimmed in places, even taken an axe to some pieces, while working alongside publisher Chris Feik from Black Inc. Given the volume of material, there is surprisingly little overlap and only occasional puzzlement about an inclusion. More striking is the consistency in tone and intelligence. Journalism is a response to the moment, but cumulatively it can illuminate a whole period. By questioning who we are, My Country proves coherent across its ambitions. There are no explicit conclusions, but at least two readings are possible. First, threaded through many different articles is a sense of the Australia Marr would like to see: a democracy that is a ‘contest of conversations’, a dialogue ‘between a nation and its leaders’, a nation ‘more open, more tolerant, more reconciled to Indigenous Australians, more attuned to Asia, more in love with the arts, a great independent republic in the south’. Give him a place ‘free, open, principled, fearless, fair’. Do we rise to this vision splendid? ‘I know my country now,’ says David Marr. Far from perfect, it is ‘a wonderfully muddled, lively society that happily accepts all sorts of confusion and contradiction. We’re real, relaxed and alive.’ Perhaps that is why ‘we always come good in the end’. g Glyn Davis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Crawford School, Australian National University. REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Unfinished business The lives of two influential feminists

Zora Simic UNFETTERED AND ALIVE: A MEMOIR by Anne Summers

Allen & Unwin, $39.95 hb, 512 pp, 9781743318416

GERMAINE: THE LIFE OF GERMAINE GREER by Elizabeth Kleinhenz Knopf, $39.99 hb, 432 pp, 9780143782841

hen Anne Summers first met Germaine Greer at a raucous house party in Balmain in the early 1970s, she threw up in front of her after too many glasses of Jim Beam. Almost fifty years later, she muses that perhaps that early encounter was one of the reasons why they ‘never really connected’. After reading Summers’ latest memoir, Unfettered and Alive, in tandem with Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s Germaine: The life of Germaine Greer, I can think of a few others. On many counts, Summers and Greer appear to have much in common, including fairly equal claims to being two of the most influential feminists in Australian history. More or less contemporaries – Greer was born in 1939, at the onset of World War II, Summers at its end, in 1945 – they were educated by nuns before escaping their stifling suburban upbringings for higher education and 1960s bohemia. Each of them made her mark early with groundbreaking books, Greer with The Female Eunuch (1970), Summers with Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975), one of the first major histories of Australian women. Both women were briefly married – Greer for a month – and didn’t have children. They enjoyed international success and wrote bestselling books about a parent, with mysteries at their core: Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989) and Summers’ The Lost Mother (2009). Neither woman has shied away from criticising younger feminists for perceived fail12 DECEMBER 2018

ings. They remain high-profile public figures. In 2011, Greer and Summers were honoured as Australian Legends by Australia Post in a series of commemorative stamps. Beyond public accolades, there are other similarities. Both women have been candid about their reproductive histories Greer, who tried to have a child, has expressed regret and some anger about hers; Summers, in her memoir, is matter-of-fact about her abortions. They share a strong commitment to living a free life, defined in their own terms. They made money and bought their own homes at a time – not very long ago – when it was still unusual for women to do so. Summers recounts her bank initially refusing to finance her mortgage back in the late 1970s, though she was making more than enough money as a member of the Canberra press gallery. Greer, meanwhile, as Kleinhenz traces, has bought, renovated, gardened, populated, and sold a series of memorable properties. These include her beloved cottage ‘Pianelli’ in Tuscany, where Greer once had a tryst with Federico Fellini. Summers takes the title of her memoir from a Joni Mitchell song, but it’s another freedom seeker, French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who acts as lodestar. This is immediately apparent in her choice of epigraph, drawn from The Second Sex (1949), correctly translated to begin, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes woman’, rather than ‘becomes a woman’,

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as Summers first read it in her youth. This seemingly minor difference ‘might seem innocuous’, writes Summers, but ‘the intended formulation was much stronger than the one served up to us’. In her closing tribute, Summers also reflects that the life of ‘this strange French woman’ – the one she most aspired to emulate as a young Australian woman – was not as free as she had once thought, because ‘Beauvoir was a doormat when it came to men’. Still, if her younger self might have been harsher in her judgement, Summers is now more inclined to situate her hero in historical context. This generous yet clear-eyed sensibility animates the entire book, even when she is settling old scores. Greer was much less forgiving in her book The Change (1991), in which she blasted Beauvoir for her dependence on Jean-Paul Sartre and for her fear of ageing. In one of the more perceptive passages in her genial but largely descriptive biography, Kleinhenz notes that there was a larger purpose to this scathing critique: in addressing menopause, Greer was once again ‘in the vanguard of new thinking about an important issue for women’. Indeed, her feminist critique of ageing has been one of Greer’s more refreshing and sustained interventions in recent decades, especially compared to her reactionary position on transgender issues or her well-intentioned but naïve expressions of solidarity with Aboriginal people. Kleinhenz’s biography is necessarily concerned with her subject’s entire life, while Summers’ memoir picks up where her previous memoir, Ducks on the Pond (1999), left off, in 1976, when the author remains a feminist but no longer a Women’s Liberationist as she moves away from the grassroots movement to new challenges, chiefly newspaper journalism. Yet both books are ultimately about what happens in the aftermath of early success and the first phase of second-wave feminism. Greer and Summers had unusual opportunities to work, travel, and play; their life histories overflow with relocations, encounters with (in Greer’s case especially) famous and influential people, and new audiences or constituencies for their work. Greer became a television

personality and newspaper columnist in the United Kingdom, where, among other things, she wrote lovingly about her garden in Essex. In the mid-1980s, when Summers became editor and, soon after, co-owner with Sandra Yates of the trail-blazing but by then rather dour US feminist magazine Ms, among her controversial new features was a regular gardening page. In their distinctive ways, Greer and Summers championed a style of feminism that resonated with ordinary women, if not always with critics or other feminists. Kleinhenz extracts from the massive Germaine Greer archive – purchased for three million dollars by the University of Melbourne in 2013, and the justification for a new biography – small gems of correspondence from women seeking advice from Greer, who was often firm but kind in response. Summers, meanwhile – first in her capacity as head of the revived Office of the Status of Women under the Hawke government, and later as women’s adviser to Paul Keating – sought to identify what issues mattered most to Australian women by asking them. That some of these issues did not directly affect Summers (childcare) or surprised her for their ongoing significance in women’s lives (such as domestic violence – despite her role in setting up Elsie Women’s Refuge, the first such refuge in Australia) says less about her singularity than it does about her political skills and capacity to listen. Her later affinity with, and admiration for, Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister, makes even more sense read in the context of Summers’ own history. Greer’s feminism – provocative, polemical, and intensely personal – travelled in two main, and sometimes conflicting, directions: scholarship and mainstream celebrity. Kleinhenz dutifully provides summaries of Greer’s canon and sketches a portrait of ‘Germaine [as] a natural scholar who rarely feels more in control of her life than when she is sitting in libraries fossicking through books and papers’, but, as a biographer, Kleinhenz is better suited to the gossipy aspects of Greer’s life than she is to elucidating her feminism. In a spirited but awkward attempt to

capture the impact of Greer’s work on women’s lives, Kleinhenz introduces ‘Cheryl Davis’ from East Doncaster, Melbourne, to whom she intermittently returns in order to trace Greer’s enduring and transformative significance. As a literary device, ‘Cheryl’ offers a creative alternative to the more robust and rigorous analysis of Greer’s work and feminism presented by Christine Wallace in the last major Greer biography, Untamed Shrew (1997). Unfortunately, ‘Cheryl’ is also a reminder that Wallace’s book – so vehemently opposed by Greer at the time that it is now a part of the latest version of Greer’s story, as well as a vital resource for Kleinhenz – is the more substantial one. Wallace may not

Greer and Summers championed a style of feminism that resonated with ordinary women have had the benefit of access to the Greer archive, but her approach was more fearless and forensic, as well as better historicised. Summers’ feminist politics are rather different from Greer’s. As she tells us, she is ‘practical’, not afraid of ‘stats and facts’, and has consistently aimed to effect or at least influence real change, whether through activism, journalism, or government bureaucracy. Like Greer, she started out as a scholar, but apart from a fleeting moment of nostalgia for not sticking with the comparatively stress-free pursuit of women’s history, Summers does not share Greer’s abiding veneration of the ivory tower. She thrives on the adrenalin of a deadline or a tightly fought election campaign, as her euphoric account of Paul Keating’s unexpected election win in 1993 demonstrates. As a writer, Summers is instinctively a journalist, with a keen sense of history and character. The soft side of Keating emerges, while Bob Hawke’s abiding appeal is only enhanced by the knowledge that he apparently read The Second Sex. But Summers suffers no fools, and some politicians and feminists come out badly. She is adamant, for instance, that Malcolm Fraser, despite his later reha-

bilitation as an anti-racism champion, was essentially a ‘tough bastard’; and she prefers the no-nonsense Betty Friedan to Gloria Steinem, whom she depicts as flighty and emotionally stunted. This crude psychological profile seems undeserved, but it is clear that writing this memoir has provided Summers with the chance to clear up unfinished business from her time at Ms. Her account of her time there is convincing. Unfettered and Alive is a hefty tome; some sections tend to drag. But its size is entirely proportionate with the life lived and the histories that Summers was a part of. Even more so than Ducks on the Pond – now a key text of Australian second-wave feminism – her latest memoir is an important work of social and political history. It is told well by someone with insider access who nevertheless, by virtue of her sex, nationality, and sheer trailblazing novelty, was also an outsider. In her preface, a letter to her younger self, Summers recalls that growing up she had only one positive role model of a free woman, her ‘spinster aunt’ Nance. The equation of freedom with not having children may alienate some, but Summers’ truth, and her defence of it, are persuasive and nuanced. The best parts of Kleinhenz’s biography are similarly attuned to the costs and pleasures of being Germaine Greer. These two towering figures of Australian feminism may not have personally connected at that Balmain party, but their work and lives will continue to resonate and fascinate for however long the question of what freedom means for women remains an open and contested one. g

Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. ❖ FEMINISM

The unsaid Felicity Plunkett DANGEROUS IDEAS ABOUT MOTHERS

edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson

UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 246 pp, 9781742589909

n essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with autotheory and what Nelson calls ‘post-shame’ autobiographical writing – Tumarkin describes being ‘beside herself ’ with exhilaration. Nelson’s work about love, connection, and the forms they take – and might be expressed through – probes ideas of articulation, doubt, and silence, variously fructive, disguising, or censorious. She writes about how, ‘feral with vulnerability’, any of us may try to stay present with ‘unnameable things, or at least things whose essence is flicker, flow’. Nelson’s work undoes seams where the sayable and unsayable meet, wanting neither easy ways of thinking that ‘ride roughshod over specificity’ nor ‘to make a fetish of the unsaid’. This commitment to uncomfortable complication underpins both Tumarkin’s work and this collection’s exploration of thinking about motherhood and the ‘dangerous ideas’ that may disturb it. Tumarkin, interrogating the ‘overmemoirisation of motherhood’, despises hackneyed criticism of the form, recognising its origins in habitual imagining of a ‘wobbly, hormone-affected’ mother as ‘the least interesting [thinker] of our culture’. The restive energy of Tumarkin’s work exemplifies an adventurous spirit running the collection. The first sentence of editors Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson’s introduction – ‘Mothers are a topic on which almost everybody has 14 DECEMBER 2018

an opinion’ – begins an exploration of the contested nature of motherhood as symptomatic of a moralising culture that pits women against each other. Nelson and Robertson contextualise this within a rise in social media phenomena such as Instagram ‘brelfies’, celebrated for both championing breastfeeding and criticised for marginalising non-breastfeeding mothers. Yet many of these debates are long-standing. When Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas (1938) that women have thought ‘while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the cradle’, critic Q.D. Leavis was quick to quip that the (childless) ‘Mrs. Woolf wouldn’t know which end of the cradle to stir.’ There is a flood of bilious commentary about mothers that wears the mask of Schadenfreude. Anne Manne quotes historian John Hirst in The Age, who described single mothers as ‘given to junk food, daytime TV and no-good boyfriends’, and Joe Hockey’s distinction between ‘leaners’ and ‘lifters’, the former being those outside paid employment. Emma A. Jane’s ‘bolshie corrective’ to Hirst-style stereotypes of single mothers is disrupted by the experience of choking on a prawn, and a moment of feeling ‘conspicuously and … wristslittingly alone’. While Jane’s witty and steely riposte to One Nation candidate David Archibald’s equation of solo mothering with a rise in ‘the portion of the population that is lazy and ugly’ offers a portrait of a loved child held within communities of affinity and care, that image of aloneness thrums beneath it. The profound vulnerability suggested by slit wrists is more than a jaunty aside. The cover’s detail from Kourtney Roy’s photo Rope – a balletic feminine figure, on closer inspection, the body of a woman who has hanged herself – warrants discussion. While it may suggest a disjunction between what we see at a glance (elegance, glamour, poise) and what is really going on (life-threatening despair), it seems a glib choice. Post-partum psychosis affects one or two in every thousand mothers; post-partum depression affects one in seven. Post-partum suicide is one of the leading causes of death in new mothers. While much of the writers’ work here is to draw attention to mothers, this cover

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seems far less attuned – and even naïve about or trivialising of – maternal mental health. Some readers most likely to benefit from this empathetic work may find this image repellent or even dangerous. The collection tirelessly questions stereotypes of mothering. Some are risible, some fan panic. Catharine Lumby examines anxiety about screen time, asking whether ‘reading a book is automatically more intellectually stimulating or productive than reading or watching something on a screen’. She brings children’s voices to the discussion, expressing their joy ‘in entering an imaginary world’ and advocating the tenacious work of ‘guiding our kids through the shallow and deeper waters of being human’. Camilla Nelson describes monitoring screen time as a ‘middle-class preoccupation’. Her exploration of ‘Mumpreneurism’ catalogues the hashtags, emojis, and purchasing links associated with the ‘branding’ of photogenic children, and the genteel scorn of, for instance, images of a (confected) child, Quinoa. Is this scorn the same as Waleed Aly’s criticism of celebrity Roxy Jacenko, whose images of her four-year-old daughter were investigated as part of an obscenity case? Aly’s critique might be seen as expressing the rights of a child who cannot have agency when it comes to subtle questions of voyeurism, money, and consent. Anne Manne argues for an ethics of care. In an exhilarating moment, she imagines an otherwise well-qualified job applicant dismissed on the basis of showing no evidence of time spent on the care of others. Alecia Simmonds’s ‘Domesticating Violence’ is a similarly clear-eyed analysis of domestic violence. Hazel Smith prefaces her sensitive discussion of voluntary childlessness with an experimental prose poem, while Quinn Eades writes in lyrical slivers about ‘Being a Boy Mama’.The exhilarating diversity of forms here – among them lyrical, poetic, and autotheoretical – expresses the range of angles on mothering, as well as the shifting, mobile terrain of non-fictional prose itself. g Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. She is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press and a widely published reviewer.

Summoning the lightning Francesca Sasnaitis THE MAN ON THE MANTELPIECE: A MEMOIR

by Marion May Campbell

UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 232 pp, 9781760800031

n 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to conduct experiments in artificial rainmaking that required flying into turbulent cumulonimbus clouds. ‘Rainmaking is the work of the Devil,’ his daughter heard. Had the radio physicists on those flights discovered how to make it rain over drought-stricken areas of Australia, they would have been hailed as heroes. As it was, his grieving widow received a nasty anonymous letter intimating that the crew got what they deserved for ‘interfering with nature’. Readers will not find the cosy chronology of a life in The Man on the Mantelpiece. In her fiction, poetry, and academic writing, Campbell contin-

ues to interrogate the self in relation to contemporary literary practice. The few known facts of her father’s life provide the barest scaffolding for unravelling her ideas. In a theoretical incarnation of a chapter from the memoir, published in Offshoot: Contemporary life writing methodologies and practice (UWAP, 2018), Campbell clarifies: ‘You don’t write out of plenitude. You write to summon the lightning through which the missing might crackle’, thus serendipitously providing The Man on the Mantelpiece with a fitting epigraph. For readers unfamiliar with the term, life writing refers to a hybrid genre that blurs the conventions of literature and memoir, fiction and non-fiction. It is a form replete with contradictions and connections. Composed of disparate fragments, repetitions, coincidences, and failures in memory and communication, it embraces invention, speculation, embellishment, and emotional truth in favour of empirical proof. It encourages ‘marginal’ writing that demands concentration and commitment of the reader. If it is like Campbell’s experiment in excavation, it rewards with ravishing, extravagant prose. For Campbell, the ‘inaugural scene, from which writing sprout[s]’ (Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1993) is the death of her father Frederick ‘Fred’ William Campbell. He is the handsome, uniformed fellow sporting a handlebar moustache, transposed from the mantelpiece to the book

cover. The author does not provide an easily devoured narrative of her search for the ‘truth’ behind his disappearance, but delivers information as it might occur to a child, the daughter of a vanished father. Minus the moustache, the cover photograph could be mistaken for a portrait of the author in drag. Campbell was four when her father died; scarcely a memory remains to her. She is reliant on the keeper of the archive, her elder sister, and on the facts ‘little sister’ gleans from official records. She compensates for unreliable memories and a paucity of documentary evidence with ‘rumours, supposition, the strange comfort of conspiracy theories’, and her gift for pouring herself into scene and character. She has had practice. As the ‘orphaned’ daughter, she tries to transform herself into the dead father, partly to console her bereft mother, Roma, but also as a way of knowing him. ‘I dress myself in myth,’ she says, and clothes herself in her parents’ personalities, trying on their early lives and intimacies. Campbell finds signs of love, longing, and relationship in their few remaining photographs. Her ‘reading’ may be fanciful, but who can say if it’s incorrect? The photograph on the mantelpiece acts as one springboard. Later, ghosts find their way back into the text through allegory and dream. Are the Enchantress and Ventriloqueen a manifestation of lover, mother, or daughter? One or all? Each holds the author in thrall. Bitter Roma would rather kill herself

MEMOIR

than acknowledge that her daughter might be gay. Roma would rather see her daughter lonely than happy. The daughter is both Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty and the spindle. She has learned the efficacy of her name – Campbell means ‘crooked mouth’. If throwing the witch from the tower doesn’t effect escape, she can try dismemberment and disappearance – an allusion to anorexia – or the maudlin solace of alcohol, anywhere ‘wounded consciousness can be drowned’. But only momentarily. Finally, it is writing that saves her, that gets it right. The torrent of words sings self into being and grants a belated reconciliation between mother and daughter. Campbell laments the loss of stories she failed to receive while Roma was still alive. The bare facts are extraordinary but give no sense of the unfolding of Campbell’s borrowed memories, meted out in poetic convolutions and dreamlike conjunctions. She is the ‘sunstruck daughter of a man who would have made it rain’. He is the body that was never found, who dies a second time when the family’s belongings are incinerated in a warehouse fire. Fred the rainmaker is a character stepped from fairy tale. Like Randolph Stow’s Michael Random (Tourmaline, 1963) or Bill Starbuck, the character Burt Lancaster plays in the film The Rainmaker (directed by Joseph Anthony, 1956), Fred comes to the story as charlatan and saviour. It does not really matter which he was: he is ultimately unknowable. What counts is what happens in his absence; what those remaining suffer; how lives evolve. The daughter grows up with a deified father and her mother’s rejection of any new liaison, none of whom lives up to Fred’s exalted standard. ‘You will never be as good as Him, you will never be as good as the Unfallen Dead’ is what the daughter learns about the missing. You can’t compete with memory. g Francesca Sasnaitis is a writer and artist. Originally from Melbourne, she now lives in Perth where she is a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. She has published in Southerly, Sydney Revi ew of Books, and Westerly, among others. 16 DECEMBER 2018

Swift-footed and quick-thinking Homer

Two contributions to the poetic collective known as ‘Homer’

Marguerite Johnson THE ODYSSEY by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson Wiley, $29.95 pb, 582 pp, 9780393089059

THE ILIAD: A NEW TRANSLATION by Homer, translated by Peter Green

University of California Press (Footprint), $44.99 pb, 592 pp, 9780520281431

or as long as I have studied Classics, first as a high-school student, later as an undergraduate and PhD student, and now as a professor, I have carried Homer’s poems close to me. The Iliad and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Odyssey are my touchstones. All that needs to be known can be found in them. I have taught them for more years than I care to remember. I still cry at certain parts. I see them, feel them, hear them. But I have never published a single article, chapter, or anything resembling scholarly criticism on them. They defy me. To contemplate translating them is so alien to me that I instantly admire any Classicist who has been brave enough to take on such a herculean task. But with admiration comes simultaneous caution and even a bit of resentment: What have they done to my Iliad and Odyssey? This suspicion has seen me returning time and again to the translators of my youth: Richmond Lattimore and E.V. Rieu. There is an intense sentimentality around my relationship with Lattimore’s translations; these were my undergraduate editions and I still have them, albeit battered and – in the case of the Odyssey – more looseleafed than bound. Rieu’s translations are treasured for more romantic reasons, centring around stories of him translating passages from the Odyssey to his wife and daughters as the bombs of World War II rained down on London. I also admire Rieu for practical reasons: he rendered the great works into prose and produced – for the first

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time in English – readable, accurate, and affordable (via the newly formed Penguin Classics) translations that took both epics out of the élite halls of Greek undergraduate classes and gave them to the public. By the same token, I am in awe of Lattimore, who took on the burden of the long, six-beat dactylic hexameter of the original, which resists the rhythms of English, and produced what is traditionally regarded as the best poetic translation of both poems. When one ponders the sublimity that is the Homeric canon, and admires its best translators, it is a mystery why Classicists still attempt to scale Mount Olympus and sit alongside the anonymous poetic collective known as ‘Homer’ and his rare priestly breed of superior interpreters. I use the word ‘priestly’ in the old-fashioned gendered sense because Homer has traditionally belonged to men. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey has, therefore, broken with tradition and has, for several reasons, contributed significantly to Homeric scholarship. This is partly because she is a woman. But this is a somewhat predictable and tedious conversation to have around the publication in view of the other, more pressing issues in need of discussion when it comes to translating Homer. In the footsteps of Shakespeare to Keats to those contemporary poets composing in English, Wilson’s translation is in iambic pentameter, which maintains the same length of the dactylic hexameter and the same lines.

Maintenance of the original word order, which is different to English syntactic structure and provides an added layer of meaning by accentuating key moments, ideas, and emotions, is also admirably observed as much as possible. Likewise, the beauty of Homer’s plain or unadorned language, with its vividness and variety of mood reliant on imagery rather than ornate vocabulary, is referenced by Wilson in a pared-back, elegant style. The characteristic epithet of both the Iliad and the Odyssey – ‘Swift-footed Achilles’, ‘Shining-helmed Hector’, ‘Grey-eyed Athena’, ‘Quick-thinking Odysseus’ – usually rendered with the same adjective in Greek, and therefore often repeatedly rendered in a translation with the same word – are interpreted and therefore translated with a fuller or more varied vocabulary herein. Thus, we have polytropos and its equivalents (like polymentis), Odysseus’s trademark epithet(s), freely translated as ‘complicated’, ‘the man who can adapt to anything’, and ‘the lord of lies’, and other variations. Rather than the reliance on one choice of word, such as ‘wily’ (also used in this translation), Wilson listens to the demands of the context to select what she senses it needs. And she is invariably right. This translation, in its entirety, is right. Translating the Iliad is not the same as translating the Odyssey. This is not only because the two poems are separated by at least a generation, with the Iliad thought to have been composed first (sometime around the middle to late eighth century bce), but also because of the substantially different – and yet related – subject matter. While the Odyssey contains folktale elements, with its middle ‘books’ dedicated to the fantastical wanderings of Odysseus, and its decidedly domestic environments, the Iliad traces some fifty days in the last phase of the ten-year Trojan War. While it has elements of domesticity, with occasional scenes of the warriors – both Trojan and Greek – eating, reposing, and, in the case of the Trojans, visiting wives, mothers, and children, the Iliad is devoid of the fairy tales of the Odyssey and its moments of levity, chronicling instead a claustrophobic world of siege warfare, violence, heartbreak, and battle

fatigue. Reading this is a life-changing experience, and its sublimity almost defies translation. ‘Touch the text at your peril’, seems to be the mantra of most Classicists, though, like Wilson, Peter Green has recently made the hero’s journey along the path of translation. Also, like Wilson, Green had established himself as a formidable translator before tackling Homer. He too was not afraid of attempting an English rendition of the hexameter, choosing to base his inspiration on C. Day-Lewis’s approach to translating Virgil’s Georgics in 1940, which was commissioned for broadcasting and therefore had to ‘sound’ like poetry. Day-Lewis’s solution, which he developed in his magisterial translation of the Aeneid in 1952, was to vary the length of the line of the strict epic metre, moving between the six-beat dactylic hexameter and the five-beat catalectic hexameter. The slight relaxation of metrical accuracy enabled Day-Lewis, and now Green, to concentrate on meaning without sacrificing poetics to it. Green is a more emphatic translator when it comes to interpreting the original as a more grandiose, rhetorical style of poetry. To be fair, the Iliad is more formal in its construction and, at times, its language, compared to the Odyssey. However, the translation is stiff at times, which is mostly the result of a more rigid approach to capturing the original word order of the Greek. At times, Homer’s translators need translating. Both new editions are, overall, excellent, although Wilson’s is a translation of her selected text that is without peer. Green’s Iliad may sit (almost) beside Lattimore’s, but the peerless English translation of the Iliad is yet to come. Perhaps, understandably, it never will. g

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COMMENT

Protecting the national interest? A covert attack on independent scholarly research

by Joy Damousi

n October, the Australian research and academic community was angered by the revelation that the former Minister for Education and Training, Senator Simon Birmingham, vetoed eleven Australian Research Council (ARC) grants that had been recommended for funding following a rigorous peer-review process. The minister did not provide reasons for his secret intervention, which resulted in a cut of $4.1 million to grants in the humanities. Academics are rarely united as one, but social media was filled with statements from more than a dozen peak professional associations in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and medical research sectors, and staunch public pronouncements by vice chancellors at La Trobe, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW, and ACU, all four Learned Academies, and Universities Australia – to name a few – who were unanimous in their condemnation. Why did the research community respond in such a highly public and united way? Senator Birmingham’s decision to exercise his right to veto grants, and to do so by stealth and without providing robust academic reasons, severely undermines the independent and rigorous peerreview assessment of applications for funding. In response to Birmingham’s actions, the current Minster for Education, Dan Tehan, agreed to introduce a new system whereby applicants would be made aware if a minister vetoed their application. A further provision, the so-called ‘national interest test’, would also be introduced, requiring applicants to demonstrate that their research meets the ‘national interest’. It remains unclear how this will differ from the existing national benefit and impact statements applicants are already required to provide. The introduction of a ‘national interest test’ in research needs to be ferociously scrutinised for three fundamental reasons. First, there are fears that such a test will further damage the outstanding peer-assessment process already in place. If research is undertaken to satisfy a politically defined ‘national interest test’, this is not research at all. Research on topics such as climate change, gender politics, sexuality, or Indigenous rights that do not align with the ruling political party of the day could easily be dismissed as not in the national interest. Progressive movements for social change over the past century or more have at some point been dismissed as not in the ‘national interest’. The right of Indigenous communities to land rights, to human rights, to not have their children stolen from them, to be voting citizens have, at different times in Australia’s history, been dismissed

at not in the ‘national interest’. Women’s right to vote, to equal pay, to abortion, to keep working after marriage have over decades been seen in some quarters as a threat to contemporary understandings of ‘the national interest’. Social reforms are invariably introduced when movements challenge the very perception of the ‘national interest’ of the day. Second, the highest quality research questions orthodoxy, challenges conventional approaches and methods, and introduces new and innovative ways of addressing a problem or problems. It opens our eyes to new ways of seeing. In order for these possibilities to be fully explored, the results of such research may not be immediate or instant, but in fact may take decades for the benefits to be seen or be made transparent. If research grants are judged through a utilitarian and short-term focus on a present definition of ‘national interest’, it will not allow what researchers often need: to take the long-term view of how research is conducted and the time it can take to have an impact. Finally, researchers engage on the world stage and internationally. Scholars work within a global community, which has enormous benefits to Australia, both to international collaboration and to the field of study to which they contribute. The best research thrives in this environment and extends knowledge nationally and internationally. If we look only to a ‘national interest’, it could force a narrowing of focus and research, which is inward-looking and parochial. The broader issue at stake is the type of nation we want to be in the future and how our most outstanding and talented researchers will take us there. If the research community is asked to define what it does through a lens mediated by the political interest of the day, it will not only prohibit imaginative, original, creative, dynamic, and transformative research, but it will create the conditions where intellectual conformity, compliance, and orthodoxy are rewarded. This dangerous and treacherous precedent should be anathema not only to the research community but to all Australians. g Professor Joy Damousi FASSA, FAHA is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the current president of national peak body for the humanities in Australia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and president of the Australian Historical Association. COMMENT

SURVEY

The heart of our culture ‘The humanities are the heart of our culture and of our knowledge, and their relevance is a constant source of surprise and sustenance – giving us answers to questions we hardly knew to ask.’ So writes Philip Mead in his response to Senator Simon Birmingham’s recent veto of eleven proposed Australian Research Council grants. One wonders if Professor Mead’s view is shared by the federal government. Not for the first time, it has targeted the humanities in a way that does not apply to science or technology. ABR shares the academic community’s dismay at this philistine assault on academic freedom.

Margaret Gardner

At Senate Estimates on 25 October 2018, it was revealed that eleven ARC grants for 2017 were rejected by the then Education Minister, Simon Birmingham. It has been many years since a Minister decided to override the exhaustive peer-review process. The Minister, with no explanation, rejected more than $4 million of grants to the humanities. Until the Senate Estimates revelation, those researchers believed that, despite receiving positive reviewer reports, they had just failed to make the cut. Now we all know they had made the cut, against fierce competition from the best researchers in their fields in the nation. But the Minister didn’t approve the awards. Not only were his decisions kept secret, there was no accounting for the reasons – apart from the views he revealed on Twitter when this information became public. This is a fundamental affront to the principles on which universities operate. Academic or intellectual freedom guarantees the pursuit of knowledge free of interference or repression by external and internal parties. We, as universities, guarantee this freedom within their areas of expertise to our staff through statute and regulation. To see this core principle so cavalierly undermined is profoundly worrying. The Minister is, in his role, allocating research funding, on advice, to support the research mission of uni-

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

versities. The discretion he exercises should not be a personal one, based on his limited opinions about research topics. When individuals seek to undermine the nature of our collective academic endeavour, we must protest. In Minister Birmingham’s secret and ill-conceived derogation of humanities research and researchers, we have reached such a point. We have values to be defend. We demand that these actions not be repeated. We must not let this matter be brushed aside. Professor Margaret Gardner AO is President and Vice-Chancellor of Monash University and Chair of Universities Australia

Ian Donaldson

Once in office, no federal Minister of Education – however diverse and distinguished their own educational record may have been – has the time, the up-to-date knowledge, or the multiple skills required to assess the many applications for government funding over which they exercise nominal oversight. Happily, the Minister is always helped in this task by the detailed assessments of experts, commissioned from within Australia and across the world, who are asked to judge whether grant proposals are, or are not, of outstanding significance and worthy of public support. There may be occasions when a Minister

sees what an expert in the field has failed to see: that a research proposal is in some way mischievous, ill conceived, or damaging to the national interest. On such rare occasions, the Minister must clearly explain to the researchers themselves, to their expert assessors, and to the general public the reasons for vetoing an already recommended grant. To withhold such an explanation – more astonishingly, to suppress all public knowledge of their veto – is to act not as an animator and inspirer of national research, but as a faceless bureaucrat might act in the service of a totalitarian state. Australia can do much better than that. Professor Ian Donaldson FAHA, FBA, FRSE, Emeritus Professor at ANU and Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Brian Schmidt

We learned recently that eleven humanities ARC grants that had been recommended for funding through the peer-review process were denied by the former Education Minister Simon Birmingham. These included an early career fellowship (DECRA) for one of our own staff members, Dr Robert Wellington. I have committed the University to provide support so that Robert is able to maintain his research program. Universities’ power to speak truth comes through their integrity, which is underpinned by the principles of academic freedom and academic autonomy. Within Western democracies, governments support these principles by providing research grants, typically administered by independent agencies, that are judged by a peer-review process, free of political or other types of interference. The competitive grants programs play a vital role in Australia’s research landscape, so it is essential that trust and confidence in their integrity are restored. I am proud that ANU stands as one of the world’s strongest centres of humanities research. The outcomes of research in these disciplines are integral to understanding and tackling many of the big issues facing society, and I affirm the commitment of ANU to humanities research as a core activity. ANU joins the broader university sector in condemning the undermining of our peer-reviewed grant system. We will continue to advocate for humanities research to receive appropriate funding, free from political interference. Professor Brian P. Schmidt AC FAA, FRS, Vice-Chancellor, President and Chief Executive Officer of ANU, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011

André Brett

The effects of Simon Birmingham’s intervention for early career researchers (ECRs) are especially chilling. One victim of this veto consequently moved his young family to the United Kingdom because

he could not obtain a position in Australia. ECRs represent some of Australia’s most promising and insightful new talent, yet little is done to keep them in our universities, where casualisation and precariousness are the norm. ARC grants are often make-orbreak because chronic failures at institutional, system, and government levels have made stable, full-time academic positions elusive, especially in the humanities. To add a secret veto is injurious; to exercise it on a cursory glance at titles adds insult to injury; to defend the veto with flippant tweets is to rub salt into the wound. It is hard to view Birmingham’s behaviour as that of somebody serious about research excellence – or somebody serious about treating others professionally and respectfully. And if Dan Tehan is so concerned with research in the ‘national interest’, perhaps some enterprising researchers should pitch a project to examine whether national interest tests are in fact in the national interest. It is obviously not in the national interest to lose talented minds. Dr André Brett, Postdoctoral research fellow in History, University of Wollongong

Stephen Garton

One of the many troubling aspects of the Seantor Birmingham’s egregious and deeply politicised action, is less the assertion that expertise can be trumped by politics (after all, it has happened before), but that this appeal to the mythical ‘base’ barely stirred the political waters. That suggests something disconcerting about the broader public perception of universities. It is fascinating that what is supposedly happening in the humanities and social sciences looms so large in the popular imaginary of what a university is. On the other hand, that popular imaginary is dispiriting given that it is so far removed from reality. The accusation that all ‘we’ do is ‘identity politics’ is deeply ingrained in many quarters. People look at me in amazement when I tell them that the most popular undergraduate major at Sydney is Economics. What would happen, however, if ministerial interference came to impact research on climate change? Would this rouse a greater popular outcry? I suspect so, but that in itself suggests that we haven’t yet persuaded sufficient numbers of citizens of the value of the humanities, despite years of good and purposeful activity to this end. We have culture work still to do. Professor Stephen Garton FAHA, FASSA, FRAHS, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, The University of Sydney

Catherine Kevin

Simon Birmingham has interfered in the granting of research funds on the grounds of a notional taxpayer who is apparently unaware of how specialised knowledge-building works and the context in which it takes place. The international context is crucial for SURVEY

universities in more ways than one. Part of the remit of research is to illuminate Australia’s relevance to the world, to ensure that our experiences, concerns, and expertise are integrated into global conversations, that the connections are made. More pragmatically, international research impact is a key measure in all three major university ranking systems, and these are closely linked to the global education market. International students are buyers in the global marketplace and for them rankings count. If researchers are forced to tailor their proposals to Birmingham’s parochial, short-term interests, their universities will be hampered in this market and in the global conversation. It is ironic that federal governments have increased pressure on universities to rely on international student income. Given Birmingham’s dismissal of ARC applications on the basis of their titles, is it any surprise that someone is failing to join the dots in the government’s flawed approach? Dr Catherine Kevin, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

Tom Griffiths

Simon Birmingham interfered in an independent review process, failed to understand the gravity of his personal intervention, and mocked the research being proposed. As Minister, he is not the expert on individual research projects. He is there to support the independent ARC, not to undermine its procedures. Decisions about research quality are not matters for politicians. The current peer-review assessment process is rigorous, exhausting, and punishing enough, and the opportunity costs of applying are, I believe, already too high. The Australian summer, which is a scholar’s precious, seasonal window of creativity, is now sacrificed to grant-writing. The impact of such summers on university research culture and morale is dire. If the Minister now imposes a further political veto, then the whole process is insupportable. Professor Tom Griffiths AO FAHA, Emeritus Professor, ANU

Lisa Featherstone

In 2017, Australia’s third-largest export earner was the higher education of international students, beaten only by iron ore and coal. Higher education is the largest service industry, well ahead of income brought in from tourism. Despite cuts to the sector, Australia’s higher education sector is strong, and many Australian universities score highly on prestigious international scales. These scales are developed largely on research quality and quantity (rather than teaching), yet they are a major factor in attracting both undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the globe. Australian universities have flourishing research 22 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

cultures. Research cultures require funding, and the Australian Research Council is central to this, especially in the humanities, where grants are both scarce and highly regarded. The recent ministerial interference is troubling on many grounds. If we want highprofile researchers who can perform on the international stage, we need to allow researchers to follow their passions, and to develop new knowledge across all of the humanities, to be shared with our students and the broader community. More pragmatically, lack of funding will lead inevitably to falling rankings of Australian universities on international scales. In the longer term, this will no doubt lead to lower numbers of fee-paying students. The impact of the minister’s interference is profound, with repercussions that are already reverberating through the sector. Associate Professor Lisa Featherstone, Director of Teaching and Learning, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland

Philip Mead

What has Australia lost with Minister Birmingham’s intervention into national research funding? How is our research culture poorer? And our contribution to world knowledge diminished? We’ve lost the investigative thinking of six established scholars about important contemporary social upheavals like rioting, and its links across the United Kingdom, America, Australia, and the Middle East. One of Australia’s leading art historians and his ideas about orientalist scholarship and the Mediterranean have been rubbished. We’ve lost the excitingly innovative work of three young scholars, including an original contribution to the history of film in a project about the relation of soviet cinema to Hollywood filmmaking. The brilliantly forward-looking work of one scholar about musicology and birdsong, and another’s about the struggle of First Nations peoples with modernity have been turned down. The humanities are the heart of our culture and of our knowledge, and their relevance is a constant source of surprise and sustenance – giving us answers to questions we hardly knew to ask. Australian taxpayers will be dismayed to see the value of our humanities research disrespected and its global impact reduced. They will also be distressed by the effects of this intervention on our winning researchers. Professor Philip Mead FAHA, Professor Emeritus of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne, ARC College of Experts

Margaret Harris

For at least twenty-five years I have heard speculation about the ARC and its alleged preferences and prejudices. Yet even the most vociferous doubters, when

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put to the test of service on a selection panel, have declared the ARC’s processes to be as fair as humanly possible. The Minister’s decision to reject the expert advice that generated eleven of the ARC’s recommendations demonstrates contempt both for the proposed projects and the rigorous process of assessment undertaken without payment by humanities and creative arts academics and practitioners. Assessors, whether national or international, have had their confidence in the integrity of the process in which they participate completely undermined by arrogant political censorship. Would the minister have applied what for all the world seems like a version of the pub test to grants from science or technology disciplines? Margaret Harris FAHA, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita, The University of Sydney

Mark Edele

I agree with the minister. Taxpayer dollars should be spent in the national interest. However, ‘national benefit’ is already part of the application process. So, either the change is semantic or what we are really talking about is a pub test. The outcome would depend on the drinking establishment in question. In my local in the inner north of Melbourne, for example, being a historian of the Soviet Union regularly passes muster. I would happily present my proposals there. Why not instead shut down the ARC? Distribute the money back to the Universities to be used for Humanities research and teaching. Then, Australian academics would no longer have to spend a quarter of their year on impossibly complex applications and their peer review. The best scholars would no longer be shut away in an ivory tower to write more proposals, never to see a student again. Careers would again be dependent on excellence in scholarship and teaching rather than in grant success. Professors would share the teaching with lecturers. Junior academics, no longer groaning under impossible teaching loads and insecure employment, could also write smart books. Now that would truly be in the national interest. Professor Mark Edele, Hansen Chair in History, The University of Melbourne; ARC Future Fellow; Member of the ARC College of Experts

Kate Fullagar

In the ongoing furore around revelations of ministerial research grant vetoes, two things are in danger of slipping from view. One is that the vetoes always and only target the humanities. The other is that the government is now gaslighting the public about what went on. In the ludicrous debate about pub tests, no one holds up non-humanities titles for scrutiny. A random search for recently funded STEM grants 24 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

turns up ‘Noncommutative geometry in representation theory and quantum physics’, ‘Structure-activity relationships in silicon-based photovoltaics through atomic scale microscopy’, and ‘Multi-person stochastic games with idiosyncratic information flows’. I do not know what any of these mean. But that is the point. I need experts to tell me what they are about, why they should be funded, and what they could do for knowledge, humanity, or the planet. If they got funded by the ARC, I trust that they are worthy because I know they were scrutinised by around ten people at the university level before even being submitted, and that they were then reviewed by two to six anonymous peers before passing an analysis by a College of internationally recognised scholars. The government needs to explain its methodology and objective in applying one test for some and a second for others. Minister Tehan recently claimed to adjust the rules for future ARC grants in order to ‘improve the public’s confidence’ in the grant system. His predecessor, however, gave no evidence of feeling pressure from the public and vetoed titles that had not been seen by the public. After such a flagrant dismissal of expert advice, it is the ministry that needs to regain our confidence. Dr Kate Fullagar, Senior Lecturer, Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University

Robert Phiddian

Yet again our sector is a victim of its low fiscal stakes and high symbolic value. It was the arts and Brandis in 2015; now it’s Birmingham and the humanities in 2018. The culture warriors make a virtue-signalling racket, knowing that the lives and careers of people in culture can be messed with casually and at no real financial or political cost. No real financial cost: $200,000 for a research project is a lot of money for an individual, but the arbitrarily condemned projects don’t amount even to a rounding error in the context of a federal budget. No real political costs: humanities and the arts have for decades been lost to the conservatives. But real institutional cost: playing to the peanut gallery to subvert settled scholarly and bureaucratic processes (never perfect, but better than decision by populist whim) is the current fad, with everything reduced to tactical political advantage. Not many dead in this little skirmish, perhaps, but where to next when a future Minister Humpty Dumpty can declare that national interest ‘means just what I choose it to mean’? It’s a very bad decision – even worse as a precedent. Robert Phiddian, Professor of English at Flinders University, foundation director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (2011–17) g

Philosopher of fairness A genius and prodigy whose time has come

Tom Griffiths HUGH STRETTON: SELECTED WRITINGS edited by Graeme Davison

La Trobe University Press, $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781760640743

his is a deeply rewarding and timely book. Hugh Stretton (1924–2015) was one of Australia’s finest public intellectuals, a historian, ABC Boyer Lecturer, and social democrat with a steely mind and a calm, clear voice of wisdom. Stretton spent thirty years arguing thoughtfully against neoliberalism, a critique he developed at the beginnings of the ideological lurch to the right in the 1980s. Politics and society are now finally catching up with him. As ideas of the public good are being revived, as governments begin to invest again in urban infrastructure, and as inequality re-emerges as a crucial social issue, Hugh Stretton’s lifetime of practical historical thinking on these matters becomes a vital resource. This selection of Stretton’s writings, skilfully edited by Graeme Davison, ranges from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and includes a glimpse or two of Stretton’s earlier self (such as his 1945 successful application for a Rhodes Scholarship). Stretton was a prodigy and a genius who lived modestly and remained humble. He was honoured and admired in his lifetime, indeed recognised very early as an extraordinary intellect with moral authority. He was appointed a professor at the University of Adelaide before the age of thirty, and resigned both title and salary for a readership at the age of forty-four to enable more intensive writing. He wrote about cities, housing, economics, the social sciences, and the practice and uses of history. My favourite quote from Stretton is about historians, and I’m delighted it’s in the book: ‘Who study societies of every kind, study them whole, know most about how they conserve or change their ideas and institutions, write in plain language, and generally

know how uncertain and selective their knowledge is at best? Historians do.’ Stretton was an ardent champion of historical thinking and believed that history, at its best, possessed three qualities that have been scarce in modern social science: it is holist, uncertain, and eclectic. Perhaps the most powerful essay in the book, and one Davison calls ‘the angriest and most revealing’, is ‘The Cult of Selfishness’, written in 1987 as a new and virulent strain of liberalism took hold of both sides of Australian politics. In his typically balanced and fair-minded way, Stretton analysed the possible causes of this diffuse ‘political and cultural sea change’, the cult of self or selfishness with its growing condemnation of altruism and encouragement of greed. He was, of course, discerning the dominant political dogma of the next thirty years, a creed now discredited, its vulgarities exposed. Stretton foresaw it all and tried to warn us. It is worth reading this book just to be reminded that a calm, devastating analysis of neoliberalism was available from its beginnings. Stretton had long been a critic of supposedly objective, value-free social science – his first book, The Political Sciences (1969), was on that subject – and in his 1987 essay on selfishness he savagely critiqued the discipline of economics for its complicity in fostering greed, its delusion that it can be a precise deductive science, and its ‘degrading ideology’ that selfishness is right and sensible. He especially lamented the reconstruction of the curriculum of higher education, a corporatisation of universities that has only escalated since he wrote. It resulted, he argued, in graduates whose heads were empty of deep moral and social reflection and whose ‘inner life of memory and imagination’ had been impoverished.

But Stretton was an optimist and a practical reformer, and so he turned, as ever, to solutions, holding onto his faith that one should treat intellectual adversaries with respect and that good argument can change minds. ‘We the intellectuals should work at it,’ he urged: the novelist and poets, the journalists and academics ‘can apply the acid to the cult of selfishness’. Stretton himself wrote a huge revised textbook of economics (Economics: A new introduction, 1999) and a manifesto on how to make Australia a fairer society (Australia Fair, 2005).

Politics and society are now finally catching up with Hugh Stretton Davison’s introduction is itself a significant essay. A pioneer of urban history and an active contributor to planning and conservation debates, Davison is able to place Stretton’s oeuvre in the context of twentieth-century Australian intellectual history, policy, and practice. The city – and the distinctive Australian suburb – were at the centre of Stretton’s work and thought as they are for Davison. Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) was his most popular and influential book: it challenged the condescension of intellectuals for their own urban neighbourhoods. He was a champion of the smaller, planned cities of Adelaide and Canberra and was one of the first Australian writers to sympathetically analyse the suburb, taking a keen interest in the domestic lives of its inhabitants. His 1970 essay ‘Australia as a Suburb’ asks: ‘Why do so many Australians choose to live in a way so unfashionable with intellectual urbanists – twelve or twenty to the acre, E S S AY S

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halfway between real bush and real city?’ And in his essay on ‘A Good Australian City’, Stretton confesses: ‘I know what I want. I want what I’ve got. A house of my own, where I can sit under a vine in my own backyard; a park somewhere near, where kids can kick a football; a short walk to Tom the Cheap and a local pub; an easy trip to work in the city; half an hour’s drive maybe to a beach or some open country.’ My only meeting with Hugh Stretton was about his father, Leonard, whose Australian Dictionary of Biography entry I was writing. I met Hugh at his beloved North Adelaide home in 2000 and we went for a walk to a Tom the Cheap supermarket. He waxed lyrical about his inner-city suburban life, sang the virtues of Canberra (rare praise of the city to which I’d recently moved), and welcomed the chance to talk about his impressive father. Leonard Stretton was a Victorian County Court judge who conducted five Royal Commissions, including one into the causes of the Black Friday 1939 fires. Stretton’s powerfully written report was acknowledged as a literary masterpiece and became a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English. Stretton senior, like his son Hugh, had strong principles, moral vision, and political audacity. Both were humanists committed to the complexity of life and to understanding and improving it through open-minded empirical inquiry into lived experience. It is instructive to read Hugh Stretton’s advice on ‘How Not to Argue’, his injunction to ‘credit opponents with as much good intent as we believe we have ourselves’, and his reminder that, ‘Facts are facts, but theories order them and explanations select them.’ Values, therefore, are central to any debate and cannot be expunged by pseudo objectivity. In the age of fake news, social media shouting, and the failure of neoliberalism, it’s time to read Stretton again and to attend carefully to this Australian philosopher of fairness. g Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and author of The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 2016).

Too dumb to fail Saving private capital

Rémy Davison CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD by Adam Tooze Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 720 pp, 9781846140365

n 1996 the pre-eminent political economist Susan Strange published her final book, The Retreat of the State. Strange had dedicated most of her career to studying the ability of the state to tame the power of international finance. The nexus between state and firm had empowered the United States for more than a century; Washington reconstructed the world order after 1945, resurrecting its former enemies, Tokyo and Berlin, to be behemoths once again. For Strange, the battle was lost in the late twentieth century: the state, she asserts, was headlong in a ‘strategic retreat’, captured by the tsunami of global capital. Strange was right. In August 2008 a black swan moment arrived: Wall Street stood on the precipice of financial meltdown, fuelled by subprime mortgages ladled out to ‘ninjas’ (No Income. No Job). These ‘liar loans’ would never be repaid; in some cases, the mortgagors failed to make a single repayment. Even doyens of the free market like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan began to speak of nationalising major US banks to effect an ‘orderly restructuring’. The vicious web of interdependence meant that Europe, at first protesting immunity from the subprime chaos, could not escape the crisis of contagion. Worse still, briefly – terrifyingly – global credit markets froze. Banks recognised, belatedly, that they were all operating under the same assumptions, built on a hugely flawed model. As the 160-year-old Lehman Brothers sank under the weight of US$800 billion in debt and went into liquidation, even the bankers began to wonder: was Armageddon finally here?

As late as January 2008, the US Federal Reserve had not seen it coming. ‘The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession,’ chairman Ben Bernanke intoned, with his telescope firmly fixed to the blind eye. This was not for want of warnings. Between 2001 and 2008 the Bush White House called on Congress to reform Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (government-sponsored enterprises) on twenty-eight occasions. Democrats and the GOP shared the blame for their inactivity. But it was President George W. Bush who fought congressional Republicans, joined with the Democrats, and authorised the US$700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in October 2008, in consultation with presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. Europe sniffed condescendingly with a touch of Schadenfreude. This was a North Atlantic crisis, the product of Anglo-Saxon financial stupidity. By October the United Kingdom had virtually nationalised and bailed out a large part of its financial sector with over £130 billion in taxpayers’ money and £1 trillion in commitments. Swiss banks like UBS had admitted subprime exposure earlier in the year. In December 2009 the Greek government entered the confessional, forced to admit its published debt and deficit figures were pure bunkum that had been bastardised for a decade. The Eurozone crisis had begun: it would engulf Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the so-called ‘PIIGS’). The reality of imprudent German and French lending to peripheral Europe became clear: giants like BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, together with the German state banks, had bad loans with leverage worse than Bear E S S AY S

Stearns. Worse than Lehman’s. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy ordered a rescue; the banks took a haircut, but the PIIGS paid the price. Austerity was the cost of bailing out the Westphalian capitalists. Naturally, in Crashed the Greek tragedy takes centre stage, with Adam Tooze’s Columbia colleague, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, cast as the Sisyphus of this particular melodrama. Varoufakis sought a nuclear option – €30 billion in Greek bonds held by the European Central Bank (ECB) – that could be used as leverage by Athens during Greece’s turbulent IMF default in June 2015. Varoufakis engaged in a last-ditch game of chicken with the ECB. Did it work? It raised hackles and the alarm in Brussels and Frankfurt, but Merkel did not blink. By July, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had lost his nerve, Varoufakis had lost his job. Months later, Merkel became Time’s Person of the Year. The 2008 crash swept Obama to power, but the new president did not expend his considerable political capital. Instead, Obama consolidated Bush’s TARP program and pumped further fiscal stimuli into the economy. Meanwhile, the GOP sought to restore the pre-2008 system, or at least obstructed its reform, watering down the Dodd–Frank Act, which was designed to separate commercial and retail banking. Obama, the harbinger of ‘change’, metastasised into capitalism’s saviour. Obama had been elected by Main Street to discipline Wall Street, but the deep irony was that while the ninjas lost their homes, the bankers lived to lend another day. In 2008, Bernie Sanders’ lonely voice in the wilderness called for the bankers to be jailed. Sanders would make a dramatic run against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but by then it was too late; Trump had usurped critical fragments of Sanders’ base, with twelve per cent of Sanders voters switching to Trump. The similarities were obvious: Sanders and Trump were singing the same song in different keys. However, the weapon the Democrats chose to wield against Trump – Hillary Clinton – was the polite face of brutal globalisation. The 28 DECEMBER 2018

Clintons and Obama had endorsed, not merely evangelised, free trade, NAFTA and China’s integration into the World Trade Organisation. Hillary Clinton’s belated disendorsement of her own initiative – the Trans-Pacific Partnership – did not only appear unconvincing; it looked desperate. Effectively, both Trump and Sanders had won by transforming America’s political discourse. Tooze’s thesis is clear: complacent Democrats viewed Obama’s 2012 electoral triumph as the consolidation of their ethical and managerial superiority over the GOP, which was the author of the economic catastrophe. But this thin veneer of victory masked the separation of the Obama–Clinton Democrats from their political base. In 2006, in a littleknown speech, a prescient Obama had warned the Senate of a ‘dangerous and growing inequality’. A decade later, as Trump swept the electoral college over a hapless Hillary Clinton, Obama had learned little and understood even less; although US employment recovered rapidly during his second term and exports (2009–13) grew by almost seventy per cent, large fragments of the white working class – the ‘shy voters’ – silently, inevitably, deserted the Democratic Party. Seven million who had voted for Obama quietly switched to Trump. They credulously lapped up the Tea Party’s rhetoric, the trailblazers for the Trump campaign. Obama and Clinton may have spoken endlessly about workingclass voters; it was unlikely they actually knew any. How the United Kingdom and EU confronted the subprime and Greek crises, respectively, stood in stark contrast. Bush, Obama, and Bernanke recognised that the lessons of 1929 and 1987 were to ensure massive amounts of stimuli in the form of liquidity for the banks to prevent a meltdown of the financial system. Only TARP, Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury debt, plus three rounds of quantitative easing (QE, the Fed’s bond-buying program) would reflate the stock market and the US economy. Throughout 2009–14, the economy binged on a dollar glut, as US$4.5 trillion in QE flooded the market. But in the Eurozone, austerity drained the

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

PIIGS, bludgeoned growth, and sent unemployment into the stratosphere. Finally, Merkel’s arm was twisted; the ECB commenced its own QE program in 2015 to boost EU growth. Some €2.4 trillion later, it remains in place. ‘Why save the bankers?’ asked Thomas Piketty, France’s best-selling theorist on inequality. Tooze shows that the great neoliberal experiment, co-authored by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and consolidated by Bill Clinton, was rescued from almost certain collapse by unlikely bedfellows, comprising Bush, Merkel, Obama, and Gordon Brown. Despite his manifest illiberalism, Trump turned out to be no different; within weeks of the 2016 election, he had nominated half a dozen Goldman Sachs alumni to his administration. Déjà vu all over again. g

Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University.

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Books of the Year

Michelle de Kretser

Stephanie Bishop’s remarkable novel Man Out of Time (Hachette, reviewed in ABR 9/18) explores a man’s breakdown and its effects on his family. It’s shimmering and sorrowful, and the writing is extraordinary. Too Much Lip (UQP, 10/18) by Melissa Lucashenko is a strong, unflinching novel about homecoming and history. With trademark wit and lucidity, Lucashenko connects the lives of her sharply drawn characters to a dysfunctional national story. Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge (Scribe, 5/18), set among working-class lives, considers the collapse of the Westgate Bridge alongside a contemporary tragedy. It’s a moving, unsentimental novel about ethical complexities. Ghachar Ghochar (Faber, 2015) is a disturbing novella by Vivek Shanbhag (translated by Srinath Perur) about an Indian family that becomes wealthy – a gem.

Fiona Wright

I was most excited by two ambitious and wild books of non-fiction, Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic (Brow Books, 9/18) and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath (Granta, 8/18). Tumarkin’s book is breathtaking in its audacity, its deep empathy, and its intellectual rigour. It’s unlike anything I have ever read. The Recovering is a deeply affecting and complex blend of biography and autobiography, drawing intimate and affirming portraits of what it might mean to come back from addiction and illness. My favourite work of fiction was Ceridwen Dovey’s taut and thrilling In the Garden

of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton, 3/18), which is about trauma and legacy and how we understand the past. It is full of images of tragic beauty.

Judith Beveridge

Sarah Day’s eighth collection of poetry, Towards Light and Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 11/18), achieves a sustained and generous weaving of lyrical intensity with moral engagement. Balanced, focused, elegantly executed, this book shows Day at her best. Simeon Kronenberg’s Distance (Pitt Street Poets), is an impressive first volume. The intimate shaping of the language and the stunning reach into the imagination in a series of historical dramatic monologues makes this book shine. On quite a different emotional register is Keri Glastonbury’s Newcastle Sonnets, (Giramondo). Hip, suave, pert, pinpointing, and penetrating, these poems engage with locale in most enterprising ways. Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter: A memoir (Text Publishing, 9/18) is a book to weep over for the tragic lives it skilfully explores.

Andrea Goldsmith

Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and selected poems (Giramondo, 9/18) is a feast. I happily indulged in the old poems, but I gorged on the new. Filled with a plethora of living things – people, insects, animals, birds – these poems are vivid, insightful, and gorgeously poetic. I am a long-time fan of the English novelist Simon Mawer. His latest, Prague Spring (Little, Brown), BOOKS OF THE YEAR

plunges into the heady days of 1968: the pleasures of new freedoms, the hopes that were brutally crushed, and the politics, both behind the scenes and in the streets. All that you would want from a novel. Jacqueline Kent’s 2001 biography, A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis: A literary life, has been republished by NewSouth (9/18). It’s a terrific history of the Australian book industry, with the narrative pull of a plot-driven novel. Given current trends in publishing, this is a timely and welcome book.

Glyn Davis

In The Silence of the Girls (Hamish Hamilton, 2018), Pat Barker reworks a strand from The Iliad. Briseis is a prize for invading Greek men. Her story becomes a meditation on the fate of women in war. Barker evokes a world entire from a few lines in Homer and invites us to rethink the original. David Malouf embraces this approach in his last novel, Ransom (Penguin, 2009). In 2018 Malouf returns to his original craft, poetry, with An Open Book (UQP, 12/18). This broadly chronological reflection on language and experience gives us the familiar observer, watching endlessly for meaning, expressing his findings through direct and sparse lines. For a different reflection on artists and writing, Half the Perfect World: Writers, dreamers and drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964 (Monash University Publishing, 11/18) by Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell recalls the exile of Charmian Clift and George Johnston. Newly recovered photos from James Burke, destined originally for Life, see a Greek idyll marred by jealousy, frustrated ambition, and the world outside. Lovingly researched, carefully constructed, compelling.

Sheila Fitzpatrick

I loved Dunera Lives: A visual history (Monash University Publishing, 9/18), by the late, lamented Ken Inglis with Seumas Spark and Jay Winter. It presents a wealth of images of and by the German, mainly Jewish, ‘Dunera Boys’ who were sent from Britain to internment here in 1940. In What the Light Reveals (Transit Lounge), a fictionalised version of the lives of Australian communists David and Bernice Morris, Mick McCoy offers an intriguing Moscow Cold War story (though I’m not sure what I think about finding myself as a character). For another remarkable, non-fiction Cold War story, read Secrets and Truths (CEU Press, 2013), American anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s account of her reactions to the huge surveillance dossier Romanian Securitate kept on her over thirty years, complete with confrontations with informers (most of her Romanian friends) and even former spymasters (who turn out rather likeable, with a methodology resembling that of anthropologists).

Marilyn Lake

Chloe Hooper’s writing is animated by a profoundly humanist impulse and a desire to understand what 30 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

happened. Just as The Tall Man: Death and life on Palm Island (2008, 10/18) charts the destructive legacies of colonialism with attention to evidence and historical context, so The Arsonist: A mind on fire (Hamish Hamilton, 10/18) documents the tragedy of the ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in the La Trobe Valley. Like the best historians, Hooper recognises her complex responsibilities to past and present, to her historical and contemporary readers. The Arsonist is a brilliant and moving book about ecological devastation and social desolation. Samia Khatun’s account of early encounters between Indigenous and Indian peoples in the Australian interior, Australianama: The South Asian odyssey in Australia, (Hurst) is post-colonial history at its best. Opening with the discovery of a Bengali songbook in an outback mosque, Khatun’s book eschews the conventional migrant narrative in favour of a strikingly original perspective on settler colonialism and multiculturalism.

Paul Giles

The most surprising and engaging academic book I read this year was published in December 2017: Jason R. Rudy’s Imagined Homelands: British poetry in the colonies ( Johns Hopkins University Press), which describes how canonical English poets were reverentially parodied by nostalgic settlers in Australia, South Africa, and other colonies during the Victorian era. Equally impressive in a scholarly sense is Carrie Hyde’s Civic Longing: The speculative origins of U.S. citizenship (Harvard University Press), which traces the retroactive and fluctuating ways in which citizenship has been defined in the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers. And Margaret Plant’s Love and Lament: An essay on the arts in Australia in the twentieth century (Thames & Hudson, 5/18) offers an eclectic overview of how high arts intersected with low arts, one that highlights the heterodox, often highly innovative nature of Australian culture over this period.

John Hawke

For its empathetic portrayal of the outer-suburban underclass, refugees, Aborigines, and all those excluded by mainstream nationalism, the most pertinent book for 2018 would be Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. In a similar vein, Rodney Hall offers a convincing portrait of the political realities of contemporary Australia, where military spending has spiralled while extremes of income inequality remain unaddressed: A Stolen Season (Picador, 4/18) confronts these issues with savage candour and a virtuosic attention to style that directly recalls White’s example. Clive Faust, another octogenarian, has provided a masterfully crafted collection of his life’s work in poetry, Past Futures: Collected poems (Shearsman, 2017). Faust’s writings appear only fugitively in local publications, but they have featured in leading international imprints over many decades. This example of his exquisitely sculpted work demonstrates

that success in poetry has little do with conventional notions of a literary career, but is measured by sincere and objective technique.

Susan Wyndham

I fell more deeply in love with Sydney’s architectural diva while reading two complementary books. Helen Pitt’s The House: The dramatic story of the Sydney Opera House and the people who made it (Allen & Unwin) is a thoroughly researched, colourful, and often shocking narrative history. Kristina Olsson’s shimmering novel Shell (Scribner, 11/18) uses the half-built Opera House and the Vietnam War as backdrop to a human drama about love, family, commitment, and loss. Two other novels stood out. Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (Text Publishing, 4/18) wraps a richly layered family story in an art theft mystery that travels from Western Australia to Sydney and Sicily. Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber) is an on-again, off-again not-quite love story set in contemporary Ireland. Behind the humorously deadpan millennial voice lies astute commentary on class, sexual violence, and other pressing issues.

David McCooey

This year, Rachel Cusk’s ‘The Outline Trilogy’ came to a suitably brilliant end with Kudos (Faber, 8/18). I am, months later, still bereft at the series’ completion. Will Eaves’s Murmur (CB Editions), while not part of a trilogy, is also one of a hat-trick of superb books. Murmur, which is partly inspired by the life of Alan Turing, ambitiously and brilliantly illustrates the relationships between fiction, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions) – Alison L. Strayer’s compelling translation of Annie Ernaux’s Les Années (2008) – shows why Ernaux has such a high reputation for life writing in France. Lastly, there have been an extraordinary number of terrific collections by Australian poets, but I must mention Jordie Albiston’s Warlines (Hybrid, 11/18). A collection of found poems based on the correspondence of World War I soldiers, Warlines is a masterwork of documentary poetry that is both profoundly moving and intensely crafted.

Lisa Gorton

Pam Brown’s new poetry collection, Click here for what we do (Vagabond, 8/18) is made of four long poems that, taking a walk through the everyday, assemble its weird onrush of habit, newness, news, advertising, commentary, forgetfulness, and changes in weather. They are quick, spare, alert, and companionable. It was fun to discover Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women, first printed in 1965, reissued this year with an introduction from Ali Smith (Silver Press). In this, Nell Dunn talks honestly with nine friends – writers, artists, factory workers – about work and sex and love and freedom. Black Inc. this year ended its long-running series Best Australian Poems. But, led by Jacinta Le Plastrier, Australian BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Poetry has been publishing an impressive, and impressively various, sequence of guest-edited journals and anthologies (www.australianpoetry.org).

Susan Sheridan

Among this year’s Australian publications, Gail Jones’s mesmerising prose and intricate structuring made The Death of Noah Glass my top novel-reading experience. Also from Text, Nadia Wheatley’s memoir, Her Mother’s Daughter: moved me deeply, recounting the life of a strong woman who found the constraints of domestic life in the postwar years unbearable. To complete a trio of genres, I choose David Malouf ’s poetry collection An Open Book. UQP has made a beautiful book to house poems of limpid grace and wise insight.

Dennis Altman

Is it a reflection of the times that the books that most impressed me this year are non-fiction? Understandably there has been an outpouring of books about US politics. Of those I read, Ben Rhodes’s The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House (Bodley Head,12/18) stands out. Rhodes was speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama; this book is a stark reminder of how the world has changed since Donald Trump’s election. Billy Griffiths’s Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., 4/18) is a wonderful account of the discovery of Australia’s Indigenous history, blending archaeology, politics, and landscape. Most powerful of all is Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador, 10/18), written from the detention centre on Manus. It should be compulsory reading for every federal politician.

Mark Edele

Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut (Hamish Hamilton, 3/18). Winton tells the story in the first-person voice of fifteen-year-old Jaxie, who is on the run as a suspect for the murder of his abusive father. When he finds a protector in dubious circumstances, Jaxie’s capacity to trust is tested to the limit, as is the physical strength needed to survive in a harsh West Australian landscape. A powerful, haunting story. In 2018 it was time to say goodbye to the irreplaceable William Trevor with Last Stories (Viking, 6/18). In a fictional world that is peopled with eccentrics, misfits, and failures, Trevor’s quiet comic sense and his compassion are held in a unique balance. These final stories are elegantly crafted, finely observed, and inventive as always.

Geoff Page

This has been a year of summations and farewells in Australian poetry. Four books may be mentioned, the heaviest of which is Les Murray’s new Collected Poems (Black Inc., 12/18). As you might predict, its 736 pages contain some of the best poetry written in this country. A work of comparable interest, if smaller scale, is David Malouf ’s collection An Open Book, which maintains an almost airy, late-life suspension throughout. Another likely valediction is Clive James’s The River in the Sky (Picador, 11/18). It’s a phantasmagoric verse memoir, less strictly controlled than his other books produced since a life-threatening diagnosis six years ago. Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music is the summation of an exemplary Australian career. Her poems are constructed from finely described details, most of which are tapped into place with simile or metaphor. The most memorable of them involve a rejection of cruelty, whether to humans or animals.

My highlights of the year are all first books. Shaun Walker is a reporter with a history degree. His The Long Hangover: Putin’s new Russia and the ghosts of the past (OUP, 4/18) is the best recent book about contemporary Russia. Johannes Due Enstad’s rigorously researched Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation: Fragile loyalties in World War II (CUP) brings a new complexity to the study of the USSR’s World War II; and Iva Glisic’s The Futurist Files: Avant-garde, politics, and ideology in Russia, 1905–1930 (Northern Illinois University Press) combines the sensibilities of the art historian with the rigour of archive-based political history. It invents a new genre: the political history of radical art. This achievement is all the more impressive, as the author is among the growing number of talented Australian scholars forced to make a living at the margins of an under-funded university sector.

Beejay Silcox

Brenda Niall

John Kinsella

‘Human beings can be awful cruel to one another,’ remarked Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I was reminded of laconic, unshockable Huck when I read 32 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

As an undergrad – full of pith and vinegar – I dismissed Australian literature as tedious, irrelevant tosh. In my defence, I’d been introduced to Aussie writers at school with all the enthusiasm of a vaccination, a literary inoculation. Rest assured, I’ve since been proved thoroughly and delightfully wrong. 2018 has been a magnificent year for Australian letters. For me, the year’s quiet marvel was Robert Lukins’s The Everlasting Sunday (UQP, 4/18) a gorgeously restrained début, in which a house of unwanted boys must survive more than winter’s cruelties. A novel of ice, with a heart of fire. But the year’s clarion call was No Friend But the Mountains, Behrouz Boochani’s inconsolably human account of his inhuman detention on Manus Island – a plea, a poem, and a mighty indictment. As Richard Flanagan insists in his foreword: this is an Australian story, its author ‘A great Australian writer’. Lisa Bellear once wrote to me in an email, ‘Let’s get busy’ – a call for living life, in conjunction with action, in so many ways. Jen Jewel Brown has done an excel-

lent job compiling much of Bellear’s uncollected poetry in the vital collection Aboriginal Country (UWAP). The emphatic, committed voice of this remarkable Goernpil woman, feminist, poet, photographer, and activist shines through. Other remarkable collections of Australian poetry this year include Kent MacCarter’s postmodern tour de force, California Sweet (Five Islands Press), Sarah Day’s remarkable book of seeing Towards Light and Other Poems, Philip Mead’s intensely honed and intelligent late-modernist re-engagement with the world as experienced in Zanzibar Light (Vagabond Press, 5/18), and the poised tension and verbal control of Misbah Kokhar’s prose poems in Rooftops in Karachi (Vagabond Press).

Astrid Edwards

Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives is intense and provocative, an artful exploration of love and power. It is fiction to devour over the summer break. The Tall Man was always going to be a hard act to follow, but Chloe Hooper has done it with The Arsonist. Hooper creates emotion from fact and recounts the Black Saturday fires with empathy and intelligence. Rachael Brown achieved an Australian first: turning a number one true-crime podcast into a Walkley-shortlisted book. Trace: Who killed Maria James? (Scribe) is a gripping read. And finally, imagine if Harry Potter had been written with a female protagonist? Jessica Townsend has done just that with Wundersmith: The calling of Morrigan Crow (Hachette) The series is a reading gateway drug for the next generation.

Frank Bongiorno

It has been a year dominated by history and nonfiction, even more than is usually the case for me. I enjoyed several, but two stood out. Billy Griffiths’s Deep Time Dreaming is a beautifully written account of how the archaeological profession came to learn what Indigenous people had long known: that they had lived in this country for aeons. Christina Twomey’s The Battle Within: POWS in postwar Australia (NewSouth, 8/18) manages to be quietly moving without ever descending into mawkishness. In a highly readable and superbly researched book, Twomey shows how Australian POWs in Japan moved from being an embarrassment on the periphery of Australian consciousness to finding a place near the centre of our collective memory of war.

Gregory Day

Richard Powers’ The Overstory (Norton) was my 2018 fiction highlight. I lost myself in the branches of this big book, in the ideas, the imagery, the eloquence, and the melodrama. I already think of it as a Moby-Dick of trees and, like Moby-Dick, it redeploys a bristling field of natural science for the purposes of an emotionally charged human narrative. Not to mention an environmentally urgent one. Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music was

also a highlight. Like Powers, Beveridge has a gift for finding ways to match the natural world in words. I also very much enjoyed Alison Whittaker’s virtuosic collection Blakwork (Magabala). The way Gomeroi words are always bursting through the English in Blakwork feels more like the future than the past. It’s surely one of the key books in our current Aboriginal literary and linguistic renaissance.

Brenda Walker

Anna Burns’s Milkman (Faber) – winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize – is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Political idealism has rotted into lethal small-scale totalitarianism, coldly observed by a funny, sensible, and relentlessly literary eighteen-year-old girl who is sexually menaced by a senior paramilitary figure. Milkman is fabulously digressive, a brilliant survey of cruelty and coercion. Alice Nelson’s The Children’s House (Vintage, 10/18) is an exceptional Australian novel about exile, also witnessed by a young and thoughtful woman. Marina’s New York is haunted by the loss of countries – Rwanda, Israel, Ireland, El Salvador. It documents both the brutal severance and the unexpected reconfiguration of community, families, and ideals.

Anthony Lynch

In White Houses (Granta), American novelist Amy Bloom inhabits the voice and spikey character of Depression-era journalist Lorena Hickok. Through archival research and vivid reimagining, Bloom offers a remarkable portrait of the not-so-secret love between ‘Hick’ and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Closer to home, David Sornig in Blue Lake (Scribe) also mines the archive, as well as extensive interviews and his own first-hand knowledge, to reconsider the zone west of Melbourne’s CBD that was once fertile wetland and lagoon. Imaginatively constructed and with erudite first-person guidance, this is the kind of riveting nonfiction that deserves the term ‘creative’. Poet Kevin Brophy sensitively explores another geography and body of water in Look at the Lake (Puncher and Wattmann, 9/18). Brophy spent two years at Mulan, home of the Walmajarri people in the Kimberley, and his wry, beautifully weighted poems quietly diarise an outsider’s observations of community life.

Suzy Freeman-Greene

I read Bri Lee’s Eggshell Skull (Allen & Unwin) in one furious day. This dark, sparkling memoir of a young judge’s associate tells how she gradually finds the nerve to report the man who molested her as a child. Lee’s voice is warm and surprising; her writing fizzes with energy, ideas, and great sentences. I also devoured the edition of Freeman’s literary journal (Text Publishing) that is devoted to the theme of power. Exceptional essays include Josephine Rowe’s charged account of her time as a life model, Aminatta Forna on street harassBOOKS OF THE YEAR

jOHN BEL L DiREC T ED B Y P E T ER E VANS

ment, and Nicole Im’s exquisite meditation on suicide. The funniest book I read this year was Andrew Sean Greer’s Less (Abacus, 2017). It’s rare to laugh out loud while reading a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Greer’s tale of an almost washed-up novelist nudging fifty is hilarious, touching, and deceptively profound.

Tom Griffiths

Alexis Wright’s Tracker (Giramondo, 1/18) offers rich and complex storytelling, a kaleidoscope of voices that illuminates the remarkable Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth and advances a new model of life writing. Mark McKenna’s Quarterly Essay Moment of Truth: History and Australia’s future (Black Inc.) is a product of decades of deep thinking and a passionate and timely call for a ‘reconciled republic’. Two novels that have impressed me with their radical ecological consciousness are Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (Fourth Estate, 2017) and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. And I enjoyed the late meditations of two great writers: Ursula K. Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking about what matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) and Jan Morris’s In My Mind’s Eye: A thought diary (Faber).

Felicity Plunkett

B Y MOL iÈRE A NE W V ERSiON B Y jUS T iN F L EMiNG 2 MARCH – 6 AP RiL 2019 S YDNE Y OP ER A HOUSE 11–20 AP RiL 2019 C ANBERR A T HE AT RE CEN T RE 25 AP RiL – 12 MAY 2019 AR T S CEN T RE MEL BOURNE

BEL L SHAKESP E ARE .C OM.AU

34 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Throughout Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water (Penguin), the pain of chains ‘someone was made to drag’ is replaced by the ache when ‘love let them be / Unclasped’. Whether her subject is the fight against chemical pollution, slaves’ liberation, or a sorrowful woman visited by angels, Smith’s poems insist on love as cure, solution, and light, as into a room ‘where the drapes / Have been swept back’. The fragmentary revelations and vivid slivers of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight ( Jonathan Cape, 9/18) collect in the dim lights of memory and secrecy as his protagonist traces ‘the obscure rigging of our mother’s life’. Robin Robertson’s The Long Take (Picador) is a marvellous booklength poem mapping a young veteran’s postwar journey in an exhilarating poetics shaped by film noir and jazz. Ceridwen Dovey’s Writers on Writers: On J.M. Coetzee (Black Inc., 11/18) limns desire, abandonment, connection, reading, and writing in an exquisite, layered essay.

Gideon Haigh

With the best book I read in 2018, I was catching up. Peter Pomerantsev’s travelogue of Russia under Putin, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), came out in paperback last year. It covers events from 2006 and 2014, during which the London-based journalist was mostly working as a television producer for Russian entertainment television. It’s like Stasiland adapted in the style of Black Mirror, bleakly hilarious when not downright chilling. An ideal historical companion volume was Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017), a saga of domestic life in a Soviet apartment block before, during, and after the Terror. Gina

Perry’s The Lost Boys (Scribe, 5/18), an engrossing expose of the Robbers Cave experiment, a classic study in social psychology, was also a fine historical recreation.

it gathers heft as it goes, with its tale of a lonely gay novelist looking down the double barrels of his fiftieth birthday and his ex-lover’s approaching wedding.

Judith Bishop

Clare Corbould

What a strong year for poetry. I loved the resonant, perceptive lyrics in David Malouf ’s An Open Book and Eileen Chong’s Rainforest (Pitt Street Poetry). Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s Rondo (Carcanet) rollicks through time and space in the green fields of his joyous imagination. Here, the first Homo sapiens baby is eyed by bemused hominids, who ponder ‘Was this bod something to do with a future?’ Thirty years ago in I’m Deadly Serious (1988), Wallace-Crabbe pictured cars ‘with hearts in their mouths / as though they had something big to offer knowledge’. Yuval Noah Harari certainly does. His own epic imagination of the human journey through evolutionary time ended on a note of high alarm in Homo Deus (Vintage, 2017). His latest, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Cape), brings his winged vision to subjects ranging from fake news to freedom to humanity’s uncertain future.

James Ley

From the avalanche of books trying to make sense of our present moment, I would like to single out two for special mention: Jeff Sparrow’s Trigger Warnings: Political correctness and the rise of the Right (Scribe) and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies (Pantheon). Sparrow’s book is a provocative reading of the culture wars that develops a distinction between ‘direct’ and ‘delegated’ politics. Jacoby’s book takes a longer historical view: it attempts to trace the irrationality of contemporary US culture back to its origins. Along the way, Jacoby develops a stimulating and wide-ranging thesis about why certain forms of unreason should have found such rich soil in the secular democratic republic of the United States. I would also recommend the latest novel by Richard Powers. The Overstory, written with characteristic intelligence, is a rich and satisfying novel that addresses the environmental catastrophe we are creating and challenges us to rethink our place within the natural world.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Phillipa McGuinness’s The Year Everything Changed: 2001 (Vintage, 6/18) is full of exploding memorybombs for those who were paying attention to the news back then. McGuinness takes that watershed year and interrogates the tripes out of it, her lively intellect playing across the 2001 news calendar like a beam of light. It also reflects the way we all live, with one eye on current affairs and the other on our own intimate and daily experience. At first, the reader may wonder why Andrew Sean Greer’s novel Less won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. While it’s witty and warm and full of delightful characters, it seems a little lightweight. But

The most important book I read this year was Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains. Part philosophy, part reportage, part memoir, Boochani’s account of Manus Island lingers in the mind. That it was composed by SMS and WhatsApp messages makes the book, and its author, all the more impressive. Recent policy changes in Canberra suggest the book has even had its intended impact. In the long term, it should also find a lasting place in the canon of prison literature. Novelist Tayari Jones probes the effects of the carceral state on intimate relationships in An American Marriage (Vintage). It’s a stunning portrait of the pressures under which even middle-class African Americans live.

Geordie Williamson

There was no competition. Les Murray’s Collected Poems squats on my desk like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a handsome volume and a substantial one whose contents are by turns grotesque, elegant, abstruse, innovative in form, conservative in spirit, and often achingly felt. Murray is a difficult poet in many respects, but this grand summa demands awe and admiration. Barry Hill’s Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, encounters, reviews 1980–2017 (Monash University Publishing, 5/18), is a compendium of life-work by another commanding figure in Australian literary culture. It reveals the sheer range of Hill’s passions and concerns over time, and it reminds us of the commitment, curiosity, and care he has brought to bear upon each of them. No Friend but the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani may or may not be the best book of the year; it is certainly the most important.

Morag Fraser

Peter Mares has been pricking Australian consciences in his informed, dispassionate way for decades. No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia’s housing crisis (Text Publishing) is yet another instance of his salutary ability to take a highly politicised issue, examine its details, and provide both a lucid and ethical response and a context that informs, rather than inflames, his general audience – journalism at its very best. Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut is a tour de force. Winton is one of the few writers I know who could carry off such a sustained vernacular performance. The voice of Jaxie Clackton is utterly authentic (sounds like the Tim Winton I heard twenty-five years ago), and his helter-skelter Bildungsroman is searing and morally confronting. Unforgettable fiction for exactly this moment. What I missed most this year was the prospect of another novel by the late and much-lamented Peter Temple. g BOOKS OF THE YEAR

What to read this summer Text Publishing – Independent since 1994

PERFECT GIFTS FOR GARNER FANS

1797. Seventeen shipwrecked sailors set out to walk hundreds of miles to Sydney through what, to them, is virgin country. And there’s a murderer in their midst. An absorbing historical narrative filled with tension and mystery.

This captivating literary mystery from the award-winning Toni Jordan tells the irresistible story of a lost manuscript, a suspicious death and a secret love that spans cities and decades. ‘Rare verve and intelligence.’ Australian

From Homer to Harry Potter, Middlemarch to Beloved—Michael McGirr’s witty reflections on the joy and importance of reading will have book lovers nodding in agreement. ‘Beautiful essays… Deeply fortifying… Edifying and intimate.’ Sarah Krasnostein

Forget the excessive tomes and ponder life’s biggest philosophical questions with hilarious cartoons by New York Times bestselling authors Daniel Klein and Thomas Cathcart. ‘A book with a lightness of touch that is also deeply serious and satisfying philosophically.’ Australian

The literary masterpiece that launched Helen Garner’s writing career. ‘It makes me

Introduced by Ben Lerner, who says The Children’s Bach is ‘a jewel…beautiful, lapidary, rare.’

examine who I am.’

Charlotte Wood

CELEBRATE THE LIFE AND WORK OF PETER TEMPLE Peter Temple will always be one of Australia’s finest crime writers. Catch up with Jack Irish in these four new editions of Temple’s riveting detective series. ‘The prose is tight, the pace breathless, the dialogue inspired.’ Sun-Herald

Tim Flannery’s exploration of Europe’s history begins 100 million years ago when the island archipelago formed and spans the time when elephants and lions roamed the islands to the arrival of humans and the present-day re-wilding of this fascinating land.

Wyatt is back in this latest page-turner, looking to out-scam a corrupt businessman who’s about to skip town. ‘Garry Disher has been giving us highly intelligent literary thrillers for decades and he gets better and better.’ Australian

This gorgeous hardback gift edition of the bestselling The Women in Black is as stylish and elegant as the cocktail frocks at Goode’s famous department store. ‘A little gem…shot through with oldfashioned innocence and sly humour.’ Vogue

The home-grown suffragettes: StellaAward-winning historian Clare Wright reveals how white Australian women, the first to win full suffrage, went on to inspire the world. ‘I want to… tell every person I know to read it.’ Australian Book Review

A book is a gift that keeps on giving. textpublishing.com.au 36 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Violence and threat A new collection from A.S. Patrić

Susan Sheridan THE BUTCHERBIRD STORIES by A.S. Patrić

Transit Lounge, $29.99 hb, 256 pp, 9781925760101

n 2016 A.S. Patrić’s first novel, Black Rock, White City won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Two years earlier (he told an interviewer) he couldn’t even get a rejection slip for it: not one of the big Australian publishers responded when he sent the manuscript. The independent company Transit Lounge took it on, and the rest is history. Or, rather, the rest of Patrić’s work comes into the light: Transit Lounge has since published his second novel, Atlantic Black (2017), and now this, his fourth collection of short fiction. The Butcherbird Stories incorporates a novella, ‘Among the Ruins’, which appears to be the previously published Bruno Kramzer: A Long Story (2013). It is a strange tale, reminiscent of nineteenth-century remakes of traditional European folk tales – or, more recently, Christina Stead’s The Salzburg Tales (1934). The protagonist is a professional rogue, and the story details numerous sadistic jobs carried out by Bruno and his fellow thugs. Bruno turns out, in the end, to be one of the men who come for Kafka’s Josef K. But where the feelings of malevolence and fear in Kafka’s novel The Trial come from the victim’s perspective, here they derive from the perspective of these perpetrators of violence. All the stories in this collection are violent and sinister. They feature bash-

ings, dismemberment, dissociative states, drugged and nightmare visions, murders (at least three), a suicide attempt, and several fatal car crashes. The focal characters and narrators are all male, and they enact, observe, and sometimes themselves suffer this violence. The title story, ‘Butcherbird’, is the least direct about violence but offers some reflection on this central theme. A man and his small daughter, on holidays in north Queensland, are out walking when they observe some birds: an aggressive magpie and a flock of butcherbirds that chatter and sing. He observes that the child is not afraid of the magpie, ‘looking at the malevolent creature as though she doesn’t even have the beginnings of a thought or feeling about a threatening bird’. At the same time, he marvels at the perfection of the butcherbirds’ instinctive song, their ‘delicate crescendo’. Cut to that night: at the resort pool he has a brief, almost-flirtatious conversation with a young girl who is ‘play-acting with her new body … with a safe man she’s seen around the resort’. Here is a second young female who lacks the necessary fear of aggression. Back in the apartment, his daughter is having a nightmare about the butcherbirds invading her room. He reassures her that this is not so and tells her: ‘the butcherbird was the songbird, despite

the nasty name’. Their song is like the art of these stories – singing prose at the service, often, of violent and malevolent images and actions. This fascination with violence and threat is characteristic of Patrić’s writing. In Black Rock, White City, readers are afforded some distance from the malevolent words and deeds that appear mysteriously everywhere – at least until the novel’s denouement. Amid all that darkness, there is a central love story being told, and humour as well. But these stories offer no such distance: experience is compressed into crisis points, and humour is rare.

All the stories in this collection are violent and sinister The stories have few specific references to place and time, although visual and aural images are strong. Characters act without apparent motivation. In such bare contexts, the violence that strikes from the page appears as an incursion of sheer unmotivated evil. Black Rock, White City allowed a reading that could attribute the fear and menace to the traumatised central characters, a Serbian couple who migrated to Australia after suffering torture and terrible loss. The stories offer no such empathetic imaginative engagement, unless you are a reader who enjoys the scary stuff (writing this review at Halloween, I’m reminded that many people do). Yet I admire Patrić’s writing and his desire to stretch language and make it work in non-realist directions. The title ‘Dead Sun’ alludes to a song by the heavy metal band Thy Art Is Murder, dramatising its sinister lyrics to horrific effect, to enact the punning meaning of the title phrase. A nameless

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man, suffering from an unexplained, severe bashing and using morphine to assuage the pain, stays in the attic room of a suburban house belonging to an old couple. He knows, somehow, that this room belonged to their dead son. The story ends with an unmotivated murder. Patrić’s writing looks back to Dostoyevsky and Kafka, to stories of individuals caught by their own capacity for murderous violence, or by the impersonal malevolence of power. And it looks forwards, with the dark arts of the present, towards the chaos to come. The hinge between these two states of being is evoked in the story ‘Punctuated Air’, where the Patrić-like narrator remembers his boyhood passion for sciencefiction stories and their ‘breaks with reality’. He recalls the moon landing, imagines those men gazing back ‘at our bubble. A planet where everything was named and there was an endless generation of stories. It was a moment in which the future seemed to open up and allow each of us daydreams of infinite possibility.’ This is one of the more grounded stories in the collection, set among immigrant families of the 1970s in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, ‘a rubble of homes that were waiting for the foundation concrete to dry’. They were the ‘jet immigrants’, dropped suddenly into a new world where ‘histories fell to the ground – thousands of broken fragments’ (Serbian, in Patrić’s case). Their children grew up into a language that was not their parents’. For a writer, being dedicated to a literary legacy ‘in which your ancestors have never belonged creates a separation within your mind and seems to say: before you, there is nothing’. This sense of isolation is intensified by the perceived erasure of the original civilisation of the country, the Indigenous belief ‘that it was a vast shared soul’. ‘Punctuated Air’ goes a long way towards illuminating the discontinuities, and the violence and threat, which are the dominant tones in The Butcherbird Stories. g Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016). 38 DECEMBER 2018

Caddie and Inga Suzanne Falkiner THE FRAGMENTS

by Toni Jordan Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781925773132

n the swampy heat of a Brisbane summer in 1986, a young bookshop assistant tries to solve a fifty-yearold mystery involving Inga Karlson, a legendary New York author who died in a warehouse fire in 1939. Caddie Walker, the bookseller, is idealistic enough to believe that books can change people’s lives. Perhaps they can: literally, and in unexpected ways. At an exhibition of Karlson’s relics in the Queensland Art Gallery, Caddie – or ‘Cadence’, named for the heroine of Karlson’s famous (and only) published work – meets an enigmatic older woman, Rachel, who seems familiar with Karlson’s much-anticipated second novel, the manuscript and all copies of which were lost, along with her publisher/editor, in the same blaze. If Caddie can locate the woman again, can she illuminate what happened all those years ago? Might some remnant of the book, extant at present only in the eponymous charred fragments on display, remain in her ageing memory? Toni Jordan is capable of luscious prose (written in the ubiquitous present tense), drily witty and idiomatic dialogue, and acute personal observation. Jordan’s 1980s Brisbane is delightfully daggy: the Gallery there is ‘world class’; cocktail onions are dyed the vivid hues of traffic lights; on a sweltering morning, the heroine stands in her kitchen in her knickers before her open freezer to cool herself. A slightly eccentric antiquarian bookseller reveals his personality neatly through his Scrabble habits: where Caddie carefully arranges and rearranges her tiles on their rack according to possibilities, Jamie leaves his letters in their random order, canvassing possibilities entirely in his mind, like a chess player. Jordan also produces a satisfying villain: the handsome, calculating, and ambitious Philip, a University

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of Queensland English lecturer who serially seduces his female students. Interspersed with these Brisbane interludes are succinct sketches of Rachel’s life in pre-war America, from her childhood on a Pennsylvania farm and youthful labour in a silk mill, to 1930s New York just after the Prohibition years. Here is a city replete with other young and impoverished immigrants, Irish and European, who eke out an existence in tenements in Hell’s Kitchen and work as browbeaten waitresses at Schrafft’s, a popular chain of restaurants. For Rachel, an accidental meeting with the Austrian-born Inga, rich and now much sought after, represents an entrée into a racier and more glamorous world. The city was laced with tiny treasures that she alone noticed: golden, robed statues on top of traffic lights; patterns made by the morning sun reflecting on canyons of marble and granite. The power of this city. The arrogance of all that steel piercing the sky – and the men pulling handcarts stacked with lumber in Chinatown, like another country altogether.

Jordan’s plot hangs together tenuously in parts, relying on a series of unlikely events, and the writing is sometimes uneven, striving for a height that it does not consistently achieve. There is a degree of literary namedropping in the build-up – Cervantes, Akhmatova, Ayn Rand, Rilke, Burroughs, Lessing, and E.M. Forster – while some rather heavy-handed parallels are drawn with Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. We learn little of Inga Karlson’s own inspirational first novel beyond the fact that, while galvanising a generation of American readers, it has raised the ire of American Nazi sympathisers. Conflicted by her own precocious literary success, Karlson herself is both reticent and self-dramatising. At the end, we still have little idea of what made her tick. The denouement is neat, but the author struggles to reach it via a cluster of seemingly illogical actions and characters whose motivations are not quite convincingly conveyed. The ending feels over-hasty and clumsily managed.

This may be rather nit-picking with a fast-paced novel transparently aimed at the popular market. Jordan was born in Brisbane in 1966 and now lives in Melbourne. A former molecular biologist and marketing manager for a vitamin company, she has told interviewers that she fell into novel-writing almost by accident, by way of an RMIT course intended to improve her copywriting. Perhaps it is this unconventional approach and lack of pretension that has led to her undeniable success in the field. Among four previous novels, the first, Addition (2008), was published internationally and achieved a long-listing in the Miles Franklin Award. The second, Fall Girl (2011), a romantic comedy, sold internationally and was optioned for a feature film. Her third, Nine Days (2013), a family drama set in the era of World War II, received accolades. Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (2016), promoted as a witty examination of modern marriage, was shortlisted for the 2017 Voss Literary Prize. In this latest novel, with its moments of poignancy interspersed with episodes of farce, Jordan has not settled yet on whether to aim for literary realism or light comedy. Best described as quality chick-lit with highbrow overtones and a murder mystery thrown in, The Fragments should attain the same popular success as Jordan’s previous works. The pleasures offered by the freshness of the writing and the intricacy of the story compensate for its occasional flaws of implausibility. g

Suzanne Falkiner’s most recent book is Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (2016).

Survival James Bradley PRESERVATION

by Jock Serong

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781925773125

n 15 May 1797 a fishing boat passing Wattamolla, in what is now Sydney’s Royal National Park, spotted three men on the beach. Rescued and returned to Sydney, the trio – tea merchant and supercargo William Clarke, sailor John Bennet, and Clarke’s lascar manservant, Srinivas – told an extraordinary story. After their ship, the Sydney Cove, was wrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait, they, along with fourteen other men, had set off in a longboat, hoping to fetch help for the other survivors. But when the longboat was also wrecked off the Ninety Mile Beach along Victoria, the survivors chose to do the only thing left open to them: follow the coast north on foot until they found help. Jock Serong’s fourth novel, Preservation, takes this largely forgotten footnote to colonial history and uses it as the basis for a compelling study of European rapacity and blindness. Opening with the return of the three survivors to Sydney, the novel reimagines not just the trek north, but also the events leading up to the wreck and the impact the survivors had on the colony in which eventually they find themselves. Much of our information about the men’s experiences comes from the account William Clarke published in a Calcutta newspaper after his return from India, but work has also been done by historian and archaeologist Michael Nash and others who worked on the excavation of the wreck in the early 1990s. Serong’s version of the story draws upon these sources and many more, fluidly deploying historical detail while also being unafraid to interpolate and reimagine. Perhaps the most significant alteration is the transmogrification of one of the survivors, John Bennet, into the man

we know as John Figge. Ostensibly a tea merchant, Figge is nothing of the sort: when the reader first encounters him, he has just woken up next to the corpse of the real Figge in a Calcutta bedroom and, still spattered with his unfortunate victim’s blood, is already beginning the process of assuming his identity. There is a whiff of the uncanny about this scene. Having awoken naked, as if reborn, the new Figge must remember himself, a process that comes with the unsettling observation that he ‘is left-handed this time, it seems’. With its echoes of Moretti and Marx, this eeriness – amplified when it becomes clear that Figge, or whoever he really is, has assumed multiple identities over the years, stealing lives in the Arctic and elsewhere – is suggestive of the book’s larger interest in the rootlessness of capital and the casual brutality of colonial exploitation. This flourish is never really developed, but it doesn’t need to be, for even without it Figge is a truly horrifying creation. Brutal, calculating, uninhibited by doubt or conscience, he conspires with Clark to wreck the ship as part of a scheme to sell its cargo of rum, then wrecks the longboat so he will have Clark at his mercy. Once they are on foot, he sets about ridding himself of the other survivors so there will be nobody to challenge his version of the story. As demonstrated by the wreck of a boatload of refugees in his last novel, the Colin Roderick Award-winning On the Java Ridge (2017), Serong brings both power and intelligence to his portrayals of characters fighting to survive. While there is nothing in Preservation as intense or visceral as some of the scenes in On the Java Ridge, his depiction of the journey northwards is never less than compelling. This intensity is both amplified and complicated by the novel’s structure, which juxtaposes the accounts of Figge, Clark, and Srinivas with the story of Joshua Grayling – the lieutenant assigned to record and assess Figge and Clark’s stories – and his wife, Charlotte. But these competing versions of what has transpired also allow the novel to explore the different ways the various characters respond FICTION

to the landscape and, perhaps more importantly, the people who inhabit it. For the self-serving Clark, the land and its people are merely inconveniences, and their only real interest lies in their ability to create wealth (the real Clark is credited with the discovery of coal on the Illawarra escarpment during the walk north). To Clark’s mind, the land is something to be controlled, its mutability offensive to his sensibilities; at one point he speaks of ‘the trading houses’ and ‘mills’ that will rise once the lagoons and shallow pools that line the coast are ‘firmly defined by seawalls’. This inability to see the place for itself is contrasted with the more watchful eye of Srinivas. Used to being invisible and nameless, at least to his white masters, he sees beauty in the landscape, and kindness in the Aboriginal people who assist them along the way. Serong makes a point of acknowledging the influence of the work of Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage upon his depiction of Aboriginal life (Preservation’s emphasis upon the material plenty and technological sophistication of Aboriginal life suggests it may well be read as one of the first post-Dark Emu novels). Likewise, its fascination with transformation and the sheen and eroticism of the writing (and indeed the emphasis upon Australia’s place in a larger colonial machine) occasionally recall the work of Rodney Hall, and in particular his magnificent The Yandilli Trilogy (1994). Yet this gripping and extremely accomplished novel never feels beholden to its antecedents or bogged down by research. Instead, it offers a fresh glimpse of the violence at the heart of the colonial project, not just as it was, but as it is. g

The Measurement Institute You wouldn’t think to look twice: no high fence crowned with broken glass, no security guard heavy with boredom and a lanyard of keys. Having composed a list the Institute might consider: how far moonlight extends into a fox den or the influence of the drone from competitive grieving on the inner ear, I entered the drive. No retina scanner or voice recognition technology at the door. I was not shadowed by a suit with an earpiece coiled discreetly into place. No one paused mid-conversation as I passed. In a corner, a photocopier was dispensing thin repetitions of light and a man was leaning over a microscope his eye to the portal of another world. Enquiry is haunted with inference, he said without looking up. The heart, for example. Like the collective weight of sunlight that falls upon the earth, our hurt can be measured. I had never spoken of how, on our last night together, she had held my hands looking down as though trying, through sheer concentration, to revive them and was now resigned to letting them go. In the morning, as she drove away a bird clipped the side mirror causing her to slow, glance back then accelerate around a corner. When I told the man her name means ‘breakwater’ in Welsh, he whispered as if quoting from a psalm or spell: Consider, then consign to memory the call and distribution of the monogamous swift.

Anthony Lawrence

James Bradley is a novelist and critic. 40 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Anthony Lawrence’s latest collection is Headwaters (2016).

Rebadging Anthony Lynch BEST SUMMER STORIES

edited by Aviva Tuffield Black Inc. $29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760640798

any readers – though apparently not enough to have saved them – will mourn the recent demise of Black Inc.’s annual Best Australian anthologies of essays, stories, and poems (which first appeared in 1998, 1999, and 2003, respectively). The last of these, however, has won something of a reprieve in Best Summer Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield. A publisher at Black Inc. when this new project began, Tuffield has since moved to UQP. It seems a good decision to have retained her as editor. Reviewing short story anthologies, it is de rigueur to state that, based on the current selection, the short story is alive and kicking in Australia – which sounds like special pleading for a form on life support. Unlikely to knock survivor memoir off its perch anytime soon, short fiction nevertheless retains its place on our shelves. In rebadging the current anthology, Black Inc. is presumably seeking to broaden the audience beyond the overtly ‘literary’. A predecessor might be The Picador Book of the Beach (1993), edited by Robert Drewe, an anthology also positioned for holiday reading. While Drewe included a cocktail of high-profile local and international authors, Tuffield has chosen exclusively Australian writers. Despite the title and glossy image of a young woman reading Proust on a beach, the current anthology has few stories set in summer or on a beach. Tuffield’s is very much a twentyfirst-century collection, with writing from, and addressing, a culturally diverse Australia. Names such as Elliot Perlman, Paddy O’Reilly, Danielle Wood, Tony Birch, and John Kinsella will be known to many readers, but Tuffield has also included lesser-known authors whose stories stand up well. Nineteen of the twenty-eight contributors are female.

While the classic Australian settings of beach and bush feature rarely in these stories, the small town or non-specific city/town fringe continues to be a site for explorations of identity, alienation, and conflict. The collection has its share of clapped-out cars, of pill-popping and other intimations of substance abuse, and of hetero couples whose relationships are threatened or are in disarray. (The lesbian couple in Kinsella’s ‘Pushing Back’ are, by contrast, highly companionable.) Fathers are often distanced from their children. This is not to say the anthology wallows in adversity. Stories generally require, after all, tension, something at stake, in order to hold our attention. Many contributions here explore familial themes and characters with sensitivity, insight, and sometimes wit. A number of stories are told, convincingly, from the perspective of youth, most often by a female narrator. These are also often set in the suburbs, which is welcome given the majority of Australians live in them. Allee Richards and Chris Womersley provide outstanding examples. The narrator of Richards’s ‘The Ones with Love and the Ones with Hate’ has cancer, and the story brilliantly charts the changed order in family life when sickness arrives. We get a tender and funny portrait – never maudlin – of mother, father, and two sparring sisters dealing with anxiety and grief. ‘Your face looks like a foot,’ one sister tells another, while we learn that it is best to take your own gossip magazines to hospital when having chemo, as, ‘Theirs will be out of date’. The narrator, Grace, might be a tribute to the many erudite ‘Graces’ adorning the pages of legendary American short story writer Grace Paley, but a more appropriate comparison might be the darkly humorous and moving stories of another major American writer, Lorrie Moore. Womersley’s ‘Petrichor’ is a wonderful portrait of a youth with a hunchback and a crush on his beautiful neighbour, who sunbathes by her family pool. We learn of the difficulties arising from the narrator’s physique – the brace, the strangers rubbing his humped back for luck – and the implied abuse of the neighbour by her father, who has a face ‘like that of a

fallen priest’. Set in Melbourne during the heatwave and dust storm of 1983, it is a compelling story of heightened passion in extreme circumstances. Other stories have similarly delicate depictions of hardship. Only a few lapse into sentimentality or offer onedimensional types (think grandmother who has done it tough but with a heart of gold), as if the reader might not be trusted with complex representations. Some are reminders of the effects on individuals of global population movements. Mirandi Riwoe’s ‘Dignity’ touchingly portrays an exploited foreign servant working in the United Arab Emirates. Demet Divaroren’s ‘What Dreams May Come’ sees a young Indian student and middle-aged Turkish man coming to understand each other in a Sydney café. Most, but not all, stories in this anthology are realist. Elizabeth Tan’s ‘Shirt Dresses that Look a Little Too Much Like Shirts’ is a delightful, futuristic, and absurdist portrait of office life, in which senior management fails hopelessly to understand its staff, corporations fall in love, and android pigeons relay messages. Marlee Jane Ward’s speculative ‘The Walking Thing’ features a town in which the habitants begin walking themselves to death. In Mikaella Clements’s ‘Magpie’, a young woman literally steals her boyfriend’s mouth. And Beejay Silcox’s ‘World Service’ stands out as explicitly metafictional. Opening with, ‘If this were a story, it would start with an argument’, this self-referential schema weaves through the story to serve a brutally honest, unsentimental, and persuasive narration up there with the best in this new, and welcome, ‘Best’ compilation. g

Anthony Lynch is a Melbourne writer, editor, and publisher. FICTION

Willa and Thatcher Nicole Abadee UNSHELTERED

by Barbara Kingsolver

Faber & Faber $32.99 pb, 480 pp, 9780571347018

merican novelist Barbara Kingsolver is renowned for her ability to infuse her fiction with her politics, in particular a passionate concern for nature and the environment. Prodigal Summer, published in 2000, is a celebration of the relationship between humans and nature; Flight Behaviour, published in 2012, is about climate change. No surprise then that her latest novel, Unsheltered, is set during two periods of scientific upheaval – the 1870s and the present – in which humans are confronted by the undeniable evidence of their own limitations. ‘I wanted,’ Kingsolver said, ‘to look at a paradigm shift, at how people behave at these moments of history when all the rules they trusted to hold true suddenly don’t apply anymore.’ There are parallel narratives in Unsheltered, told in alternating chapters. Both are set in the same house in Vineland, New Jersey, which is in a state of total disrepair. In the story set in the present, Willa and Iano, in their mid-fifties, live there with both Iano’s sick, irascible father, Nick, and their rebellious twenty-something daughter Tig. Iano, an academic, 42 DECEMBER 2018

has recently lost his tenured position and is now a poorly paid junior lecturer. Willa, a journalist, has also recently lost her job. When their son Zeke’s partner dies, his newborn baby, Dusty, comes to live with them too. In the story set in the 1870s, the house is occupied by Thatcher Greenwood, a new science teacher at the local school, his beautiful, petulant wife, Rose, his mother-in-law, Aurelia, and Rose’s younger sister, Polly. Rose refuses to leave the house, which was built by her father, despite its condition. Meanwhile, Thatcher’s attempt to teach his students about Darwin’s theory of evolution is stymied by the headmaster, Cutler, who (like most people in the provincial town, including its founder, Landis) regards Darwin’s views as heretical. Thatcher’s only comfort lies in his friendship with his neighbour, Mary Treat, a scientist and writer with whom he has a strong rapport. Treat is a real historical figure, as are many other characters who interact with the (fictional) Greenwood family. The concept of shelter is central to the book. In the most literal sense, Willa’s and Thatcher’s families are both at risk of becoming unsheltered as their houses collapse around them. Neither family has the shelter of job security. Iano is on a yearly contract, as is Thatcher, whose adherence to Darwin’s ideas puts the renewal of his teaching contract in doubt. Kingsolver is concerned also with the shelter that love – romantic, familial, or platonic – can provide. Willa and Iano’s love gives them strength; the troubled Tig finally finds peace in her love for her boyfriend, Jorges, and for Dusty; and Thatcher, whose wife is no comfort to him, finds solace in ‘the shelter of [Mary’s] human arms’. Equally significant is the metaphorical shelter of long-held beliefs. Both stories are set in a time of historical flux, when people need to adapt, and abandon old ideas, to survive. In the 1870s, Darwin’s theories challenged traditional beliefs in the supremacy of humans over animals. Vineland’s citizens are ‘terrified witless at the prospect of shedding comfortable beliefs and accepting new ones’. Today, as Tig (whose views, like Mary Treat’s, reflect Kingsolver’s) reminds

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Willa, people refuse to accept climate change or the fact that the earth’s resources are finite. In response to Willa’s bewilderment that, despite having done ‘everything right in life’, she and Iano are almost destitute, she explains that, ‘The rules have changed’, and the secret to happiness (and survival) is to lower your expectations and consume less. Kingsolver draws other parallels between the United States in the late nineteenth century and today. The country then, emerging from the Civil War, was deeply divided. Cutler’s call for ‘a return to fundamentals’ to heal the country’s wounds sounds familiar, as does Mary’s warning that, ‘When people fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order’. Effigies of Darwin swing from the trees as the crowd yells, ‘Lock him up’. The megalomaniacal Landis, with his ‘ruddy cheeks and an odd flop of hair’ bears an uncanny resemblance to the current US president. Unsheltered is also about what Kingsolver describes as ‘the heartenlargening earthquake of family life’; her portrayal, largely through Willa, of the ups and downs of family life is highly convincing. Willa must contend with the inevitable tensions when different generations live under the same (leaking) roof, with the corrosive impact of sibling rivalry (Zeke and Tig are in constant conflict) and with the impact of a newborn on a family. Despite those challenges, it is clear that Willa derives great satisfaction from her love for her family, and her efforts to protect them. In Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver has once again created a memorable and deeply moving narrative, at the same time exploring enduring themes as well as topical issues such as climate change. The concept of shelter, and what it means to lose it, is critical. Just as those in the nineteenth century were compelled to abandon the false shelter of old ideas in order to see the truth, so, she argues, must we. ‘ Without shelter,’ Mar y tells Thatcher, ‘we stand in daylight.’ g Nicole Abadee is the books writer for the Australian Financial Review Magazine.

Poetry special

Dorothy Porter in the Botanical Gardens (photograph by Robert Colvin)

Andrea Goldsmith on Dorothy Porter Review

Les Murray

Peter Goldsworthy

Interview

Poet of the Month Kevin Brophy

Review

David Malouf Judith Bishop

POETRY

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘A rare ear, our aery Yahweh’ Les Murray as one-off fluke and maverick angel

Peter Goldsworthy COLLECTED POEMS by Les Murray

Black Inc., $59.99 hb, 736 pp, 9781760640965

seven-hundred-page Collected Poems? The cover photograph of the Big Bloke himself is an embodiment of what’s inside in all its sprawling abundance. As is his surname, which can’t help but invoke our country’s big river, whether in full flood, or slow trickle, or slow spreading billabongs. The first Les Murray poem I read was more a chain of ponds: the long sequence Walking to the Cattle Place: A meditation, published in an issue of Poetry Australia in 1972. I’d received a complimentary copy because the magazine contained one of my first poems. When I finally tired of admiring mine, I somehow found the time to glance through the others. I was floored by Murray’s cow poems, as surely as if their small herd had trampled right over me. I forgot my own juvenile scribble. It was obvious that this was the work of an off-the-scale poetic imagination: At the hour I slept kitchen lamps were sending out barefoot children muzzy with stars and milk thistles stoning up cows. They will never forget their quick-fade cow-piss slippers Nor chasing such warmth over white frost, saffron to steam, It will make them sad bankers. It may subtly ruin them for clerks 44 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The sequence begins in Sanskrit, and winds its way through various cattle cultures and languages from Xhosa to a stockman’s Aboriginal English, as the poet meditates his way through a single day. It was luscious stuff, not least because luscious is a favorite Murray adjective, whether applied to cattle-dung, or plants, or meat: ‘luscious bone-fruit’ in the darkly shocking ‘The Artery’. Although Murray is a celebrator of life to his own bony core, he is never one to avert his eyes from its horrors. Along with its companion cattle-slaughtering piece, ‘Death Words’, ‘The Artery’ prefigures the much later ‘The Cows on Killing Day’, a tour de force written from the collective point of view of a first-person-plural herd-consciousness. There is no other poem like it. Murray was once derided as a mere writer of cow poems, but even if that were all he wrote, he would stand as one of the most original poets in the English language. Or any language. I have a Hindi selection of his work, Setu... (The Bridges...), structured (not surprisingly) around his cow poems, which proves the point in one very slim volume. Of course, he was always more than that. Sometimes, to telling effect, he was even less. The next poem of Murray’s that gored me was ‘The Mitchells’, a halfmumbled, less-is-more piece so laconic it is almost an anti-poem, or perhaps a final Zen-like distillation of

earlier celebrations of the laconic style (which I read later) such as ‘Noonday Axeman’. This stuff springs more from the dried creek bed than the Murray in full flood. He wrote an entire book of small pieces – poems the size of photographs – in 2002. ‘The Aboriginal Cricketer: Mid-19th Century’ is a brilliant exemplar, although the more recent ‘Dog Skills’, a poem from the wordless world of whistling up cattle dogs, perhaps sums it up best: ‘Where whistling reshaped fingers // and words were one syll.’ There are also slow-spreading lagoon poems – ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, ‘The Quality of Sprawl’ – and poems such as ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’, ‘Letters to the Winner’, and ‘The Shower’, which are more like a torrent of ideas and images. Reading through this giant compendium makes you wonder if Murray could have published his various styles under various pseudonyms, like the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and ended up with different schools of critics squabbling with one another. The combative polemicist would attract plenty of critics in our easily outraged era, but you’d need a tin ear not to like the epigrammatist (‘No land rights for bankers’; ‘I adore the Creator because I made myself ’) and maybe a tin eye to ward off his visual twin the imagist’s ‘galahs in their pink confederacy’, sheep in a parched field ‘like legal wigs’, a cemetery as ‘the absorbed marble chess of the dead’, and ‘it is the time of day / when shadows come in like animals / and shelter under their trees’. Then there is the performance poet, when Murray, who likes to claim he is tone-deaf, ramps up the music in poems like the percussive ‘Morse’, the railway-rhythmic ‘The Smell of Coal Smoke’, the sheer verbal brilliance of ‘The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains’, or the entire Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, with its origins in Indigenous traditions. Most left-field is Les Murray the Strange Poet. When editing his New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), he wrote of avoiding predictable selections, of seeking out his chosen poets’ ‘Strange Poem’: the poem in which they produce something better than, or beyond, their normal creative selves. There are countless very strange poems in this book, the much-anthologised ‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ still being as weird as any. Perhaps it was written to prove or to disprove the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh? O’er our ur-area (our era aye ere your raw row) we air our array, err, yaw, row wry - aura our orrery, our eerie ü our ray, our arrow. A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

This atonal music, half fingernails on blackboard, half bat-sonar pitched beyond the ear’s range, was first

published in the important 1987 collection The Daylight Moon, but already looked clairvoyantly ahead to where it would come to roost (and where it has migrated to in the omnibus under review): Translations from the Natural World (2003). Not many books as strange as this one have been published anywhere; it remains the most cutting-edge and most naturally avant-garde book published in this country. Numerous poems are sheer genius: ‘Mollusc’, ‘Prehistory of Air’, ‘Two Dogs’, ‘The Cows on Killing Day’ (of course), and its fellow crowdfunded consciousness poems, ‘Pigs’ and ‘Shoal’. Thomas Nagel argued that ‘we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience’ – of a bat, say – ‘without relying on the imagination – without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject’. He argues, ‘This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method – an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.’ Murray does his best to magic other subjectives into our subjective at least – and to shake off the anthropomorphism that plagues animal poems. Translations is a masterwork of mind-reading and ventriloquism – and a celebration of the dazzle of language. It’s hard to lift a line from these miniatures without diminishing them, but here’s a quatrain from an earlier, more straightforward animal poem, ‘Wagtail’, to show what tail-twitchy fun the poet is capable of: Busy daylong eating small species, making small faeces, and a great wealth of song.

There are numerous Strange Poems in his most controversial volume, Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). Many are fuelled by depression (‘compere of the predawn show’), none more so than the hard-to-read ‘Corniche’, a poem in which the fear of dying becomes a longing for it as the only cure, or solution. And yet, as the poet wrestles with the darkest of thoughts: A self inside self, cool as conscience, one to be erased in your final night, or faxed, still knows beneath all the mute grand opera and uncaused effect – that death which can be imagined is not true death.

‘Corniche’, like the other pre-dawn compèred poems in this book, is not easy to move past. But the sun rises again in the playful sarcasm of ‘The Rollover’: ‘Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors / are going round to watch them evict a banker.’ There are also moving family portraits of the poet’s autistic son (‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’) and of his dying father, Cecil (‘The Last Hellos’): ‘Don’t die, Dad – / but they die.’ Cecil’s elegy made me turn back a hundred-odd pages to The People’s Otherworld (1983) and reread the POETRY

three celebrated poems Murray wrote in memory of his mother, who died when he was a boy. Otherworld is a ‘hinge’ volume in Murray’s work, besides ‘The Steel’ (the last line of which gives that volume its title) and various other poems I have already mentioned above, it contains ‘Equanimity’, with its satisfyingly steady-state vision: … it lights us from the incommensurable we sometimes glimpse, from being trapped in the point (bird minds and ours being so pointedly visual): a field all foreground, and equally all background, like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective.

‘Equanimity’ offers us ‘a first approximation’ of heaven, to quote from the last poem in the same volume. ‘Satis Passio’ is a kind of Ars Poetica, offering several other overlapping definitions: ‘Art is what can’t be summarised’, ‘Art’s best is a standing miracle / at an uncrossable slight distance’, and ‘there is this quality to art / which starts, rather than ends, at the gist. / Not the angle, but the angel.’ Murray seems to me like some maverick, hyper-verbal angel, plonked down among us to mess with our heads, move our hearts, make us dabble our toes in luscious dung, and shower us with language in Shakespearean abundance. Given the autism in his family, his own gifts have a semi-autistic flavour. His brain is a very strange

connecting machine, capable of the loosest of loose associations in a richly metaphoric way. He does and says what he likes, unconstrained by the tastes of the last fifteen minutes. He takes enormous risks and, if occasionally he doesn’t succeed, he is never afraid to have a go. He has, in short, absolute nerve. Which includes dedicating most of his books, including this one, to The Glory of God. Snobs mind us off religion nowdays, if they can. Fuck them. I wish you God.

Snobs, agnostics, or believers, we are surely all on the same page when it comes to celebrating the beauties and wonders – and continuing profound mysteries – of existence and consciousness. Back to ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’ and the closing lines of ‘Death Words’: ‘Perhaps God is inevitable. / He will not necessarily come, though, again, in our species.’ There was nothing inevitable about the strange angel Les Murray. He is a one-off fluke, so singular it’s hard to see a poet like him coming again in our species. As a bat? Maybe. g Peter Goldsworthy divides his time between writing and medicine. He has won literary awards across many genres.A new opera,Ned Kelly,written with composer Luke Styles, will première at the 2019 Perth Festival.

Last days!

John Kinsella · Russell West-Pavlov

ˈtɛmp(ə)rərɪnəs On the Imperatives of Place Challenges for the Humanities, Vol. 2 2018, 372 pages €[D] 69,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-8174-7 eISBN 978-3-8233-9174-6

Temporariness: a scandal arising from our persistent search for permanence, but also a hallmark of the precarity and ecocide of the present time. In this volume, two practitioners and theoreticians of the word, space and time, interrogate the ‘temporary’ via a collage of genres that mobilize an aesthetics and ethics of mitigated presence. In this work, they question our need for presence and suggest the ephemeral as a way of envisaging sustainable futures. We should be critiquing our very presence... what counts, it would seem, is our common personhood across a spectrum of species and across a spectrum of places... John Kinsella is a poet and activist from the Western Australian Wheatbelt and Cambridge/UK Russell West-Pavlov is a writer and academic in Tübingen/Germany Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@narr.de \ www.narr.de

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Peter Porter Poetry Prize Entries close 3 December 2018

First prize $5,000 + an Arthur Boyd etching Second prize $2,000

Three shortlisted poems $500 each

www.australianbookreview.com.au

‘A door ajar to the future’

Doubling and dividedness in David Malouf ’s poetry

Judith Bishop AN OPEN BOOK by David Malouf

University of Queensland Press, $29.95 pb, 104 pp, 9780702260308

t is a curious thing, and not a little moving, to see writers celebrated for their work in other genres turn in later life with renewed vigour to poetry. David Malouf, like Clive James, has avowed a desire for poetry now, as the main form of writing his expression wants to take. Certainly, its brevity has a part in this, for the best of poems can happen, if fortunate, in minutes, not months, as Malouf himself observes. Yet the cogency of poetry speaks also to an impulse to voice the essential in life and nothing but, and to do it in a way that calls on all the writer’s powers of sound and gesture and concision. Malouf ’s An Open Book is his third book of new poems in eleven years, following Typewriter Music (2007), Earth Hour (2014), and a Selected, Revolving Days (2008). Speaking about An Open Book recently in Melbourne, Malouf described how his inner impressions from external events find their way into a poem through a kind of close listening. Citing D.H. Lawrence, Malouf likened the process of writing to the speaking of a daimon. A daimon is a figure for the other in the self. In An Open Book, ‘A Word to the Wise’ uses the Lawrentian trope of the wind to describe the poet’s sense of being spoken through, not speaking: … To be as a wheatfield, all ears for the breezes … … full of birds’ cries and the whisper of change.

In an early, striking poem, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’, Lawrence wrote: ‘Not I, not I, but the

wind that blows through me! // If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed / By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world.’ An echo between the poets takes shape in these lines. Doubling and dividedness (both formal and semantic) are characteristic gestures in Malouf ’s work. The gestural dimension of language in lyric poems is like the bones beneath the flesh: they shape the body we see. Malouf as a poet knows well the bones he works with. Many of these poems have multiple couplings, such as the ‘inner and outer weather, the discordancies of heart / and hand, the mess and muddle we mischief into’ in ‘House and Hearth’. In ‘The Double Gift’ and ‘Understood’, among other poems, it is time that is dual. The divided time of the ‘present perfect’ is manifest in cut flowers, ‘touched already … with the poignancy // of absence’. The word ‘perfect’ shimmers between the grammatical sense of completion and the toopotent beauty of these flowers, whose clarity ‘tilts / the occasion to unreal’. The (almost) title poem,‘The Open Book’, recalls another pairing, of reader and read: how the poet as a child (the ‘open book’ of the title) was at once legible, but in his secret inner life, hidden to his mother. He remains half-hidden: as Stephen Romei observes in an interview in The Weekend Australian (29 September 2018), Malouf keeps some details private, such as a lover’s name (a lovely poem is addressed to the unknown ‘R.S.’). Yet, as a lyric poet, Malouf gives to the reader most intimate glimpses of his inner world. Light-footed in tone and sound, these poems are further studded with puns and double meanings, such as ‘all

ears’ above. Elsewhere, dividedness is present in the urge to connect. In ‘A Tavola’, the poem recalls the touch of ‘hand to mouth’ and ‘cup to lip’ – such simple, sensual connections as are easy to overlook. But how the poet relishes the coming-into-being of a relationship (newly or again). Recorded in a poem, such moments – the ‘flutter’ of a horse’s lip, the ‘pressure / of your touch’ – ‘what we reach for and see // through to … and still hold dear’ – ‘will outlast us’. One of the beauties of these poems is how they catch the inner feeling of lives beyond our own – a ‘jasmine slip / in its rage for Lebensraum’, a small ‘life gone fluttery // on panicked / wings seeking the air’ (‘Garden Poems’), or a young child’s dialogue with self in the wonderfully humorous ‘The Prospect of Little Anon on an Inner-city Greensward’. The poet’s feeling naturally extends into kinship with other living things. The word ‘kin’ itself recurs in ‘The New Loaf ’ and ‘Cestrum Nocturnum’. The former is a paean to the art of making bread and the intertwined histories of grain and humankind: ‘Field and flesh were made one for the other / gratis. When we break it / all’s mended. Kind are kin.’ The etymological networks of Malouf ’s thought are evident, for ‘kin’ and ‘kind’ are kin, descended from a single root in Old English, whose meanings include ‘the natural order’. The poet’s feeling for interrelationship extends to the ‘gentle governance’ of the unseen reasons that drive himself and other creatures, ‘[a]n order we cannot see / the grounds of ’ but ‘acknowledge and keep’ (‘At Pennyroyal II’). Beyond the POETRY

unseen, Malouf recalls his attention to the unsaid and undone, ‘[l]earning to catch in the slight disturbance // of an empty room the held / breath of an occasion / missed’ (‘Eavesdropping’). Speaking in Melbourne, Malouf also recalled how he carries in his body a certain memory from having grown up in Brisbane: the way the streets, rising up, would suddenly, at their summit, present an unexpected view. That experience of a new world beyond this one’s horizon became an existential dimension, to be always sought anew: ‘How we long for the adventure / of a new page’ (‘Parting’); ‘Windows II’ records ‘the seasons’ // yearning or the mind’s /

The cogency of poetry speaks also to an impulse to voice the essential in life and nothing but for distance and the colours / of change’ while in ‘A Tavola’, an angel brings ‘like a gunshot, / the ambush of news’. History appears in a thunderous passage of warplanes, but also in the passing of the thick white crockery that poverty ordained, of currencies, writing slates, and culinary fêtes, such as the Tuscan sagra, celebrated still in the ‘dying days of another empire’. The ‘many delectations’ of sensual delight go hand in hand with the new. They animate several poems, whose spring and summer buoyancy carries the reader in headlong rhythms: ‘heady with the perfume / of dreams, or freeto-air, a low cloud caught / in passing’ (‘Garden Poems’). Three poems on erotic love revise verses from Dante, Horace and Ronsard, each pressing the perennial case that time being what it is, love is for today, without promise of tomorrow. Yet, as in the poem ‘Learning Curve’, desire springs eternal ‘[f ]rom under / the bed / -covers’ as ‘in myth’. Even coming late in life, these poems in An Open Book give resonant voice to the hope ‘that nothing is ever / done with / or over’. g Judith Bishop was a finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award for her poetry collection Interval (UQP, 2018). 48 DECEMBER 2018

Elegy and paradox A poetic tribute to Tina Kane

David McCooey A PASSING BELL: GHAZALS FOR TINA by Paul Kane

White Crane, $22.95 pb, 72 pp, 9780648337119

arely does one come across a book that is both intensely ‘literary’ – stylised, sophisticated, deeply engaged with its antecedents – and achingly moving, so viscerally raw that it takes one’s breath away. A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina – an elegy-sequence for Tina Kane, to whom Paul Kane was married for thirty-six years – is such a work. Kane’s use of the ghazal is an inspired choice. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965) notes that the ghazal is an Arabian form that brings together the amorous, the elegiac, and the mystical, all elements central to A Passing Bell. Kane does not use the monorhyme of the traditional ghazal (aa ba ca, and so on), but the repeating twelve-line structure that he employs gives form to the poems’ intense expressions of grief. Tina Kane – who died of motor neurone disease in 2015 – was a conservator in textile conservation at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. She was also a textile consultant, writer, translator, and critic. (ABR published a late poem of hers in December 2014.) The word ‘text’ comes from the Latin word meaning ‘tissue’ and ‘woven fabric’. Kane does not belabour the link between his work and that of his late wife’s, but it is movingly apparent: ‘You knew the way of working, Tina, how – in your hands – / the smallest thread could ravel up the world’. The image of shared work, and a shared life, runs throughout the collection, and its loss produces a melancholically repetitive process of ravelling and unravelling: ‘There are threads of you everywhere I go because they hang off me, barely visible. / Tug at one and I unravel. But

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

then, every morning, I gather myself together’ (Ghazal 109). The importance of the loss of mutual activity is seen in the way the poems repeatedly stage the poet’s grief within the domestic sphere. The Kanes’ houses and gardens (in North America and Australia) figure throughout the collection. One of the exceptional features of A Passing Bell is the way in which its rich domestic imagery exists in both abstract and concrete realms. The flower motifs may call to mind the laying of flowers on the dead in pastoral elegy (just as the references to drunkenness call to mind that conventional motif in the ghazal), but Kane’s elegiac world is never merely conventional, however informed it is by the weighty literary precedents of the elegiac tradition. But neither are things ‘merely themselves’. The poems’ focus on time, space, and the weather engages simultaneously with the physical and the metaphysical. This is particularly notable when it comes to the figure of light and those bodies and processes that produce (or rely on) it: the sun, the moon, comets, stars, fire, mirrors, photographic film, and lightning. The symbology of light is, of course, deeply associated with life, as seen in Ghazal 27: ‘As the storm blew in, prismatic light shone, flat and horizontal. / Then – just now – a vertical rainbow appeared.’ But light is, paradoxically, also associated with the afterlife, as a moment in Ghazal 116 suggests: ‘I know you live in a luminous body, Tina, for I’ve seen it and – touched – been lit as well.’ One can read this as visionary or everyday as one likes, but the relationship between life and afterlife suggests the centrality of paradox to this collection. Such

paradox can be found throughout: ‘The more I try to be alone, / the more public my grief ’ (Ghazal 56); ‘I realize that you have become my solitude’ (Ghazal 79); ‘My daily round is a sort of tomb, a place I’ve buried myself in to survive’ (Ghazal 93); ‘My life borders on paradox, Tina, a land you travelled through before me’ (Ghazal 106). Mourning, as A Passing Bell so powerfully shows, is inherently paradoxical, bringing the playful, bound freedom of creativity to the melancholic confinement of grief. The work of mourning, Kane shows us, requires time, and the weaving together of apparently disjunct things: life and art; light and darkness; self and other; life and death.

The cogency of poetry speaks also to an impulse to voice the essential in life and nothing but Throughout the collection, the ambiguous figure of the ‘Master’ is referred to. This silent figure, to whom the poet repeatedly turns for answers, could be a religious teacher, or a personification of poetry, or even death itself. But this collection does not traffic in religious dogma or (ultimately) literary conventions. At the collection’s most heartbreaking moment, the poet asks, in his simplest language, the question that all bereaved people ask: ‘Why did you die?’ (Ghazal 116). In its use of the ghazal to represent what we might call modern grief, Kane revises a number of that form’s key features. One of the most notable is the convention of including the poet’s name in the final line (a way for the poet to both break the ghazal’s ‘spell’ and claim authorship). In all but one of

Tina Kane at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

the poems in A Passing Bell, Kane places not his name but the name ‘Tina’ in the closing couplet. The cumulative effect of this is deeply moving. Its repetition calls attention to the poet’s loss but also to his unshakeable love. There is another key antecedent evoked in A Passing Bell: the figure of Orpheus, the musician–poet who went to the underworld to bring back his beloved Eurydice. But here it is – as the extraordinary epilogue of A Passing Bell puts it – the beloved who has led the poet out of the underworld of grief. This is a powerfully affecting ending. It must be little consolation for a writer to be told that he has written his masterwork, if that work cannot be read by the person for whom it was written. Such a bittersweet paradox seems

wholly – if sadly – appropriate for this extraordinary work. g

David McCooey’s latest book of poems, Star Struck, was released by UWA Publishing in 2016.

POETRY

TRIBUTE

An imagination on high alert Dorothy Porter (1954–2008)

by Andrea Goldsmith

heard the Egypt story countless times, but then Dorothy Porter believed that if a story was worth telling, it warranted multiple retellings. In the late 1980s, before Dot and I met, she visited Egypt to gather material for her verse novel Akhenaten (1992). In Cairo, she joined a tour group taking in the major historical sights. Dot was, by this time, steeped in the life and times of the visionary pharaoh Akhenaten: no matter what was in front of her, her thoughts remained fixed on Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti. It was perhaps inevitable that she would suggest the tour group take a detour – a very long detour as it turned out – to see Akhet-Aten, the city built by Akhenaten and greatly loved by him. She promised her fellow travellers an unparalleled treat. Dot knew that Akhet-Aten had been abandoned at the end of Akhenaten’s reign; she also knew that, while it had long been an important archaeological site, there were no extant buildings. But in her mind, Akhenaten’s city existed – fully formed and filled with life. The bus travelled for hours through the desert. Dot noticed the legs of a dead donkey ‘sticking out / stiff / in an otherwise / serenely barren desert’, but little else distracted the eye. Finally they reached their destination. Dot, immersed in her own excited imaginings, truly had arrived at Akhet-Aten, but not so the rest of the group. Far from the glittering city Dot had promised, they were confronted with more of Egypt’s abundant desert and another of its many archaeological sites. The heat was sizzling, the wind was wild, sand stuck to their skin, grit caught in their clothes. Dot’s fellow travellers were not happy. Before a riot broke out, Dot stepped forward and gave one of her greatest performances, creating for the group – and for herself – Akhenaten’s beloved city. Out of the archaeological site, she fashioned buildings, gardens, water features, and temples. She created Akhenaten himself, that strangely beguiling figure with the long pointy chin and the thick cushiony mouth. She produced a long-dead Pharaoh and his city from a wildfire imagination fanned by memory and desire. Her fellow travellers returned to the bus satisfied. Ever since childhood, Dorothy had plunged into her imagination to entertain others. At the age of fourteen, she

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

captivated her schoolmates with a novel in instalments, shaped around a visit to the school by The Beatles. Best of all, she entertained herself with these stories, experiencing the risky and tantalising adventures that eluded her in real life. The imagination’s workings were always mysterious to her, but not the rewards. Dorothy was an adolescent when first she experienced the ‘supernatural potency of poetry’. She felt as if poetry had found her, chosen her; she could not explain why or how, but she was profoundly grateful. This gift – and she always regarded it as a gift – remained subject to the vulnerability that invariably accompanies unexplained events and experiences. As she reminded herself: The gods give and the gods take away. Her lifelong poet companions included Shakespeare, Auden, Dickinson, Sappho, Lorca, Akhmatova, Cavafy, and Coleridge. She identified in particular with Rilke, a poet terrified that his imagination would cool down and poetry would desert him, plunging him into the darkest abyss. When Rilke’s lover Lou Andreas-Salomé suggested that he might benefit from psychoanalysis, he refused: he was afraid that if his demons were taken from him, so, too, might be his angels. Dot shared Rilke’s fears and anxieties. She was more likely to consult a fortune-teller than a psychologist. One of her fortune-teller experiences, a complete rip-off in New York City, found its way into her verse novel What a Piece of Work (1999). Dot was a pagan – with strong Jewish underpinnings (her paternal grandmother was Jewish). Nature was sacred and life-giving. There were libations under our apricot tree for the rewards that came to us, and special prayers offered for friends or family in trouble. Dot valued all living things equally: cats and rhinos, squids and sea hares, snakes and frogs. And birds. She was a dedicated bird watcher, albeit in her own idiosyncratic way: waiting silently and patiently was certainly not Dot’s way. She delighted in the happenstance of birds and drew rich inspiration from them. When she was undergoing chemotherapy, every morning a wattle bird appeared beyond the bedroom window, prancing along the balcony rail, noisily showing off. She wrote ‘The Wattle Bird’, a poem sparking with humour and anxiety:

I’m old enough to be flattered and take no courting attention for granted

And when the wattle bird failed to appear: I sip my strong coffee and listlessly watch the window longing for the joyous noise of my new, if just rattling through, boyfriend.

Her own personal totem was a bird: the raucous, brash, weirdly glamorous sulphur-crested cockatoo. The ancient Egyptians believed that the souls of the dead come back as birds. I welcome every sighting of a sulphur-crested cockatoo. Dorothy revelled in the white heat of her poetic imagination and was never bored in her own company. Her imagination was always on high alert, so much so that often she did not see what was in front of her. This was extremely convenient when it came to housework, and enormously productive when it concerned poetry. One day, when she was writing The Monkey’s Mask (1994), we went to Melbourne’s Luna Park. Up ahead of us, on the main path, was a big-bottomed woman in bright-pink tracksuit pants. Several months later, Dot wrote ‘Style’. In love I’ve got no style my heart is decked out in bright pink tracksuit pants.

Sometimes, such as in ‘Style’, I could locate the ‘memorymushed images’, but mostly I could not – and Dorothy adamantly did not want to. Like Rilke, she refused to question, she didn’t want to analyse. Don’t tempt the evil eye, as she would say. Just be grateful for what you’ve been given. People are surprised to learn that it has been ten years since Dorothy Porter died. It doesn’t feel that long, they say. And why should it? Her poems are still being read, her songs are still being played. But there’s something else with the death of this small woman who carved out such a large space, something more. The most powerful presence is absence. When the pyramid dissolves you will keep its shadow. its deep rich space. in you.

I look through the glass windows at the back of our house, and I see her, standing on the path by the apricot

tree, the strong squat figure, the fine brown hair, those expressive hands wrapped around a glass of white wine, and she’s talking and laughing and talking some more. And then she’s off and away, shooting to the skies like a comet, and, still talking, she zooms into the cosmos and out of sight. Bliss. g Andrea Goldsmith’s new novel, Invented Lives, will be published by Scribe in April 2019.

Faith

I’ve lived a life illuminated and choked by dreaming sometimes everything threads together in a lightning-charred tapestry almost too exciting to contemplate let alone live with other times have left me stranded and sobbing in a muggy black night of longing and plain bloody nonsense but best of all dreaming has left a dusting of memory-mushed images doesn’t matter if they can rear at me like the legs of the frozen dead donkey I saw sticking out stiff in an otherwise serenely barren desert they burn and smelt this world, this life into great messy plundering sense.

Dorothy Porter ‘Faith’ was first published in Other Worlds: Poems 1997–2001 (Picador, 2001). POETRY

‘A feeling trap’

Linguistic play and happenstance in Michael Hofmann’s poetry

Philip Mead ONE LARK, ONE HORSE by Michael Hofmann

Faber & Faber, $29.99 hb, 104 pp, 9780571342297

ichael Hofmann’s home ter- not memories, Stau not traffic jam, and ritory is language, while his my favourite: vulcanizadora (tyre repair life is extraterritorial. He was shop). And he’s always attracted to the born in Germany, went to school in Eng- distinctively specific English word too: land, now lives in Germany, but teaches peculation, cyclothymia, deltoids, foulard. in North America. He has also made Glitches of association occur occasiona living out of working between lan- ally; they hardly make sense but are guages, translating scores of texts from somehow admirable for their ordiGerman into English. He is as well- nariness and humour – ‘little roosters, known as a translator as he is as a poet. little rosters’, ‘The Golden Basket, the He has said some interesting things Golden Casket, the Golden Gasket’, ‘… about his linguistic domicility. In one it’s Compestela. Ah, Stella. / Stella or interview, he speaks of his problems Vanessa, make a decision’. The volume’s with English: for him it’s a ‘class trap, title, from a Jewish joke, is another sign a dialect trap, a feeling trap’. German of Hofmann’s love of linguistic play and doesn’t have such heffalump traps, he happenstance. This foregrounding of language itfeels; it offers greater scope for frankness (get it?), despite its wounds. Neverthe- self is no affectation, it is core. We have less, he continues to write poems in no idea who the woman in ‘Portrait d’une Femme’ is, but she’s a contempoEnglish. As this latest collection, One rary, an English rose gone ape. The most Lark, One Horse, illustrates so vividly, striking moment in the description of though, Hofmann is a serial adultera- her is linguistic: tor. His idea of poetic licence is an import licence, diversifying rather than polluting a version of everyday or correct English with all sorts of linguistic goods, with half a mind in German and in other lexicons as well. Whether the reader is annoyed or delighted by this aspect of his poetics probably depends on your attitude to language: do you want more or less? With Hofmann you always get more: terremoto, not earth tremor, Spelunken rather than dive-like, vieux jeu rather than oldfashioned, froideur rather than reserve, Recuerdos Michael Hofmann (photograph by Thomas Andermatten) 52 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The venomous articulation with its trademark solecisms (naive to wonder how anyone with a Cambridge degree in it Could hurt the language like you). A sort of chronically over-emphatic sub-style of maimed English, a testosterone debris of nursery babble, pop psychology, tabloid yelp and obscenity.

Michael Hofmann is not much interested in over-explaining the situations and settings of his poems: where they are and whom he’s talking about. That doesn’t really matter, you have to pick up the clues: Tartu signals the Estonian river setting of ‘Dead Thing’; ‘Sankt Georg’ is about the changing urban-

With Hofmann you always get more: terremoto, not earth tremor scape of Hamburg-Mitte; ‘Lake Isle’ is about an ideal place to live on ‘Danube Street’ (a reversal of Yeats’s Innisfree idyll); ‘LV’ is about late middle age (‘say, 1400 AD’); the opening prose poem is titled ‘Lindsay Garbutt’; about reading and nostalgia for The Velvet Underground – a German connection here, too, through Andy Warhol and singer Christa Päffgen. We have no idea about Lindsay Garbutt, unless we’re very in with North American poetry circles, until we get to the ‘Acknowledgements and Thanks’ page at the end of the volume, where we learn that she commissioned the poem (as associate editor at Poetry magazine). But still, why the title exactly? This collection also includes a few poems about Hofmann’s experience in Australia, in Queensland where he was writer in residence in 2008. ‘Judith Wright Arts Centre’ is a disarming poem about the poet’s ‘office at the Judy! The Judy / at the head of Fortitude Valley!’ with its exuberantly Pinterest (not Pinteresque) snaps of Brisbane streetwear:

The pre-owned and the pre-loved, the much-travelled And the want-away, the ripped and the buff And the sweatered and coated, the baby-dolled and the muscle-shirted And the skirts pulled over trousers and leggings, And the flipflops and biker books, and tote bags and shoulder bags Strapped across the bosom. (And it was all one style, And the name of that style was called Alternative, or maybe, Consensual Alternative at the World’s End.) The Judy.

Like this poem, the poems from Australia, ‘Letter from Australia’ and ‘Recuerdos de Bundaberg’ are as sharply attentive as the many other poems about outlandish places. Australian vowels may sound like ‘short i’s in words / like beach, bush or bake’ to English ears, but that’s just how he hears them; there is no trace element of Northern condescension here. After all, ‘the Beeb burbles all night / dreaming to itself in Queen’. Hofmann’s eye for embarrassing local detail is surprising too, he clocked the Neal–Della Bosca Iguanagate affair and Troy Buswell’s antics. There are also poems of political commentary, sardonic usually, although these tend to be simply lists of outrages. ‘Higher Learning’ is one of these anaphoric pieces, a dramatic monologue by university management: ‘We monetise the university … we casualise the support staff … We free up tenure.’ ‘Silly Season, 2015’ lists global financial disorder, neo-Nazi terrorism, gun violence, ethnic cleansing as exhibits in the appallathon of contemporary political life. ‘The Case for Brexit’, anaphoric first person this time, lists the cruelties of English school life: ‘I should have liked to be called Roger or Arthur. The / bully Brian Lory pummelled and pummelled. All Trutex or Aertex. Caps Striped ties …’ Once again, it’s the linguistic signage underlying such schoolyard behaviour that he particularly recalls: ‘Practically everything was a shibboleth. Harwich was a trick. / Berwick was a trick. Worcester was a trick.’ Manchester textile

brands Trutex and Aertex seem to suggest even the fabric of school uniforms was infused with the insolence and vindictiveness of persecution. That’s all to describe some of the rich, strange, distinctive language of Hofmann’s poems, but there is another aspect that is equally important: the contrapuntal relation between the surface of his lines, the simplicity of his syntax, and the openness and often gentleness of his mentality. His vocabulary may be what is most to the fore in our reading of these mannerist poems. It’s what makes them like Arcimboldo portraits, the astonishing conjunction of what aren’t extraordinary linguistic elements in other contexts, but just in their being brought together in this particular fashion. But Hofmann’s syntax is nearly always simple, often tending towards the list, or even the note, the clipped, talky fragment. Sometimes the effects are a marvel of delicacy and resonance, as in

the poem ‘Ostsee’, a colour snapshot of a moment beside the Baltic Sea. Hofmann has been wrongly characterised as a savage reviewer, the epitome of the transAtlantic, score-keeping literary wolf, when what he is, is insouciantly individual and honest, with a GSOH. g

Philip Mead’s most recent poetry collection is Zanzibar Light (2018).

Cyndi Lauper June 22

And many happy returns of the day to Cyndi Lauper, 65, once said to ‘dress funny’ and her voice likened to ‘rat’ (or ‘rat’s’), singing the song ‘Money changes everything’, like a coarsened Bowie, and to the nameless, ageless rat featherbedded in a mysteriously malfunctioning Indian ATM machine in over a million mostly shredded rupees.

Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann’s latest collection is One Lark, One Horse (2018). POETRY

with

Kevin Brophy Which poets have most influenced you?

John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eric Beach, Myron Lysenko, Ania Walwicz, Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson – in that order through time; though tomorrow the answer would be a variation on this.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

No future for a poem without both craft and inspiration being involved, but no use for a poem unless it is first brought to life by inspiration (by breathing it in, then breathing it out).

What prompts a new poem?

Reading poetry has always been for me an inspiration. I can rarely read a good book of poetry or a terrific poem without throwing it down and writing some of my own under its influence. Memory and the senses, all of them, are starting points too.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

This is a very personal question, and hard to answer because the circumstances, especially at the beginning of writing a poem are so fragile and I am so vulnerable (to all the usual self-criticisms I suffer from). For me, a few hours inside myself at a desk or staring out the window from a table are best.

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

Hours on each line, weeks on a stanza, months on the whole poem, but with long breaks between. Most poets spend most of their time not writing poetry, and it has to be this way.

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

Leonard Cohen, I guess, for that voice half-singing, half-rhyming, always nostalgic about love, and somehow making you feel he is in love with you too because we all share this nostalgia. I don’t so much want to talk to him as listen to him. 54 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

The Puncher & Wattmann Anthology of Australian Poetry, edited by John Leonard.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

This poet needs the kind of solitude that a home and a family and a small group of friends provide – away from poetry. As for the ‘rapacious throng’ (the collective noun used for poets in an Irish medieval text) of poets out there, I need to be part of them too, to test myself against them, define myself as existing somewhere across their spectrum, and join in the general kerfuffle of admiration and contempt rife in a coterie of any kind. Mostly, though, it’s the solitude I need.

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

Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems would amuse and sustain me in such a desperate time.

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

‘but what does a frog / in a well know of the waiting ocean?’ (Peter Steele, from The Knowledge).

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

When I asked a representative of this public, she smiled at me and said that the public is apprehensive about poetry, but love having it presented and explained and discussed. As a teacher, I have given a good part of my life to doing just this.

Kevin Brophy’s latest book is Look at the Lake

(Puncher & Wattmann, 2018), a record of a year living in a remote Aboriginal community in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Recent books include This Is What Gives Us Time (Gloria SMH) and Walking: New and selected poems (2013). Kevin is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

(photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey)

of the Month OPoet PEN PAGE

The field of battle

Modish essays from a master of the English language

Robert Dessaix THE ORIGINS OF DISLIKE by Amit Chaudhuri

Oxford University Press, $50.95 hb, 333 pp, 9780198793823

here is something oddly Jesuitical about this arresting, if not quite thrilling, collection of essays in defence of Modernism (and so modernity). It may be Krishna that Amit Chaudhuri champions, rather than Catholic doctrine, or at least Krishna’s delight in ‘the infinitely tantalizing play, chicanery, and light and shade of the created universe’ (music to a Modernist’s ears, even if our essayist is an atheist), but all the same, I smell casuistry in the service of an orthodoxy. It makes at times for compelling reading. Modernism in this celebrated Bengali novelist and thinker’s version has poetry, cinematography, painting, and fiction – art of every kind – growing out of the physical, the human, the homely, the unremarkable. It is irresolute and rational, not complete and magical. Ironically, a host of didactic sacred texts sprang up to celebrate it, many in French. Now, like Catholicism in England five hundred years ago, this orthodoxy is in mortal danger of losing its authority. Some might say it is already dead. Whether its take on the universe is convincing or not is beside the point here: beyond a small number of protected enclaves, such as Chaudhuri’s own Department of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia, it has lost its sway over us. In its battle with the market, the market has won. If I might misquote Habakkuk, the earth is now filled with the knowledge of the glory of globalisation, not Guattari. Given the avalanche of scriptural quotations in The Origins of Dislike, I think I should be allowed my Habakkuk. From Sontag to Said, Derrida to Deleuze, Barthes to Benjamin (obsessively), the anointed are quoted over and over again. And why not? On occasion they were

pithy. (But not always. Here’s Derrida on spirituality: ‘The absence of the transcendental signified extends the play of the signifier to infinity.’ Maybe. And, then again, maybe not.) Still, the unending conga line of ageing, aggrieved authority figures becomes almost self-parodying, even a touch macabre. I found myself on tenterhooks wondering if Teju Cole and Clarice Lispector would manage to get a mention. Near the end of the book, they do. In part I enjoyed this book – and there’s much to take pleasure in here – because of another mischievous little Jesuitical device: equivocation. Chaudhuri says one thing but thinks and does another. He performs his deft feints, however, to protect himself from his peers, not the mob, as the Jesuits did. On a visit to the Louvre, for example, he finds he dislikes what he calls ‘Renaissance’ painting, no doubt for reasons as diverse as his Bombay boyhood and the state of his digestive tract on the day. His argument, however, is both diverting and diversionary flimflam: the art is hyper-realist, he avers (although it’s not), and, for ideological reasons supplied by John Berger, hyper-realism is something Chaudhuri can’t abide. In other words, a problem of taste is being solved by the application of a theoretical rule. This is casuistry. While this whole collection is a love song to good taste and cultural capital, if not capital of the Marxian kind, we’re po-facedly assured that ‘taste’ is a word ‘now hardly used’. This is a Bourdieuan piety, not a fact. Chaudhuri means ‘hardly used by people like us’. Every word of these essays has been weighed fastidiously in the balance of fashion, modishness, and self-preservation. It is true that ‘taste’ is a word impossible to

use innocently, but, from a Modernist point of view, so what? When Chaudhuri claims that Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, and Graham Greene are ‘now largely forgotten or have turned into minor literary-historical facts’, while Henry Green is ‘still among us’, he is again striking a blow for academic orthodoxy on ‘the field of battle’ that he considers all art and writing to be. In the Greene vs Green fight, Greene has come out on top. Greene sells, Green doesn’t. Chaudhuri believes in the commonplace and the common man, but not so much, it turns out, in the common reader, whose eyes will glaze over within minutes of opening the book. Faced with any doctrinal pronouncement, the common reader, expecting narrative and closure, can feel disempowered. The ideology itself is focused on empowering the disempowered, but Chaudhuri’s way of writing silences and immobilises the reader. Instead of ‘in my opinion’, ‘I rather think’, or even ‘I am convinced’, we get an assertion followed by ‘as Derrida puts it’ or ‘in Susan Sontag’s words’; first the truth and then its source. It’s a performance and – although ostensibly a collection of personal essays, with asides about the family car in the 1980s or a visit to the Louvre with his wife – it reads more like a series of manifestos. Chaudhuri himself alludes to the fact that Indian English lacks any demotic form of the language, so even a streetsweeper can sound bombastic. Chaudhuri often sounds bombastic. Paradoxically, I find the doctrine he espouses appealing, if rather old hat. Chaudhuri’s love of modernism and its art in various forms is infectious. Whether he’s writing about his greatly E S S AY S

loved Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913, or his dislike of historicism, narrative, and ‘completion’, he displays a learned curiosity and indeed a joy in what is playful, poetic, and fragmentary. This is a book of fragments: Iranian cinema, creative writing courses, V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, sunlight, Jun’Ichirō Tanizaki and his shadows, Picasso, Paul Klee, the Bengali poet Rajiv Mehrotra, literary Pakistan, flânerie, the perniciousness of literary prizes – the range is impressive, the insights numerous. His comments on why Austral-

Every word of these essays has been weighed fastidiously in the balance of fashion, modishness, and self-preservation ian writers are of no interest to foreigners at all unless they’re writing about Australia are wounding and spot on. I’d have liked to feel, however, more of the carnality and mischief he so admires in Ingmar Bergman. The text is too monkish and overthought for a writer who wishes above all things to feel spontaneously, joyously alive in the flesh. Perhaps Chaudhuri needs to follow his own advice on ‘handed-down categorical narratives’: dismantle them. He is aware of the anxiety many artists and writers feel about having come after the masters who are formative to them, yet his prose is stiff with this anxiety, not a syllable is blithe. Postmodernism relieved this angst through irony, but Chaudhuri isn’t good at irony. Perhaps he should just cock a snook and move on. Or is the whole enterprise of these essays actually a ludic extravaganza? Perhaps he really thinks the postmodern superstar Dubravka Ugrešić is the most awful bore. (Only joking.) All the same, this is a fine performance for a select audience by a master of the English language. The unhurried reader will finish the volume dazed, I suspect, but enriched. g Robert Dessaix is a broadcaster, essayist, and memoirist. His most recent book is The Pleasures of Leisure (2017). 56 DECEMBER 2018

The set Gemma Betros LEFT BANK: ART, PASSION AND THE REBIRTH OF PARIS 1940–1950

by Agnès Poirier

Bloomsbury $39.99 hb, 377 pp, 9781408857441

‘A

country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,’ warned French-Algerian writer Albert Camus in a January 1945 editorial. Camus’ ominous edict, issued in the weeks following the end of Germany’s occupation of France, encapsulates something of what Agnès Poirier is trying to say in this, her second book in English. The Occupation and its aftermath form the start of an exuberant tour of the cultural and intellectual life of 1940s Paris, centred on the French capital’s Left Bank. Born and raised in Paris, Poirier is a London-based writer, film critic, and political journalist, probably best known to Australians through her Guardian columns. Her first English-language book, Touché: A French woman’s take on the English (2006), began with her youthful escape from the France of Jacques Chirac to pursue her self-declared love affair with England. Some of the author’s more astringent observations soon saw her in trouble with Britain’s tabloid press. Touché, meanwhile, was as much about her beloved Paris as London, predictably highlighting the superiority of Parisian culture, cafés, and conversation. In this light, Left Bank seems a logical sequel. Poirier sets out to provide a portrait of those ‘who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences how we think, live and even dress today’. She is particularly interested in how the ‘world’s most original voices’ set out to find a ‘Third Way’ as an alternative to competing models of capitalism and communism in postwar France. As indicated on the book’s stylish front cover, these voices belonged to such figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Albert Camus, and Arthur Koestler along with a cast of extras that rival in number those of Marcel Carné’s classic Les enfants du paradis (1945), one of the many films Poirier discusses along the way. A former history student, Poirier certainly understands the importance of context. Part One explores how our leads experienced World War II and the Occupation, essential, she argues, for understanding their ‘unquenchable thirst for freedom in every aspect of their lives’. Part Two charts that search for freedom as Beauvoir and Co. renounce the complacency of the past and the conventions that shaped it. Politics, jazz, lectures, poetry, passionate love affairs, and alcohol-fuelled all-nighters display in Part Three the ideas and lifestyle that put the Left Bank on the world’s cultural map, attracting from across the Atlantic such writers as Richard Wright and Norman Mailer, as well as (concerned) economic assistance in the form of the Marshall Plan. Waves of ‘intellectual’ tourists soon followed, the men among them sprouting appropriately existentialist beards (‘awfully ugly!’ observed Beauvoir). But tourists soon outnumbered existentialists. As Sartre’s new political party collapsed, the next generation shifted across the Seine, and the Left Bank’s stalwarts began to depart, it seemed that its moment had passed. The book ends abruptly with Beauvoir contemplating Jean Monnet’s proposal for a United Europe. In her introduction, Poirier appears to set herself up against Anglo-American historian Tony Judt, who, in his 2011 book, Past Imperfect: French intellectuals, 1944–1956, asked why these intellectuals who had so much power to change the world failed to do so. Rather than offer an answer, Poirier is content to document this ‘post-war Parisian intellectual irresponsibility’ through ‘a reconstruction, a collage of images, a kaleidoscope of destinies’. Crammed with detail and anecdotes, there is little explanation or analysis, only page after page of Adventures in LeftBankland. Poirier may not have paused to consider how (in)digestible this is for the reader: opening the book at random, you might find on one page alone

Saul Bellow, Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brâncuşi, Ellsworth Kelly, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Georges Braque, and a plethora of French place names. Inevitably, there is much repetition. The unasked question that permeates this dense narrative is why the idea of Paris, or rather of this particular, time-bound idea of Paris, still fascinates us so. Is it because it offers a dream of an alternative existence in an alternative time, where life is somehow better, more cultured, experienced more deeply (a theme explored through a different decade in Woody Allen’s, Midnight in Paris [2011])? Its appeal could also have something to do with the lack of responsibility its intellectuals and artists enjoyed: Sartre, for example, did his best never to own anything, while Beauvoir for years resisted living anywhere but in a hotel. All attempted to avoid the strictures of traditional family life. Poirier is at her sharpest when identifying what this meant for some of the women involved: being cheated on, ignored, humiliated, and abused, they provided, she suggests, ample inspiration for Beauvoir’s worldshaking 1949 work Le deuxième sexe. Yet for all her vivid storytelling, Poirier’s Paris is strangely insular. Grim weather and severe food rationing occasionally intervene to temper the adventure, but it’s all presented in a way that makes life in Left Bank Paris seem, in a somewhat British manner, jolly good fun. We rarely discover what, say, ordinary Parisians made of the Left Bank set, or indeed make of them today. Poirier might have found in Left Bank an explanation for the postwar paralysis that, in many ways, still grips contemporary France, but without any sort of argument, she instead describes a Paris sealed both in the past and in the imagination. g

Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at the Australian National University.

Endless wonder Paul Humphries THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2018

edited by John Pickrell

NewSouth $29.99 pb, 302 pp, 9781742235882

first encountered Stephen Jay Gould when I happened on one of his books in a bookshop during my late teens. Its unusual title, The Panda’s Thumb, caught my eye. The lead article channelled Charles Darwin’s approach to understanding the natural world, not through looking at perfect adaptations to the environment but through recognising that nature works with what it has, often inelegantly and always surprisingly. It was the perfect foil for creationist bunkum and appealed to the evolving sceptic in me. Gould’s writing opened up a complex, fascinating natural world, one that promised an endless source of wonder. The type of writing epitomised by Gould (who died in 2002) – accessible, intelligent, and entertaining – has inspired generations, and, I am glad to say, continues today in the likes of The Best Australian Science Writing 2018, edited by John Pickrell. The latest compilation of recent popular science writing, it showcases advancements in research but also highlights the importance of fundamental concepts championed by writers like Gould. The compilation considers an assortment of topics in several forms – poems, short pieces, longer essays, book chapters – originating from sources including the ABC, Cosmos Magazine, New Scientist, The Monthly, various Australian newspapers, and a few online magazines. As Pickrell points out, physics and mathematics are featured topics in this year’s edition. Being an ecologist, I approached these with a little apprehension. My fears were quickly allayed by the quality and clarity of the writing. I was especially taken by Margaret Wertheim’s fascinating piece on dimensions, in which she elegantly describes how the universe may comprise eleven

dimensions or perhaps many more. To be honest, my head started spinning at one stage, but Wertheim’s considered prose managed to reduce it to a mere rocking from side to side. Rod Taylor’s short, humorous thought-game about travelling through a hole in the centre of the earth (don’t try it!) proved that complicated physical and mathematical concepts can be a lot of fun. Richard Guilliatt’s profile of physicist and Australian of the Year Michelle Simmons (who wrote the book’s foreword) taught me, among other things, that great things are often done by the humblest people. Pleasingly, many articles deal with environmental issues: the seriously worrying loss of Tasmanian kelp beds; how volcanic eruptions changed the climate and reduced the flow of rivers in Ancient Egypt, causing conflict; the microflora and -fauna of Parisian street gutters; and how Melissa Ashley learned the process of stuffing birds in an attempt to engage with the ornithologist and artist Elizabeth Gould. Ben Walter’s lyrical article on visiting Tasmania’s Tarkine forest to understand the role of climate change in altering fire regimes was refreshing. It presented an honest reflection of the complexity of environmental issues: causes are not simple, and neither are solutions. I loved Rick Shine’s ‘A new toolkit for fighting the toad’, which enthusiastically described key events in the discovery of the Achilles heel of the amphibian we love to hate. I am often frustrated by the dominance of medicine in science media reports in Australia. Sometimes it seems as if the only science of any note is the latest cancer drug or a new superfood. So it was a relief to have relatively few of these in The Best Australian Science Writing 2018. The ones there bucked my preconceptions: they are well-written, engaging, and deep. Carl Smith’s description of the bionic body-part wave that is set to break – in a good way – was inspiring, as was Michael Slezak’s revelation about how former Australian chief scientist Ian Chubb is personally benefiting from some of the pioneering research on immunotherapy. Jo Chandler’s extensive coverage of the fight against polio in Nigeria in the face HISTORY

of terrorism was scary but inspiring. Elizabeth Finkel helped me to navigate the labyrinth that is medical cannabis. Special mention must go to federal parliamentarian Andrew Leigh for his fascinating history of how randomised medical trials literally save lives. I now have a much greater respect for placebos than I had before. Leigh claims that he lives his life following meta-studies that have truly tested the effects of drugs and procedures. The format of The Best Australian Science Writing can be frustrating: with a little tweaking, its reach and longevity might be extended. Many of the contributions, when originally published, were illustrated, which enriches any article on science. For example, Robyn Arianrhod’s article, ‘The origins of entanglement’, was first published in Cosmos Magazine (as ‘Einstein, Bohr and the origins of entanglement’) and carried a wonderful photograph of physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein at the 1927 Solvay Congress in Brussels. In the anthology we simply get this text: ‘Bohr looks thoughtful, hand on his chin, while Einstein is leaning back looking relaxed and dreamy.’ Strangely, only Wertheim’s piece is illustrated. Articles might also be organised thematically, with a one-sentence description of each article beneath the sometimes obscure titles. Perhaps the omission of these components saves costs, but I am all for anything that brings excellent popular science writing like this to a wider audience. g

Paul Humphries lectures in ecology and animal diversity and studies the ecology of rivers at Charles Sturt University. 58 DECEMBER 2018

Living with fire

Approaching fire from a different timescale

Billy Griffiths BURNING PLANET: THE STORY OF FIRE THROUGH TIME by Andrew C. Scott

Oxford University Press, $40.95 hb, 256 pp, 9780198734840

few years ago I walked through a burning landscape with a young archaeobotanist, Xavier. We were in Arnhem Land, and the local Indigenous landowners had lit a low-intensity fire – a cool burn – to encourage new growth and reduce the fuel load around nearby settlements. The newly blackened landscape looked clean, even beautiful. As the smoke spiralled lazily around us, Xavier pointed out details and patterns in the charred vegetation, explaining what they revealed about the fire history of the landscape. We paused in front of a fallen eucalypt, its blackened trunk glistening with grids of charcoal. Under a microscope, these cube-like chunks can be read for information about the species of the tree, when it was seeded, and the intensity of the fire that consumed it. In an ancient campsite, charcoal residue gives us an insight into the role of fire in past societies: how people have harnessed flame over millennia. Geologist and palaeobotanist Andrew C. Scott shares this fascination with charcoal – indeed, he is one of the world’s leading charcoal specialists – but he approaches fire from a very different timescale. His new book, Burning Planet: The story of fire through time, begins with the evolution of the first vascular land plants – or fuel – during the Silurian Period, some 420 million years ago. He charts the explosion of plant biodiversity in the Carboniferous Period, 359–299 million years ago, when fire was everpresent and the trees mainly responsible for today’s coal evolved. Some one hundred and forty million years ago, flowering plants appeared, adding vibrant colour to the Earth of the Lower Cretaceous, and, from thirty

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million years ago, grasses evolved and diversified. In his sweep of deep time, Scott looks at the role of fire in the past five massextinction events, but he doesn’t touch on the idea of a human-induced ‘sixth extinction’. He acknowledges the grim realities of anthropogenic global warming, but his main focus is on the world before people. He wants to understand the ‘fundamental elements of fuel, heat, and oxygen on geological timescales’. Humans don’t enter his story until the last thirty pages of the book. Scott’s relationship with fire began in the early 1970s, when, as a graduate student, he embarked on a series of experiments comparing fusain (a fossil material) with modern charcoal. He charred conifer leaves in his mother’s oven, made charcoal in a garden bonfire, and then compared these samples with fusain under a microscope. His study of their cell structures revealed that they were essentially the same material: fusain was fossil charcoal. It was a major breakthrough in palaeobotany and unexpectedly propelled Scott into a career devoted to fire. With Burning Planet, he seeks to synthesise his life’s work. The book is global in scope and directed towards a lay audience. Scott writes clearly and with great enthusiasm for his subject matter, although the narrative occasionally reads like a textbook – ‘Charcoal 101’. It is richly illustrated, with evocative reconstructions of past landscapes, vivid photos of bush fires, and striking ‘micrographs’ of charcoalified plants. The binding thread of Burning Planet is the anecdotal account of Scott’s research career, which has unfolded at a time of great change in his discipline.

The catalyst for these advances, he explains, has been the development of real-time satellite imaging: ‘It is only when we see images … from space that we realize the scope and scale of wildfire on Earth.’ Even political boundaries, such as the Sino-Russian border (where two fire regimes meet), are decipherable from space. Satellites help track plumes of smoke from the peat fires of Indonesia as they merge and drift northwards towards Singapore and Malaysia. They also allow daily monitoring of the main source of ignition: lightning. There are roughly eight million lightning strikes every day on Earth. Some of these strikes are preserved in the geological record, where the heat of the lightning has melted grains of sand into fossilised tubes. An event that lasted an instant has marked the Isle of Arran for the past 260 million years. Scott’s journey into deep time serves to illustrate his central argument: that fire is a force of nature. The planet has been burning for hundreds of millions of years. All plants and animals evolved with fire, and many need it to spread, survive, and reproduce. It is impossible to remove fire from the landscape: ‘we have to learn to live with fire’. Humans, of course, have also evolved with fire. Over the past two million years, the Homo genus has learnt to use fire for cooking, hunting, land management, and myriad social, cultural, and political purposes. Fire has changed our biology, and people have used fire to transform ecosystems and fire regimes. Scott acknowledges that the word ‘natural’ seems unsuitable when referring to ‘a habitat that has been managed by humans for hundreds or even thousands of years’. But sadly he does not explore Indigenous burning in any great depth.The cultural burns that

Deer taking refuge in a river during a wildfire in North America

Xavier and I observed in Arnhem Land lie outside his narrative, as does the humanist perspective that historian Stephen J. Pyne brings to his fire histories. Scott finishes by reflecting on the future of fire in an increasingly globalised world, and especially the ecological consequences of invasive plants. The introduction of eucalypts to Portugal, for example, has altered the local fire system. Eucalypts, which have evolved to burn, fuel more severe and intense fires that have spread into native vegetation and urban areas with disastrous consequences. Scott warns that ‘with climate and vegetational changes, fire may become a problem where it was not in the recent historical past’. He even worries about fires in his home county of Surrey in the United Kingdom: a densely populated, forested area with regular controlled surface fires. ‘Imagine the havoc if any of these fires should become major crown fires,’ he exclaims. ‘Can we plan ahead?’

Scott touches on the toll of fire on communities – ‘amply illustrated by the Black Saturday wildfires of 2009 in Victoria’ – and laments that ‘there still appears to be little general understanding of wildfire’. But he hesitates to be too explicit in his prescriptions, instead weighing up the evidence with detached concern. On the question of prescribed burning in heathlands, for example, he writes that ‘this is a complex issue with no completely right or wrong answer’. There is something refreshing, albeit academic, about this approach. Scott is, at heart, a scientist. He is diligent about his references, cautious in his interpretations, and explicit about his caveats. He is seeking to share with others his fascination with fire, as well as his fears for the future of this burning planet. g Billy Griffiths is a historian and research fellow at Deakin University. His latest book, Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia (Black Inc., 2018), is now available as an audiobook.

ENVIRONMENT

The feeling of what happens A lucid investigation of consciousness

Nick Haslam OUT OF MY HEAD: ON THE TRAIL OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Tim Parks Harvill Secker, $35 hb, 312 pp, 9781911215714

ow does consciousness, the feeling of what happens, emerge from the object that Tim Parks describes in this engaging book as ‘a gruesome pinkish grey, vaguely intestinal lump’? Is mind identical with brain, is it secreted by it in some fashion, or does it, as some philosophers suggest, mysteriously ‘supervene’ on neural processes? Dualism is deeply unfashionable, and the rise of brain science has made materialism the new common sense, but how can the wisps of subjective experience be tethered to the electrochemical fizz inside our skulls? These questions define the mission of the many psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who study consciousness, but the prospect of a mutually satisfying answer continues to recede into the future. Parks, a celebrated English novelist and chronicler of expatriate life in Italy, has entered the fray with a lucid investigation into the nature of experience and its grounding in the brain. His book is the product of a fellowship that brought him and other eminent humanists into contact with German scientists in the hope of sparking some deep, boundary-dissolving insights. Parks comes to the challenge with some strong preconceptions. He is critical of what he sees as the reductive imperialism of neuroscientific explanation, ‘the notion that the brain is the be all and end all’. He especially objects to the orthodox neuroscientific view that consciousness resides in the brain. The mainstream position within the cognitive sciences that experience derives from mental representations ‘in the head’ is unsatisfying and profoundly wrong to him, not least because our subjective 60 DECEMBER 2018

perceptions feel as if they are outside us, in and of the external world. There is, he writes, ‘a seamless oneness of object and experience’. Parks’s reservations about the ‘internalist’ view on consciousness are shared by a group of dissident thinkers who sometimes characterise themselves as studying ‘4E cognition’. On this view, consciousness and mind are enacted through active engagement with the world, embedded in physical interactions with the environment, extended into that environment, and embodied in our physical being beyond the brain. The rise of the 4E approach reflects a growing frustration with a computational understanding of mind as software that operates on representations somehow generated by the brain’s jellied hardware. To many, that understanding fails to do justice to the richness of experience and our sense that the mind is in the world, rather than the world merely being represented in the mind. Parks goes further, however. He favours the radical ‘Spread Mind’ approach of Italian roboticist and philosopher Riccardo Manzotti. To Manzotti, ‘experience is made possible by the meeting of perceptive system and the world, but actually located at the object perceived, identical with it even’. The identity of object and experience is a leap too far for most philosophers, but to Parks it has a ‘strange obviousness’. The Spread Mind view encounters some notable problems accounting for experiences where no object is present, such as dreams, hallucinations, and even memories, and the delayed experience or deferred perception explanations it offers are intriguing if not entirely persua-

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sive. It must be said that although Parks likens him without embarrassment to Galileo, Manzotti’s paradigm-smashing work has yet to shake the foundations of consciousness studies, and its closeness to mysticism makes that outcome unlikely. Many readers will delight in Parks’s vivid rendering of complex ideas. He has a masterful capacity to entertain theories of the nature of consciousness not as abstract objects of academic scrutiny but as living concerns. These concerns illuminate from within his personal reflections on meditation, love, age, and dreaming. They also give a special resonance to his discussions of Buddhism and of language, which he presents as primarily responsible for the illusion that consciousness is internal. Language privileges thought over perception, and ‘it is only in language [italics his] that objects and senses are ever really separate’. The same passion for revealing the truth of subjective feeling imparts a sharp edge to Parks’s interviews with his scientific interlocutors. These discussions tend to disappoint him, and he often seems dismayed that the authorities fail to see the limitations of their work with the clarity that he does or to share his convictions about what matters. All the same, his pursuit of the essence of consciousness is very much a shared and interactive process, propelled by his hungry curiosity, and it gives the work the narrative momentum that brain books often lack. Even so, as transporting as the book is as a record of Parks’s enquiries, it is not entirely satisfying as an explora-

tion of the radical understanding of consciousness that sparked it. Manzotti is a shadowy presence throughout, occasionally glossed but rarely quoted. The Spread Mind theory remains rather elusive and indirectly apprehended as a result, as if handed down on stone tablets, and Parks is sensitive to the anticipated criticism that he, a layman, is somehow captivated by a wrongheaded muse. Just as Manzotti’s voice is largely absent, so too are the voices of thinkers who disagree with him. Parks interviews three highly regarded scientists during his time in Heidelberg, but consciousness is not a primary concern for two of them – one studies infant cognition, the other neuro-

transmission in the mouse brain – and the third does not subscribe to the ‘consciousness in the head’ cognitivist view that Manzotti and Parks most forcefully attack. A more direct confrontation with intelligent defenders of the mainstream neuroscientific position on consciousness might have given the book more intellectual heft and made it less an exercise in elegant shadowboxing. g Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Graduate) at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is An Introduction to Personality, Individual Differences and Intelligence (Sage Publishing, 2017).

‘No longer a place apart’ A new history of the University of Melbourne

Kate Murphy SHIFTING THE BOUNDARIES: THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE 1975–2015 by Carolyn Rasmussen Miegunyah Press, $49.99 hb, 411 pp, 9780522872460

uring the 1960s and 1970s, student radicals protested that their places of learning were getting too close to industry and government. In 1970, Monash University students occupied the university’s Careers and Appointments Office to oppose the use of the university as a recruiting ground for companies profiting from the Vietnam War, and to protest its outreach to industry in the ill-fated Monash University Scientific and Industrial Complex. Universities could not pretend to be dedicated to truth and free enquiry, students argued, while operating hand in glove with capitalism and the ‘military-industrial complex’ that they ought to be critiquing. Despite the concerns of student activists, university administrators were similarly keen to preserve a traditional understanding of their institutions as

being ‘primarily devoted to extending and deepening human understanding’, in the words of Stefan Collini in his What Are Universities For? (2012). David Derham, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne from 1968 to 1982, although influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s relatively utilitarian vision of the modern university as a training ground for good citizenship, wasn’t much concerned with making a case for how the university could contribute to economic growth or other ‘practical’ applications of knowledge. For Derham, intrinsic dividends flowed to the community from having the university in its midst, but its primary commitment was to a higher purpose. In the twenty-first-century Australian university, that sentiment has been significantly revised. The University of Melbourne’s strategic plan, Growing

Esteem 2015–2020, reflects its vision of being ‘deeply connected’ with business, government, and community. ‘Engagement’ is prioritised as ‘the lens through which we view all of our activities’ and ‘an integral part of the university mission’. Carolyn Rasmussen’s earlier history of the university from 1935 to 1975, co-authored with John Poynter, was titled – slightly inconveniently for the university – A Place Apart (1996). (The current strategic plan declares that ‘We are no longer a place apart’.) Happily, Rasmussen was invited back regardless, her new work updating the story, giving prominence to the concept of engagement as it emerged, though slowly, from the 1960s. Shifting the Boundaries traces the ways in which change, both within and outside the university, was reflected in the evolution of what ‘engagement’ meant, from a narrow focus on alumni to today’s vociferous outwards-facing activity in the realms of culture, online learning, and commercial partnerships. This history takes the story to 2015, covering: the end of the golden age of public funding; the introduction of the Unified National System of Higher Education by the Hawke government in the late 1980s and the managerialism (and doubling of enrolments at Melbourne) that came with it; the ill-fated Melbourne Private venture and related commercialisation in the lean Howard years; and the implementation of the ‘Melbourne Model’ curriculum that has reshaped the university since 2008. Rasmussen structures her narrative by ‘pausing’ at decade-long intervals (the first in 1975) to reflect on the foregoing decade under four headings: campus, students and staff, governance, and engagement. This structure allows a self-contained consideration of each period within its various contexts (political, pedagogical, technological). It also decentres the role of vice-chancellors. As Rasmussen notes, universities are much more than their leaders, even if, over this period, their influence became more pronounced. The first section of each chapter attends to the changing physical infrastructure of the campus. Space has important stories to tell, about pedagogical change, for instance, as demonstrated in the PSYCHOLOGY

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62 DECEM B E R Impact 2018 AUSTRALIAN Real Authors, Real

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new Teaching and Learning building at my own institution, designed to discourage teacher-focused lectures and facilitate student-centred, collaborative, ‘active’ learning. In the academic mindset of the 1960s, a high failure rate for students was an indicator of high standards. (There was some public disquiet when rabble-rousing student journalist Pete

As Rasmussen notes, universities are much more than their leaders Steedman gained entry to the university in 1967 in order to edit Farrago, despite having failed at Monash – Monash!). The new view, evolving over the following decades, was that teaching quality was an important determinant of student success. In the first few decades of Rasmussen’s story, complaints about lecturers (some merely dull and a few ‘barely sober’) are omnipresent. Efforts to improve teaching, including curriculum reform and student evaluation of courses, resulted in generally high levels of student satisfaction by the 1990s, in line with national trends. While Rasmussen pays close attention to changes in the secondary school environment, critical to a full understanding of how students encountered university over time, many characteristics of the student experience emerge as perennial, despite the university’s pivot to increased student-centredness (partly a product of their repositioning as consumers in the emergent neoliberal climate). The impersonality of the university, large class sizes, and limited access to academic staff (even in the imagined golden age of the 1960s and 1970s) echo across the decades covered in this book. More specific to the University of Melbourne is the alienation experienced by students who are not products of Victoria’s more prestigious private schools. (My mother, arriving straight from Sunshine West High in 1968, was so cowed by the self-confidence of her privileged peers at Melbourne that she claims to have not uttered a word in tutorials during her entire degree.) All Melbourne’s vice-chancellors

since 1975 have subscribed to some version of the old idea of the university, viewing their task as being to secure its economic independence so that it may pursue its own destiny; but achieving this in a period of massive growth in size and complexity required new governance models at odds with the idea of the university as a collegial community. As former Provost Peter McPhee reflects in his afterword, devolved management can bring a loss of coherence, but strong central leadership comes at the cost of staff disempowerment. Many academics are wearied by the bureaucratic weight of mass institutions trying to impose a ‘university mind’. Rasmussen offers a perceptive account of the development, with a University of Melbourne-specific flavour, of a range of challenges familiar to those working in universities today: the need to balance public accountability with perceptions of greater surveillance; misunderstanding between staff and increasingly distant administrations; the tension between the research imperative and

undergraduate teaching responsibilities; under-resourcing of teaching; and the pressure for one’s research to be externally funded. University histories have been abundant in recent years, especially from the older sandstones, several of which (including Melbourne) have established academic units dedicated to the history of their institutions. This is to be welcomed, especially when the resultant histories, like this one, both avoid congratulatory narratives and invite self-reflection. This book will be of interest to Melbourne graduates and other members of the university community, as well as to those generally interested in Australia’s second-oldest university and how it weathered, with considerable agility, the higher education storms that blew in from the mid-1970s. g Kate Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at Monash University. She is currently researching Australian student activism in the 1960s and 1970s. ❖

Might and maps

A narrative of early America and George Washington

Josh Specht THE INDIAN WORLD OF GEORGE WASHINGTON: THE FIRST PRESIDENT, THE FIRST AMERICANS, AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATION by Colin G. Calloway Oxford University Press, $53.95 hb, 640 pp, 9780190652166

s a young man, George Washington (1732–99) worked as a surveyor. Looking at a landscape, he could plan its division into orderly tracts. These skills would prove useful when he became the first president of the United States in April 1789. At the time, Americans widely believed that new territory was vital to securing ongoing independence, in large part because small parcels of land could be sold to European settlers, expanding the

American polity and helping pay down crushing Revolutionary War debts. As a result, President Washington made the fledgling country’s territorial expansion his chief focus. It was a perfect fit between man and mission, between a surveyor and a country that would grow from a set of colonies perched on the east coast of North America to a continent-spanning empire. Of course, this growth was far from inevitable. What would become the United States was E D U C AT I O N

already inhabited by as many as a million American Indians, and expanding west beyond the Appalachian mountains would be far messier than reorganising a landscape along a surveyor’s grid. Colin G. Calloway’s The Indian World of George Washington is a narrative of early America told through the biography of its most influential person. Interaction with American Indians, as allies and enemies, in diplomatic negotiations and on the battlefield, was at the centre of Washington’s life. So, too, was this interaction at the heart of the story of early America. Early in Calloway’s book, Washington, as well as the American colonies more broadly,

President Washington made the fledgling country’s territorial expansion his chief focus are in over their heads when it comes to American Indian geopolitics. A young George Washington, tasked with his first real military responsibility, is manipulated by an Iroquois leader named Tanaghrisson into a conflict with French forces that would help spark the globe-spanning Seven Years’ War (the North American theatre of the conflict was known as the French and Indian War). Rival American Indian factions, seeking their own security by pitting land-hungry European powers against one another, sided with either the British or French. Ensuing Indian raids would reveal colonists’ vulnerability, but also unite them in a shared fear of Indian might as well as a collective desire for reprisal. By the time of the American Revolution, we find Washington and much of the colonial élite angry about crown policies limiting settlement of lands in which this élite was heavily invested. In the Revolution’s aftermath, the United States was free to expand without European influence. Washington hoped that American Indians would freely sell their land and cheerily adopt ‘civilised’ ways of life, but there was no doubt that the United States would get the land, either by sale or by force. Over the course of his life, Wash64 DECEMBER 2018

ington’s views about American Indians changed little. As a young soldier, he was unimpressed by seemingly capricious Indian allies but excited about the possibilities of Indian land. Early failures, including his disastrous relationship with Tanaghrisson, gave Washington a bit more experience dealing with American Indians, but his overall views changed little. What did change for both Washington and the United States, though, was the ability to act on these views. As Calloway explains, in his early life Washington ‘addressed Indians as brothers and negotiated the terms of his relationship with them; as President, he addressed them as children and mandated policies for them’. Meanwhile, the United States evolved from a settler-colonial society ‘held back by Indian power and anxious for Indian allies to an imperial republic that was on the move, dismantling Indian country to create American property, and dismantling Indian ways of life to make way for American civilization’. There are many fascinating stories and details in Calloway’s book. For instance, in the 1790s the streets of then-capital Philadelphia were filled with rival American Indian delegations. At times, however, these details obscure Calloway’s larger point. Tales of state dinners with Cherokee diplomats certainly challenge our view of early American politics, but by the end of the book I was unsure how diplomacy related to the inexorable loss of Indian land. Similarly, Washington’s relationship with squatters – as a land speculator and as a president – looms large in the story. Both parties needed each other: squatters to do the day-today dirty work of dispossession and settlement, and élites to occasionally bring the full might of the American state onto intractable Indians. Calloway observes that, once in power, Washington ended up dealing with frontier areas in much the same way as the British crown (managing pioneers and squatters with temporary settlement boundaries), but the connection of this observation to the broader process of settler-colonialism is unclear. Calloway’s book persuasively shows that American Indians were at the cen-

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tre of Washington’s life and the early American world. It is an account that tells us a lot about territorial expansion and settler-colonial violence in early American history. Yet at times, maintaining a simultaneous story of Washington as person and Washington as symbol of broader American development becomes too much to manage. The closing chapters of the book provide a twist to the story of George Washington, land speculator. As it turns out, Washington never really profited from his schemes. Failed or inconclusive lawsuits against squatters and letters to cash-strapped relatives about his own financial woes highlight that there was more to land than deeds or maps. The financial struggles of Washington the man reveal the limits of Washington the symbol. Now that Calloway has shown us that American Indians and their land were central to the story of early America, perhaps we need to look to the squatters, and their relationship with both American Indians and political élites, to fully understand the violent process by which the United States went from land ownership on paper to land ownership on the ground. g

Josh Specht teaches American history at Monash University. His first book, Red Meat Republic: A hoof-to-table history of how beef changed America, is due in April 2019, from Princeton University Press. ❖

Whatever happens, don’t lose Michael Sexton STERN JUSTICE: THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF AUSTRALIA, JAPAN AND THE PACIFIC WAR CRIMES TRIALS

by Adam Wakeling

Viking $34.99 pb, 390 pp, 9780143793335

ustice or vengeance? This is always the question raised by war crimes trials, although it might be noted that they are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Some were proposed at the end of the Great War but never eventuated. The original and best known is, of course, Nuremberg at the end of World War II. Over the decades, there have been various prosecutions by the International Criminal Court, particularly concerning events in the Balkans in the 1990s, and by some one-off tribunals, such as in relation to the killings in Rwanda in 1994. This book provides an exhaustive but highly readable account of the Tokyo trial of 1946–48, about which very little has been written in comparison with Nuremberg and the other trials, about which almost nothing has been published, conducted by the Allies at various locations in the Pacific region between late 1945 and mid-1951. The author, himself a lawyer, explains that the charges fell into three categories: starting wars in violation of international treaties, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity. All the charges in the first category were heard by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East sitting in Tokyo and presided over by Sir William Webb, Chief Justice of the Queensland Supreme Court. The defendants came from the military and the bureaucracy, and the wars in question were those commenced by Japan against Manchuria in 1931, China in 1937, and the United States in 1941. The twenty-five

defendants argued that the charges disclosed no crimes known to international law and that, in any event, the wars had been started in Japan’s selfdefence. After proceedings lasting two and a half years, all the defendants were convicted, with seven being sentenced to death. Of the eleven judges on the tribunal, however, three dissented, with one, Justice Radhabinod Pal from India, simply rejecting the right of the Allies to conduct the trial at all and pointing to their use of the atomic bomb on Japanese civilians as conduct just as criminal. Some of the Tokyo defendants were also convicted on charges in the second and third categories, largely arising from the Japanese capture of Nanking in 1937, when between 100,000 and 300,000 Chinese were killed and raped, and the use of prisoners of war and native labourers on the Burma railway, where more than 12,000 POWs and between 42,000 and 74,000 of the local workers died. Of the various trials conducted by the Allies in the Pacific region, all for second and third category offences, Australia held 294 hearings, all carried out by military courts, which resulted in 138 executions and prison sentences of varying lengths. By 1953, however, all those sentenced to prison terms had been returned to Japan and most were released by 1957. Many of these trials concerned the treatment of POWs. The samurai code of bushido, which had come to influence the Japanese military in the 1930s, supposedly dictated death before surrender, making prisoners a subject of contempt to their captors. Almost half the Australian deaths in the Pacific area – 8,000 men and women – died as POWs. The book uses as a case study the events at Sandakan in North Borneo where, out of 2,000 Australian and 750 British POWs, there were six survivors. One of the Japanese convicted over Sandakan was cynically unrepentant: ‘Whatever happens during a war, do not lose.’ As the author notes, the Japanese as a whole seemed puzzled by the trials and had little sense of national guilt over the events of the war. Towards the end of the book, the author takes up the question of the morality of these and other war crimes trials. It is certainly open to point to

mass killings of civilians by the Allies at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But it would be hard to deny that there was a difference overall between the way the war was conducted by the Allies as opposed to the Germans and Japanese, who, it can be said, also initiated the conflict. Some of those who objected to the trial process did so not because they considered that the defendants did not deserve punishment but because it was done under a cloak of legality. Chief Justice Harlan Stone of the United States Supreme Court wrote privately about his fellow Justice Robert Jackson, who had taken leave from the court to lead the prosecution team at Nuremberg: ‘I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretence that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.’ Does this mean that summary execution of those considered to have committed war crimes is a better alternative? Overall, Wakeling believes that the Tokyo trial and the other hearings carried out in the Pacific region served the useful purpose of identifying the conduct of those prosecuted for the community in countries like Australia and had an element of fairness that would have been lacking in summary executions. This is the conventional view of war crimes trials, but their morality and utility will continue to be the subject of ongoing debate. g

Michael Sexton has, since 1998, been solicitor general for New South Wales. He is co-author of a text on defamation law and the author of several books on Australian politics and history. HISTORY

with

Why do you write?

Anne Summers

I have things I want to say and I am bold enough to hope that people may be interested in these things, and what I think of them.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

My dreams are extremely vivid, often upsetting, usually in full colour, but not always able to be summoned back to consciousness the next day. Which may not be a bad thing.

Where are you happiest?

Near water – preferably the ocean, though I will settle for a river. I don’t like lakes: I want my water to move.

What is your favourite film?

It used to be Jules et Jim. At the moment, for what are no doubt obvious reasons, it’s All the President’s Men. But then again, it’s hard to go past All About Eve.

And your favourite book?

Our reading needs change, and the books we revisit constantly grow in number, but if I must choose, I will nominate Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) for the way it forced me to confront the ugly fact that the works of so many of the (male) writers I admired – specifically Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller – were predicated on a deep hatred of women. This changed me forever.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine. Vivienne Westwood, Angela Merkel, Vera Brittain.

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

‘Then’ when used to denote a position once occupied by a person, as in ‘the then Prime Minister’. It is utterly redundant to insert this qualifier. It ought to be totally obvious from the writing that the person was then and is not now. Let’s bring back ‘sheila’. So much better than ‘chicks’ and other terms used today to talk about women.

Who is your favourite author? Joan Didion.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine? Edith Campbell Berry.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

I like non-fiction writers to have clarity about their topic and be imaginative in their approach, to whatever the subject is. I like fiction to be confronting in its creativity 66 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

and ambitious in its narrative reach.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa. I guess everyone goes through their Heathcliff phase.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

All my life I have craved to write full-time, to devote myself fully to the book or whatever it is that I am working on. I have never managed to do this; I keep being tugged in other directions. My whole life has been a struggle between my desire to observe, and to chronicle, the world and the need I feel to engage and to act to change it. This activism is not necessarily incompatible with writing, but it does slow me down. I have never managed to achieve equilibrium between these two desires; they compete for priority, and I expect they always will.

How do you regard publishers? Necessary.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

In Australia, criticism tends to be rather timid. In our small pond, many book reviewers pull their punches. It is rare to see tough appraisals and even rarer to read the lengthy, informed, critical engagement with a writer or a theme that requires time, knowledge – and courage.

And writers’ festivals?

I happen to like festivals, perhaps because my other half – Chip Rolley – is a festival director. I appreciate the effort that goes into creating this unique form of literary engagement which is part-performance, part-discussion, and fully about books, writing, and the subjects that engross us.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

I do. And I don’t believe writers who say they don’t. All of us want to know what people think of our work, and reviews are part of that appraisal. Nowadays, of course, there are so many other channels for people to express their opinions. Book reviewers no longer have the field to themselves.

Are artists valued in our society?

Artists and writers are celebrated and sometimes admired, but they are not appreciated.

What are you working on now?

I am thinking about what to do next. It may take some time.

Anne Summers’s latest book, the memoir Unfettered and Alive (Allen & Unwin, 2018), is reviewed on page 12.

(Photograph by Kevin McDermott)

Page OPEN POpen AGE

ABR Arts

Dennis Altman on Boy Erased Theatre

A Cheery Soul Ian Dickson

Opera

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Michael Shmith

Theatre

Twelfth Night Tim Byrne

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. Some reviews in the print edition are edited for length. ABR ARTS

A Cheery Soul 

Ian Dickson

his reviewer has the currently unfashionable opinion, that Patrick White, like Henry James, was a novelist and short story writer of genius who had an unfortunate obsession with the stage. In the 1960s, the nascent Adelaide Festival produced the one play of his that deserves repetition, The Season at Sarsaparilla (1962). Its success motivated him to write another couple, one of which was A Cheery Soul, which John Sumner directed for the Union Theatre Repertory Company in 1963. More unfortunately, towards the end of his career he was encouraged to write plays of an increasingly third-rate standard, which diverted him from what could have been his final masterpiece, the novel The Hanging Garden.

A Cheery Soul started life as a short story based on an irritating neighbour of White’s who harassed the denizens of Castle Hill, the then outer-Sydney suburb to which White and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, had condemned themselves in the 1950s. White transmogrified his neighbour into Miss Docker, whose relentless compulsion to do good temporarily shatters the lives of an uptight but loving couple, causes chaos in an old folks’ home, and destroys the life of the local vicar. What works in a short story – in particular, the rhythm of White’s prose – doesn’t transfer successfully to the stage. White’s dialogue veers from the arch to the mystifyingly mystical. A chorus, which has echoes of T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion (1939), also has the sort of voice-over effect adaptors use when they can think of no other way of getting across aspects of the original work. The first production was something of a disaster, and A Cheery Soul lay dormant until Jim Sharman revived it in 1979. Sharman realised that the only way to breathe life into this moribund piece was to jettison any attempt at realism and to make Miss Docker completely grotesque. Robyn Nevin, with all guns blazing and the most effective silent scream since Helene Weigel, duly obliged. Nevin’s Miss Docker had a terrifying vitality that contrasted with the pinched lives of her neighbours. At the play’s conclusion, when Miss Docker has been rejected not merely by her acquaintances but also by her God, Nevin exited with an unquenchable resilience, which echoed the final lines of the story. ‘Then the tears gushed out of Miss Docker’s eyes. It was the wind of

Nikki Shiels, Sarah Peirse and Tara Morice in A Cheery Soul (photograph by Daniel Boud) 68 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

course, the dust, the grit … She must not let on though. She was not the kind to spread despondency, encourage grief. Never, ever, ever, ever.’ Director Kip Williams is also determined to bring the audience to Miss Docker’s side. In his program notes, he says: ‘it’s very important to myself and the whole team that she’s not simply a figure of derision or a clown to laugh at’. Ironically, by emphasising her human qualities and having Sarah Peirse play her in a merely slightly exaggerated style, he loses the dynamism that is the only thing that makes Miss Docker almost admirable, and she remains merely a disruptive bore. Technically, Williams gives the play the works. Elizabeth Gadsby’s sets move seamlessly from suburban home, complete with the ubiquitous Hill’s Hoist to a decaying mansion, a bleak roadside, an almost empty church, and, finally, a windswept suburban street. Nick Schlieper’s lighting emphasises the overt theatricality of the play. In contrast to Williams’s recent production of Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui (1958), the video elements here are used effectively and with restraint. Only Clemence Williams’s too imposing and attention-grabbing music doesn’t quite work. The bemusing guest appearances of Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, presumably included to cover costume changes, had this reviewer scratching his head. Williams has picked himself a stalwart cast, and there are some stand-out performances. Peirse is always an interesting performer and, within the limits imposed on her by the script, she manages some trenchant moments, especially in her dealings with the Custances, the well-meaning couple who take her in during the play’s first act. Anita Hegh is both funny and sad as Mrs Custance, a warm, passionate woman shackled by the chains of suburban norms in 1960s Australia. Her relief when the tiresome old baggage is dispatched to the Sundown Home is the one genuinely joyous moment in the play. Tara Morice is both imperious and frail as Mrs Lillie, the once well-connected beauty who threw in her lot with a handsome ne’er-do-well and ended up first in a poky suburban house with a corrugated iron roof and finally in the musty embrace of the Sundown Home. But all the cast handle their multiple roles with aplomb. The sight of an imposing, frocked-up Bruce Spence made one long for his Lady Bracknell. It is essential for a healthy Australian theatre that what is now a sizeable reserve of plays is re-examined, and all praise for Kip Williams’s attempt to find a contemporary approach to A Cheery Soul. But could we move past White and re-explore Dorothy Hewett, perhaps, or Louis Nowra? g A Cheery Soul, written by Patrick White and directed by Kip Williams, is being performed at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House from 10 November to 15 December 2018.

Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the University of New South Wales.

Hedda 

Maggie Haining

ne of the quandaries facing contemporary adaptations of classics is the risk of the story being lost in a translation, which can isolate the work from the original culture and text. Melissa Bubnic’s reimagining of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (which had its première in Munich in 1891) runs no such risk. Directed by Paige Rattray, Hedda removes Ibsen’s characters from nineteenth-century Norway and the world of academia and situates them in present-day Gold Coast on the deck of a ‘McMansion’. Although Hedda retains the original characters’ names, the setting is about as far away from Ibsen as you can imagine. Hedda is the second play to be staged at the newly refurbished Bille Brown Theatre (I reviewed the first, Nearer the Gods, for ABR). Designer David Fleischer has set up the corner stage with two towering white walls, sparse white furniture, glass doors leading to a concealed inside space, and a barricade between the deck and an imaginary pool – features that are typical of a vapid Surfers Paradise mansion. Lighting designer Emma Valente bathes the white space in varying shades of day and night; the production ends with an impressive white-out effect. Along with Fleischer’s design, and the intermittent thumping of an electronic soundtrack from sound designer Kelly Ryall, these elements highlight the artifice of the space and the nature of the occupants within it. Bubnic’s depiction of the Gold Coast aesthetic – by no means sympathetic – plays into its reputation for crime, debauchery, and the tastelessness of the middleclass bogan. While the portrayal tends to rely on a (perhaps undeserved) stereotype, it captures the tension between social classes that Hedda Gabler is known for, to darkly comedic effect. Much of the comedy derives from the social rivalry between Hedda (raised by a wealthy Melbourne family) and the Gold Coast ‘family’ of the Tesmans – new money made from meth dealers and dubious real estate agents. But the contrast between Hedda and the Tesmans is not just played for a laugh at the expense of Queenslanders. The difference ABR ARTS

in décor, attire (Hedda always wears black, the others varying shades of colour), and even idle conversation is, for Hedda, the way in which she stakes her identity and authority within the family. As the consequences of her manipulative exploits unfold, Hedda revels in them, dominating the physical space around her as the stakes rise. One of the most alluring aspects of Hedda is the talented seven-strong cast, all of whom give layered performances. Almost immediately, Andrea Moor and Helen O’Leary (as Julia Tesman and Berta, respectively) had the audience in hysterics, playing the bogan aunts of Hedda’s new husband (and meth dealer) George Tesman ( Jason Klarwein). In a play where nearly everyone is a kind of monster, some of the tenderer and funnier moments were shared between aunt and nephew (Moor and Klarwein). But their amusing relationship does not detract from the impact of Klarwein’s portrayal of a proud, violent man. Jimi Bani (as Ejlert Lövborg) moves effortlessly between the comic, the absurd, the deranged. Bridie Carter (Thea Elvsted) brings a muchneeded sweetness and sympathy to the ‘family’, and plays the optimistic Thea with genuine and engaging passion, even in the face of graphic violence and self-destruction. Joss McWilliam is menacing but hilarious as the corrupt Brack. His scenes with Cormack are some of the funniest, and the most tense. Danielle Cormack as Hedda Gabler was always going to be the standout. An assured television actor (Rake, Wentworth), she is a natural fit for an iconic role such as Hedda Gabler. Cormack – mesmerising and commanding – reveals the complexity of her character through her dynamic expressions and physicality; at times she stalks around the stage as if on a catwalk. Cormack and McWilliam in particular have a flawless way of shifting between intimidating and humorous moments in order to conceal their motives. Hedda can be considered a dark comedy, but both actors enact their more playful moments with an undercurrent of danger and menace. This renders the more graphic scenes all the more effective. Hedda may have a polarising effect on audiences, particularly among those expecting something closer to Ibsen’s text. Some of the depictions of violence were so explicit they evoked audible revulsion from audience members. For me, these depictions were not a case of violence for the sake of violence. The impact of a powerful, manipulative woman at the centre of a morally ambiguous world fuelled by male violence was as refreshing as it was disturbing. g Hedda is being performed at the Bille Brown Theatre by Queensland Theatre Company from 10 November to 8 December 2018.

Maggie Haining is a Brisbane-based writer, PhD candidate, and sessional academic in Drama at the Queensland University of Technology. 70 DECEMBER 2018

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Boy Erased 

Dennis Altman

e all love redemption movies. The twist in Boy Erased is that redemption comes by escaping religion rather than discovering it. Garrard Conley is a college student who grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist family in Arkansas. When his parents discover his homosexuality, they pressure him into attending a Christian conversion camp. He lasts twelve days before fleeing. In 2016, Conley published a memoir (Boy Erased) which detailed his experiences. Conley’s book is part memoir, part polemic. Joel Edgerton, who wrote and directed the film, has managed to combine both strands successfully. (With a brooding creepiness, he also plays the role of the ‘therapist’ Victor Sykes, who runs the Love in Action centre.) This is a message film, but it is also the story of a boy’s complex relations with his parents, played brilliantly by Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. Kidman seems to have morphed from the ingénue of Moulin Rouge! to the perfect mother figure; there are some parallels here to her role in Lion (2016). Crowe, playing the part of the part-time pastor and car dealer struggling with his faith and his genuine love for his son, relishes the slide into middle age. But, if anything, the parents are too sympathetic; I would have liked Edgerton to be tougher in his depiction of the prejudices that are disguised in the name of God. The film is held together by Lucas Hedges, best known for his role in Manchester by the Sea (2016). Garrard’s struggles to come to terms with the sexual desires conflicting with all he has been taught are shown through flashbacks to several encounters. The first, when he is seemingly raped by a fellow student, Henry ( Joe Alwyn), I found rather unconvincing; the second, a passionless night with the worldly Xavier (Theodore Pellerin), too idyllic. But Hedges is convincing precisely because so much seems held in, which make his occasional outbursts of anger and frustration the more convincing. His growing awareness of the cruelty of the conversion program underlines the essential futility of the enterprise. Much of the film takes place within the claustrophobic enclosure of the Love in Action centre, where inmates are constantly pressured to recant their sins in the name of God. There are some striking performances here, particu-

larly from Flea, the bass player for Red Hot Chili Peppers, and pop star Troye Sivan. The deliberate drabness of the centre underlines the relentless psychological assault on the participants. There is an underlying voyeurism and repression in the conversion program depicted here, leading to the suicide of one of the participants. A couple of women are included in the intake, which makes the constant exhortations to be ‘real men’ somewhat confusing. The film leaps forward four years when Garrard flees the centre. Now he is a self-confident and successful gay man with a promising career as a writer. The film ends with a confrontation between Garrard and his father, in which there are echoes of the final scene in Call Me By Your Name, except that here it is the son rather than the father who speaks of the necessity to accept love and speak truthfully. The real Garrard Conley is now, indeed, a successful writer who lives in New York with his husband; he is a much sought-after speaker. None of this we see in the film. Had Edgerton been less faithful to the book, he might have made a film that was more exciting and less earnest. Boy Erased marks a successful Australian invasion of Hollywood, with a film whose director and two of its major stars are locals in an American movie. None of the US reviews seem to have remarked on this, which speaks well for their ability to adopt American accents, thankfully without too obvious an attempt to adopt a Southern drawl. The film comes at a time when debate about conversion therapy is likely to intensify when the Morrison government finally tables its report on religious freedom. One recent survey of LGBT Australians found their top priority for government action was the banning of conversion therapy, as has already been done in a number of US states. The idea that deeply held sexual desires – or, indeed, one’s sense of gender – can be altered through therapy, prayer, or punishment is central to a belief that anything that deviates from what Raewyn Connell has termed hegemonic masculinity is a problem. One does not have to hold that homosexuality is hard-wired to recognise that sexual desires are more deeply rooted than simple matters of ‘choice’. In the film, Viktor suggests that it is only a matter of behaviour, like choosing to play football. This ignores the complex interplay of desire, behaviour, and identity that constitute our sexual selves. Two people find redemption in the film: Garrard and his mother, who tells him that she will always regret succumbing to the pressure to send him to Love in Action. But we can’t assume that this is the fate of most of the men who have struggled to overcome their sexual desires. Inevitably, the film circles back to Garrard’s family and their final reconciliation. Despite the grimness of much of the film, it ends, as do all redemption stories, with the assurance that love will triumph. Would that were always the case. g Boy Erased (Universal Pictures), 114 minutes, directed by Joel Edgerton, is based on the memoir by Garrard Conley.

Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in Human Security at La Trobe University.

Twelfth Night 

Tim Byrne

welfth Night was probably composed in 1601, and certainly no later than 1602. Hamlet has a more doubtful provenance, possibly written before 1601 but also certainly no later than 1602. It is not inconceivable that Shakespeare worked on them simultaneously, or back to back. What is clear is that the themes and preoccupations of these two works tend to bleed into each other, even while their effects dramatically diverge. One theory, and it’s a good one, is that the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son Hamnet (his daughter Judith’s twin) informed both plays: Hamlet, a fantasy of the young man cut off in the prime, and Twelfth Night, a fantasy of reunion for siblings severed by fate. In both plays, ‘the whirligig of time brings in his revenges’. The plot reads like a mash-up of Shakespearean comedic tropes, even though it plays like a singular work of genius. We start with separated twins, recalling The Comedy of Errors; Viola (Esther Hannaford) and Sebastian (Caleb Alloway) survive a shipwreck but presume each other perished. Viola disguises herself as a pageboy named Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino (Lachlan Woods), with whom she promptly falls in love, à la As You Like It. When she is sent to woo the countess Olivia (Christie Whelan Browne) on the Duke’s behalf, she finds herself having to resist the lady’s affections. This results in a group of lovers who each love somebody different, the central conceit in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is interesting that all of these antecedents have a vein of darkness or deep melancholia flowing just under the surface. Hamlet says he has ‘of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth’, but that’s equally true of at least half the characters in Twelfth Night. They may claim to know the origin of their grief, but its true source feels strangely out of reach. As Harold Bloom says in Shakespeare: The invention of the human (1998): ‘An abyss hovers just beyond [the play]’. The director’s job is to tease these deeper currents to the surface without dampening the comedy. While Simon Phillips does an admirable job with the more rambunctious elements of the play, he tends to short-change the plangency. It’s not a deliberate turning from the darker aspects of the piece ABR ARTS

Christie Whelan Browne as Olivia in Twelfth Night (photograph by Jeff Busby)

– indeed, some of the most savage lines hit hardest – but a by-product of his emphasis on festive foolery. The upshot is that the production is extremely funny. The most riotous performance is that of Frank Woodley, who makes the ludicrous fop Sir Andrew Aguecheek something of a paragon of foolishness. While extended digressions of stage business and dumb-show buffoonery can cripple Shakespeare, Woodley’s drunken attempt to walk through a doorway is simply one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Richard Piper makes a hearty meal of Sir Toby Belch, the character with the most lines in the play, and who is also its lord of misrule. Colin Hay, of Men at Work fame, makes a rather taciturn Feste, but his singing is so soulful it places the character at the centre of the drama. Russell Dykstra, who replaced Geoffrey Rush in the role of Malvolio before rehearsals began, emphasises the fastidiousness of the part over the narcissism, which makes his extended humiliation even harder to bear than usual. Malvolio is condemned to ignominy and torture, mainly because of a kind of haughty steadfastness to rule and regulation; his comeuppance seems due to his misguided entertainment of the idea of social mobility, rather than a particular wrong he has committed on any person. This makes Olivia’s maidservant Maria (Tamsin Carroll in the fiercest, most focused, and resolute performance of the night), who has concocted this ‘revenge’ on Malvolio and who eventually does wed well above her station, the play’s chief plotter and angel of retribution, but also the greatest hypocrite left standing. Whether this represents justice of any kind is a question left unanswered. 72 DECEMBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The lovers feel almost like the subplot in this production. Hannaford’s Viola is plaintive and likeable, and she brings a breeziness to the character’s gender gymnastics, but she only occasionally hits the high poetic lyricism that the role invites. Woods nails the narcissism and reflected love impulse of Orsino, even if he never touches the delicate self-mockery the part calls for. Whelan Browne is delicious, as surprised as we are by her precipitous headlong fall into infatuation, but it must be said that two of her stand-out moments – the first when she turns and sees Malvolio in his cross-gartered attire and emphasises the O in his name; the second when she suggests a slight sexual frisson at the sight of two Cesarios with her line ‘Most wonderful!’ – are uncannily similar to Mark Rylance’s seminal Globe Theatre performance in the role. It’s not fair to call it an ersatz performance, but it’s also hardly definitive. Phillips is a big-picture director, and his vision here is glorious; his Illyria is really just Venice in the Baroque, but so sumptuously realised and so effortlessly staged – the stunning set and lavish white-gold costumes are by Gabriela Tylesova, the sublime musical arrangements by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall – it carries that wonder that suggests a fully articulated other world. Hamlet’s fool is dead, but Twelfth Night is chock full of live ones. I know where I’d rather spend Christmas. g Twelfth Night is being performed at the Southbank Theatre by Melbourne Theatre Company from 12 November 2018 to 5 January 2019. (Longer version online)

Tim Byrne is a Melbourne theatre critic.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 

Michael Shmith

et it be said – indeed proclaimed – that Opera Australia’s new production of Wagner’s paean to life and art and love is musically as close to a triumph as it could have been. If, by the end, you feel the outside world is a better place than the one you temporarily abandoned six hours earlier, then Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has surely wrought its magic. Did this happen in Melbourne? Well, almost. Those mischievous gremlins that activate Wagner’s Curse (what might go wrong will go wrong, in spades) were happily not in attendance, and this long and majestic evening unfolded at its own pace and in its own time and space – or what I prefer to call Wagner Standard Time. From the first bars of the prelude, so confident and assured, to the affirmative C major chorus at the end, conductor Pietari Inkinen cast the work in one huge paragraph in which the intervals seemed mere distractions. Within this colossal framework, there were always things one noticed anew; little things that focused the mind. As with his sterling conducting of Der Ring des Nibelungen in this theatre in 2013 and 2016, Inkinen was indeed masterly of structure, but also balance and pace. Not as easy to get right as one might think: the margins between grandeur and intimacy are especially treacherous, even more so in an opera as lengthy and complex as this one. A huge wreath of elder leaves, therefore, to Inkinen and to Orchestra Victoria, which played with tireless magnificence throughout. Meistersinger is exceptional among Wagner’s operas in that it is the most human: it deals not with gods, dwarfs and dragons, but with real people: people with names and surnames and jobs; people who exist not in the upper reaches or lower depths, but at a definitive place and time: Sixteenth-century Nuremberg, midsummer’s eve and day. The time of Albrecht Dürer (he is mentioned in the libretto), but also of his near-contemporary, Meistersinger’s central character, Hans Sachs. If Wagner’s Curse had been at work, then it was

before the performance. Opera Australia was forced to change its Sachs twice: James Johnson (Wotan in the company’s 2016 Ring) withdrew, as, more recently, did Shane Lowrencev. Luckily, as Hans Sachses don’t grow on linden trees, the Opera found a third one, the German bass-baritone Michael Kupfer-Radecky, who has sung the role at La Scala and the Bavarian State Opera, Munich. Kupfer-Radecky must have had his work cut out. Not so much with the role itself, which he sang with grace, dignity, beauty, and quiet authority and, of course, in flawless German, but assimilating himself, effectively at the last moment, with a production new to him – and one far from traditional, with lots and lots of tricky stage business to learn. Meistersinger is a real company opera, and Opera Australia has cast it strongly and imaginatively, mostly from within its own forces. The chorus of sixty-six, directed by Anthony Hunt, sang their hearts out as if they really believed it was midsummer’s day (some members doubled as apprentices). The assorted Mastersingers, a diverse bunch in terms of appearance, age and, no doubt, income, were distinctively fine. Senior Mastersingers included Daniel Sumegi’s stalwart Pogner, and Luke Gabbedy’s youthful Kothner. Domenica Matthews’s busy bee Magdalene was not only Eva’s maid but a sort of all-purpose concierge and stage manager. Nicholas Jones’s agile and ardent David, one of the best I have seen and heard, made definitive sense of his Mastersinger 101 instructions in Act I. Warwick Fyfe’s Beckmesser was simply extraordinary and galvanising. As with his incomparable Alberich in The Ring, Fyfe brought the same combination of quirkiness and menace to Nuremberg’s artful Staatsschreiber. His performance remained – just – on the right side of caricature, and was properly sung, not bellowed or distorted. Stefan Vinke, as Walther von Stolzing, certainly sang the part, if hobbled by a long wig and silly costume that turned him into a wandering tramp. Vinke had the right heroic stamina, and he acquitted his Preislied and variations thereof with no sign of strain. His ability to belt out the notes was admirable, but the role needed more charm and persuasion. Natalie Aroyan’s Eva was gloriously sung and impetuously performed: this Eva is to be reckoned with, I thought. I wasn’t wrong. I hope to hear more of Aroyan. There is definitely an Elsa or Senta in the making there. Kasper Holten’s production (here revived by Dan Dooner) was first given last year at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, his farewell as the company’s director of opera. Costumes – a mixed bag of epochs and styles, let alone terrible hats for the Mastersingers in Act III – are by Anja Vang Kragh, the adroit lighting by Jesper Kongshaug. Holten’s production banishes all notions of medieval Nuremberg, and is set in what he describes in his synopsis ABR ARTS

as the Mastersingers’ club: a club to which Walther craves admittance. Clearly, as we see in Act I, this is a men-only establishment, but with many bustling serving maids and the occasional haughty Frau Meistersinger in attendance. Mia Stensgaard’s permanent set, crisscrossed with stairways and awkward angles, resembles more an M.C. Escher drawing than anything more clubbable. Yet, this handsome, tall structure, which at the end of Act II physically distorts to set the scene for a real Bacchanalia, still suggests the original setting. It is more effective in the first scene of Act III, where the entire set almost imperceptibly revolves, its inexorably slow axis transporting us from Sachs’s workshop to the festivities. There is nothing wrong with updating Meistersinger, and I think of recent productions set at the Nuremberg trials and in a suburban backstreet. Holten’s club analogy has its points, and the guild-within-a-guild concept, along with the labyrinthine set, works well. But my innerBeckmesser is still smouldering at one master-mistake that hobbled the very end of the opera. Just as all and

sundry are celebrating the joy of life and art and love, Eva, for reasons best known to the director, flounces off in a rage, all because Walther, having rejected membership of the Mastersinger Club, is persuaded by Sachs to accept it. Whatever contemporary message this is supposed to have conveyed, this misguided, egregious, and distracting moment sullied not only Wagner’s intentions, but most that had gone before. At one stage, Walther scrawls a graffito on the wall: Kinder, Schafft neues! Or, Children, think of the new! This quote, from Wagner himself, remains eternally encouraging. As far as Holten’s thoughts on Eva Pogner are concerned, they are simply childish. That ending should be reworked. g Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, presented by Opera Australia, was performed at the State Theatre, Arts Centre Melbourne on November 17, 19, and 22. (Longer version online)

Michael Shmith is a Melbourne-based writer and editor.

Opera and identity A study of eighteen Australian operas

Peter Tregear NATIONAL IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN OPERA: MYTHS RECONSIDERED by Michael Halliwell Routledge, $221 hb, 238 pp, 9781472433275

ust as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, nor does the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for being long ago overshadowed by those iconic sails, and by the internal compromises that mired its construction. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, for instance, presents physical and technical hindrances to opera production that the recent renovations can only partially redress. Erecting a public space for opera on such a scale and cost, in such a prominent location, was always going to be a fraught endeavour in Australia. Opera has never been front and centre of the 74 DECEMBER 2018

nation’s cultural consciousness, and yet here was a bold attempt to make it so by sheer force of architectural conceit and stunning location. The public turmoil that accompanied its construction was of such a scale that it eventually inspired an opera in its own right, The Eighth Wonder (1995), by Alan John and Dennis Watkins. It in turn serves as one of eighteen Australian operas for investigation in Michael Halliwell’s National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered. The underlying premise of the book ‘is that it is possible to read the postcolonial development of Australian national identity in the nation’s modern operas’. To this end, Halliwell discerns recurring themes across these works, such as their interest in ideas of ‘the quest’, ‘the outsider’, ‘gender’,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

‘race’, failure’, and ‘the bush’, among others. With the exception, perhaps, of ‘the bush’, at first glance there seems to be little that sets Australian opera apart in such themes; they are also frequently encountered across the mainstream operatic repertoire. Such ubiquity speaks both to the form’s international currency but also to its historic cultural ambition. What is perhaps more telling about the peculiarities of the Australian operatic landscape is the fact that The Eighth Wonder is only one of a very small number of contemporary Australian works to have received more than one production. This dismal statistic is true even of the work that Halliwell considers to be ‘central to an Australian operatic canon’, if such there be one: Richard Meale and David Malouf ’s

Opera Australia’s 2016 production of The Eighth Wonder at the Sydney Opera House (image courtesy of Opera Australia). Michael Halliwell reviewed this production for ABR Arts

Voss (1986). I suspect there would be very few opera singers or performers, let alone audience members, who could hum a note of it today. Halliwell’s survey of these eighteen works thus takes on something of the character of an archaeological dig. In returning each of these works to our attention, he provides detailed synopses and digests of their critical reception before exploring the broader themes they share in common. This alone makes his book a useful reference work. A more complete understanding of their reception, however, would require closer consideration of the institutional context in which each work arose. The shape and form of these works will have been determined as much by the contingencies of institutional cultures, the public, and private funding arrangements that lie behind them, as much as by a composer and librettist’s wish to tap into, and express, something of the national Zeitgeist. Furthermore, a rarely acknowledged accompaniment to all this creative work is the lack of strong advocacy from our national company, and also from our conservatoires and the mainstream arts media, for the very idea of a repertoire of Australian operas. Arguments derived from close engagement with the music itself are also few and far between. The following assertion by the series editor, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, in her

preface – ‘new brands of scholarship have allowed a more comprehensive and intensive interrogation of the complex nexus of means of artistic expression operative in opera, one that has meaningfully challenged prevalent historicist and formalist musical approaches’ – is one that should therefore, in this context, not pass without comment. Such a scholarly approach has no doubt enriched some aspects of our understanding of opera in society, but I worry that it can also serve as an excuse for music scholars to avoid in-depth engagement with the music altogether. It is self-evidently true that much of the meaning and peculiar affective force of opera is to be found in the music as much as in the text, or more particularly, in the interconnections between both. However, Halliwell’s focus may have been drawn more towards the libretto of these works because the musical aspects of these works are also the least overtly Australian in character. The kinds of contemporary compositional styles one most frequently encounters in Australian operas are essentially international in origin and character. This book is at its most interesting and provocative when considering the ways and means by which Australian opera composers have nevertheless tried to engage with, or allude to, Indigenous cultures. Today such attempts might also face the added challenge of likely accusations

of cultural appropriation. This in turn points to an overarching problem that Halliwell himself alludes to in the preface. Musical attempts at expressing, let alone defining, an Australian national identity will always be uncertain and unstable, caught as they will ever be between the echoes of the global cultures that initially European, and now more recent, migrants have brought with them to these shores, and the Indigenous cultures they largely ignored or usurped in the process. Ultimately, it is no surprise (nor damning criticism) to note that Halliwell does not in the end offer a compelling overarching view of the current state or future direction of contemporary Australian opera. Indeed, as he notes himself, ‘[i]f there is one aspect that perhaps stands out in this journey through recent Australian opera, it is the wide variety of subject matter and musical styles displayed in the operas that have been discussed’. His survey serves to remind us, above all, that no nation (but especially ours) can be an island entire of itself. In these days of rising xenophobia in Australian public life, that is no bad note for us to hear. g Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. His most recent book is Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking tertiary music education (2014). ABR ARTS

From the ABR Archive

To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Dorothy Porter’s death, we reprint Stephanie Trigg’s review of her verse novel Wild Surmise (Picador), which appeared in the October 2002 issue of ABR. Andrea Goldsmith writes about her late partner on page 50.

orothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly cracking pace across some not entirely unexpected territory: an adulterous love affair between two women; and the death, through cancer, of a husband. Additional glamour and some thematic variation are provided by the women’s profession, astronomy. Both women are favourites on the lecture and television circuit, and Alex Leefson’s passionate interest in finding traces of biological life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, generates some of the more purely lyrical moments. One of the hardest things to achieve in the verse novel is a balance or, at least, an accommodation between two powerful and often rival impulses: one towards narrative, the other towards lyric. In the main, Porter manages this potential contradiction well, though, if the page-turning quality of this novel is anything to go by, it is arguable that narrative wins out in the end: these are poems that tend to lead you on to the next one, rather than inviting slow, or considered, rereading. At what point does the husband realise his wife’s infidelity? And when does the wife realise her husband’s mortality? Porter’s writing is fast and punchy, well-suited to the dramatisation of a dynamic and passionate love affair. Her lyrics are direct and powerful, though not completely immune from romantic cliché (‘my heart is exploding’) or a too easy melodrama (‘Alex’s mind rips and splits / like the ocean floor’). At her best, though, this directness takes a simpler, more reflective form. From ‘Radiation’: ‘when I flow to her / fast and shallow / like a channel / from a deep lagoon / frothing across to the sea // I have her intense attention. / It’s only afterwards / wearily driving home / I feel my skin / flake away / in a leprous snowfall …’ Like The Monkey’s Mask, but less obtrusively, Wild Surmise is concerned with poetry, and is even similarly, riskily, haunted by bad student poetry. Daniel is an embittered academic in a university English department whose course on Romantic Poetry has to be defended in terms of cost effectiveness, while he spends hours assessing his students’ ‘stilted stories / and pretentious poems’. But when it comes to filtering and assessing his own life, he can still draw on his favourite resources – Dante, Marvell, Coleridge, Rilke, Dickinson, and others – in a number of lively dialogues. In this way, Porter offers a series of variations on the traditional themes of the symposium of poets and the possibility of

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communing with the dead. Thus, it is Marvell for a walk to the lemon tree in the garden; Dante, and not Cavafy or Keats, for a trip to hospital. The poem ‘a green Thought in a green Shade’ is typical of Porter’s fearlessness in its self-conscious reprise of Marvell: ‘Is he right in arguing / with such lusciously lonely / metaphysical wit / that it’s best / to wander solitary? … The marvel of a ripening lemon / can’t be shared any better / than the bone-scratching terror / of cancer.’ I call this ‘fearless’ because of the poem’s insistence on naming its literary allusions (‘metaphysical wit’); its typically heavy alliteration (‘lusciously lonely’); its heavyhanded punning (the ‘marvel of a ripening lemon’). But, in the end, like many other poems in this collection, this one offers up its own understated yet chilling and distinctive metaphor (‘bone-scratching terror’). I mentioned the ‘almost classic’ form of Wild Surmise, partly as an allusion to the sexual territory and the forceful style that are now distinctively associated with Porter. This new work is also instantly recognisable as a novel of adultery, though it’s not an Anna or an Emma who dies. Rather, it is the unhappy husband who perishes, with the result that, as the novel closes, the attention shifts away from the passions and disappointments of sexual love, towards the mystery of mortality. At Daniel’s wake, his mother wonders: ‘Just what was he all about?’ Alex shows her into Daniel’s study, pointing to his ‘high-rise blocks / of lonely poetry tottering over them’. While the mother eventually recognises his love of poetry as her own legacy to her son – ‘he bloody well / got it from me’ – it’s interesting to speculate about the claims or concessions that Porter’s own poetry might be making. Does Wild Surmise itself constitute some kind of ‘lonely poetry’? On the other hand, Porter also shows us how to build our own ‘high-rise’ blocks, providing a bibliography (‘Daniel’s Poetry Reading List’) at the end of the volume. So, in addition to the rival generic claims between narrative and lyric, and the rival emotional claims of husband and lover, Porter also dramatises the rival epistemological claims of poetry and science to explain the worlds we know and those we speculate about: the other worlds and the after worlds. Even if subtlety is sometimes sacrificed to melodrama (perhaps especially where this ‘dazzling woman’, this ‘brilliant foreign lesbian’, the allegorically named astronomer Phoebe, is concerned), Porter’s novel offers a wonderfully varied sense of the things that poetry can do, encompassing dialogue, drama, meditation, and passion. Ultimately, too, she demonstrates that poetry can both celebrate and command science. g