Australian Book Review October Environment Issue 2018

Environmental matters

Welcome to our annual Environment issue. From Cane Toads to tidalectics, fungi to honeybees, urban challenges to rampant coal, our reviewers and commentators address some of the fundamental challenges to society and the natural world. Each year the threats seem more nightmarish, the political inaction more reprehensible.

For the fourth time, Eucalypt Australia has supported this themed issue; we are grateful for its continuing interest. The story of the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust (now widely known as Eucalypt Australia) is remarkable – green philanthropy, so to speak. Since 2007 Eucalypt Australia has awarded more than $1.23 million in grants.

Read more about its history and programs on page 28.

Watercolour artist Ian Robertson (pictured opposite), the recipient of the 2018 Dahl Medal, is a true student and protector of eucalypts.

He has illustrated major books on the subject, and his arboretum in South Australia has an extensive collection of eucalypt species.

Many thanks to Dr Ruth Morgan, a Senior Research Fellow in History at Monash University, who co-edited this section of the magazine, as she did in 2015. Ruth, an environmental historian and historian of science, is the author of Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015).

The fall of Ian Buruma

Everyone knew that Robert Silvers – founding and long-time editor of the New York Review of Books (1963– 2017) – would be a hard act to follow, but it just became a whole lot harder after the ouster of his successor, Ian Buruma, after one year in the seat. As we were going to press, the New York Times reported on his sudden departure from the magazine.

2018 Dahl Medalist Ian Robertson with Eucalypt Australia Trustee and Secretary of DELWP John Bradley (Eucalypt Australia)

This followed the publication of an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, ‘a disgraced Canadian radio broadcaster who had been accused of sexually assaulting and battering women’ (NYT, September 19). Ghomeshi was acquitted of

charges of sexual assault in 2016. His essay was one of three related articles published in the October 11 edition of NYRB, under the headline ‘The Fall of Man’. Online publication of the article created a predictable furore on social media. Buruma commented: ‘I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation? How can I be?’

Then he was gone.

ABR Arts

No program has been more transforming for this magazine than ABR Arts, where we review film, theatre, dance, television, music of all kinds, art exhibitions, and much more. The response from the arts community has been enthusiastic. Readers know that ABR Arts – with its lengthy, considered reviews – stands for something rather different from the critical miniatures that we see elsewhere. (We liked the story about the newspaper that sent its tennis editor to review a play by Seneca.)

For the past three years, The Ian Potter Foundation has generously supported ABR Arts with a three-year seeding grant, which enabled us to greatly extend our arts coverage. We are most grateful to the Potter Foundation for its championing of better arts criticism and for its long-standing support for this magazine.

Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund – an integral supporter since the creation of the Calibre Essay Prize in

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novel, The Minotaur, which Penguin Random House will publish in 2019.

Jesus in Parramatta In Peter Goldsworthy’s 1993 novella

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Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, the Pollard family seek to isolate themselves from the world and to live through one another, only to be confronted by medical and existential realities.

Back in 2015, actor–writer Steve Rodgers won the inaugural Lysicrates Prize for his adaptation of the novella.

At the time, the play was described as ‘a rumination on a kind of suffocating love’. This month the National Theatre of Parramatta will present its world première, directed by Darren Yap. The season runs from October 18 to 27.

Meanwhile – when he is not reviewing Les Murray’s new Collected Poems (Black Inc., October) for ABR – Peter Goldsworthy is finalising his new

John Hirst

As we extend our presence and publishing in New South Wales, with continuing support from the state government, we are keen to meet new writers and critics. Peter Rose, who will be in Sydney on October 11 and 12, is available for meetings with reviewers and arts journalists.

We’re looking for people who are familiar with the magazine: its style, its content, its mission. To arrange a meeting, contact Peter Rose at editor@australianbookreview.com.au.

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Letters

Dear Editor, It is a tad disingenuous of Marilyn Lake to repeat the quote from John Hirst about history and myth in her review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The war for White Australia 1914–1918 (ABR, August 2018) given Hirst’s scathing comments on those ‘deconstructing’ the Anzac story in his 1990 article ‘The Gallipoli Landing’ (reprinted in his Sense and Nonsense in Australian History [2006]). And, by

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the way, it was Keith Murdoch who was a war correspondent, not his uncle Walter.

Kevin Rattigan, Berremangra, NSW

Marilyn Lake replies:

The myth of Anzac clearly excites strong views. I am disappointed that the critics have not engaged with my intellectual argument that memory and history cannot be so easily disentangled.

October 2018 Felicity Plunkett Sheila Fitzpatrick Susan Reid Tim Flannery Fiona Gruber Nicole Abadee Cassandra Atherton Peter McPhee David Trigger

Letters

Kevin Rattigan, Marilyn Lake

The cruel experiment that is offshore detention The transformation of Donald Maclean Coal dust on Scott Morrison’s hands How many walls?

Chloe Hooper on Black Saturday Markus Zusak’s Wintonesque novel Murakami’s new novel Napoleon on St Helena From the ABR Archive

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Memoir

Leigh Sales: Any Ordinary Day Gail Bell 11 Robyn Williams: Turmoil Danielle Clode 13

32 34 35 38

Essays & Literary Studies

Fiona Wright: The World Was Whole Francesca Sasnaitis 14 Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer (eds): Antipodean Perspectives Brian Matthews 53 Samuel Hynes: On War and Writing Robin Gerster 55

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Politics

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Jan Zielonka: Counter-Revolution Ben Wellings 15

Poems

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Fiction

56 60

Davina Allison 16 Lisa Gorton 41 David Cohen: The Hunter and Other Stories of Men Sophie Frazer Margaret Morgan: The Second Cure Jack Rowland Laura Elizabeth Woollett: Beautiful Revolutionary Anna MacDonald Melissa Lucashenko: Too Much Lip Jane Sullivan Rosalie Ham: The Year of the Farmer Brenda Walker Alice Nelson: The Children’s House Sarah Holland-Batt Emily O’Grady: The Yellow House Jay Daniel Thompson David Whish-Wilson: The Coves Gillian Dooley

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Environment

Stefanie Hessler (ed.): Tidalectics Michael Adams Rick Shine: Cane Toad Wars Libby Robin ‘Aluminium Dreams’ Lauren Rickards Alison Pouliot: The Allure of Fungi Andrea Gaynor Helen Jukes: A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings Keegan O’Connor Joëlle Gergis: Sunburnt Country Lauren Rickards Joy McCann: Wild Sea Paul Humphries Seamus O’Hanlon: City Life Frank Bongiorno Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones (eds): Urban Choreography Sara Savage

History

Peter Moore: Endeavour Alan Atkinson Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder: The Fountain of Public Prosperity Paul Collins

Interviews

Open Page Kristina Olsson Publisher of the Month Chris Feik

Poetry

Michael Aiken: Satan Repentant David Dick

Young Adult Fiction

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Clare Atkins: Between Us A.J. Betts: Hive Meg Gatland-Veness: I Had Such Friends Eliza Henry-Jones: P is for Pearl Margaret Robson Kett

ABR Arts

Laura Hartnell Sally Grant Anwen Crawford Maryrose Casey Patrick McCaughey David McInnis Gillian Wills Peter Tregear

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The Harp in the South Marking the Infinite You Were Never Really Here Dark Emu Martin Gayford: Modernists and Mavericks Stuart Kells: Shakespeare’s Library Michael Atherton: A Coveted Possession Evita CONTENTS

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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.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Australian Book Review October 2018, no. 405 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post Printed by Doran Printing Published by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘The other side of the fence’

Anatomising the cruel experiment that is offshore detention

Felicity Plunkett NO FRIEND BUT THE MOUNTAINS

by Behrouz Boochani, translated by Omid Tofighian Picador, $32.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781760555382

TRUTH IN THE CAGE by translated by Mansour Shoushtari

Rochford Street Press, $10 pb, 21 pp, 9780949327055

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ehrouz Boochani describes being smashed into the sea by the boulder-like weight of an overpacked, splintering boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. The wreck’s ‘slashed carcass’ gashes the flailing survivors and the bodies of those who have died, and Boochani settles under a wave, finding refuge ‘by imagining myself elsewhere’. Finding the strength to surface, he sees a group of men clinging to a wooden spar torn from the battered boat. Its spikes lacerate Boochani’s legs as he sinks and surfaces amid violent waves. A British boat approaches: ‘our gruelling odyssey has come to an end’. Having faced death in those underwater moments, Boochani reflects that ‘even a brush with mortality gives life a marvellous sense of meaning’.

If it were a piece of fiction, this intense account of being rescued would settle after its zenith. The writing recalls other stories of refugees’ sea journeys to Australia, such as Nam Le’s celebrated short story ‘The Boat’ (2008). But Boochani’s work is not fiction, and respite is illusory.

It is July 2013, days before the Kurdish poet and journalist’s thirtieth birthday and days after the second Rudd government’s announcement of measures to reinforce its borders by turning back asylum seekers arriving by boat. After a month on Christmas Island – CCTV cameras in the toilets, strip searches, and the issuing of ludicrously ill-fitting polyester clothing – Boochani is transferred to Manus Island, one of the offshore immigration detention centres originally set up by the Howard government in 2001.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Boochani, whose educational background includes a postgraduate degree in political science, political geography, and geopolitics, began to record his experiences of what he calls Manus Prison. The name expresses the loss of asylum seekers’ freedom and highlights a dark irony: a prison holds prisoners as punishment for a crime or while awaiting trial. Given that Australia is a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, with its principle of non-refoulement – which guarantees protection to refugees who have reason to fear persecution should they return to a particular country – the question of legality is important here. Several arms of the United Nations have condemned Australia’s policy of offshore processing.

No Friend But the Mountains is a work of witness.

Richard Flanagan, in his foreword, acknowledges the ‘near impossibility of its existence’. Written in Farsi, amid the traumatic deprivation it evokes, the narrative was sent as text messages to refugee advocate and translator Moones Mansoubi, who formatted the material and sent it to Sydney University academic Omid Tofighian. Others involved include Janet Galbraith, founder of Writing Through Fences, an organisation devoted to enabling the writing of refugees, and Sajad Kabgani, a PhD student who worked with Tofighian and Mansoubi to produce the translation. Arnold Zable provided feedback and encouragement.

In its steady witness, No Friend But the Mountains recalls accounts of the Shoah such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), which Philip Roth described as being motivated by the need ‘systematically to remember the

German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose’. Levi, who describes a dream of relating his experiences of Auschwitz with no one listening, is driven by the need to ‘bear witness’, conscious of the words of a guard who taunts prisoners that if they were to survive, their testimony would soon be considered ‘too monstrous to be believed’. Boochani, too, writes against forgetting. In his case, though, bearing witness to history abuts a project of informing the world beyond Manus Island of what is happening there now. This extends Boochani’s work as a journalist.

The work transcends memoir, especially because Boochani is often self-effacing. The blaze and flicker of his self-assessment limns a more empathetic project through which he examines larger questions of the nature of human behaviour and the search for an adequate way to name and anatomise the cruel experiment that is offshore detention.

In this sense, Boochani’s work recalls psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). At once an account of Frankl’s experience of concentration camps and the foundational expression of his psychotherapeutic method, logotherapy, Man’s Search for Meaning argues that human suffering, while unavoidable, might be endured best by having some focus beyond it, by having a sense of meaning. ‘Those who have a “why” to live,’ Frankl wrote, ‘can bear with almost any “how”.’ For Frankl, the salvation of humanity is ‘in love and through love’.

Boochani’s project shares this kind of philosophical enquiry. In his translator’s note, Tofighian strives to illuminate the book’s various generic elements to frame its reading. Supplementary transcripts of discussions between Boochani and his interlocutors continue this. Of these, the use of the term ‘kyriarchy’, first used by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schlüssler Fiorenza to describe enmeshed social systems of domination and oppression, is a key aspect of Boochani’s project.

Prose is interspersed with ribbons of poetry. These lyrical slivers are drifting and meditative, though they enclose moments of trauma as well as respite. For Boochani, as for many vastly more privileged poets, isolation and silence are treasured. He writes of longing ‘to isolate myself and create that which is poetic and visionary’. In the intensely hot, crowded spaces of the centre, he asserts his indomitable imaginative freedom: ‘the mind still has the power to leave the prison and imagine the coolness under the shade of a bunch of trees on the other side of the fence’.

Boochani is a prodigiously gifted poet and prose stylist. There are few false notes. When he describes the bodies of female lawyers visiting the complex, what may sound like objectification underscores the inhumanity of secluding people from the liberty to love. His fleeting allusion to past loves highlights the barbarity of five years of isolation.

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ike No Friend But the Mountains, the chapbook of poems Truth in the Cage by Mohammad Ali Maleki has been produced with the help of Australian supporters. Their translator is fellow detainee Mansour Shoushtari, whose interview by Boochani was published in the Guardian. Boochani writes that Shoushtari ‘projects beauty, he projects tenderness, he projects kindness’.

Maleki tends a garden on Manus Island, yet his poems evoke images of the natural world thwarted or gone awry – ‘the autumn leaf grows green’, ‘the moon implodes’, ‘the butterfly flies back to its cocoon’. In an allegory of refoulement, everything in ‘Silence Land’ is turned back: the tree to its seed, the sea to its source, the river to its spring.

In the more surreal ‘Myself ’, groans swell the sky, the sea becomes stormy and fish ‘[scatter] in fear’.

The book’s first poem, ‘Dream of Death’, begins by addressing readers as ‘my dears’, and implores: ‘please, I ask you, listen’. Both Boochani and Maleki evoke the experience of there being absolutely nothing to do and the impact this has on the mind. Each writer has endured this year after year.

Although Maleki writes of blankness and weariness, in ‘Where is My Name?’ he affirms ‘I won’t neglect to report on these days.’ From the ‘cursed city’ of Manus, he writes tender works of witness and consolation commemorating others people’s deaths: Hamed Shamshiripour, who died by hanging, and Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian asylum seeker whose body washed up on a Turkish beach. Yet for all their gentleness, these are steely poems, refusing silence and namelessness.

Boochani interrogates his history of ‘non-violent resistance’, of choosing the pen over fighting, but these important books offer ways forward that violence in response to violence is unable to do. And each recalls Paul Celan’s courageous insistence on literature as resilience: ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.’ g

Felicity Plunkett is Poetry Editor with University of Queensland Press and a widely published reviewer.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

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Enigma no more

The transformation of Donald Donaldovich Maclean

Sheila Fitzpatrick A SPY NAMED ORPHAN: THE ENIGMA OF DONALD MACLEAN

by Roland Philipps Bodley Head, $35 hb, 448 pp, 9781847923936

W

ho doesn’t like to read about the Cambridge spies? Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby were all students at Cambridge in the early 1930s when they were converted to communism and later recruited as Soviet spies. The Cambridge Four did decades of sterling work for the Soviets. Having risen to senior positions in the British Foreign Office (Maclean and Burgess), the British intelligence service MI6 (Philby) and as Surveyor of the Queen’s Paintings (the art historian Blunt). To be sure, it was not always appreciated in the Kremlin, since from Moscow’s standpoint it all looked too good to be true, not to mention distractions like the Great Purges and World War II playing havoc with their networks.

The story of Burgess and Maclean’s successful ‘exfiltration’ to the Soviet Union made international headline news in 1951, and the same was true in 1963 when Philby followed them through the Iron Curtain. By the 1970s a reverse movement of family members out of Moscow had begun, with Maclean’s American wife, Melinda, returning to the United States and his three children to Britain. (Shortly after his re-entry, I encountered a still shell-shocked Donald Jr and his wife at a party in London and gave them a lift home.) As for the Fourth Man, the British had known about Blunt’s spying since the 1960s, but he was publicly outed only in 1979, strangely without punishment except for the loss of his knighthood.

Through an avalanche of publication, including some by the spies themselves, the Cambridge Four have become as familiar to anglophile readers as the Mitford family. So my first reaction on 10 O CTOBER 2018

seeing this new book on Maclean was that it would be excellent light reading for a long flight, offering the pleasure of entering a familiar world of the imagination whose tenuous connection with reality is irrelevant. The idea that there might actually be something new in this Maclean biography did not cross my mind.

I was wrong, but it was a while before I realised my mistake. I had read, with pleasure but without keen attention, a number of nicely written chapters covering familiar ground: childhood – stern, upright father, success at a public school that inculcated habits of secrecy and deception; university (covered only briefly, unusually); recruitment as a

The Cambridge Four have become as familiar to anglophile readers as the Mitford family spy; entry into the Foreign Office.

The Donald Maclean presented here is a high achiever, reacting to some extent (but not flamboyantly) against his father’s conservative moralism, who was drawn to the idea of a double life and got a kick out of it. The bit I didn’t remember reading before was Maclean’s enjoyable affair – in the late 1930s before he met and married Melinda – with his Soviet handler, the East End-born Kitty Harris. This satisfied his needs for secrecy and support, despite breaking all the rules of tradecraft.

With Maclean’s appointment in 1944 as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Washington, the story moves to the United States, where he provided the Soviets with remark-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

ably good high-level information but sailed close to the wind because of his distaste, clearly expressed when drunk, for American mores and, above all, for American policy in the Cold War. Of course, he wasn’t the only senior person in the British Foreign Office to be anti-American. Nor was he the only one to go on drunken binges, though Maclean, except for a later, brief episode in the Middle East, was not in Burgess’s class as a drunken, loose-lipped troublemaker. Maclean’s normal story was that he had been on the left in youth but had outgrown it; however, on more than one occasion when drunk, he told friends and even acquaintances that he was a communist and/or Soviet spy.

Nobody took this seriously. As in the case of Philby, the British establishment (and particularly the Foreign Office) displayed amazing zeal in protecting their own and turning a blind eye on outrageous behaviour.

So far, so familiar, though it’s all admirably done, by an English expublisher with family connections to both Maclean’s Foreign Office world and his left-wing one, using newly opened Foreign Office and MI5 archives as well as the extensive older documentation. I was more than half way through the book when I noticed that Philipps’s Maclean, though labelled an enigma in the title, was emerging not as a mixed-up, schizoid double-dealer with charm and good social connections (the standard composite picture of the Cambridge Four) but rather as a man of political convictions (pro-peace; antiAmerican; pro-Soviet but not blindly

so; concerned about social justice and critical of the British class system) to which, despite his double role, he adhered fairly consistently throughout his life. To my surprise, I found this argument basically convincing, to the point that, as far as I was concerned, Philipps had succeeded in contradicting his own title: Maclean is no longer an enigma, because Philipps has explained him.

The next surprise was what happened after Maclean goes to the Soviet Union in 1951. There are some difficult years of debriefing and idleness in the boondocks (Kuybyshev) before the Macleans (Melinda had joined him after a few years, unhindered by British surveillance) were able to return to Moscow in 1955; and it took a few more years for Donald to get a job that really suited him as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of the World Economy and International Relations.

But Philipps’s unexpected conclusion is that Maclean liked his new life in the Soviet Union. This – based, admittedly, only on English-language materials; though the Russian, had Philipps had access to them, would probably only have strengthened his case – goes completely against the standard (Western) Cambridge Four narrative, which is that the ex-spies were desperately bored and unhappy in their uncongenial Moscow exile. Maclean, as Philipps recounts it, dropped his binge drinking in Moscow, found satisfaction in his job, got on well with his think-tank colleagues, and won respect inside and even outside the Soviet Union for his scholarly analyses of foreign policy. Needing a new identity in his first years in the Soviet Union, he took the name of Mark Petrovich Frazer, after the Scottish author of the anthropological classic The Golden Bough (1890). But by the time his foreign policy book came out in Moscow in the 1970s, he felt free to publish under his real (if Soviet-inflected) name: Donald Donaldovich Maclean. g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and Mishka’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s (2017). She is a professor at the University of Sydney.

Blindsided Gail Bell ANY ORDINARY DAY

by Leigh Sales

Hamish Hamilton $34.99 pb, 263 pp, 9780143789963

A

ny Ordinary Day, Leigh Sales’s investigative report from the coalface of tragedy and resilience, is based on solid research and lengthy interviews. Sales, who wants to know the secrets of surviving outrageous fortune, has the journalistic chops to take on the quest. ‘I rely on a particular skill set … I know how to craft a line of questioning,’ she writes early in her new book. Readers familiar with Sales’s on-camera persona as the anchor of ABC television’s The 7.30 Report will perhaps brace themselves for some field surgery as she probes the testimonies of people who have met and overcome one or more tragedies. But those readers may be surprised.

Each story in Sales’s third book begins with a glimpse into ‘an ordinary day’ in the life of someone to whom bad things will happen. To set the tone for what will follow, Sales chooses two instances from 2014 that are still resonant in the public psyche: cricketer Phillip Hughes padding up for a Sheffield Shield match at Sydney Cricket Ground; and Katrina Dawson leaving her law office mid-morning for a hot chocolate at the Lindt Café. Hughes will die in hospital two days later as the result of a blow to the neck; Dawson will be killed in the gunfire that ended the Lindt Café siege sixteen hours after it began.

Sales then steps into the narrative with her own ‘ordinary day’ story from 2014: a medical crisis that threatened her own life and that of her unborn child. ‘Blindsided’ by the experience, she asks: ‘When the unthinkable happens, what comes next? How does a person go on?’ These are questions that invoke Camus’s ungovernable universe and set the narrative in motion. Shoulders squared, reporter’s toolbox open, Sales begins. A foreshadowing of her approach can be found in her previous book, On

Doubt (2009). Her well-argued thesis, partisan only in its determination to hold on to her own ‘old-fashioned’ journalistic principles, is preceded by a hectic introductory chapter on growing up in Queensland where her inconvenient questions and backchat set up frequent clashes with her regimental sergeant-major father. Sales, we learn, is no slouch when it comes to interjecting.

After some neatly summarised science on trauma, grief, adaptation, and the current thinking on evolutionary biology, Sales grows impatient with theory and yearns to start a conversation. Her inner journalist wants access to the horse’s mouth, not the riding manual.

Sales is a good interviewer, and these chapters have the authentic ring of unrehearsed revelation.Yet almost immediately, the interviewer is photo-bombing the moment. ‘I’m so sorry to cry, I’m a terrible sook,’ she says to Michael Spence, vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, who lost his wife to cancer in 2012, leaving him widowed with five children. The scene is both endearing and slightly jarring. What is the reader to make of these interjections?

Later, she meets Stuart Diver, sole survivor of the 1997 Thredbo landslide in which his first wife drowned. In 2015 his second wife died from breast cancer.

Diver acknowledges the public perception that he is jinxed, rejects it, yet still has doubts about ever marrying again, even though each wife died in tragic circumstances. Before the reader can process this information, Sales jumps into the narrative: ‘You might be thinking, Hang on, I still reckon losing two wives by the age of forty-four is pretty weird’, followed by an analysis of the two deaths. She concludes that Diver himself is statistically more likely to die before any hypothetical third wife.

Jumping into the narrative is a recurring pattern as the book gathers momentum. ‘Let me just break into Hannah’s story here to tell you what it’s like to sit across from her and hear this,’ Sales writes of the author Hannah Richell, whose husband Matthew died in a surfing accident in 2014. Didactic nods to the reader like, ‘As the last chapter explained’, or ‘Get it?’ while BIOGRAPHY

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SYDNEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA “…a titanic struggle between the individual and the collective.”

THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES

BRETT DEAN’S DRAMATIC ORATORIO

The Telegraph, UK

Based on Plato’s famous account of the trial and death by hemlock of Socrates and featuring Peter Coleman-Wright (who starred in Dean’s acclaimed opera Bliss), the oratorio is a courtroom drama in music that’s emotional, colourful and thrilling.

Brett Dean conductor Peter Coleman-Wright baritone Andrew Goodwin tenor Sydney Philharmonia Choirs Thursday 11 October, 1.30pm Friday 12 October, 8pm

Presented as part of the Emirates Metro Series

Sydney Opera House

JEAN-YVES THIBAUDET PLAYS THE EGYPTIAN After a five-year absence, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet returns to perform Saint-Saëns’ Egyptian piano concerto, full of colour and evocative themes and demanding the utmost dazzling virtuosity. Conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste returns to Sydney with the music of fellow Finn, Jean Sibelius and his Second Symphony. Prepare for a night of power, poetry and revelation.

Jukka-Pekka Saraste conductor Jean-Yves Thibaudet piano Wednesday 17 October, 8pm Friday 19 October, 8pm Saturday 20 October, 8pm

Presented as part of the APT Master Series

Sydney Opera House

sydneysymphony.com (02) 8215 4600 Tickets also at: sydneyoperahouse.com 9250 7777

explaining a joke about a police officer’s name – along with bracketed asides like ‘(while I’m thinking, Wow, big call to go to homicide!)’ – might be endearing to Sales’s fans, and not out of character to her podcast listeners, but the overall effect in a book tackling a serious subject can be disorienting. Any Ordinary Day sits between stools: neither straight memoir, though rich in digressions into private aspects of her life, nor the focused reportage of a Walkley Award– winning broadcast interviewer. The conversational style, like stand-up comedy, works best when the audience is sitting comfortably in their seats.

In the last third of the book, Sales hits her straps. Her interviews with Richell and forensic counsellor Wendy Liu are stand-out pieces worthy of close study. Sales is still interjecting, but by then the reader either forgives her and goes with the flow, or ignores the asides and focuses on the wisdom on the page.

For a book that wears its heart on its sleeve, there is plenty to admire. The main questions are answered. Sales, known for her trademark verve, disarms her audience with glimpses of her offscreen nerves behind the studio curtain, and delivers, surprisingly, a happy ending. ‘You will be okay,’ she writes – the self-empowering mantra one might hear, perhaps, from a woman of a certain age entertaining doubts. g

Gail Bell is an author, essayist, and reviewer. Her first book, The Poison Principle, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for nonfiction in 2002.

Brio has just published a new edition of her second book, SHOT (2003), under the title Being Shot. ❖

Grasshopper Danielle Clode TURMOIL: LETTERS FROM THE BRINK

by Robyn Williams

I

NewSouth $32.99 pb, 223 pp, 9781742235776

n 2014, veteran ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams was diagnosed with bowel cancer. It was, he reports, his third brush with death, following cardiac arrest in 1988 and bladder cancer in 1991. His description of the experience, including surgical reduction of his gut and rectum and subsequent debilitating chemotherapy, is brief but graphic. He has survived, but the experience, as he puts it, quite literally, gave him the shits. More positively though, it also resulted in this book: a collection of letters from the brink, ‘the book you write when you don’t have much time left’, although it is not entirely clear whether this lack of time is his own or, collectively, ours.

In characteristic fashion, Williams (and his wife and fellow science broadcaster, Jonica Newby) tackled his condition through research and the application of science. Unhappy with the impact of chemotherapy, they opted for a program of vigorous and ‘irksome’ exercise, which recent research has found to mobilise adrenaline and macrophages, cleaning up the body’s waste. It is a recipe Williams would clearly have us apply to society’s broader problems – review the scientific evidence, develop a rational response, and be prepared to step out of your comfort zone to achieve the results you need to survive.

The fact that this is not the approach modern society takes to its very obvious ailments clearly bewilders Williams.

Raised in relative poverty (a ‘slum child’) by radical parents, Williams has an optimistic approach to the future that is hard to shake. The current climate, however, is giving that optimism a pretty solid beating. ‘Are we facing an age of confusion and failure?’ Williams asks, ‘A prelude to the kind of collapse that Jared Diamond writes about, but this

time on a global scale? Or is this merely a short interlude, a transitory spell in the armpit of history before a new creative generation arises, no longer willing to dally with the squalor of present headlines.’

This is the turmoil of the title. The book is ‘an attempt to convince myself that the turmoil, this age of venom and spite and ignorance, is transitory. It cannot last because it is self-destructive.

People are too good.’ Over his forty-six years as an ABC science broadcaster,Williams has presented plenty of evidence of what Australian and international scientists are capable of discovering and achieving, if only we would listen to them.

Williams admits that he has ‘a brain like an electric grasshopper’ and with so much material to choose from it is no small wonder that this wide-ranging and entertaining book darts across seemingly random topics with great rapidity. It is a book of paradoxes – of success and failures, of great intellectual achievements and abject stupidities, of a terrifying fear for the future held in check only by that passionate belief that good will prevail and that our progress, towards a brighter future, is inevitable.

Williams shares stories of remarkable researchers who are poorly acknowledged in their own country, the grief of losing colleagues, the perplexity of gender and unexplored privilege, the gross unfairness of modern management that promotes mediocrity and offers no rewards for quality, and the downright evil of ‘yellow journalism’ that breeds fear and stalls progress.

The absurd accusations against the ABC and others of leftist bias by anyone incapable of constructing a rational counterargument clearly rankles. I am reminded of the chorus of Redgum’s 1983 battle cry for equal rights: ‘Well, if that’s being commo, it’s commo where we stand.’

Although, as Williams points out, it’s not commo at all, not even a delicate shade of pink. He reminds us of Alan Bennett, who noted on the apparently inevitable slide from left to right with age that ‘one has only to stand still to become a radical’.

Williams clearly feels that he has had an inordinately lucky life. His MEMOIR

13

achievements are many; he was the first journalist to be elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He has done for Australian science what Attenborough has done for wildlife, consistently and reliably bringing to our attention its importance and significance over decades. The lingering ‘death’ of the ABC by a thousand cuts has clearly taken its toll. The termination of hugely marketable content producers like the BBC Natural History Unit and Catalyst simply defies economic common sense. The steady erosion of health and science content has nothing to do with audience or popularity. What will happen when we no longer have such stalwart defenders to guard the gates? And yet Williams himself is unwilling to give in to such despair. Turmoil, he notes, is characterised by ‘terminal frustration’, temptation to just give up and let evil win. But there is no sense that Williams intends to do so.

It is clear that we need better issue of leadership. ‘We need experienced diplomats who know their history. We don’t need bully boys waving their rockets.

We need people determined to maintain a civil society and who know, pace Thatcher, what society is made of. We need great leadership.’

In today’s bleak political landscape, it’s not at all clear where that leadership is going to come from, but Robyn Williams’s entertaining and insightful book helps us to remain determinedly hopeful that it will. g

Danielle Clode’s latest books include a biography of the naturalist Edith Coleman, The Wasp and the Orchid (2018) and a children’s guide to Australian fossils, From Dinosaurs to Diprotodons (2018).

14 O CTOBER 2018

Shelter Francesca Sasnaitis THE WORLD WAS WHOLE

by Fiona Wright

Giramondo $29.95 pb, 256 pp, 9781925336979

F

or a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body.

Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal.

Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of her second collection of essays, The World Was Whole. That her body was once fitting and knowable, that the world was once whole, is suggested by the title, which comes from Louise Glück’s poem ‘Aubade’: A room with a chair, a window.

A small window, filled with the patterns light makes.

In its emptiness the world was whole always, not a chip of something, with the self at the centre.

The association of emptiness with wholeness makes a compelling metaphor for anorexia, the illness with which Wright grapples. Why she chose to edit the phrase ‘In its emptiness’ from the lines she quotes might be intended to reinforce her argument that each world or life is whole unto itself.

In her award-winning first collection, Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on hunger (2015), Wright unravelled the genesis of her illness. She wrote unsparingly about the eating disorder that began when she was nineteen and still living ‘at home’ with her parents.

The rare physical condition that caused her to vomit without volition after most meals went undiagnosed for eighteen months. She was advised to excise foods she thought might trigger the vomiting from her diet until, she writes tellingly, ‘hunger became my safest state’. For Wright, purging was learned behaviour;

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

she did not think of herself as anorexic.

Ostensibly, Anorexia nervosa is not the subject of her second collection, but as anyone who has experienced a chronic medical or psychiatric condition will attest, illness or pain tends to overshadow every other aspect of existence. The idea that the person is the disorder, however, is precisely what Wright has spent the last fifteen years or so of her life resisting. What she finds most damaging is the punitive language of illness, which sets the body up as a battlefield and implies a lack of will or determination if the invader is not routed. She resists the rhetoric that denigrates the routines necessary to her survival, as if repetition is less valid than spontaneity, and she struggles to convince herself that imperfect health does not mean an incomplete life.

In Glück’s poem, Wright also finds echoes of Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. She names her dog Virginia and is loath to admit that it took an animal to teach her the joys of interdependence. It is novel for her to feel needed and, although she questions our anthropomorphic tendencies, is comforted by what she perceives as Virginia’s unconditional love. Anorexia is the opposite, she says. Anorexia teaches self-sufficiency and necessitates shutting down needs in order to avoid pain and disappointment, a sad variation on the Buddhist tenet that tells us the root of all suffering is attachment. Both ‘body’ and ‘home’ have become tropes for what Wright actually wants: ‘shelter, and security, a stable base from which to build my self and life without constant inconstancy’. Wright’s freelance status leaves her financially insecure, but her world is hardly empty. She surrounds her recalcitrant body with the minutiae of existence, and particularly in the pivotal essay, ‘The World Was Whole Always’, draws together those disparate fragments, impressions, and images into an arresting bricolage. Humorous anecdotes are juxtaposed with poignant reminders of what she cannot hope to be; acute observations work against each other and in tandem.

Returning from a teaching job in the northern suburbs of Sydney, she observes ‘the sun … spraying like an

errant garden hose through a crack in the cloud cover’. By the time her train reaches Erskineville, ‘the sky is pink, electric’, the rosy glow of nostalgia descending over the streets of Newtown and Marrickville. Only occasionally does her world of house hunting, shared living, parties, social anxiety, housemates and their peccadilloes, and local cafés seem like a rarefied version of Sydney’s inner-west, made overly precious by an insistent poeticism underscored by apposite lines from Les Murray, Grace Paley, and Gwen Harwood.

Not that Wright is without humour.

Her intense introspection is leavened by self-deprecating insights. At a writers’ conference in Reykjavik, where she manages to travel despite her illness and her fears, Wright is confronted by the spectacle and strangeness of Iceland’s geography, and draws a parallel between her condition and the language of volcanic action: spew, disgorge, heave, spit. ‘Great,’ she writes, ‘I’m fucking seismic now.’

The confessional nature of Wright’s essays tends to provoke solicitude.

Sometimes she seems very young and unsettled, her future at risk. On the other hand, her bravery is impressive. She is unflinching in revealing the progress, if one can call it that, of her illness. Perhaps being born in the 1980s makes her a member of the generation for whom public self-disclosure is routine, but, given the extreme consequences of her anxiety, her trust in the compassion of the reader is baffling. Perhaps sympathy is not the issue. The essays collected in The World Was Whole shape an informal autobiographical narrative that seeks neither pity nor special consideration.

Any sympathy evinced is the incidental result of Wright’s talent for eloquent and graceful prose. g

Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD student at the University of Western Australia.

Ghosts at the banquet The fading magnetism of liberalism

Ben Wellings COUNTER-REVOLUTION: LIBERAL EUROPE IN RETREAT

by Jan Zielonka Oxford University Press, $30.95 hb, 176 pp, 9780198806561

J

an Zielonka has provided us with an engaging and stimulating diagnosis of the pathologies of the European crisis of liberalism. The prognosis is not great, but there is hope.

This short book takes the form of an intergenerational letter to Zielonka’s former mentor, the émigré German liberal intellectual Ralf Dahrendorf.

Dahrendorf wrote a treatise on the European revolutions of 1989, which was in turn based on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

This intergenerational aspect of the book means that there are several ghosts at the banquet: notably the French Revolution of 1789 and the liberalnational revolutions of 1989. Yet the 1930s are lurking between the lines, too: there is more than a ‘whiff of Weimar’ about this analysis of the ‘counter-revolution’ against the post-Cold War order.

Zielonka’s dialogue is an intraliberal one spiced with a hint of internecine betrayal. Part of the reason why support for authoritarian ‘illiberal democrats’ like Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Viktor Orbán has grown in the past decade lies at the door of liberalism itself: ‘liberalism’, Zielonka explains to his mentor, ‘has become a shallow ideology of power with fading magnetism for the electorate’. The aim of this hard introspection is to begin the process of outlining a viable liberal alternative to neo-liberalism, which he credits as the root cause of the current crisis. Like communism before it, neoliberalism was great in theory but didn’t quite work out in practice.

Thus the diagnosis is clear. Europe has moved from the victory of liberalism that ended the Cold War to a disparate counter-revolution that amounts to nothing less than ‘a powerful move-

ment aimed at destroying the narrative and order that dominated the entire continent after 1989’.

The pathologies of the crises outlined by Zielonka consist of succinct statements of the by now familiar reasons for the current predicament. The groundwork for the crisis was laid with the subordination of politics to the market from the 1980s. As a result, parties ceased to be mass organisations structuring politics. Instead they became cadres concerned with managing the economy according to the neo-liberal creed, corroding faith in democracy itself. The de-politicisation of the economy also had a negative effect on perceptions of equality. The crisis bailouts – and the subsequent permanent austerity they ushered in – created ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’.

This collapse in trust was not helped by external shocks. Russia’s permanent white-anting of the liberal order created a difficult politics on the eastern borders of the European Union, as well as within it. The migration crisis suggested borders were not inviolable and radicalised public opinion and policy responses. Terrorism operated as a clash of value systems that produced mutual feelings of insecurity. The result was ‘a sweeping disorder generating insecurity’ that counter-revolutionary political entrepreneurs effectively exploited.

This was all exacerbated by Europe’s unique political structure. The European Union was once the jewel in the liberal crown. But Zielonka speaks of the EU in the past tense and suggests that it has become ‘an agent of disintegration at odds with the liberal creed’. Brexit – or, more accurately, the non-metropolitan English and Welsh vote to leave the EU in 2016 – underscored all these dynamics.

E S S AY S

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Like Claus Offe in Europe Entrapped (2015), Zielonka describes a kind of political stasis: apparent options for exiting the multiple crises are politically implausible because ‘visionless technocrats dominate policy-making while visionary zealots dominate politics’.

But Zielonka is not yet ready to give up and move to New Zealand, the dream of many Europeans during the latter stages of the Cold War. Although less combative than the message in Jan-Werner Müller’s What Is Populism? (2017), Zielonka tells us that ‘the liberal creed is worth fighting for, but not in a crude and stubborn manner’.

Zielonka calls for liberals to respect those communities who find comfort in the counter-revolutionary messages, but to cleave to liberal values of equality and freedom with extra conviction. This won’t be comfortable. It entails, for example, what he calls ‘genuine dialogue’ with electorates on the issue of immigration.

The big idea is to reform capitalism.

No small amount of ink has been spilled in this regard over the years, sometimes leading to illiberal outcomes. Zielonka admits this will not be easy, but the aim is to restore the balance between corporate efficiency and social justice. There is no alternative to this because ‘there is no chance for equality to be taken seriously without abandoning neo-liberal economics’.

Zielonka has been trying to reformulate Europe for some time, from his Europe as Empire (2006) to Is the EU Doomed? (2014). In Counter-Revolution he calls for a festival of ideas to take place across Europe. This sounds like the French Revolution in 1790 before it all turned bad. We might say that such a festival is already taking place and has not had liberal outcomes. But Zielonka challenges liberals to let go of a defensive posture. He does not quite advocate leaping from the foundering vessel in order to swim for the shore.

Rather, he suggests running repairs to the liberal project while throwing some things overboard in order to save the ship from going under. Neo-liberalism would be the first to go.

It is not all doom and gloom. Zielonka’s pessimism of the intellect – another ‘valley of tears’ lies ahead for Europeans 16 O CTOBER 2018

– is leavened with optimism of the will if serious introspection leading to change is undertaken by liberals. This book represents an attempt to move beyond the politics of position where liberals disdain those who support the counterrevolution and vice versa. It calls for a ‘polyphonic’ and ‘neo-medieval’ Europe grounded in cities and regions. This would work if identities match territories, which in some cities and regions they do. Yet the nation remains strong in Europe despite – indeed because of – sixty years of European integration, so it cannot be dismissed as a site of democratic and civic engagement.

Zielonka’s prescriptions carry with them the risk of ‘revisionism’: that in order to accommodate critique you

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

absorb too much of the critics’ program.

Yet he is surely right to attempt reconciliation. Like all good narratives, the arc takes the reader into the depths of despair only offer the hope of redemption at the end. Yet it is too early for happy endings. Introspection exposes vulnerabilities, and reform is always a risky venture (ask Mikhail Gorbachev).

Yet Zielonka believes that if his call to constructive introspection is followed, another ‘wonderful renaissance’ awaits for Europe. Let’s hope he’s right. g Ben Wellings is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. He is author of English Nationalism and Euroscepticism: Losing the peace (Peter Lang, 2012). ❖

Wittgenstein, 1951, Peppered moth Tell me how they move for the light and I will gather wild orchids for you and five species of cockle shells and leave them by your window, by your specimens and nautical maps, your notes on the wingspan of night herons and the driftwood that you salvaged from ships lost to a distant shoreline.

Darling, I have watched you track a whaling fleet through open waters, southbound, but before you return to the deep let me tell you how, this morning, their wings on the birches down by the river were like silk.

Davina Allison ❖

Davina Allison teaches at QUT and has published in various magazines.

Environment issue

Cantharellus concinnus (detail from a photograph by Alison Pouliot)

Tim Flannery on Bruno Latour Review

Commentary

Review

Adani

Aluminium dreams

Black Saturday

Susan Reid

Lauren Rickards

Fiona Gruber

ABR’s Environment issue is generously supported by Eucalypt Australia.

ENVIRONMENT

17

Coal dust on his hands Examining the issues around Adani

Susan Reid ADANI AND THE WAR OVER COAL

by Quentin Beresford NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 416 pp, 9781742235936

THE COAL TRUTH: THE FIGHT TO STOP ADANI, DEFEAT THE BIG POLLUTERS AND RECLAIM OUR DEMOCRACY

by David Ritter UWA Publishing, $29.99 pb, 200 pp, 9781742589824

W

ho can forget the image of Scott Morrison, as federal treasurer, juggling a lump of lacquered coal in parliament on 9 February 2017? Appearing pretty chuffed with his own antics, Morrison urged people not to be afraid. Eighteen months later, the jester is now prime minister. His ascension results from one of the most undignified and ill-conceived political coups in Australia’s political memory. The Liberal Party clambers from the rubble of its bitter internal ruptures with the same foot soldiers of big coal even more prominent.

In Adani and the War Over Coal,Quentin Beresford provides detailed analysis of each policy switch and deal struck by politicians and mining corporations to advance the coal industry. Politicians with personal interests vested in coal radically deploy the power of their office to smooth and broaden the reach of resource corporations. Pugilistic audacity and naked entitlement characterise a war conducted on behalf of big coal against Australian citizens and environments.

With his sharp insights, Beresford’s rich documentation and exposition of events prosecute the extent to which Australia’s major political parties have become a revolving door between government and resource corporations.

Operating as Australia’s ‘ghost government’, mining businesses buy and engineer policy outcomes through the system of political donations, lobbying, and career fluidity between their own executive ranks and government. As if 18 O CTOBER 2018

following Adani and the War Over Coal to script, Prime Minister Morrison has chosen as his chief of staff John Kunkel, ex-deputy CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA); his new environment minister is Melissa Price, a former mining company lawyer; and Angus Taylor, the new energy minister, is opposed to renewable energy and refutes the science of climate change.

Beresford reminds us that the coal juggled by Morrison had been provided by the MCA. Thanks to their exemption from the register of lobbyists, the MCA’s influence on the government is invisible to the Australian people.

Beresford notes that the chunk of coal was lacquered to keep Scott Morrison’s hands clean. There is no such glossing over the fact that coal is a grubby pollutant that affects real people and environments. Coal dust afflicts the health of miners. It gathers on window sills and washing as it blows through regional communities bought up and socially fracked by big coal. Carbon emissions released from burning coal exacerbate global warming and climate change.

These are facts omitted in pro-coal advocacy and policy designed to increase the net worth of a small élite.

Big coal relies on government welfare for its viability; this comes in the form of tax concessions, royalty holidays, and infrastructure loans. In the case of Indian mining oligarch Gautam Adani, state and federal governments have been tying themselves in coalblackened knots to financially prop up

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

his Galilee Basin mine operations. They have enthusiastically promoted Adani’s gross exaggerations, such as the 10,000 jobs that would be created by the proposed Carmichael coal mine. It was left to a small environmental organisation to challenge these deceptions in the Federal Environment Court. Given

The chunk of coal was lacquered to keep Scott Morrison’s hands clean the way Adani operates in India – his treatment of poor communities, the prevailing corruption, environmental degradations, and continual flaunting of regulations – his operations are unlikely to be better in Australia. Yet both major parties are willing to risk the Australian environment and public funds.

Quentin Beresford is a professor of politics at Edith Cowan University.

In Adani and the War Over Coal, he acknowledges that both major political parties are compromised by their receipt of mining industry donations. He delivers a particularly detailed explication of the determined, multi-decade efforts by the Liberal and then Liberal–National Coalition governments to expand the coal industry, resist climate action, and exert open hostility toward the environment. We learn of their relentless deployments of financial, legal, and reputational strikes against expert scientific institutions, and community legal

and environmental organisations. Expert bodies such as the Climate Change Commission were closed. Cuts in staff numbers at the Department of Environment reduced the agency’s oversight capacity. The government slashed funding for environmental bodies such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and the network of environmental defenders’ offices. Militaristic deployments continue with attempts (failed for now) to quash dissent by removing the tax deductibility status from not-for-profit organisations defending the environment. In New South Wales, the Liberal party introduced harsh new anti-protest legislation threatening prison sentences and disproportionate financial penalties.

Right-wing think tanks constituted by fossil fuel advocates, such as the Institute of Public Affairs, affect a semblance of authority and independence in order to advance their coal interests and discredit opposition. As Naomi Orsekes observed of the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry deploys a campaign of lies to build corporate and personal wealth. Beresford’s searing criticism of the conservative media’s influence on government affairs presages the media’s recent influence in the unseating of yet another prime minister. Big Coal proponent Rupert Murdoch uses his media battalion to carry the government and ghost governments’ deceits and attempt to discredit opponents and expert scientists. Representatives from the fossil fuel industry stack policy reference groups; their executives now sit on the board of the CSIRO. The government also intervened to remove an entire chapter from a UNESCO report on climate change and world heritage sites, which would have highlighted carbonemission impacts to the Great Barrier Reef. These are just a few examples of the relentless campaign to advance the coal industry.

Wilfully ignorant of the long-term implications of their actions, both major political parties, the Liberal– National Coalition in particular, have dug themselves into narrow cul-de-sacs of coal-fuelled policy. On a regular basis, government ministers conduct doorstop derogations of everyday citizens who

Snap protest outside a public lecture by Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley at the University of Melbourne, 2016 (photograph by Takver via Wikimedia Commons)

are concerned for the Great Barrier Reef, the environment more broadly, health, communities, and the economy.

The citizens they declare war against are First Nations people, health professionals, scientists, elders, students, communities, lawyers, farmers, faith leaders, and veterans – all branded by the government as extremists, ecoterrorists, coal-phobics, or green fascists.

Importantly, Beresford discusses the passion of Australia’s environmental and community organisations and their top-level campaign strategies to prevent Adani’s operations and the expansion of the coal industry. This includes #StopAdani, which is emerging as one of the nation’s biggest social movements, backed by a powerful coalition of these organisations. Several overlapping issues are explored in David Ritter’s The Coal Truth: The fight to stop Adani, defeat the big polluters and reclaim our democracy, including the coal industry’s influence on Australian politics and the powerful campaigns to confront Adani and prevent the coal industry’s incursion into the Galilee Basin. The prologue for The Coal Truth is written by Adrian Burragubba, spokesperson for the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council, whose traditional lands and sacred springs are at risk of destruction should Adani’s Carmichael mine proceed. Ritter’s reflections on his con-

cerns for the planet, Australia’s climatepolicy vacuum, and his experiences as CEO of Greenpeace Australia Pacific occupy half of the book. The balance is taken up with insights from health, science, and economic experts.

Both books acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of thousands and thousands of Australians who have protested against the extreme policies and actions of pro-coal governments and resource corporations. Hundreds have been arrested and charged for their protest.

Whatever it is that impels individuals to finally draw a line in the sand and take action against corruption, it is time for these diverse, brave stories to be told. g

Susan Reid, a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, is a writer, artist, curator, and lawyer.

ENVIRONMENT

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How many walls?

A manifesto for a new kind of politics

Tim Flannery DOWN TO EARTH: POLITICS IN THE NEW CLIMATE REGIME

by Bruno Latour Wiley, $28.95 pb, 140 pp, 9781509530595

B

runo Latour is one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists. Based in France, he brings a refreshingly non-Anglophone approach to the big political problems of our times. At the heart of his latest book are the hypotheses that ‘we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center’, and that ‘a significant segment of the ruling classes … had concluded that the Earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else’. These are strong and challenging statements, but, as Latour says, how else to explain the ‘explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation … or the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation state’ that are so characteristic of much of current politics?

For Latour, President Donald Trump’s announced intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement (which in fact can only take place on the day after the inauguration of the president following the next US presidential election), proved that ‘the climate question is at the heart of all geopolitical issues, and that it is directly tied to questions of injustice and inequality’. Trump’s supporters see him as the great wall-builder, the man who will shelter America from a fast-changing and increasingly threat-

ening world. Yet, Trump adds to the very threats that Americans and others must face. His ongoing efforts to undermine the Paris Agreement include recent measures aimed at dismantling Obamaera regulations on old coal-fired plants, which are likely to prove the most impactful of his actions yet in allowing CO2 concentrations to spiral upwards.

How many walls will be needed to hold back the melting glaciers, advancing deserts, and rising seas that the additional CO2 will trigger?

The issues of refugees and climate change are inextricably interwoven.

Latour brings a unique focus to the subject, looking at border-crossers from the perspective of tourism as well as migrants. As he says, the wealthy can afford to fly to developing countries for holidays, but the inhabitants of these nations cannot visit the homes of the wealthy they host. When they do try to reach wealthy nations, the poor find walls, fences, and prisons barring their way.

Latour makes us see that migration is fundamentally an economic issue: the rich wish to protect their privilege and are willing to use racism, xenophobia, and the nation state to achieve their ends.

Latour understands that many of those most adamantly opposed to migrants are not economically privileged.

Their insecurities, which are based on

genuine concerns, are used by the ultrawealthy to protect their own interests.

If we are ever to break the hold of the ultra-wealthy on the economically insecure, Latour argues that we need to build protections for those who feel threatened by migrants, and indeed for those under assault from a changing climate. The alternative is to let the wealthy continue to use the media they own to

How many walls will be needed to hold back the melting glaciers, advancing deserts, and rising seas? co-opt the poor with populist politics.

This is a critical point. Yet just what protections we might offer is not spelled out in any detail by Latour.

There is no doubt that increasing globalisation is causing political stresses.

But so is technological change. The very idea of political representation is itself becoming obsolete as the 24-hour news cycle and the real-time reactions to events take hold. It seems inevitable that the next step in the evolution of democracy will involve some form of decisionmaking by an informed public, perhaps through the use of citizen juries. But the current world of politics is not that sort of place: it’s a world of left and hard-right

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THE HUNTER AND OTHER STORIES OF MEN

by David Cohen

I A line of Syrian refugees crossing the border of Hungary and Austria on their way to Germany. Hungary, Central Europe, 6 September 2015 (photograph by Mstyslav Chernov via Wikimedia Commons)

ideologists seeking election, and that is the milieu into which Latour launches his ideas.

Latour thinks that, if we are to move into a better future, two things need to happen simultaneously: we become re-attached to the soil that supports us (and thus become truly local); and, at the same time, we become attached to the world. In effect, it’s an elegant restatement of the old axiom ‘think global, act local’. As we attempt to do this, the reality of our situation means that we will have to compromise. The inhabitants of carefully planned and regulated cities will somehow either have to find ways of accepting ever more migrants from a bourgeoning population (Africa’s population alone will reach four billion by 2100), or they will have to pay for measures that eliminate the factors making life so intolerable for many in the developing world.

Latour is the master of the bon mot.

Sentences like, ‘Ignorance on the part of the public is such a precious commodity that it justifies immense investments’, make Down to Earth an entertaining read. But it is far more than that. At its most profound, it is a manifesto for a new kind of politics, and indeed a new way of being in this age of climate disruption. Occasionally, however, the pithy summaries can get in the way of comprehension. ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy’, is delivered on page two, but it is

only far later that it is unpacked enough to make sense.

In attempting to find a starting place from which to build a better future, Latour goes back to the dying days of the reign of Louis XVI when, between January and May 1789, the king’s functionaries drew up a ‘ledger of complaints’ in which ‘all the villages in France, all the cities, all the corporations, not to mention the three estates, managed to describe fairly precisely their living environments, regulation after regulation, plot of ground after plot of ground, privilege after privilege, tax after tax’. Latour sees this great geography of grievances as one of the triumphs of France’s revolutionary era.

Perhaps, if the work had been done earlier, and actions had been taken to redress the grievances, the outcome of the French Revolution might have been different.

The period we are now emerging into is, in Latour’s view, no less dangerous than those endured by the French in the 1790s. A great, global geography of grievances could catalyse actions that could begin to slow the flow of migrants.

It could also slow climate change itself.

Yet, after twenty-one years of negotiations wasted in the lead-up to the Paris climate agreement, we are coming to the problem very late in the day. g Tim Flannery was Australian of the Year in 2007 and is the current head of the Climate Council. His latest book is Europe: A natural history (Text, 2018).

Transit Lounge $28 pb, 218 pp, 9781925760064

n David Cohen’s collection of wry and quirky stories, he follows the lives of various men in their rituals of ordinariness – their failures, foibles, and fetishes – with a razor-like eye observing the disenchantments of modernity.

The titular story, ‘The Hunter’, opens onto a wasteland of urban gothic, where economic imperatives rub up against the environment. The grubbiness of capitalism is localised in a development site in an unnamed city, home to an endangered ibis population. As protestors gather to decry the removal of these once-sacred birds, the anonymous narrator–developer explains his determination to proceed: ‘We recoil at the sight of their accordion necks. We are repelled by their black torn-stocking heads.’ This coolly detached narrative voice gathers sinister force as the story moves briskly with the logic of rapacious consumption. Cohen’s tone is perfectly measured in clipped phrasing, the economical clauses mimicking the precision of poetry.

This is the diffident voice of the alienated everyman, a voice that, with little exception, persists throughout the entirety of this collection. The sacrificial fate of the site manager is brutally ironic, an allegory of our failure to recognise our own vulturelike relationship to the environment and each other.

The other stories in this book do not quite match the tension of the first, but Cohen’s tragi-comic sensibility creates some astonishing moments of what we might think of as the suburban surreal: a recently divorced man’s transposed desires culminates in an erotic fixation with a Hills Hoist in ‘Washing Day’; while in ‘The Woodsmen’, a man becomes disturbingly fond of a chainsaw. Men are unravelled here by their engagement with seemingly banal objects: an electric saw, a screwdriver, a woman’s bra. ‘Although these men lived together,’ says one of Cohen’s characters, ‘their lives never actually intersected.’ This is a summation of the lives of these strangely ordinary men, and Cohen lucidly highlights the bizarre underside of the real.

Sophie Frazer ENVIRONMENT

21

What makes an arsonist?

Examing the events of Black Saturday

Fiona Gruber THE ARSONIST

by Chloe Hooper

Hamish Hamilton, $34.99 pb, xxx pp, 978670078189

T

he language we use to describe fire, Chloe Hooper points out, gives it a creaturely shape: it has flanks, tongues, fingers, a tail. It licks, it devours. Fascinated by its mythic force, we talk about taming a fire as we talk about taming a beast, but when it comes to vast tracts of bush, we can only contain it and wait for another natural force, the weather, to extinguish the flames.

On 7 September 2009, the weather in Victoria was not friendly. A highpressure system had settled over the Tasman Sea, bringing temperatures in the mid-forties, the highest recorded since records began in 1859. Any moisture in the air had evaporated; humidity was below five per cent. After a sweltering night, the state’s residents awoke to warnings of extreme danger; all the firefighting bodies were on standby.

Warnings and water tankers notwithstanding, Victoria suffered the worst bushfires in the country’s history. Four hundred separate fires burned in Victoria, generating 80,000 kilowatts of heat, the equivalent of 500 atomic bombs.

Along with the destruction of more than one million acres and 3,500 buildings, 180 people lost their lives and 414 were injured, many seriously. The toll on wildlife and livestock was horrendous.

In The Arsonist, Hooper reignites the memories of those cataclysmic events with relentless, devastating effect. Her focus is on one fire, deliberately lit, an 82,000-acre flare-up on the outskirts of Churchill in Central Gippsland. Eleven people died.

Police estimate that fifty per cent of fires are suspicious, and there is a long history of setting fire to the bush. In the locality of Churchill, the history goes back much further; the careful fire farming of the Indigenous dwellers and the 22 O CTOBER 2018

reckless firing of vast tracts of ancient forest by early colonial settlers, hungry for farming land and pasture. ‘Here, it was as if this preference for flames was as much in the DNA of certain locals as it was in the plants,’ she writes.

The Arsonist begins with a member of the arson squad sitting at the intersection of two nondescript roads in a forestry plantation. On one side, the trees are untouched, neat dark rows of Pinus radiata stretching to the horizon.

On the other side, a plantation of Eucalyptus globulus (full of flammable oil) has been torched. Americans call them gasoline trees, as fit for purpose as a Molotov cocktail. Hooper likens the scene to an image from the pages of the Brothers Grimm: Picture a fairytale’s engraving. Straight black trees stretching in perfect symmetry to their vanishing point, the ground covered in thick white snow. Woods are dangerous places in such stories, things are not as they seem. Here, too, in this timber plantation, menace lingers.

The blackened trees smoulder. Smoke creeps around their charcoal trunks and charred leaves. The snow, stained pale grey, is ash.

The site of ignition is known both as the area of confidence and the area of confusion; this is where the flames first ignite, before they develop strength and a cohesive pattern and direction. This is where the clues lie, clues that can tell you if a fire was deliberately lit.

Only one per cent of arsonists are caught, but the police had a suspect almost immediately. Brendan Sokaluk and his distinctive blue Holden sedan had been seen in the area, and the car was abandoned at an odd angle just

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

metres from where the fire had started.

Sokaluk was brought in for questioning. Hooper gained access to the arson squad and Sokaluk’s legal team; she interviewed friends, work colleagues, and family, and followed the often harrowing court case, trying to answer basic questions: What did he do? Why did he do it? What makes an arsonist?

The book – divided into three sections: ‘The Detectives’, ‘The Lawyers’, and ‘The Courtroom’ – is an attempt to give a rounded view of Sokaluk, from those who wanted to clear his name as well as those who wanted to lock him up. Did Sokaluk fit the bill of an arsonist too neatly, Hooper asks. Was he fully aware of the consequences of his actions? We learn that Sokaluk, thirtynine in 2009, was on the autism spectrum and had been picked on all his life.

The Latrobe Valley, where Sokaluk grew up, may have the world’s largest brown coal deposits, but it is also an area of significant disadvantage. The typical social profile of an arsonist is of a male, commonly unemployed, with a fractured social background, a history of family dysfunction, addiction, abuse, and poor social and interpersonal skills.

Sokaluk shared some of these problems, but he had a loving and supportive family. He lived independently and had had girlfriends. He also held down a gardening job for eighteen years, though he was disliked by most of his colleagues for perceived slyness, occasional aggression, and general incompetence. He’d taken indefinite stress leave two years earlier.

As with many works of reportage set in depressed semi-rural settings (the 1997 Victorian case of murdered child Jaidyn Leskie comes to mind), there is a sense of middle-class urbanites peering over the back fences of these ‘unfortunates’ in horrified fascination.

Hooper, all too aware of the pitfalls of prurience, does her best to avoid them: we’re never made to regard Sokaluk as merely a type. This is an individual, though his motives remain opaque and his actions caused devastation.

Unlike The Tall Man (2008), Hooper’s examination of the events surrounding the death in custody of Indigenous

man Cameron Doomadgee, placing Sokaluk’s life and times in the broader context, doesn’t reveal a far larger failing in Australian society today. The Tall Man exposed the fracture lines in relations between Aboriginal Australia and its white colonisers. It confronted the deeply problematic encounters between the police force and the community on Palm Island, thrown together from different clans and with no roots in place or time.

Fifty per cent of fires are suspicious, and there is a long history of setting fire to the bush The message in The Arsonist is muted, its lessons diffuse. There is no feeling of outrage that this case is but one example of a cancer at the heart of society. What do we learn about arsonists? That they have disruptive impulse control and conduct disorders. What can we learn about forestry and monocultures? That a stand of gumtrees will go up like a pack of crackers, that the Indigenous practice of fire farming shaped this land and kept nature in balance, and that we have shaped this land in a way that throws nature out of kilter and makes annual conflagrations far more likely.

One is left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness. An act of arson on the outskirts of Churchill killed eleven people. Elsewhere, poor maintenance by electricity companies ignited fires that caused many more deaths; others were caused by lightning igniting the tinderdry bush. The exhaustive 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission drew testimony from hundreds of experts and victims. But memories fade and few people read Royal Commission reports.

The Arsonist may not provide answers, but it asks disquieting questions. Bearing witness, it reminds us of the victims and the terror, the senselessness of a flame tossed onto a forest floor, and the awful silence of a landscape razed by fire. g Fiona Gruber is a critic and broadcaster. Her family’s farm property at Flowerdale, north-east of Melbourne, was partly burnt on Black Saturday.

Sea of possibilities The ocean as connector, not separator

Michael Adams TIDALECTICS: IMAGINING AN OCEANIC WORLDVIEW THROUGH ART AND SCIENCE edited by Stefanie Hessler MIT Press (Footprint), $69.99 hb, 256 pp, 9780262038096

H

umans live on the Blue Planet: seventy per cent of ‘Earth’ is covered by oceans. We increasingly hear these descriptions: that oceans are the largest habitat, that eighty per cent of all species live there, that they determine weather and climate. All of which, and much more, is true. But the meaning of this still fails to find purchase with most people.The edited volume Tidalectics – subtitled ‘Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and science’, and compiling a pelagic compendium to unsettle and then reconfigure assumed certainties – engages with this challenge.

In one sense, none of this is new.

The immensity of the ocean’s scale and significance has been both embraced and recoiled from for millennia. Poets from ‘Beowulf ’ (via Seamus Heaney, 1999) – ‘the ocean lifted / and laid me ashore’ – to Adrienne Rich (1973) – ‘And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black, the merman in his armored body’ – have hauntingly expressed humanity’s polarised entanglements with the sea. But it is also new: there has been a tsunami of publications, exhibitions, and symposia on oceanic meanings in the last few years, including the National Museum of Australia’s beautiful exhibition and catalogue on the 1800–04 Nicolas Baudin voyages, The Art of Science (2016); marine conservationist Jonathan White’s much lauded book Tides: The science and spirit of the ocean (2017); and Sydney University’s interdisciplinary and experimental international conference, Sustaining the Seas (2017).

The essays, poetry, and images curated in Tidalectics continue this interest in spanning and probing our ambigu-

ous and conflicted relationships with the sea. The book’s title is a neologism from Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite, coined to refuse the linear inevitability of ‘dialectics’, proposing instead an unresolved cycle, a tidal pulse and rhythm. Because most of us are earthbound, terrestrial, in language and in being, attempting to reach an oceanic worldview requires many such refusals, inversions, alterities, and paradoxes to our grounded cultural and political assumptions. In the context of the radically changed understandings of the fixity and stability of Earth systems, and their associated political and social structures engendered by the concept of the Anthropocene, the book’s contributors suggest the ample metaphor and fact of the ocean as an alternate structure of thought. The increasingly rigid line of thinking, from the Enlightenment to modernism and capitalism, has gridded and disciplined and subdivided the planet. This tradition does not give us useful tools to navigate a destabilised present and future. Tidalectics’ editor, Stefanie Hessler, argues for an oceanic thinking to ‘add nodal nexuses enabling a complex thinking that transcends separations’ – recognising the ocean as connector, not separator.

Nearly thirty contributors engage across subjects from insurance to indigeneity, wave physics to poetry, law to algae, most of them acute and revelatory.

The essays are brief and focused. While most contributors are senior academics, the writing is accessible, sometimes conversational, and often inspirational.

The collection usefully includes classic works. Rachel Carson in 1937 writes poetically of the ‘sea’s children’, and Epeli Hau‘ofa in 1993 inverts the reENVIRONMENT

23

ceived wisdom that Oceania is many small dependent islands of limited possibilities, and is instead a large sea full of possibilities and reciprocal connections. The central essays for me came from writers skillfully mapping these inversions of perspective that oceanic

ment since then, both preserving memory and also washing it away: ‘not all that is significant leaves a durable trace, nor should everything be remembered’.

Both of these essays connect to the improbable argument that the ocean is like a radio, broadcasting waves. Stefan

Flotilla at Lahad Datu Water Front, Borneo 2010 (photograph by Torben Venning for Bajau Laut Pictures via Wikimedia Commons)

thinking might give us.

Cynthia Chou takes us to the world of Orang Suku Laut, the sea nomads of Southeast Asia, introducing their understanding of themselves living within a sentient ecology, an intentional world.

This is of course correct. Humans are not the only active, thinking agents on the planet, not the only beings with a subject position: ‘they perceive the ocean as a source of knowledge from which humans should seek revelation …

Truths inherent in the ocean will be revealed … only if humans advance their sensory education.’ Astrida Neimanis considers the paradoxical threats and impacts inherent in the notion of the Anthropocene and asks, ‘are we really that small, and that large?’ She highlights how we insist that the planet-marking human signature is only relevant if measured in stone, in geological stratigraphy, and asks instead about oceanic archives.

The physical fact of the water cycle suggests that the water we touch today is the same water formed at the birth of our wet planet, bearing witness to every mo24 O CTOBER 2018

Helmreich makes this pitch: that waves transmit energy and information about events occurring often far distant and in the past, and also from the future: ‘waves that move with the winds of human-made climate change, waves that come to life in a newly melted …

Arctic Ocean’. The program on Radio Ocean contains both music and documentary, the songs of crustaceans and cetaceans, as well as the inundation of living human communities.

The message I draw from this collection is one that inverts a human command-and-control solution to present and impending planetary unravelling. It challenges us to recognise that the emperor has no clothes, and instead asks for inter-species solidarity, for collaborative survival, for embrace of inescapable precarity and indeterminacy, for approaches that support life but recognise its ephemerality. As contributor Francesca von Habsburgargues, we should consider ‘changing ourselves, before we attempt to change the world’.

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The book is one outcome of a series of projects – residencies, ocean voyages, commissioned research and artworks, an exhibition – generated over six years from 2011, and curated and edited

by Stefanie Hessler for the ThyssenBornemisza Ar t Contemporar y TBA21-Academy, self-described as the only Western arts organisation entirely dedicated to work on climate change and oceans. The physical form of the book uses a rhythm of black and white pages to reflect tidal complementarities, the design meant to instantiate the meaning. While this works, the hardback format with lots of black detracts from the inspiration and beauty of the words and images.

Environmental and climate analyses reveal that the world’s oceans are paradoxically highly vulnerable to human impact and unlimited in their capacity to make humans vulnerable.

There has been much writing over the last decade on these ocean risks and possibilities.

This volume presents and condenses key currents in this thinking and is both an explanatory chart and an inspirational compass for navigating these waters. g

Michael Adams teaches and researches at the University of Wollongong. His essay ‘Salt Blood’, on freediving, won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize.

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THE SECOND CURE

by Margaret Morgan

The amphibian tsunami of ‘unnatural’ Cane Toads

Vintage $32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9780143790235

A

plague with myriad weird effects spreads throughout the world in Margaret Morgan’s début, a speculative political thriller.

The disease’s name is toxoplasmosis pestis: it causes people to develop intense synaesthesia, to act in impulsive and dangerous ways, or to lose their religious faith. In Sydney, scientist Charlie Zinn attempts to synthesise a cure, while in Brisbane, journalist and ‘political tragic’ Brigid Bayliss tries to ‘shine daylight’ on the rise of a far-right Christian politician who is exploiting his state’s fear to gain power. There is a lot to set up in the novel’s first half, and not all of it is done with equal grace. Occasionally, Morgan’s reliance on scientific jargon can be difficult to wade through, especially when she outlines the disease’s ‘genetic mutation’.

A number of chapters are heavily freighted with exposition.

Despite this, the novel quickly becomes readable once things have been established, and the second half is satisfyingly paced. The novel takes a temporal forward leap, and there is real pleasure in discovering the ways in which this vision of Australia shifts and changes. From the proliferation of autonomous cars and smart homes controlled almost wholly by computers to the pervasive rise of surveillance equipment and government control, the world that Morgan has created here seems highly plausible, which gives it resonance. Seeing the characters traverse a world in which people are ‘scared to talk’ and ‘scared to stick out’ as the vice grip of governmental control tightens is disquieting. The Second Cure is a novel well calibrated for our cultural and societal moment. It is a vision of where our country could be headed without vigilance, a nation where ‘the self-centred … impose their pathology on the rest of the community’.

Jack Rowland ❖ 26 O CTOBER 2018

Libby Robin CANE TOAD WARS

by Rick Shine

University of California Press (Footprint), $49.99 hb, 288 pp, 9780520295100

C

ane Toads are peculiarly Australian. They don’t belong, yet they thrive here. They breed unnaturally fast – even faster than rabbits. They are ugly, ecosystem-changing, and despised. Introduced in 1935 to eat the pests of sugar cane in Queensland, their numbers have exploded right across Australia’s tropical north. They are famously ‘unnatural’, since Mark Lewis’s popular 1988 film Cane toads: An Unnatural History.

Only in Australia, where they have no close relatives, are they called Cane Toads (their scientific name is Rhinella marinus, formerly Bufo marinus). Originally from South America, the species is now widespread internationally, but its success in Australia is legendary.

Elsewhere, toads are common and much loved, part of literary and cultural traditions, and even ‘harbingers of spring’.

Here, where cane toads have a history of just eight decades, they are bad news.

As Rick Shine explains, an invasive species exposes ‘an entire fauna and flora’ to a devastating newcomer. Native ani-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

mals die from eating the toad because they never had the ‘evolutionary opportunity’ to adapt to its powerful poison.When Cane Toads crossed the Queensland/Northern Territory border in 1983, threatening the iconic Kakadu National Park, they became a national problem, and CSIRO was invited to study ways to eradicate them. In the ensuing years, politicians increasingly realised that there were votes in efforts to eradicate Cane Toads. Government support was offered to ‘toad-busters’ for their work by the early 2000s.

Rick Shine’s Cane Toad Wars is a personal account of his scientific work with this extraordinary animal. It is a rollicking good read – written with a wry, self-deprecating humour, but deadly serious about understanding the biology of this organism and its place in the landscape. Fanned by fecundity, the Cane Toad population irrupts and spreads westward. A single female can lay forty thousand tadpoles at once and can do this twice a year. The frontier Cane Toad has longer legs than any

Rick Shine with a Cane Toad on his shoulder (photograph by Terri Shine)

other amphibian, even those that came first to Queensland. Shine has radiotracked toads moving more than two kilometres per night, noting that ‘most amphibians don’t move that far in a lifetime’. ‘No other amphibian on the planet has dispersed as far and as fast as the Cane toad in Australia.’

Cane Toad wars have been waged by zealous toad-busters all the way across northern Australia, successively trying to defend their patch from the assault.

In the end, it proved impossible to kill them faster than they arrived. As Shine puts it, ‘the amphibian tsunami kept coming’. The fate of people in a posttoad world became the subject of leaps of the imagination, with toad-busters pressing the urgency of their work on politicians in the hope of support.

Citizen science is crucial to cane toad management, but it had to be better informed. Shine’s work was not just in toad-busting but also in myth-busting.

‘As the alien amphibians marched toward the site’ where his reptile research had been based for twenty years, Shine seized his opportunity. The Cane Toads were coming, but to a place where there was well-documented information on native fauna. He set up operations at the prosaically named Middle Point, near Fogg Dam. Originally established as an agricultural research station to support a failed enterprise in growing rice, Middle Point’s more important contributions were to the life histories of magpie geese (which ate the rice) and later to snake biology. In 2005, Shine won a major grant to study Cane Toads. Team Bufo was born. ‘Rather than just documenting ecological carnage … we had stumbled across a superb “model system” to look at evolution as it happens.’

Shine worked on evolutionary processes, heritability, and ecological change, and on managing the vulnerable native animals, not just the toads. His most unexpected work was in environmental politics and ‘the bizarre circus that plays out at the intersection between science and society’. Toad science has been shaped by the need to communicate findings for international journals like Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. But its social context

is profoundly local. Active toad- busters were watching their every move, and sometimes popularity obstructed science. As they experimented, the scientists feared headlines like ‘Boffins Undo Toad-Busters’ Good Work’. Yet, Shine argues, his science was improved by the need to explain his work to people who understood toad behaviour but were unfamiliar with biological principles.

He kept puzzling about the accelerating rate of toad dispersal. This led him beyond orthodox evolutionary theories of change over time, to consider evolution over space – he calls this ‘spatial sorting’. Cane Toads were at the vanguard of this idea, but further evidence now comes from South African starlings, Chinese vines, and North American pine trees. Even cancerous tumours may have adopted a ‘spatial sorting’ strategy to disperse dangerously in a body. Cane Toads have become a building block for basic science, not merely a pest to eradicate.

Read this book if you want to learn about spatial sorting and the remarkable adaptations toads achieve. Yet it is also a deeply cultural book, exploring life in unlikely and inhospitable parts of the tropical north of Australia. The frontier stories are of toads, of native animals learning toad aversion, of scientifically inclined humans living with toads and crocodiles (and fierce bantam roosters).

The social context is key to understanding how the scientific ideas emerged.

In 2016, the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science went to Rick Shine and Team Bufo. It was a fitting tribute to their evolutionary biology, practical conservation science, and tropical ecology. It was also a cultural prize for managing the animal that most represents the unnatural in the popular imagination. This is a book for and about Australians. Despite the American publisher and the toad on the cover, its big story is the nexus between invasive species management and Australia’s identity. g Libby Robin’s next book, The Environment: A history of the idea (co-authored with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin), will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in October 2018.

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ENVIRONMENT

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[Advertorial]

Celebrating the Eucalypt In the ten years since it was launched, the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust has awarded more than $1.23 million in grants to support the conservation, cultivation, education and research of eucalypts. The Trust was established in 2007 from a generous bequest from Bjarne Dahl and now operates as Eucalypt Australia.

Norwegian-born Dahl spent his working life among the eucalypt forests of Victoria, in the early days as a forest assessor in government service, and in later years as a forester in industry. During that time he developed an affinity with the Australian bush and a high regard for the Silvertop Ash, Eucalyptus sieberi.

Dahl linked his well-being and financial prosperity to eucalypts, so much so that he left his entire estate to the Forests Commission of Victoria.

To publicly recognise and reward others who have made a significant and sustained contribution to eucalypts, Eucalypt Australia awards a medal in Bjarne Dahl’s honour.

The inaugural recipient, Dr Dean Nicolle OAM embodies the same passion as Bjarne Dahl. His interest in eucalypts led to the establishment of the Currency Creek Arboretum, a largely self-funded arboretum planted with seedlings mostly collected by Dean in the wild. Sited on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, it has the largest collection of eucalypt species in the world, with over 900 species and subspecies.

Dean’s efforts align closely with the aims of the Trust – he is a respected authority on the systematics and ecology of eucalypts and willingly shares his research through both scholarly and publicly accessible publications. He is an active conservationist who has made an outstanding commitment and contribution to understanding, cultivating and conserving eucalypts. Dean received the medal in 2015.

Dr Suzanne Prober received the medal in 2017. Based at the CSIRO in Perth, Suzanne is a botanist and ecologist with a broad interest in adaptation and resilience of natural ecosystems to climate change, in ecosystem function and management, fire ecology, indigenous ecological knowledge and conservation and biodiversity. Her work extends from the field and on-site experiments to the application of genomics technology to predict the resilience of eucalypt species populations across a landscape and the species’ potential to adapt to changing environments.

The 2018 recipient of the Dahl Medal is watercolour artist Ian Roberts OAM. His appreciation for eucalypts is expressed through scientifically accurate illustrations. Ian has illustrated the seedlings of over 600 species and his illustrations make valuable contributions to two important books: Eucalypts of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt by Malcolm French and Native Eucalypts of South Australia by Dean Nicolle. Ian grows eucalypts, runs a small plant nursery and has an arboretum near his home in South Australia which has the largest collection of eucalypt species outside of the Currency Creek Arboretum.

Eucalypt Australia acknowledges the achievements of the four Dahl medallists and celebrates their efforts.

www.eucalyptaustralia.org.au

(photograph by LBM1948 via Wikimedia Commons)

Leon Costermans was awarded the Medal in 2016. Leon has devoted his life to sharing his knowledge of the botanical and geological aspects of south eastern Australia. His books on the native trees of Victoria and adjoining areas are invaluable handbooks for those wanting to identify plants. Originally self-published in 1966, Trees of Victoria has been reprinted 13 times. Native Trees and Shrubs of South-eastern Australia is up to 15 printings. Leon has a long history of sharing his expertise with environmental and community groups and schools, and leading field studies and vegetation surveys.

COMMENT

Aluminium dreams

by Lauren Rickards

I

n the Melbourne Museum is a collection of rainforest leaves. Wafer thin, they are not part of the forest gallery that gives visitors a taste of Victoria’s modern-day temperate rainforest. Rather, they are part of an exhibition about the tropical rainforest that Victoria was home to millions of years ago. Donated by the late palaeobotanist David Christophel – who explains in a video on the museum website that he never stopped feeling excited at being the first human to lay eyes on fossils buried millions of years ago – the fragile leaves are from the warm, moist Eocene period, about forty to fifty million years ago, when Australia was still part of the fragmenting supercontinent, Gondwana.

Despite their scientific value, when the leaves were excavated they were not the reason for digging. The focus was on their surrounding matrix, the rest of the rainforest that had condensed into the dark combustible substance we call coal. Unlike Scott Morrison’s lacquered black coal, this coal was brown, meaning that it was only partly dried out, its transformation from rainforest incomplete. From a resource perspective, this lignite is a ‘low rank’ product suitable only for local combustion to release its millennia of sunlight.

The area where the coal was being mined and burnt was the bushland behind the coastal town of Anglesea.

Just on the margins of the Otway Basin coal reserve, the site was chosen for its proximity to Geelong, because the resultant electricity was destined for an aluminium smelter at Point Henry. The owner of both was Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America, which commenced in Australia in 1961 as part of a global corporate expansion designed to stimulate the mass production and consumption of domestic and manufacturing products.

Australia offered Alcoa a welcoming governance environment and seemingly copious amounts of the two main ingredients that aluminium requires: bauxite and electricity. Bauxite is an attractive, highly weathered rock that Alcoa continues to mine in Western Australia, just as Rio Tinto does within the subtropical forests of Queensland, helping make Australia the largest bauxite exporter in the world, despite the low grade of much of its resource. Producing masses of waste sediment, the spotted rock is crushed and mixed with caustic soda in

an energy-intensive process to produce a white powder, alumina. Alcoa ships its alumina around the Great Australian Bight to Victoria, some going to the smelter at Portland on the western coast, and some to Point Henry, where, with the help of nearly twenty per cent of Victoria’s electricity, it is transformed into aluminium.

That was until the Point Henry smelter, as well as an aluminium recycling plant and two associated rolling mills (which turned aluminium into cans), were closed in 2015 amid, among other things, a dispute with the Loy Yang coal-fired power station in the Latrobe Valley over energy prices.

Such is the electricity required for aluminium smelting that electricity prices are a major influence on its profitability; a point Alcoa used to its advantage in negotiations with government over whether it would keep its already subsidised Portland operation open following a blackout in 2016. Such an incredible amount of electricity was required by the Point Henry smelter that the Anglesea coal mine could only provide less than half of the energy needed. The remainder came from Victoria’s other brown coal reserve, the Gippsland Basin that stretches underneath the Latrobe Valley. Extensive coal mining and power station infrastructure was established in the Latrobe Valley partly to cater for the voracious hunger for electricity of Alcoa’s aluminium smelter in Portland, helping legitimate the government’s construction of the 500 km, 500 kilovolt transmission line that stretches across the bottom of Victoria, distributing coal-fired power to millions of users along the way.

In her book Aluminum Dreams: The making of light modernity (2014), sociologist Mimi Sheller documents Alcoa’s leading role in the weaving of postwar dreams of prosperity-based peace. Distracting from the heavy, polluting, industrial processes actually involved in producing aluminium, including its energy supply chain, potent greenhouse gas emissions and red oxide ponds, aluminium dreams of light modernity draw attention to the elemental properties of the metal itself: its shininess, lustre, lightness, ductility, and resilience under stress.

Aluminium’s sleek lines and versatility have underpinned its privileged place in our everyday lives and aesthetic norms. Even sustainability critiques have been met with ENVIRONMENT

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geologists is that it requires a rewriting of part of the positivity. Aluminium’s lightness is now celebrated for official international geological record, although preenabling more energy-efficient vehicles. It is also ‘endhuman eras such as the Eocene will remain untouched. lessly recyclable’, with the process requiring just five per For Earth System scientists, the significance of the cent of the energy needed to produce it. In theory, this Anthropocene is even more profound. As their discimeans that aluminium can be circulated virtually conplinary name suggests, Earth System scientists imagine tinuously within a circular economy, at least if recycling the Earth as a single system of interactions between the plants are kept open. It in no way guarantees, however, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and that more is not produced and that the circle does not atmosphere. From this perspective, the Anthropocene swell ever bigger. represents a major step change in planetary functioning, Aluminium production continues to grow in part precipitated among other things by the simultaneous because it enables as well as requires another growing logarithmic surge in the mass dislodgement, producindustry, electricity transmission, which, regardless tion, and movement of matter around the planet and of energy source, is primarily responsible, along with its dangerous accumulation in the atmosphere. The aluminium production itself, for the synthetic perfluoroAnthropocene spells a shift from the ‘Goldilocks’ carbon molecules that warm the atmosphere thousands homeostatic state of the of times more effectively than highly habitable Holocene carbon dioxide and linger in epoch we barely registered the atmosphere for thousands we were in, into a different, of years. A 1929 advertiseless habitable one. Recent ment for Alcoa in Bloomberg modelling suggests that Businessweek proudly prounless the changes that claims aluminium’s nationare progressively unfoldbuilding role in electrifying ing abate and the Earth is the United States. ‘Aluminrestabilised through some ium is acting as the vehicle kind of radical collective for the transmission of that effort, we are headed for a most intangible of all travel‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario. lers – electricity’, it declares.

Being beyond anything ‘Hundreds of thousands of humans have experienced, miles of Aluminium Cable of this is a future that is hard every conceivable size – from Lauraceae, fossil leaf. Registration no. P 231195 to imagine. Yet perhaps the great 220,000 volt high (photograph by Jon Augier, copyright Museums Victoria) the forty-million-year-old tension lines to the small leaves preserved in the Meltelephone wire – weaves its bourne Museum provide clues. At the time they were web of civilization across the countryside ... bringing growing, Earth was also a Hothouse, one uninhabited light and sound communication and power; carrying by humans. The leaves thus point to a possible temporal harnessed electrical energy from the point of its generaanalogue of the future. tion to the point of its use.’

More tangibly, the rainforests of the Eocene provide Another of the sectors heavily reliant on aluminium, clues as to our future because of the special treatment and particularly interested in the ‘web of civilization’ it its lignite form has received. More than the leaves per weaves, is the military. Contributing to Alcoa’s success se that caught the attention of David Christophel in in the early twentieth century was its core domestic the overburden of the Anglesea coal mine and, later, relationship with the US military, helping fit out not colleagues and I on our visit to the Melbourne Museum, just its electricity infrastructure and food stores but the real clue as to which way the Earth’s future may its rockets, satellites, and aircraft. Like other planes, unfold seems to lie in the leaves’ surrounding matrix, a the one that infamously dropped the atomic bomb on dense brown matter that continues to entangle elaborate Hiroshima – the Enola Gay – had an aluminium alloy supply chains, sites, times, and dreams. g skin. The radioactive traces that Enola Gay’s trip left behind added to those that had been unleashed upon the world two months prior by the Trinity Bomb atomic Lauren Rickards is an Associate Professor in the test. Being the starting point of a radical, global-scale School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at RMIT environmental experiment involving the detonation of University in Melbourne. She visited the Melbourne more than 2,000 atomic bombs, the Trinity Bomb has Museum as part of a Making Futures event organised by been proposed as a potential marker of the commencethe Anthropocene Campus Melbourne and the Everyment of a new epoch for the Earth, the Anthropocene. day Futures project, during which she worked with The proposed Anthropocene epoch is yet to be Matthew Kearnes, Martin Leckey, and David Turnbull formally endorsed. Should it be so, its significance for to piece together the narrative recounted here.

30 O CTOBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Low beggars Andrea Gaynor THE ALLURE OF FUNGI

by Alison Pouliot

CSIRO Publishing $49.99 pb, 280 pp, 9781486308576

O

f all the forms of life historically divided into kingdoms, only two – plants and animals – have attracted large bands of human followers. Entire organisations and university departments are devoted to understanding, controlling, and conserving plants and animals, and our cultural domains are saturated with their likenesses. Two of the other kingdoms, Protista and Monera, have arrived on our radar more recently and most often in the guise of pathogens, though recent advances in microbiology have seen the microbiome take on a whole new cultural salience. That leaves Carl Linnaeus’s ‘thievish and voracious beggars’, the fungi.

Fungi also have their followers, including Alison Pouliot, who spent a thousand days in the forests of eastern Australia and northern Europe contemplating why fungi are regarded so differently from other life forms. She also engaged with a multitude of fellow fungus enthusiasts over the course of four years and hundreds of forays, workshops, and seminars. The rich corpus of stories, images, and impressions emerging from these encounters provides a way in to the underlying issues around our paradoxical and contradictory relations to fungi, and to nature at large.

Pouliot’s argument for a reappraisal of the ecological, social, and ontological significance of fungi unfolds in nine chapters. While each turns around a particular concept, the structure is not rigid and compartmentalised, and the significance of senses, emotions, and values runs like mycelia throughout.

One important theme is that of language and its relationship with perception and knowledge of fungi; from the connotations associated with the use of ‘mushroom’ as a verb in English, to why fungi are ‘hunted’. The text dances

persuasively towards the conclusion that a more appropriate fungal lexicon is needed to express not only the poetry of fungi, but also their cultural and ecological significance.

A related theme is the organisation of knowledge. Pouliot proposes that if we were to take a fungus as our archetype of the living organism, our approach to understanding the natural world would be very different. Western scientific understandings of nature, even in the age of ecology, still bear the imprint of an earlier emphasis on identification and categorisation. However, really understanding fungi (and perhaps even more so lichen) demands a more relational approach that places processes and interdependencies front and centre.

The impassioned final chapter, serving as a conclusion, focuses on fungal conservation. Here it is most apparent that fungi, while important in their own right, also serve to throw into sharp relief some of the key problems with commonplace contemporary approaches to the non-human world. In their spontaneity, ambiguity, and essential interconnectedness, fungi provide a model for a different way of approaching nature, conservation, and – allegorically – human societies. In the same way that concepts from scientific ecology informed the new environment movement and its cultural effects, Pouliot calls for the uptake of ‘fungal wisdom’ – the ‘attentive care and resourceful hope’ that emerge from deep engagement with this hidden and unruly life.

Photo essays comprising stunning macrophotography of fungi appear between substantive chapters. Pouliot’s use of a very shallow depth of field in most of the photographs evokes a sense of mystery, appropriate for a kingdom that remains poorly known to science, especially in Australia. The images draw the viewer’s attention to specific aspects of the diverse and delicate beauty of macrofungi, but in presenting much of the organism out of focus they work to reinforce a key argument of the thesis: that to know fungi requires multisensory engagement.

Given the book’s emphasis on the Western cultural neglect – even disparagement – of the fungal kingdom, the

title at first seems perplexing. Its overtones of glamour, while actually well suited to the beauty of the photography, seem at odds with the more earthy subjectivity that Pouliot advocates. One wonders whether the alluring photography is framed here as the Trojan horse for the book’s project of recovery – of species often associated with dirt, decay, and disorder, as well as those followers of fungi who, as mycologist William Hay noted in 1887, were commonly regarded by their scientific peers ‘as a sort of idiot among the lower orders’ and required to ‘boldly face a good deal of scorn’.

Authentic fungal followers – downward-gazing folk at home among decay – are probably not uniquely possessed of a natural sensibility that will lead us out of ecological crisis. But reflecting on the nature of fungi – and their followers – certainly leaves us with a richer sense of where we might have gone wrong, and possibilities for less damaging ways of thinking and being. This tale of misunderstanding, marginalisation, and possibility thus delivers insights far beyond the (important and fascinating) fungal kingdom. The skilful use of stories and images does not merely embellish or enliven the text, but evokes a deeper, emotional understanding, making it a book both engrossing and motivating.

In the preface, Pouliot wonders – as many of us who understand the truly dire state of things do – whether it was ‘an indulgence’ to be writing about fungi instead of actively resisting the acts of ecocide that daily destroy them. While such resistance is crucially important, such rearguard action can never – as we can see – keep up with the pace of destruction. What we need is deeper cultural change, and we can only hope that alluring works like Pouliot’s are playing a role in that shift. g Andrea Gaynor, an environmental historian, is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.

Her research seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power of history to help address real-world problems. Her most recent book, co-edited with Nick Rose, is Reclaiming the Urban Commons: The past, present and future of food growing in Australian towns and cities (2018).

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Reading bees Keegan O’Connor

A HONEYBEE HEART HAS FIVE OPENINGS: A YEAR OF KEEPING BEES

by Helen Jukes

Scribner $35 hb, 293 pp, 9781471167713

T

he eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist François Huber (1750–1831), who is still credited with much of what we know about bees, was almost completely blind when he made his acute ‘observations’ and significant discoveries. Huber studiously recorded the queen bee’s ‘nuptial flight’ and method of impregnation, her reproduction of very useful worker bees when inseminated and less useful drones by parthenogenesis (i.e. without insemination), and her violent, stinging duels with rival queens. Wrought from painstaking experiment, his findings inadvertently challenged common associations of the queen and her commonwealth with chastity, virgin conception, and peaceful government.

Before Huber loved bees, he loved books. As a boy, he read voraciously and tirelessly, so much so that his bookishness was considered to be the cause of his loss of eyesight at age fifteen. Thereafter, his love of books did not wane: for the remainder of his life he was read to faithfully by his eventual wife, Maria Lullin, and his loyal servant, François Burnens. (Burnens was his pair of eyes and his indispensable collaborator over his several years spent studying the honeybee.) Huber also wrote a landmark book himself, New Observations on the Natural History of Bees (1792).

It consists of a series of letters, written in a narratively compelling, episodic plain-style, addressed to contemporary Swiss bee expert Charles Bonnet. Early in the book, Huber describes his personally designed observation hives that aided close inspection into the world of the honeybee: these were ‘Book, or Leaf-hives’ – flat frames that opened up like pages so the bees could be ‘read’ on both sides. In Huber, the naturalist, the 32 O CTOBER 2018

beekeeper, and the bibliophile communicated with vitality and ease.

Huber is one of the more unlikely and most interesting leading players in Helen Jukes’s A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, a work about bees and books.

The memoir is not the first work in contemporary literature to consider Huber’s life and work: the poet Nick Flynn’s Blind Huber (2002) and the novelist Sara George’s The Beekeeper’s Pupil (2002) give fictionalised accounts of the fascinating naturalist. Jukes’s interest in Huber, however, stems more from her reading in the cultural history of the honeybee, including three concurrently written works that are referenced frequently throughout her memoir: Hattie Ellis’s Sweetness and Light: The mysterious history of the honeybee (2004), Bee Wilson’s The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us (2004), and Claire Preston’s Bee (2006). (Beekeeping is clearly enjoying a boomlet.)

These latter cultural histories enter Jukes’s life as part of an emerging, unexpected interest in beekeeping, detailed in the opening section of the book.

Living in Oxford and strained by the demands of her office job, the author thinks back to her fledgling experiences of urban beekeeping in a friend’s hives in London. Her promise to start keeping a backyard hive compels the bookish thirty-year-old to further reading, but it’s not until she is later gifted a hive and a colony that she makes good on this vow. The memoir tracks her year of living and learning as a novice apiarist: from her spontaneous decision to get a hive in November, to the anxious establishment of the colony in early autumn, the equally anxious prospects of the swarm (the departure of her colony) in July, and, finally, her own prospective movements in October.

Much of the book concerns the networks and communities that Jukes’s experiment relies on. These include not only friend circles and beekeeping societies, but the ever-widening company she keeps in her library. The more captivating sections follow her reading adventures from ancient and Enlightenment natural history and philosophy to contemporary science and cultural studies. Huber, whose letters she tracks down in the British Library (another hive),

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

is the principal mainstay. In the ‘reading’ sections of the book, we read and learn with her; we are held in those processes, which are recorded with neither foresight nor hindsight.

In reading Huber, if there is a giddy sense of facility between bees and books – and beekeeping and book-writing – Jukes is a little less sure about their unity. On the one hand, she is self-critical about using books as a crutch and about wanting to ‘stick to reading about bees in books, where the words don’t move around like real bees do and everything has been laid out neatly in order’. On the other, she recognises a productive feedback between the two. The bees’ buzzing, dancing language starts to unsettle the hold she has on the language she reads and uses. Faced with her swelling hive and bee-library, words like hive, home, keep, swarm, and observation unhinge and hum with a new poetry.

Bees in Jukes’s writing – as in Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1901 classic The Life of the Bee – are complex, ebullient, perceptive, and adaptable creatures.

They are able to wreak welcome havoc on humanity’s need for simplicity, categorisation, and limited ways of seeing – in books and in life. The memoir itself, and its expansion beyond the simple ‘observation journal’ where it began, may reflect the author’s project for an insect-eyed openness to the world around her. As a result, Jukes does tend to give too much space to the charmingly simple and quaint untidiness of her own life: dirty dishes left piled in the sink, chipped mugs, coffee-stained and dog-eared books, her unorthodox love of eating tomato vines. These moments help to pad out her observations about amateur beekeeping into a ‘life’, but they often result in the very comfortable predictability that keeping an anarchic colony of buzzing strangers had supposedly upended. Perhaps they also make us too alert to the less adventurous polities and customs that – to borrow words from a Les Murray bee poem – cushion all this ‘loose talk’ of ‘springtime or freedom’. g Keegan O’Connor is a writer and teacher of English Literature and English as a Second Language living in Melbourne. ❖

IF THE TUDULGAL COULD THRIVE ON A SMALL SANDY ISLAND AND BECOME A LEADING CONTROL CENTRE IN AUSTRALIA’S TORRES STRAITS

HOW CAN THESE INSIGHTS HELP BUILD MORE RESILIENT AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD?

Monash Arts making a difference through research

Compared to other countries, Australia has next to no research about its sandy cay islands that formed 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, but that is about to change with a new break-through ARC Discovery project by Monash Indigenous Studies Centre Professor Ian McNiven in collaboration with the Tudulgal and local communities in the north of Australia.

The project will offer for the first time longitudinal evidence on how major societies could thrive on sandy cays in Australia, shedding important insights for communities around the world searching for ways to build more resilient communities against climate change and major challenges ahead.

Listen to the podcast via iTunes, Soundcloud or at arts.monash.edu/news/ian-mcniven-tudu

As part of Monash Arts Researchers podcast series, Professor Ian McNiven shares the incredible discoveries made so far about Tudu island – that was the epicentre of the Torres Straits, one of the greatest maritime societies the world has ever seen. And, we hear about the project’s future plans and opportunities for students and researchers.

Have you considered research?

Research areas » Film, Media and Communications » Historical Studies » Linguistics and Applied Linguistics » Literary and Cultural Studies

Practice-based research degrees » Philosophy » Social and Political Sciences » Theatre, Performance and Music

For more information visit: arts.monash.edu

» Creative writing » Journalism » Music composition » Music performance » Theatre performance » Translation studies

CRICOS provider: Monash University 00008C/01857J

Shining a light

Stories of climate science in action

Lauren Rickards SUNBURNT COUNTRY: THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN AUSTRALIA

by Joëlle Gergis Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 320 pp, 9780522871548

S

unburnt Country is a fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy.

The first two of these dominate the self-representations of the book. In particular, it is framed as filling a gap in our (Western) understanding of the Australian continent’s climate history by reconstructing earlier settler colonial climates. Going beyond the official climate records that commenced around 1900, the book reports on innovative Australian research that has combed through settler diaries and other written records for climate-relevant information.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the records found seem to be about extreme events and provided by white male colonists. The result is a romantic colonial-era drama that reiterates the undeniably epic nature of the colonies’ early years. Key to this drama are the weather and climate, which are given a powerful, capricious character that continually trips up courageous colonial settlers as they slowly come to the realisation that the country they invaded has ‘one of the most spectacularly erratic climates in the world’. Gergis, weaving together the stories with flair, complements many with well-chosen details and illustrations. In the process, these stories of early settlers’ lived experiences are revealed as not just a second cousin to ‘real’ climate data, but a valuable part of our cultural history, as professional historians of Australia have long known. By relaying these stories of climatic catastrophes with evident 34 O CTOBER 2018

passion, compassion, and a comfortingly simple focus on climate (one that does not engage with the wider politics of settler colonialism or writing history), Sunburnt Country implicitly offers glimpses into both the physical and social reasons that Australia has been mythologised as a ‘land of drought and flooding rains’.

Besides descriptions of colonial climates, the book includes an array of insights and snapshots about the long-term climate of Australia and how scientists are working to decode it. Using easy-to-understand snippets of specific scientific studies, Gergis explains how past climates can be read off the landscape thanks to the ‘tattooing’ of climatic experiences on tree rings, ice cores, coral, and sediments. One chapter also acknowledges indigenous Australians’ intimate understanding of climatic cycles, contingencies, and expressions in the landscape. The overall result is a succession of interesting snippets of information about past climates interspersed with valuable insights into how different climate systems function and how such information is derived. We learn, for example, that in New Zealand at least, tree-ring data indicates that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate system has been unusually pronounced in the twentieth century, but still does not equate to what was experienced in the medieval period. This attention to the continuities as well as discontinuities with past climates usefully complicates the oft-repeated binary of old climate versus new climate, or climate variability versus climate change. At the same time, Gergis describes in detail how a ‘human fingerprint’ on the climate is clearly obvious from the mid-twentieth century.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

The upshot is that ‘modern societies may not have experienced the full range of natural variability that occurred in the past’, but this is just further reason to be prepared ‘for some nasty climate surprises in the future’.

It is on the question of humaninduced climate change that Gergis’s stories of climate science in action are most compelling. Representing a new era of concerted transparency in how climate science is done, Sunburnt Country provides not just generic insights about how climate science approaches research problems, but about what it is like for Gergis and colleagues to perform such work in a hyper-politicised social context. This more autobiographical element of the book usefully reveals the mundane practices involved in professional research, such as writing grant applications, checking data, revising publications, as well as the moments of intellectual excitement that make it all seem worthwhile. Not only does this window into the doing of climate science add an engaging personal note to the story, but it usefully shines a light on what Paul Edwards calls the ‘vast machine’ of climate science: the immense cross-institutional, international network, structures, and procedures that collectively produce, test, and validate scientific information about the climate. It is this diffuse machine and its convergence in observational, modelling, and theoretical studies that points with uncommon confidence to the fact that the global climate is changing and is doing so due to human interference in the atmosphere.

We come then to a further element of doing climate science that Gergis’s account usefully reveals: the way organised climate change scepticism attempts to derail scientific processes, and the resultant hyper-vigilance that now inflects climate science practices such as peer review of publications. Gergis gestures to the painful embodied costs of doing climate change science under the gaze of malevolent interests and a paranoid discipline, costs that are layered atop the ‘normal’ emotional costs of climate change that all of us face.

Unsurprisingly, Sunburnt Country also contains advice on how society

needs to act to ward off the worst of projected climate change outcomes.

Following some useful syntheses of the physical impacts of projected climate change in Australia, including sobering assessments of the situation facing different ecosystems, Gergis provides high-level overviews and broad endorsement of the ‘symbolic start’ provided by the Paris Climate Agreement.

But rather than discuss adaptation solutions – as may have been expected given the book’s focus on climate (change) impacts and silence about sources of greenhouse gases – it turns to the question of emission mitigation.

Here, despite decent overviews of recent developments in Australia, Gergis stumbles on the over-trodden step from climate science to climate solutions.

As social science and humanities scholars such as myself frequently argue, the latter requires a deep, critical understanding of society; deeper than provided by Gergis’s calls for government action, technological innovation, and individual-level reconnection with nature.

While all of these things are undoubtedly required, on their own they obscure the power of more important factors, namely corporate capitalism’s ongoing frontier logic of expansion, extraction, and externalisation, which is – the book might have noted – inseparable from the settler colonialist project that led to temperate climate Britons struggling with the more tempestuous Australian climate in the first place.

This is the silence in Sunburnt Country that I felt most keenly. The very act of colonialism and the related effort to create a new territory, settlement, and node in the imperial economy were climate-changing acts. Sunburnt Country left me hungry for a parallel, intersecting history of Australia’s emissions and climatic interventions; a history not of just a young nation’s struggles with a seemingly capricious, volatile climate, but of the longer, uneven, embedded engagement of Indigenous and settler populations with ‘the environment’ (broadly defined), of which atmosphere and climate are a part. At a time when prime ministers continue to exploit Dorothea Mackellar’s patriotic poem about Australia’s sunburnt character to

explain away ‘natural disasters’ such as the Tathra fires – disasters covered with human fingerprints at multiple levels – we need to reboot Australia’s climate re-education. The first, ongoing lesson is to appreciate that extreme climate variability in Australia is natural, normal, and inevitable; a message Sunburnt Country contributes to. But, as the book also indicates, a second lesson is now also needed: the fact that the climate is not just variable but the whole climate envelope is now shifting. A ‘new normal’ is emerging but the reasons are neither natural nor inevitable. To understand and address the latter we need to return to Britain and Europe more broadly, not to unpack the climate assumptions the early settlers brought with them, but to understand why they were heading off to settle a new continent in the first place. We need to return to the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the rise of the Anglosphere, and the

birth of the corporation. We need to trek back beyond the mid-twentiethcentury ‘Great Acceleration’ in consumption rates and carbon dioxide concentrations that Gergis refers to, to the industrial revolution, the sixteenthcentury emergence of the Capitalocene, and the idea that to be productive is to extract value from other bodies, things and places.

Understanding these longer histories requires socio-political literacy more than scientific literacy. At multiple levels, Sunburnt Country assists greatly with the latter. More importantly, though, it opens the way for subsequent, more critical analysis of the relationship between the ongoing settler colonial project and climate change. g Lauren Rickards researches and teaches on the social dimensions of climate change and the Anthropocene at RMIT University.

The caper, the winds, the walks An inspiring look at the Southern Ocean

Paul Humphries WILD SEA: A HISTORY OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

by Joy McCann NewSouth, $32.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781742235738

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cebergs loom large in Joy McCann’s Wild Sea: A history of the Southern Ocean. They are one of the most recognisable features of the higher latitudes of the Southern Ocean and the one that people often look forward to the most when voyaging south for the first time. Ice gets its own chapter in an inspiring book that spans the geologic and human history of this great swath of howling, tide-swept body of water that girdles the world.

The Southern Ocean lies south of all the other major oceans – the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian – between Antarctica and Australia, South Africa, South America, and New Zealand. It streams along just south of the notoriously

treacherous continental capes, where oceans mix and mountainous seas have devastated shipping for centuries.

Several remote sub-Antarctic islands – Kerguelen, South Georgia, Heard, Macquarie, among others – feel the force of the Southern Ocean’s tides and bear the brunt of its winds. Only coldadapted animals like penguins, seals, whales, and krill thrive in such extreme climates. Scientists have felt the lure of the Southern Ocean for centuries and still visit its islands and the Antarctic Peninsula each year. They and, increasingly, tourists now dominate the human presence in this remote region of the earth, where sealers and whalers once plundered and became rich.

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Wild Sea is organised thematically: ‘Ocean’, ‘Wind’, ‘Coast’, ‘Ice’, ‘Deep’, ‘Current’, and ‘Front’. In each, McCann weaves vignettes of Southern Ocean exploration, experience, and exploitation into chapters, some tight as sailcloth, others a little looser. The book’s breadth – philosophy, science, literature, natural history, fishing, hunting, commerce – is greater than its depth, clearly targeting a general audience. Chapters as themes was a bold choice. A chronological narrative of human contact with the Southern Ocean would have been safer and avoided the repetition that was inevitable as characters appear and reappear in different contexts. But I was always impressed by how McCann effortlessly structures the narrative of each theme.

The human history and contemplation of the Southern Ocean goes back almost two thousand years, as philosophers grappled with how the earth maintained its equilibrium, speculating that a great southern land counterbalanced the land masses in the northern hemisphere. The British, Dutch, and French sent out ships in the eighteenth

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century in search of such a land. One of these was the Endeavour, commanded

by James Cook. These seafarers risked death and discovered not the hoped-for land but bitter cold, extreme weather, and ‘prodigious’ waves that dwarfed anything experienced before.

Map-making and wind charts followed closely after early voyages, and these were especially useful for ships transporting people to the new colony of Australia. It was soon realised that harnessing the power of the winds of the ‘Roaring Forties’ (latitude 40–50 °S) and ‘Furious Fifties’ (latitude 50–60 °S) could mean the trip from England to Adelaide was reduced to just over two months. This eased the process of colonisation and enhanced the potential for remote industries like sealing and whaling.

McCann writes at length on the harvesting of marine resources, especially in the chapter ‘Current’. This was for me the most comprehensive, insightful, and compelling topic in her book. Currents, especially those that upwell nutrient- and food-rich water from the ocean’s depths, are what drives food webs that once supported countless seals and whales.

The sealing and whaling industries took off in the early 1800s. By 1911–13, whalers around the Antarctic Peninsula, South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich islands alone were killing more than ten thousand whales annually. This increased with each year, aided by the introduction of more efficient harpoon technology and factory ships. As whale numbers decreased, efforts intensified, but whaling became less and less economic. Neverthe-

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less, it took until 1982 for the international moratorium on commercial whaling to be ratified. The impacts of this slaughter on the Southern Ocean and its wildlife are still being felt to this day.

Although the plunder that went on paints an indelible, blood-red stain on the history of the Southern Ocean and its islands, the more edifying riches that were gained by adventure and science are at the vanguard of Wild Sea. The cast of characters that sailed from obscurity into notoriety are many. Anyone with a little history will recognise names like Douglas Mawson, James Clark Ross, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton. The names of scientists may be less well-known, but McCann describes their achievements with equal passion. McCann also draws our attention to the oft-neglected women whose contributions include, but are not limited to, the mapping of the sea floor (Marie Tharp), marine biology (Isobel Bennett, Mary Gillham, Susan Ingham, and Hope Black (née Macpherson), and conservation (Rachel Carson).

At times I wanted to hear more stories of the characters who populate the history of human experience in the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean apparently selects for extremophiles, which makes for great storytelling.

Some of my favourites were the participants in the ‘Sunday Times Golden Globe Race’: a solo, non-stop, roundthe-world race that began in Britain in 1968. Participants variously retired, lost interest, or committed suicide as the race slowly turned to farce. Only Robin Knox-Johnston completed the race, ten months after he set out. But as I read, I realised that people are mere supporting cast in a much larger production.

The real heroes in Wild Sea are the capes, the winds, the mountainous waves, the remote islands, as well as the seabirds, the seals, and the whales of the Southern Ocean. And, of course, the icebergs. g Paul Humphries lectures in ecology and animal diversity and studies the ecology of rivers at Charles Sturt University. He is co-editor of Ecology of Australian Freshwater Fishes (CSIRO Publishing, 2013).

Matheson Library atrium, Monash University, Clayton (photograph by Dianna Snape)

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Coffee, food and massages Transforming urban Australia

Frank Bongiorno CITY LIFE: THE NEW URBAN AUSTRALIA

by Seamus O’Hanlon

NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 241 pp, 9781742235615

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few years ago, while taking a tram through Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs, I decided to visit the Northcote factory – an industrial laundry – where my father worked as a storeman between 1973 and 1982. Or rather, I thought I’d check to see whether the business was still there, for I hadn’t been anywhere near the place in the more than thirty years since his death.

As I entered the street, I heard noises that sounded vaguely industrial, but it soon became clear that the hammering was coming from the construction of some units. Could it be that the street was now residential? Not entirely: the factory, or part of it, had, against the odds, survived the gentrification of this highly desirable corner of Melbourne.

Still, there was something amiss. I could not see any workers. The factory was clearly still doing business, but I didn’t spot a single human being during my stroll. The eerie quiet was a far cry from the bustle of the 1970s.

Seamus O’Hanlon’s City Life: The new urban Australia helps place this trip down memory lane in perspective. When commentators – frequently journalists – have turned to the economic renovation of modern Australia since the 1970s, their triumphalist narratives are invariably models of abstraction, far removed from the impact of change on any actual people and places. They have little interest in those affected by the reforms they celebrate, politely averting their gaze from the post-industrial wastelands.

The world of neoliberal economic reform has brought cheaper cars, cheaper clothes, and cheaper holidays. It has gifted us nice restaurants, bars, and gyms, as well as opening hours convenient to 38 O CTOBER 2018

those who patronise them. The betteroff can hire cheap labour to clean their loos and mind their children, the latter subsidised by governments otherwise impatient with spongers. Urban renewal has revitalised the inner city, creating ‘lifestyle’ benefits for anyone with the money to pay for them. Who would want a noisy Rosella factory if you can have in its place an art gallery, a café, or a studio apartment?

Of course, that same transformation has also created outer suburbs that, in parts, still bear more than a passing resemblance to Berlin in 1945. In 2016, O’Hanlon reports, the Melbourne state electorate of Broadmeadows – once a major industrial centre and the site of the Ford car plant – had just 53.5 per cent of its population of fifteen to sixty-four-year-olds in the labour force. Only half of these were working full-time. The land that invented the Freddo Frog – created in 1930 by the Melbourne firm MacRobertson’s, I learn from O’Hanlon – no longer makes motor cars and has largely abandoned the mass production of anything much except university graduates.

O’Hanlon is understandably ambivalent about these changes. He tells us at the end of the book that some years ago he came to accept that there was no future for Australians in producing goods that could be made more cheaply overseas and imported. He clearly loves Australian cities, celebrates the ethnic diversity of the largest of them (while noting that much of Australia remains very white and even Anglo-Celtic), and admires the ingenuity that has gone into the making of the post-Fordist urban order. Abandoned factories and offices have become apartments, unwanted

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industrial land has been taken over by expanding universities, and the shabby and decaying inner cities of the 1970s have been turned into sparkling residential, entertainment, and educational precincts.

Yet there are reasons to hesitate.

As O’Hanlon argues, there is a sameness about many of the developments that have emerged from urban renewal.

Waterfront projects such as Darling Harbour in Sydney and Southbank in Melbourne could just as easily have been in London, Baltimore, or Shanghai. City high streets now increasingly resemble each other. When developers, real estate agents, and politicians – they can be hard to tell apart – bang on about ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘diversity’, and ‘lifestyle’, they are really using euphemisms ‘for wealthy, educated, highly cultured, and internationally focussed, but also often young, female, hedonistic, and, in some neighbourhoods, gay’. It is all very inclusive, so long as you have the money to buy inclusion. And there is the irony that the very circumstances that draw the young and creative to inner-city areas soon pass as the wealthy professionals move in, pushing up the price of housing.

In Australia, there are other reasons to worry. Urban revitalisation is being driven by speculative investment encouraged by government policy. This includes sale to overseas investors – usually Asian – of large city apartments that in due course will become run down and in need of repair and renovation. How will the government face the problem of ensuring that absentees cough up? And isn’t there a danger that, at some point, the bubble will burst?

O’Hanlon is an astute commentator

on the paradoxes that the new urban Australia is throwing up. He has a dry wit that enlivens an account that sometimes threatens to become bogged down in its large array of facts – especially figures. And he is good at showing how the various economic, policy, social, and cultural pieces fit together. Yet, his account is somewhat limited in its geographical focus. Sydney and Melbourne dominate, as they dominate the Australian urban scene, but he misses some opportunities. Brisbane is barely mentioned, and so Expo 88 and South Bank are overlooked. The Saints fans will be cranky at his ignoring Brisbane’s contribution to the Australian punk scene, which he presents as a Melbourne show. The revitalisation of Fremantle – partly stimulated by the America’s Cup defence of 1986–87 – is not discussed, nor do Canberra, Wollongong, or Newcastle have any role in his story.

One of O’Hanlon’s findings is that while Melbourne is growing faster than Sydney, it is some way behind in terms of its status as a world city and centre for finance, media, and much else that is shiny, glamorous, and lucrative. As recognised by many historians, this tale of these two cities – and their touchy relationship – has been central to Australian history for 170 years now.

In the period immediately ahead, we seem destined to encounter yet another fascinating chapter.

O’Hanlon ends on a somewhat pessimistic note. Has Australia, by investing in much-needed infrastructure, wasted the opportunities offered by the China boom to create truly great cities?

Why do we need to sit forever in traffic, or catch two trains and a bus to get to work? And can we really build a prosperous country by selling each other, as he puts it, ‘coffee, food and massages’? Like so much else that has gone wrong in this country over the last quarter of a century, the chance to reinvent the Australian city for a globalised world has probably been wasted by a political class lacking in vision, competence, and courage. g Frank Bongiorno teaches at the Australian National University, where he is Head of the School of History.

Urban adagio Sara Savage URBAN CHOREOGRAPHY: CENTRAL MELBOURNE 1985–

edited by Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones

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Melbourne University Press $44.99 pb, 319 pp, 9780522871661

n her influential 1961 text The Death and Life of Great American Cities, American-Canadian urban activist Jane Jacobs famously characterised the complex order of a successful city as ‘an intricate ballet’. The ‘dance’ of a thriving city sidewalk, says Jacobs, bucks trends of uniformity and repetition in favour of improvisation, movement, and change.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a book named Urban Choreography draws heavily on Jacobs’s work. In their introduction, co-editors Kim Dovey and Ronald Jones shed further light on their choice of title: ‘A city is not a static object but an assemblage of interconnections between people and place. …

Urban choreography is the practice of shepherding, of seeking to ensure that synergy and harmony prevail over chaos, but it is not micromanagement of the form or the life of a city.’’

Clearly, the editors (Dovey, Jones, and Rob Adams) share Jacobs’s belief that spontaneity and unpredictability are integral elements of any flourishing city. They also believe that urban transformation should be slow: at the book’s launch in early 2018, Dovey (professor and former head of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne) even commented that an early working title for the book was ‘Incremental Urbanism’, referring to the importance of gentle reshaping over sudden, reactionary urban change. In the chapter ‘Designing and Framing Public Space’, Melbourne architect and public realm expert Peter Elliott reinforces this sentiment: ‘Those parts of a city that undergo gradual piecemeal change, rather than radical surgery, retain more layers of history and memory.’ Urban Choreography is a book that attempts to peel back some of these layers to map the

gradual, yet dramatic, shift in Melbourne’s city centre from the mid-1980s until today.

With the pervasiveness of a Coles jingle, local media love to remind Melburnians that their city’s population has nearly trebled in the last fifty years and is set to double again by 2050. Adams, Dovey, and Jones aren’t interested in limiting this growth; instead, Urban Choreography reckons with the double-edged sword of population density and the Jacobsian notion that for this particular dance to effectively play out in a city, mixed primary use and walkability are essential. (In his 2016 book Urban Design Thinking, Dovey frequently refers to ‘DMA’: the trinity of density, mix, and access ‘that comprises a structural core that is necessary, although insufficient, for the emergence of urban intensity’.)

At its heart, Urban Choreography is a story of increasing density and the way Melbourne has handled this continuing challenge in recent years.

In the opening chapter, Danish urbanist and architect Jan Gehl reflects on his forty-year relationship with Melbourne – from early investigations on street life in inner-city residential areas to the long-running research collaboration with City of Melbourne, Places for People, which surveyed the central city’s public life in 1994 and again in 2004. In ‘Taking Council’, Lecki Ord, a former lord mayor of Melbourne, pays tribute to the community activism led by social and environmental planners Ruth and Maurie Crow, champions of functional mix and the drivers behind a number of instrumental plans in the early 1970s. Elsewhere, urban economist and planner Marcus Spiller details the effects of neoliberal reforms in Melbourne in ‘Economic Change and Urban Design’ (complete with a seemingly straight-faced observation that 1970s Melbourne looked and felt ‘provincial’), while in ‘A City with Soul’ former Federation Square CEO Kate Brennan considers Melbourne’s changing relationship with public art (‘no longer an embellishment of successful urban design and planning but an essential component of it’).

One valuable contribution comes from co-editor Ronald Jones, landscape ENVIRONMENT

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architect and urban designer, whose comprehensive chapter – clear-sighted and refreshingly lacking in spin – recounts some pivotal moments in Melbourne’s recent urban history (including those in which he played a major part, like Birrarung Marr and the pedestrianisation of Swanston Street). Equally compelling is Dovey’s thoughtful series of interviews with Adams, conducted over several months at Mario’s in Fitzroy.

With a career spanning sixteen lord mayors and a chief commissioner, Adams is arguably best placed to tell the tale of Melbourne’s many recent transformations, and the conversational format of this chapter allows for more frank dialogue and candid reflections than the rest of the book.

There are some telling moments in ‘The Marios Talks’. When discussing the network of laneways for which Melbourne is now well-known, Adams makes a distinction between street art (‘a positive thing’) and tagging (‘mindless’), as if the two forms of graffiti aren’t fundamentally entwined. For all the fuss made in Urban Choreography about the rights of people to reclaim public space, it’s clear where the line is drawn (or indeed aggressively removed) by the City of Melbourne. (Why not instead address the many factors that might lead to an excess of tagging in the city?) Similarly jarring are Adams’s thoughts on architectural and artistic acknowledgements of Traditional Owners in the city: ‘Clearly, this is a relationship we still need to better understand, and be prepared to listen to and discuss more, if we are to find long-term meaningful positions,’ he says – and he’s right – but if this is so, why wasn’t the topic given more airtime inside this otherwise impeccably thorough volume?

True to its open-ended title, Urban Choreography: Central Melbourne 1985– culminates with a nod to the future: what next for Melbourne’s urban adagio? If an updated edition were to be published in another thirty years’ time, what will we have learned? And how might recent developments – the Metro Tunnel; the proposed Apple store in Federation Square; the Public Housing Renewal Program; or the Andrews govern-

ment’s ‘anti-association’ laws – fit into the story? Urban Choreography is not simply an execise in hindsight, nor is it just a reminder of the importance of good local (and state) governance: it’s a salient expression of the inherent power of urban design – slow, fast, Jacobsian, or

otherwise – to shape our daily experiences in the city. g Sara Savage is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and producer based in Melbourne.

Her work frequently covers art, design, architecture, and urbanism.

Landscape with Magic Lantern Slides ‘ You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways.’

Lucretius

This stillness before rain – a field, its broken statues overrun with grass – their eyes – split seedheads, sky-backed, thronged with light – tussock, speargrass, wild fennel – irradiate its white stare – this middle distance built perpetually out from the statues’ eyes – in which each word lives in its own landscape, widening back through silent weather ‘as though at home’ – Their hands – half-open, palms turned upwards – in couch-grass, its scratch-fine shadows – are broken gestures – out of scale, themselves a landscape worn with touching – inventing vanishing points inside its ranks of stone – these head-high mounds of building wreckage – bluestone, broken concrete – with the sky growing back from them – clouds infolding silence – ‘much, and so cold’ – in dazed tumult the colour of molten glass where its light pours through – Now a bright-edged blotch – fogging in old celluloid – transforms into a ray containing sequence within itself and small rain floats inside its landscape walled in glass – Do you remember? A factory. A path.

Train lines, curving away and back to where they are hung in light – unallusive, single, arraying themselves over that gulf which is the distance of my eye – and its surface shivers, grass in wind – now sliding back into its solitude – making candid that ‘need for something new which all the myths proclaim’ –

Lisa Gorton

Lisa Gorton’s most recent poetry collection is Hotel Hyperion (Giramondo, 2013).

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Dunbar boys Nicole Abadee BRIDGE OF CLAY

by Markus Zusak

Picador $39.99 hb, 579 pp, 9781743534816

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ost writers seek to better their previous books, but in Markus Zusak’s case this goal was particularly difficult, given that his last book was The Book Thief. Published in 2005, it has sold sixteen million copies worldwide and spent ten years on the New York Times bestseller list. It is thus no surprise that Zusak has taken ten years to write Bridge of Clay, his sixth book.

So, does it deliver? Yes, in spades.

Zusak has crafted a strapping story (almost 600 pages) about love, family, courage, betrayal, and guilt. There is every chance that the family at its core – Michael and Penny Dunbar and their five sons, Matthew, Rory, Henry, Clay, and Tommy – will come to inhabit as familiar a place in Australian literature as the Lamb and Pickles families from Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (1991). The world that Zusak creates in Bridge of Clay is every bit as fully realised, the characters as memorable, the prose as accomplished.

Bridge of Clay centres on the fourth Dunbar boy, Clay – ‘the best of us’ – and his efforts to expiate the (perceived) sins of his past. Set in Australia in the 1980s (look out for excellent cultural references), it is narrated by Matthew eleven years after the main events have taken place. The story unfolds gradually through chapters which alternate between the past and the present. It 42 O CTOBER 2018

opens with a man, ‘the Murderer’, breaking into the home of the Dunbar boys. They are a rambunctious bunch, aged thirteen to twenty, who have lost both parents – ‘Our mother was dead.

Our father had fled.’ It turns out that the man is their father, Michael, who walked out on them two years earlier after their mother died. Michael, whom the boys despise (hence ‘the Murderer’), has returned to see if any of the boys will help him build a bridge over the river near where he lives. They refuse. Clay, however, changes his mind.

Bridge of Clay is largely a book about love: romantic, family, and fraternal.

The love story of Michael and Penny lies at its core. They are not an obvious match – she a refugee from Eastern Europe, schooled in the Greek classics and the piano, he a shy Australian man nursing a broken heart – but they fall in love, marry, and have five sons. Their life is brutally disrupted when Penny is diagnosed with cancer. Although there are moments of humour (much of it black), Zusak’s descriptions of Penny’s slow decline as witnessed by her husband and young sons are almost unbearably sad. The other love story is that of the teenage Clay and Carey. Zusak’s depiction of their romance is as tender as it is respectful.

‘In Carey Novac, Clay had found someone who knew him, who was him.’

Zusak writes powerfully of family love. The Dunbars’ family life is shambolic but joyful, and Zusak’s depiction of it ranges from the hilarious – such as when the whole family, Penny included, sit down to dinner with their shirts off – to the heartbreakingly poignant, when the boys gather around Penny’s sickbed while their father reads her beloved Homer to them all. Finally, there is brotherly love, in abundance.

Bridge of Clay is also a book about betrayal, guilt, and redemption. Penny betrays her father when she flees Europe; later, her body betrays her. Michael betrays his sons when he abandons them after her death. Clay betrays his brothers when he leaves them to help Michael build the bridge. Each must deal with the guilt and try to atone for their sins.

For Michael and Clay, the path

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to redemption is the building of the bridge. They model theirs on the famous Pont du Gard aqueduct in France, and they share a passion for Michelangelo, especially his sculptures of David and The Slaves. The former is perfect, while the latter is unfinished, depicting the bodies of the slaves in an eternal struggle to emerge from the marble – a metaphor for Michael and Clay’s efforts to make their own bridge perfect.

Ultimately, Clay acknowledges the futility of that quest – ‘I’d die to find greatness like the David some day …

But I know … we live the lives of the Slaves.’ It might not be perfect, but the bridge is beautiful, and it seems to even become an extension of Clay himself – the ‘bridge of clay’ of the title.

Zusak has crafted a strapping story about love, family, courage, betrayal, and guilt Zusak has a delightful turn of phrase. When Clay is with Carey, a jockey, ‘His heart was out of its gate.’

The novel is replete with imagery and allusion: it opens with a biblical reference (‘In the beginning there was …’) followed closely by a description of Michael’s ‘crown of thorny hair’. Water is a leitmotif; when Clay leaves to join his father, he is surrounded by (metaphorical) floodwater, and he dives in ‘to a bridge, through a past, to a father’.

There are multiple classical allusions, reflecting Penny’s deep love for The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as modern ones – Michael is a ‘wasteland in a suit’ after Penny’s death.

Zusak has said that Clay’s experience building the bridge reflects his own of writing the novel – ‘Clay wants to achieve something great, but he knows he is only human. His only greatness is knowing he can’t ever achieve it fully – but trying to make it there anyway.’

The analogy is not germane. Zusak has created a great novel, rich with meaning, and one that will endure. g Nicole Abadee is the books writer for The Australian Financial Review Magazine.

Jonestown revisited Anna MacDonald BEAUTIFUL REVOLUTIONARY

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett Scribe $32.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781925713039

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aura Elizabeth Woollett’s novel Beautiful Revolutionary chronicles the decade leading up to the Jonestown massacre in Guyana when Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, orchestrated the ‘revolutionary suicide’ and murder of more than 900 members of his congregation, as well as the assassinations of US Congressman Leo Ryan, a delegation of journalists, and a defector from ‘the Cause’.

Woollett spent years researching the novel; she interviewed survivors and relatives of the deceased. Given the extent of this research – her preservation of Jones’s name and character, her utilisation of the biographies of those close to him, her detailed representation of the historical events leading up to and including the massacre on 18 November 1978 – it is a curious decision on the author’s part to change the names of other key historical figures, especially Jones’s lover, Carolyn Layton (who, in the novel, becomes Evelyn Lynden), and his wife, Marceline Baldwin (here, Rosaline).

Narrated in the third person, Beautiful Revolutionary shifts artfully between the fictionalised perspectives of Evelyn, Rosaline, Evelyn’s soon-to-be ex-husband Lenny Lynden, Gene Luce (a Temple member since its foundation in Indianapolis in the 1950s), and other characters more or less close to Jones and his inner circle. These perspectival shifts have an unexpected effect.

Although Temple life is never directly narrated from Jones’s point of view, although his stories of ‘[h]ow America will set fire to itself, mushroom clouds over every major city’ are related at a remove from the man himself, and although we never see from within his visions of ‘karmic retribution’ for an escalating number of ‘enemies’, Jones

nevertheless emerges as the novel’s most well-rounded character.

Perhaps this is because there are no perspectives in the narrative that are properly external to the Peoples Temple. Any wider context is limited to the book’s opening and closing pages: before newlyweds Evelyn and Lenny join the Temple in Evergreen Valley, California, and after the US media reports of ‘starvation, sleep deprivation, public beatings and illegal weaponry’ that spark calls for Jonestown to be investigated and lead to the Congressman’s visit.

The insularity of Beautiful Revolutionary lends it an atmosphere of cloying claustrophobia that is appropriate to the representation of cult life. Jones is the central ordering presence – ‘Father’ to all his congregation – including those who eventually defect. For Rosaline, it is Jones’s ‘genius and his cruelty, that he doesn’t follow other men’s rules; makes up his own rules’, and polices the behaviour of his congregation accordingly.

Nevertheless, one of the challenges of representing such a community, especially when doing so from the perspective of the faithful, is to convince a contemporary reader of the charismatic power of a man like Jones. If we can suspend our disbelief enough to have faith in Jones’s magnetic appeal, perhaps we can also work towards an understanding of how, and why, apparently intelligent individuals willingly endured isolation from non-Temple family and friends, ritualised public humiliation, rape, forced labour, and even death at Jones’s hands. Woollett’s novel is brimming with historical detail and her depiction of Jonestown is impressive, but Jones is presented as a comically flawed character, even from the point of view of those who will give their lives for him.

This makes his baleful power over them difficult to fathom.

Throughout the novel, the faithful consciously work to prop up Jones, to provide the ballast he needs to give the illusion of a god-like power. They ‘pick through new members’ trash cans for anything Father might use during his predictions’, when he appears to read the minds of his followers. They prepare the chicken gizzards that Jones slips ‘into some poor old sister’s mouth … to

be choked up and passed off as cancers’ in one of his public ‘healings’. They stage an attempted assassination and a series of bomb threats, grist for the mill of his increasing paranoia, evidence of his many enemies. And they do all of this for the good of the socialist group as defined by Jones. Of the gizzards, Rosaline says: ‘I know it feels like dirty work, but we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t for the greater good. … Lotsa these folks wouldn’t come all this way if it wasn’t for the healings.’

From within the Temple, it may have seemed better to foster the illusion of Jones’s power than to risk a crisis of faith in his vision of a socialist utopia. Certainly, the need to believe in some higher cause is a more persuasive motivator than some of the others suggested in the novel: for instance, that Jones ‘is a minister’ and Evelyn ‘is a minister’s daughter’ who loved her father ‘too much’; that, for Gene Luce, ‘the universe made sense’ when Jones ‘put his hand on [his] crotch’ and ‘fucked him against that wallpaper’; and that, for Jones, ‘the sex plane is sickening … but I will sacrifice my body over and over, if that’s what it takes to bring you people to enlightenment’. All of which contributes to a portrait of Jones but fails somehow to do justice to the people who followed him.

The publication of Beautiful Revolutionary marks the fortieth anniversary of the massacre. A well-written account, it raises important questions about the desire for faith, especially in a time of crisis, and the dangerous appeal of a powerful personality dressed up as a revolutionary. g

Anna MacDonald is currently writing a novel and is a Research Associate at Monash University.

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The well Cassandra Atherton KILLING COMMENDATORE

by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen Harvill Secker $29.99 pb, $45 hb, 637 pp, 9781787300194

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here is a running joke in Japan that autumn doesn’t start each year until Haruki Murakami has lost the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Most recently, in 2017, he lost to Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but is now a British citizen. To date, two Japanese writers have been awarded the prize – Yasunari Kawabata (1968) and Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) – and many believe Murakami will be the next Japanese laureate. However, it won’t be this year, because the Nobel Prize for Literature has been postponed due to a sexual misconduct scandal, and while Murakami was one of four finalists for the substitute New Academy Prize, he has recently withdrawn from the prize stating that he wants ‘to concentrate on his writing, away from media attention’.

You don’t need to be a Murakami devotee (Harukist), to enjoy Killing Commendatore; it has many of the elements that have made him the most famous Japanese writer of his generation. Published in Japan on 24 February 2017, with the title 騎士団長殺し (Kishidanchō Goroshi), this epic novel in two volumes has already gained plenty of attention. With its first-edition printing of 1.3 million copies in Japan, and its subsequent classification as ‘indecent’ in China, readers are anticipating the new English translation.

After two consecutive novels writ44 O CTOBER 2018

ten in the third person, Killing Commendatore charts Murakami’s return to first-person narration. In Japanese there are several first-person pronouns, and the ‘I’ in this novel uses the more formal watashi. This is a departure from Murakami’s earlier works and lends the novel some of its ethereal quality – even in the English translation. The narrator is an unnamed thirty-six-year-old portrait painter living in Tokyo. In ‘Part 1: The Idea Made Visible’, when he discovers he has been cuckolded and his wife wants a divorce, he begins an abstracted journey with no destination.

Travelling through Hokkaido and pre3/11 Tohoku, he finally settles in the vacant house of a famous Japanese artist, Tomohiko Amada, on a mountaintop in the remote area of Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture. The lonely, isolated artist is a familiar trope in Murakami’s writing and allows for inflected moments of self-discovery in uncanny contexts.

This is evident when the narrator finds one of Amada’s paintings called Killing Commendatore and believes that it depicts the gory killing of Commendatore from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, transposed to the historical Japanese setting of the Asuka Era (552–645ce).

It is from this point that the novel subtly shifts from a realist to surrealist narrative, as nightly the narrator is woken by the incessant ringing of a bell. After searching the property, he discovers that the noise originates from underneath rocks near a Shinto shrine. Around the same time, the narrator is commissioned to paint Wataru Menshiki’s portrait.

Menshiki is a mysterious, retired IT baron who lives across the mountain from Amada’s house. When Menshiki hears the bell, he recalls Ueda Akinari’s Tales of the Spring Rain, specifically the story ‘The Destiny That Spanned Two Lifetimes’, where a farmer finds a sokushinbutsu (a self-mummified Buddhist monk). Menshiki hires landscapers to excavate the site; they find nothing but a bell inside the well-like cavern.

Murakami has a preoccupation with wells and has famously stated, ‘it is my lifetime dream to be sitting at the bottom of a well’, expressing his desire for isolation. But the well also serves as a space between worlds in Murakami’s

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

books, so when the narrator takes the bell into Amada’s art studio, he is visited by a two-foot-tall man who calls himself an ‘Idea’ but who looks like the Commendatore in the painting. In ‘Part 2: The Shifting Metaphor’, the novel slips into double metaphors and ambiguities, as Murakami’s beguiling breed of magical realism plays with the reader’s sense of corporality and fantasy.

Intertextuality is a key feature of this novel, and the echoes of other texts haunt not only the plot but also some of the more lyrical passages of incurvate writing. In addition to Don Giovanni and Akinari’s short story, Killing Commendatore references Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Bluebeard’s Castle, and, in Murakami’s own words, pays homage to The Great Gatsby. Indeed, Murakami has an enduring relationship with Fitzgerald’s classic. He translated it into Japanese and has used it as an intertext in many of his other works. While the character of Menshiki is supposed to be a kind of Jay Gatsby figure, and some of the wasteland of the valley of the ashes may be referenced in various parts of the novel, it is unlikely without the promotional material and Murakami’s obiter dictum that the reader would be aware of this connection.

Importantly, Killing Commendatore is considered a controversial book for its references to Auschwitz and the Nanjing Massacre. In his conversation with the narrator, Menshiki acknowledges the Japanese military’s massacre of Chinese citizens and soldiers who had already surrendered. Murakami has stated: Because history is the collective memory of a nation, I think it is a grave mistake to forget about the past or to replace memory with something else. We must fight [against historical revisionism].

Novelists are limited in what we can do, but it is possible for us to fight such forces in the form of storytelling.

Murakami won’t win the Nobel Prize this year, but in his exposure of Japanese wartime atrocities he bravely lobbies for historical reconciliation. g Cassandra Atherton is a poet and scholar.

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Crossroads Jane Sullivan TOO MUCH LIP

by Melissa Lucashenko

University of Queensland Press $29.95 pb, 328 pp, 9780702259968

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stranger rides into a one-horse town on a shiny new motorbike.

Cue Ennio Morricone music.

Except it’s not a stranger, it’s that skinny dark girl Kerry Salter, back to say goodbye to her Pop before he falls off the perch. The first conversation she has is in the Bundjalung language (translated for our benefit) with three cheeky crows.

One bites a dead snake in the head and its fangs get wedged onto the bird’s beak, fastening it shut. Chances are it’ll starve to death, thinks Kerry. ‘The eaters and the eaten of Durrongo, having it out at the crossroads.’

That hapless crow is an apt portent for what Kerry encounters in Durrongo in the rest of Melissa Lucashenko’s splendid black comedy, where just about everybody bites and gets bitten in a cycle of ancestral woes and injustices, pointless violence, family dysfunction, and general stuff-ups. I’d have sighed and wept a bit throughout if it wasn’t so funny.

Lucashenko, born of a European father and a Goorie mother, has produced a string of fine novels (notably Mullumbimby, 2013) and essays, but she has said that Too Much Lip was the most difficult book to write. I’m not surprised: it is consistently unflinching and makes no excuses for anyone, black or white. Lucashenko has also 46 O CTOBER 2018

said she had in mind Alan Duff ’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) and The Beverley Hillbillies television show (1964–71). Somehow she pulls off this zanily incongruous mix of influences.

One thread of plot sounds familiar: big bad Jim Buckley, mayor of Durrongo, plans to bulldoze the Salters’ ancestral land on the river and build a jail, and the family is desperate to stop him. Is this yet another tale of colonial bully boys wanting to destroy a sacred Aboriginal Eden? It’s more complicated than that. Way back when, the men with muskets shot Granny Ava as she swam across the river to save herself and her unborn child. She made it, and without her there would be nobody.

Spectres from the troubled past weave in and out of the story, producing staggering surprises for both the characters and the reader. Meanwhile, Kerry struggles to make sense of her maddening family: Pop, the old bastard, the dying patriarch; Pretty Mary, Kerry’s mother, trying to hold everything together but inclined to hit the Fruity Lexia when the going gets tough; big brother Kenny, always a hair-trigger away from violence; little brother Black Superman, who thought he’d got away to Sydney but is inexorably drawn back; and saddest of all, Donny, Ken’s anorexic teenage son, who escapes into the comfort of war games on his computer.

Not to mention a sister who has been missing for decades.

What makes this spark up is Kerry herself, who is not just an observer but an active and frequently aggressive participant, as you’d expect from someone who roars into town on a stolen HarleyDavidson Softail. She’s the one with too much lip, she says with regret, but also a defiant pride: ‘Give the arseholes a blast, then stand and defend, or else run like hell.’ I’m always on Kerry’s side, especially when she’s stupidly courting danger or burgling the enemy stronghold. But I found it a little hard to take that she would fall so fast for Steve, the handsome whitefella, when she has always been drawn to her own kind – black and female. If Jim Buckley is the stock white baddie, Steve comes dangerously close to being the stock white goodie.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Mind you, Lucashenko has a lot of fun reversing the stereotypes as she gives us a lustful portrayal of Steve’s hot bod in language usually reserved for female sex objects. So I can forgive her, especially as most of the characters are caught up in an intricate and horribly sticky web of history, ancient and recent, where it’s very hard to lay conclusive blame, even for heinous crimes. You have to go back to the original ‘hard men’, the invaders and colonisers, and their atrocities – and they too have muddied things with their contribution to the gene pool.

Another astringent pleasure is the blunt and energetic language Lucashenko uses in narrative and dialogue.

Much of the story is told in Aboriginal vernacular English and the occasional Bundjalung word that isn’t translated, but the meaning is more or less clear.

Here’s Pop showing his granddaughter how the local Mount Monk is shaped like a fist: ‘It’s a gunjibal’s fist waiting for us mob to step outta line, waiting to smash us down. We livin’ in the whiteman’s world now. You remember that.’

There were times when I was so horrified I didn’t want to believe what I was reading. Was Lukashenko exaggerating?

But she tells us in an afterword that virtually every incidence of violence depicted in the novel has occurred within her extended family at least once.

Somehow Lucashenko wraps up a happy-ish ending from all this evil, hatred, and sorrow. Reconciliation, forgiveness, and understanding are at least on the cards, threats are briskly dispatched, and, paradoxically, the spectacular arrival of the family’s totem shark makes the contrivances more believable.

There is some extraordinary Indigenous writing around at present that heralds a new stage in Australian literature, perhaps in world literature. Too Much Lip is a worthy addition to the work of such original and passionate writers as Kim Scott and Alexis Wright.

Talking crows, a talking shark: these are the surreal and symbolic bookends to a story that so often feels hopeless, yet is still the crucible of hope. g Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne.

Water worries Brenda Walker THE YEAR OF THE FARMER

by Rosalie Ham

Pan Macmillan $32.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781760558901

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n time and with water, everything changes,’ according to Leonardo da Vinci, who worked with Machiavelli on a strategic and ultimately doomed attempt to channel the flow of the Arno. Large-scale water management has had some notable successes in parts of Australia, but as poor practices and climate change put river systems under near-terminal stress, we face irreversible and potentially catastrophic ecological failures. Michael Cathcart, in The Water Dreamers (2009), provides an account of this. Attempts to rectify the ecological degradation of our rivers involve expensive and possibly futile federal policies, opportunism, and the potential for suffering in farming communities. Everything may indeed change in time and with water, but changes in water practices in Australia are particularly fraught.

Rosalie Ham’s fourth novel, The Year of the Farmer, uses a rural romance to put the case for the primacy of farmers and irrigators in a dysfunctional water buyback scheme. As she suggests, there is a lot more at stake than the fate of individual farmers – food security depends on sound water management. One of her characters has a ‘vision’ of famine.

He argues that he is expected ‘to work for nothing to feed everyone’. His is not the only appalled voice in the debate about the future of water in Australia.This debate is not usually conducted through popular romance, but the rural novel is Ham’s literary forte – she is best known as the author of The Dressmaker (2000).

The Year of the Farmer is set in a drought-stricken part of the Riverina where ‘paddocks [were] faintly ticking, crackling as they baked in the sun’, and ‘the air was perishingly dry’. Dogs run in packs across the country, threatening the sheep. Locals look out for their own, gossip, watch Australian Story on the

ABC, and worry. The farmer in question is Mitch, popular, capable, and in difficulty. The girl he loves has left for the city, his compromised marriage is on the rocks, the drought has destroyed ten years of his efforts on the land, and he is increasingly entangled in a buy-back scheme run by self-interested, transitory, or venal bureaucrats. Everything depends on water, and farmers who have regarded the river as their own for generations must compete with tourism and development and listen to arguments from environmentalists who are completely alien to them.

Rosalie Ham has a fine eye for smalltown politics and farm work. Her descriptions of the landscape are the greatest achievement of this novel.

They seem to have the authority of long observation. Her genuine concern for the human cost of water allocation is the motivating force of the novel, although other issues such as the impact of divorce on farming families and the poignancy of the elderly, unable to continue on the land they love, also form part of her concerns. Consistent with the romance genre, change comes to the community and to Mitch. There is the possibility at least of happiness and restitution, and one of the mysteries of the plot is somewhat ambiguously solved.

However the problems of drought and water management that the novel raises are not easily assuaged. There is far more to the issue than the considerable plight of farmers.

In particular, irreconcilable conflicts arise from ideas about who owns river systems. Cathcart describes how Alfred Deakin legislated to ensure that rivers were in public hands, that is, that ‘no private individual could own a river or control the use of its water’. The relatively recent practice of water trading, a federal response to the degradation of rivers in Australia, reverses this. Irrigators may lease or sell water rights that are formally allocated to them in an attempt to restore the fatally – from an ecological point of view – diminishing flow of river water. This interference seems, to farmers, like a violation of long-held entitlement. In The Year of the Farmer, Mitch argues that ‘you’re taking my water and making me pay

for it’. One farmer ‘thought about her river, the way it curved around the spot, and its busy population of fish, snakes, frogs, lizards and birds’. Relinquishment of what they believe to be exclusive ownership is hard, if not impossible, for these characters. In the book, an unpredicted release of water destroys a nineteenth-century system of barrages, resulting in immediate erosion. The barrages were built by the ‘ancestors’ of the farmers concerned, seeming to establish a venerable claim on the river and water management. However, there are more ancient and significant human interventions in rivers than nineteenthcentury barrages. Cathcart describes the ‘Stonehenge’ of Australia, the extensive stone fish trap in the Darling river at Brewarrina. Aboriginal people are described as ‘gone’, or, more chillingly, ‘vanquished’ in the book, but they are the prior and, in this novel, silent river custodians with convincing claims to ancestral connections to the water. The Year of the Farmer also dismisses the legitimacy of non-farming interests.

Environmental concerns about water management are raised in the novel: ‘If there’s no river there’s no water, there’s no nature, no farms, no food, no one to sell food, no town, no animals … nothing.’ But the voice for the environment is uttered by caricatures: a ‘ropey-haired scruff ’, ‘ferals’, and ‘Centre-link avoiders’. Water authority bureaucrats are likewise discredited in the novel as ridiculous or corrupt. The novel cannot credit the complexity of water management or the legitimacy of more than one point of view. g

Brenda Walker is Emeritus Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.

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Marina and Constance Sarah Holland-Batt THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE

by Alice Nelson

Vintage $32.99 pb, 296 pp, 9780143791188

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hat are the limits of maternal love? How do children fare in its absence? Is mothering a socialised behaviour or a biological impulse? These are the questions Alice Nelson pursues in her second novel, The Children’s House, which draws its title from the name given to the separate quarters alloted to children in the communal child-rearing characteristic of life in kibbutzim in Israel. The idea underpinning this parenting model is utopian, egalitarian, and socialist: the community, rather than the mother or father, assumes responsibility for the child; the parents, alleviated from the financial burden of caretaking, are free to pursue bonding and love in a way that capitalist imperatives preclude.

But all utopias have their victims, and in The Children’s House it is the protagonist, Marina, the daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, Gizela, who suffers under the yoke of collective education alongside her brother Dov. Gizela’s relinquishment of her children in the kibbutz produces a lifelong anxiety in Marina and her brother; the siblings grow up pining for affection, while Gizela remains unrelentingly aloof and eventually disappears from their lives altogether.

By the novel’s opening, Marina is an adult, having forged a comfortable life for herself in New York in spite of her difficult and peripatetic childhood.

A renowned academic at Columbia, she is writing a monograph on the Hasidic movement in the United States. Her husband, Jacob, is a successful psychiatrist with a practice in Chelsea. She has tried and failed to have children, but is stepmother to Jacob’s moody son, Ben. Riding the crest of Harlem’s gentrification in the late 1990s, the family has moved into a brownstone that formerly 48 O CTOBER 2018

housed an order of nuns.

Marina’s vexed relationship with motherhood comes into sharp relief when she meets Constance, a twentyyear-old Rwandan refugee who has moved into the projects with her son Gabriel. As Marina grows more attached to Gabriel and more alarmed

by Constance’s flat affect and lack of mothering instincts, her attempts to become the pair’s benevolent protector are tinged with both maternal zeal and liberal crusaderism. Marina identifies an English language class for Constance to attend, buys her groceries, and masquerades as her case worker. She also picks up Constance’s maternal slack, taking Gabriel on excursions to the Natural History Museum and the zoo. In these encounters, Constance remains frustratingly opaque as a character: while her seeming indifference is clearly a product of her trauma, her passivity and silence render her a cipher that the novel struggles to endow with convincing humanity.

Not so for Marina and her husband Jacob: the portrayal of their family life is where Nelson is most proficient. The intimacies of marriage and the ripples of disagreement between Jacob and Marina about how to handle Ben’s errancy are handled with insight and subtlety, as is Marina’s grief when a piece of devastating news lobs into her mailbox. The novel is studded with poetic observations of domestic life: Marina sees a pair of shoes suspended from a wire outside, ‘aloft and swaying gently in the wind … [like] an entreaty’; later, she watches ‘the soft roll of [rain] against the dusty window’. While the surfeit of detail hampers the narrative pace at times, Nelson skilfully evokes the textures of a gentrifying Harlem, and probes Marina’s presence as yet another interloper changing the face of the historically black neighbourhood.

Yet as the neighbourhood hurtles into the future, Marina increasingly dwells in the past, spurred by her observations of Constance to revisit her own fraught relationship with her mother Gizela. The resultant lengthy passages of recapitulative exposition about life in the children’s house – the most fascinating aspect of the novel – lack urgency or

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

crisis, relegated as they are to Marina’s childhood. And as the parallels between Constance’s mothering and Gizela’s become clearer, so too does Nelson’s bald restatement of the connections: we are told that ‘Gizela did not know how to be a mother’; elsewhere, that ‘Constance had retreated into a terrible blankness’, among many other explicit and clichéd pronouncements. Nelson’s inclination towards such summation is unfortunate; more often than not, the reader is told, rather than shown or convinced, what drives her characters. Constance and Gizela suffer from this most of all; the weight of their respective symbolic roles often outweighs their distinction as individuals.

Perhaps unavoidably, the links Nelson draws between Gizela and Constance become implicit comparisons or metaphors likening the suffering endured by Holocaust survivors with that of those who lived through the Rwandan genocide. We are told of Holocaust survivors: ‘Perhaps their ability to love their children in the old ways had been scoured out of them, along with everything else.’ And of the surviving Rwandans: ‘Each face had the same look of mute incomprehension, the same blank stare. It was the look that Constance bore.’ But while Nelson’s novel offers some insight into the lives of the kibbutzim and the intergenerational trauma wrought by the Holocaust, it is ultimately unsuccessful at grappling with the horrors of the Rwandan civil war. Perhaps out of trepidation, Nelson rarely adopts Constance’s perspective; when she does, she offers scant insight into Constance’s interior life or what lies behind her traumatised silence.

At one point, Marina observes of Constance: ‘Whatever might have sharpened her devotion to the child in Rwanda, seemed to have sunk away, like the rest of her, into irretrievable depths.’ In the end, Marina’s failure to comprehend Constance becomes the author’s. I only wish that Nelson had tried harder to bring Constance to the surface. g Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book, The Hazards, (UQP, 2015) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry.

The first celebrity

The completion of a triumphant life of Napoleon

Peter McPhee NAPOLEON: PASSION, DEATH AND RESURRECTION 1815–1840

by Philip Dwyer Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 390 pp, 9781408891759

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son of the French Revolution, Napoleon embedded in French society the Revolution’s core goals of national unity, civil equality, a hierarchy based on merit and achievement, and a rural society based on private property rather than feudal obligations. To these he added the Civil Code, the Bank of France, and other reforms, but he was never able to establish a stable political regime, primarily because internal rule was always subject to the insatiable demands of his external empire.

Napoleon’s obsession with creating a European order under French hegemony came at the expense of perhaps 900,000 of his own people’s lives, and those of a greater number of other Europeans who fought him or who were drafted into his armies. For two million or more Frenchmen who served in the imperial armies, soldiering was a miserable experience: it meant physical privation, fear, disease, and death. But Napoleon’s legacy of horrific numbers of deaths was overcome by the romanticised pride of those who survived: the one million men discharged from the armies in 1814–15. Their tales were embellished across time as subsequent French regimes floundered in a Europe determined to establish a balance of power against any further French imperial fantasies. The power of Napoleon’s legend was also a deliberate creation by the emperor, during the six remaining years of his life, and his acolytes.

Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle. He has published widely on modern European history, but his trilogy on Napoleon is his great triumph.

The previous volumes – Napoleon: The path to power, 1769–1799 (2007) and Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in power, 1799–1815 (2013) – brilliantly charted Napoleon’s story from his Corsican childhood to his Waterloo. Now Dwyer has examined with equal flair Napoleon’s imprisonment and death, and his resurrection as an almost supernatural celebrity.

At the end of the volume, Dwyer reflects that ‘I am not entirely sure I have understood him as much as I would have liked to’, oscillating between feeling that at times he was actually in conversation with Napoleon, and at others that he was just another of the emperor’s exhausted, obedient aidesde-camp. He is too modest: the trilogy ranks with the finest of the hundreds of biographies of Napoleon, and this third volume is especially rich in investigating the creation of a durable, unusually potent myth that became a full-blown cult.

From the moment of Napoleon’s capture and detention in a ship off the Devon coast in 1815, there was a polarity of responses: from popular English fascination – even adulation – towards the world’s greatest celebrity, to demands for bloody retribution in the Tory press. The government’s solution was exile and imprisonment, with twenty-six of his supporters and staff, on the distant, hot, wet, and windy South Atlantic island of St Helena.

Dwyer tells the story of Napoleon’s exile with consummate skill, drawing on a vast array of sources to provide us with a detailed but vivid description of the rituals and tedium of detention in ‘The Briars’, then ‘Longwood’. (Alexander Balcombe, the son of one of St Helena’s purveyors, and an alleged Napoleonic

sympathiser, would name his estate on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula ‘The Briars’ in the 1840s.) At ‘Longwood’, Napoleon dictated his memoirs variously to four intimates who would later become his ‘evangelists’. There are brilliant passages on the petty jealousies and passions in this humid, all-male environment of alcohol, boredom, and worry about Napoleon’s constant illnesses. His protracted, excruciating death in May 1821 – ascribed by Dwyer either to a gastric haemorrhage

Dwyer has examined Napoleon’s imprisonment and death, and his resurrection as an almost supernatural celebrity or stomach cancer – was to become another element of the Napoleonic legend, the alleged poisoning more proof of Albion’s perfidy.

Almost immediately, widespread popular suspicion in France about Napoleon’s demise, aged just fifty-one, escalated into certainty that he would reappear, then into a reworking of his memory into that of an idealised saviour: the invincible general, protector of his people, and defender of democracy until undone by betrayal and conspiracy. In other words, Napoleon was transformed into the antithesis of the narrowly based, monarchical regimes and their supine foreign policies that succeeded the empire.

The volume is enriched by scores of well-chosen illustrations, in colour as well as black and white. Particularly interesting are those which draw on BIOGRAPHY

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Napoleonic artefacts (pipes and canes depicting his head) or woodblock prints, one of which, from 1835, depicts Napoleon’s apotheosis, welcomed into the heavens by Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Frederick the Great. The Christ-like depiction of Napoleon resonates for Dwyer, whose provocative conclusion is that the followers of both Christ and the emperor used a similar set of images of sacrifice, redemption, salvation, and love.

Was Napoleon the first popular celebrity? The most fascinating chapter of Dwyer’s book details the scale of his cult in 1820–40. There were hundreds of thousands of cheap images and mementoes of Napoleon produced in Britain after 1815, more than of Queen Victoria, for sale to people in England as well as in France. Dwyer details five hundred Bonapartist singing associations, or ‘Friends of Glory’, in Paris alone in 1836; in 1831 there were twenty-nine new plays about Napoleon.

The attempt by King Louis Philippe I (1830–48) to both profit from and undermine Bonapartist memories by bringing Napoleon’s ashes back from St Helena to Les Invalides in December 1840, simply allowed freer rein for hostile comparisons with the image of his regime as one of sordid speculation, social callousness, and foreign cowardice. The population of Paris was then 935,000: crowd estimates for the return of Napoleon’s ashes were up to 800,000.

It furnished the occasion for a worker’s newspaper to describe him as it wished: It was not the … ambitious conqueror that the crowd came to salute, but the artillery lieutenant of ’93 ... Above all it was revolutionary France, represented at this ceremony by the veterans of the armies of the Republic and Empire, that the people of Paris came to salute, touched by all these memories of our glorious past ...

The cultivation of the Napoleonic legend was further enhanced by his nephew Louis-Napoléon’s quasisocialist rhetoric. In August 1840, Louis-Napoléon landed at Boulognesur-Mer hoping to foment a Bonapartist rising. Although this was an 50 O CTOBER 2018

ignominious failure, Louis-Napoléon became a living reminder of a regime that grew more attractive to the masses with the passing of time. One reason for his crushing election as president of the Second Republic in December 1848 was certainly the appeal inherent in his name.

Louis-Napoléon’s seizure of power with the army in December 1851, and his proclamation of the Second Empire, only strengthened the myth of Bonapartism as representing the deepest longings of ‘the real France’, la France profonde. The constructed memory of Napoleon has cast a long shadow of the strong man who could slice through

the verbiage of self-seeking politicians, if needs be with the army, to satisfy the people’s longings. In 2014, Lionel Jospin, prime minister of France from 1997 to 2002 and twice a presidential candidate, published a powerful polemic, Le mal napoléonien, in which he identified this authoritarian shadow as an ongoing blight on French democracy. Of course, it is not an exclusively French spectre. g Peter McPhee has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Robespierre: A revolutionary life (Yale University Press, 2012) and Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (Yale University Press, 2016).

A history of endeavour

The strange connection between timber and humanity

Alan Atkinson ENDEAVOUR: THE SHIP AND THE ATTITUDE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

by Peter Moore Vintage, $34.99 pb, 416 pp, 9780143780267

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n 1786, extraordinary limewood carvings at Hampton Court near London by the seventeenth-century master Grinling Gibbons were destroyed by fire. A recent book by the American carver David Esterly, The Lost Carving: A journey to the heart of making (2012), describes his own commissioned efforts to replicate and replace those carvings.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable book. To read it is to sense the pungent majesty of wood and the strange connection between timber and humanity. During carving,

by Esterly’s account, the wood under his hand seemed to wrestle, even interweave itself, with the muscles and brain of the carver.

Peter Moore’s story of the naval barque Endeavour likewise conjures up the tangible. The woodenness of Endeavour, with which, in 1768–71, James Cook sailed to the end of the earth, is for Moore a recurring theme, from original forest trees to final wreckage. In its

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

range, Moore’s book is altogether more ambitious than Esterly’s, but there is also something like the same attention to skill and striving throughout. Note the subtitle. Moore expands on the story of a particular ship with an argument about the word ‘endeavour’, one of the buzzwords of Enlightenment English. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), ‘endeavour’ is defined at exceptional length.

As Moore says, the Dictionary itself, as a venture in words, was a remarkable combination of striving and skill.

Comparing book and ship suggests another dimension to ‘endeavour’, though Moore leaves it implicit. From Johnson’s Dictionary to Cook’s expeditions, endeavour was a long-term business. It involved perseverance – nine years for the Dictionary and several years each for Cook’s three voyages.

Endeavour began as a collier (a coal transport) built and based at Whitby, not far from Cook’s birthplace

in Yorkshire. Using this connection, Moore quotes Henry Taylor, master of another Whitby collier, on the virtues of good seamen, especially ‘[t]he power of emulation, united with sobriety and an ardent application’ – application not only to the task at hand but also, through endurance, to long voyages fraught with risk and hardship. To those virtues, Cook himself added an extraordinary adventuring ambition and also, as his biographer J.C. Beaglehole put it, a rare ‘analytical and detective energy’.

As with the carvings at Hampton Court, Cook’s work in bringing Endeavour to a pitch of achievement was a matter of both body and mind.

Also, the voyage of 1768–71 was a scientific expedition. Endeavour carried a team of skilled men headed by Joseph Banks of the Royal Society, who were to set up a temporary observatory on Tahiti so as to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, besides other research, largely botanical. Endeavour had been refitted partly to make room for collected specimens. For scientific ambition, this voyage compares, say, with more recent trips to Mars, and yet once again, like seamanship, the scientific effort involved the engagement of intellect with the palpable world.

Besides body and mind, there was a third element, though it too is only implicit in Moore’s story. The lateeighteenth century abounded in new novels, but the best-sellers of the time were sermons, and the most popular sermons, like the new novels, offered a new understanding of character. The bestsellers of all were the sermons of the Scottish minister Hugh Blair, in which Blair wrestled with the issue of human character, including the way character worked in the long term. He made integrity into a leading Christian virtue, not just moral integrity but integrity of purpose, that firmness, he said, ‘which … gives vigour and force to [a man’s] exertions on every great occasion’. All this fed into the new fascination with ‘great men’, men who seemed to rival even God in their rearrangement of Creation. Note again the subtitle of Moore’s book. To this point, changing the world had been the preserve of the Almighty.

Issues of spirituality run right

through the book, including the spirituality of personification. Things are persons.

In its making, Moore says, a ship like Endeavour passed through three phases of personification and each was differently gendered. The original oak was masculine. ‘Alive in the countryside, trees were regarded as a symbol of male strength … stoic, weathered, constant.’

The tree was cut down. ‘As a living tree, he [had] stood in the landscape. As timber it lay in the yard.’ But then, as a ship, ‘she was built, a graceful figure, made eloquent out of the products of the earth’ – ‘eloquent’ through having an independent voice – and not only eloquent, but strangely skilled, agile and determined in ‘her’ own way, so as to work the elements in some predetermined fashion.

The mystery of personification recurs throughout, in connection with human skills. Moore makes a good deal of the way in which the travellers by Endeavour engaged with and tried to understand the people they found in the Pacific, so that this is not just a story of discovery and achievement – of English endeavour – but also of things beyond discovery. The travellers wonder at their own unusual power, but also at things their minds could not reach. Here, the story concentrates on Joseph Banks and his team. Moore spends some time on their dealings with the Tahitian people, especially Tupaia, who insisted on joining Endeavour for the return voyage but who died in transit. They called Tupaia – ‘a sort of high-priest’ – ‘Man of Knowledge’ and ‘an extraordinary genius’. He learnt to use watercolour well, but he showed his genius mainly in reading the intricacies of the sea.

Tupaia was to be very useful in piloting Endeavour along the Australian east coast, and he impressed Cook with his detailed knowledge of the geography and peoples of the central Pacific. For Cook, Tupaia’s appeals to the spirit of the waters, in prayer from the stern windows, might have made little sense. But this seaman of the Enlightenment did glimpse a type of maritime expertise, including a familiarity with the movements of sun, moon, and stars, beyond anything ‘we’ had in Europe, ‘a simple elegant [knowledge] system’, Moore calls it, which made

Tupaia’s people unafraid of long sea journeys.

In the end, Endeavour was converted to a troop carrier in the British effort to suppress the American Revolution.

In other words, a medium of endeavour became an enemy of endeavour, an irony Moore does not remark on. This is, nevertheless, a wonderful book, a perfect pleasure to read, and an expression itself of great skill. g

Alan Atkinson who taught Australian history for many years at the Universityof New England, is the author of The Europeans in Australia and Commonwealth of Speech. He held ABR’s inaugural RAFT Fellowship.

Quote of the Month ‘No one can ignore the relevance of Manus Prison Theory. With the passing of time this theoretical approach will become increasingly more salient. Basically, how can a nation look to the future when its leaders cage little children for years, in a remote and forlorn prison? What future does a nation have when those same leaders take selfies with little children as part of their PR campaigns? Are these leaders not demagogues?’

Behrouz Boochani, translated

by Omid Tofighian, writing in The Guardian 31 August 2018

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51

Evangelicals in early Australia An exhaustive rebalancing of Australian historiography

Paul Collins THE FOUNTAIN OF PUBLIC PROSPERITY: EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY 1740–1914

by Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder Monash University Publishing, $49.95 hb, 688 pp, 9781925523461

M

ythology, Manning Clark regularly assured us, was our ‘great comforter’ because it explained creation, evil, and our place in the world. According to Clark, three ‘mythologies’ were dominant in the formation of non-Indigenous Australia: Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Enlightenment.

Historiography gives shape and identity to these myths. Here, Catholicism is richly endowed, with historians of the calibre of Edmund Campion and Patrick O’Farrell, the latter of whose book The Catholic Church and Community in Australia: A history (1977) is among the best. The Enlightenment myth has transmuted into Australian secularism with the Bulletin writers of the 1880s looking forward to a non-religious ‘paradise’ that would become increasingly free of dogmatism and cant. Free state education was to be the vehicle of this process.

Stuart Piggin and Robert D. Linder argue that, historiographically, the role of evangelical Protestantism in the formation of Australian culture and public institutions has been completely neglected. They perceive a secular bias in the history profession and claim that scholarship has been ‘prodigiously negative’ about the role of religion generally, and evangelical Protestantism in particular, in Australian history. Their aim is not just to write a history of the Protestant churches as institutions, but to tell the story of lay and clerical evangelicals in shaping the broad social and political sweep of Australian life up to 1914. A second volume up to 2014 is planned.

The book begins in the 1740s with the evangelical revival in England 52 O CTOBER 2018

(the ‘Great Awakening’ in America), because the British officials central to the foundation of Australia were deeply influenced by this religious renaissance.

Evangelicals were not just committed to anti-slavery but intimately influenced the highest levels of the British government. Piggin and Linder incisively reinterpret the origins of New South Wales, taking us beyond the utilitarian ‘dumping ground for convicts’ thesis, to seeing the colony as ‘a great reform experiment’ motivated by an ‘Evangelical-humanitarian confluence’.

They also claim that many of the values Australians most treasure today derive not from the Enlightenment but from evangelical Protestantism.

Perhaps the most difficult problem is identifying exactly what an evangelical is. Throughout the nineteenth century they were often on opposite sides of public arguments, but they always shared basic values: the need for conversion and transformation of nominal belief into living faith, the centrality of the Bible, and the devotion to Christ crucified. These values found expression through an emphasis on liberty, participatory democracy, capitalism, public morality, freedom of the press, self-improvement, and civicmindedness.

The book’s great strength is the detailed way in which it restores the centrality of evangelical Christians in the formation of Australian culture and public institutions. They argue that the state education system was perhaps the greatest evangelical achievement of all, so that from the 1880s to the 1960s state schools promoted a kind of civic Protestantism that inculcated Christian values in the community. They also claim that

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

many of the progenitors of Federation were public-minded evangelicals who worked for a ‘Christian commonwealth’, a term borrowed from Oliver Cromwell’s 1650s Britain.

Evangelicals were also strongly committed to the welfare and evangelisation of Aboriginal Australians.

The prologue to the book describes the attempt of Lieutenant William Dawes to learn the Eora language and to relate to the local people. Dawes’s evangelical convictions were integral to his sensitivity to the situation of the Aborigines.

From the start, evangelicals were also active in missionary work in the Pacific.

This commitment to reaching across the profound cultural divide between black and white in Australia was continued by later evangelicals. It was missionaries who not only protected Aborigines from rapacious and murderous white settlers, but also preserved Aboriginal languages as illustrated by the work of Lancelot Threlkeld in the Lake Macquarie area. It was also evangelicals who denounced from the pulpit and in the press the massacres of Aborigines like Myall Creek, although it was Catholic Roger Therry who prosecuted the convict murderers.

All of the early Church of England chaplains like Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden were evangelicals working to evangelise a ‘degenerate’ New South Wales society. This situation changed with the appointment of a high church Tory, William Grant Broughton, as archdeacon in 1829, and then bishop of Australia in 1836. Governor Richard Bourke, a liberal Irish Anglican, supported the other churches, and denominationalism began to emerge with William

Ullathorne organising the Catholics, John Dunmore Lang the Presbyterians, and Joseph Orton the Methodists.

Under Broughton, Anglicanism split into evangelical and high church wings. The book says that the high churchmen took over ‘the official Establishment paraphernalia’, allowing the evangelicals ‘to get on with being the third way between the snobs and the rabble’. Despite the growth of separate denominations, throughout the nineteenth century evangelicals maintained strong links among themselves drawing on their shared basic values.

One of the interesting claims the book makes is that ‘the truth is that the early Labor Party owed more to the evangelicals than the Catholics’. This fits into the book’s broader thesis that the role of evangelicals has been consistently underestimated in Australian history.

Of the twenty-four members of the first Labor caucus, at least sixteen were Protestants and only three were Catholics.

Reading this ver y long book (583 pages of text), I was eventually worn down by its remorseless focus on evangelicals; it is as though they were the sole actors in this historical drama. Context is sometimes lacking, with evangelicals seen in a vacuum.

For instance, the book claims that the chief critics of the brutality of places of secondary punishment like Norfolk Island were the evangelical chaplains; this overlooks the critique of the Norfolk regime by Catholic Vicar General Ullathorne, and Bishop Robert Wilson in Hobart. There is also something claustrophobically ‘Anglo’ about the book. Perhaps this is understandable, but it means that it lacks a broader, multi-ethnic context, the kind of reality you can’t escape in Catholicism.

At times, you feel overwhelmed

with detail. Individual evangelicals multiply, church organisations come and go, and subtle theological distinctions proliferate. Someone, in the end, is an evangelical if they say they are.

While I sympathise with the authors’ aim of peopling history with forgotten evangelical high achievers, I am less patient with the confusing complexity that results. Perhaps it reflects the fact that the book has been so long in the

writing; Stuart Piggin says it began in 1988. Despite these drawbacks, this is an important book that rebalances Australian historiography and goes a long way to restoring the role Christianity played in our national story. g Paul Collins is a former ABR Fellow.

His most recent book is Absolute Power: How the pope became the most influential man in the world (2018).

‘Painting into the eye of the light’ Evoking Bernard Smith

Brian Matthews ANTIPODEAN PERSPECTIVE: SELECTED WRITINGS OF BERNARD SMITH edited by Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer

Monash University Publishing, $29.95 pb, 425 pp, 9781925495669

T

he editors begin their introduction to Antipodean Perspective with some ground clearing: ‘The putting together of a series of responses to an important scholar’s work is a classic academic exercise. It is undoubtedly a worthy, but also necessarily a selective undertaking. In German it is called a Festschrift …’ The Festschrift continues to be, in academic circles especially, a way of honouring the work, contribution, influence, and originality of this or that scholar or, sometimes, of a university librarian or outstanding teacher.

Antipodean Perspective belongs in this general category, but it is interestingly and fruitfully different. In what might be called the standard Festschrift, the honouree is of course referred to in

detail: it’s rather like an academically slanted ‘This is your life’. Antipodean Perspective, however, assigns the commentary and reminiscence to carefully chosen interlocutors, both venerable and youthful, who, by and large, make relatively brief but, at least in this case, penetrating or enlarging contributions on specific texts which they choose, while the honouree, Bernard Smith (1916– 2011), is represented by substantial quotation from those texts or, in some cases, their complete reproduction.

This departure from more or less standard Festschrift practice is part of the reason why this collection is so beautifully and continuously evocative of the man himself. There are many voices here, but Smith’s is, properly and

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characteristically, the strongest without, in general, being strident, insistent without being cajoling.

This is a big book, but it is probably best read from the beginning – Tim Bonyhady’s Chapter 1 commentary on ‘Impressionism in Australia’ (Place, Taste and Tradition, 1945) – to the end: Emma Hicks’s Chapter 25, ‘A Distant Relationship’. This way, the voices of the contributors proliferate, becoming not a cacophony but a kind of aural tessellation of emerging patterns, colours,

This departure from Festschrift practice is why this collection is so evocative of Smith himself harmonies, and dissonance Smith’s own voice sounds with varying notes of assurance, emphasis, speculation, theorising, producing that effect to which the editors refer in their introduction: as ‘Each contributor [selected] a text or excerpt from Smith’s writing that meant something to them personally and that they would like others to read and [for which each writes] a brief introduction … in an uncanny way, there was the sense that Smith himself had already written in advance how they could respond to the work.’

Inevitably, some selections and commentaries stand out. It will come as no surprise that one of these is ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’ (1959). Bernard Smith’s truculent opening remarks left no room for misunderstanding the provenance and central concerns of the ‘manifesto’: Let it be said in the first place that we have all played a part in the movement which has sought for a better understanding of the work of contemporary artists both here and abroad … But today we believe like many others, that the existence of painting as an independent art is in danger. Today tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists, abstract expressionists and their innumerable band of camp followers threaten to benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious mysteries.

The art which they champion is not an art sufficient for our time, it is not an art 54 O CTOBER 2018

for living men. It reveals, it seems to us, a death of the mind and spirit.

And yet wherever we look – New York, Paris, London, San Francisco, Sydney – we see young artists dazzled by the luxurious pageantry and colour of non-figuration …

Although this is not the only place in the collection where it happens, the editorial strategy of inviting commentators to offer a prefatory statement about their chosen Smith moment is seen at its best here. Ronald Millar is witty and pointed, but not needlessly acerbic: ‘Painters make their own myths, which may have less to do with their physical surroundings than their inner life and the potential connections of that life to the lives of others. The means of communicating this may very well be nonfigurative, and not necessarily a “withdrawal from life.” … At this distance from the event,’ he suggests, ‘[the Manifesto] looks like a last-ditch literary excursion to attack something fundamentally visual.’

The idea of a literary provenance or comparison here is interesting. Smith quite often shows a lively awareness of the incipient parallels between art and literature and their Australian discontents. Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy both wrote ferociously about the importance of Australian language, Australian figures, and Australian description in fiction. In Place, Taste and Tradition, Smith mentions the kind of links that might usefully be drawn between Frederick McCubbin and Lawson – ‘desire for realism … forthright championing of the art of his country, and [a pervasive] note of sentimentalism’. In a discussion at a 1976 conference at Exeter University – ‘Readings in Australian Art’, recalled here by Emma Hicks – Smith quoted appreciatively from Furphy’s withering attack in Such Is Life (1903) on Henry Kingsley’s ‘slender-witted, virgin-souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill [his] exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle’. What especially interested Smith were Lawson’s rejection of turning an outback ‘hell’ into a ‘heaven’, his insistence on ‘describing [something] as it really is’,

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

and Furphy’s addition of the word ‘misleading’ to his litany of castigation.

Smith’s essays and excerpts in Antipodean Perspective reveal the precision and persuasiveness of his critical writing, but also his imaginative flexibility and assured range. The difference, for example, between the prose of his ‘Marx and Aesthetic Value’ (‘Can it be shown, within the presuppositions of historical materialism, that aesthetic value is invariably present in one kind or another in all material production …’) and this from The Boy Adeodatus (1984): One fine day Mumma Parky came to see them all before she went away to Queensland. She wore a white cotton dress with a frilly neck, her long hair was divided across her forehead and swept up in a bun at the back. Bertha served tea in the garden and Olive Solomon, the photographer from the Boulevarde, was called in for the special occasion. Bennie stood on the folding chair in his velvet jacket, patent leather shoes and white socks. ‘Why don’t you wear this ring, Rose’, said Mum Keen, ‘it will look better’. Behind them was the sweet loquat.

The adjustment of tone and the addition of a detailed, painterly perspective that has taken place between the Marx and the memoir are effortless and perfectly judged. Likewise, Smith’s exquisite description of Hodges’ View of Point Venus and Matavai Bay looking East: ‘Painting into the eye of the light …’

Having successfully and creatively taken every possible liberty with the recognised Festschrift format, this collection concedes to custom in its conclusion with Emma Hicks’s excellent ‘A Distant Relationship’, describing her first meeting with Bernard Smith and also, as it happens, my own, at Peter Quartermaine’s ground-breaking ‘Readings in Australian Art’. Smith, as remembered, is fascinating and magnetic, an inimitable, stylish, and daring intellectual, a true original among his celebrants in Antipodean Perspective, who do him proud in different voices. g Brian Matthews’s Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010.

Old lies Robin Gerster ON WAR AND WRITING

by Samuel Hynes

University of Chicago Press (Footprint) $44.99 hb, 215 pp, 9780226468785

‘E

very man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ Samuel Johnson’s aphorism was commended to me many years ago by Peter Ryan, then the longserving publisher at Melbourne University Press. The author of a superb personal account of his war experience in New Guinea, Fear Drive My Feet (1959), Ryan had just read a manuscript I had submitted to MUP. It was a critical and possibly excessively sarcastic account of the heroic theme in Australian war writing. My cynicism about the Anzac industry had a personal basis, Ryan seemed to be implying.

Apparently I was driven by envy and self-loathing. Nevertheless, he published the manuscript, and in the book I shamelessly deployed the ever-quotable Johnson as an epigraph.

It is logical to assume that it helps to have experienced war in order to write about it, though the preponderance of mediocre ‘war memoirs’ might suggest otherwise. ‘We can never entirely imagine what it’s like to actually fight a war,’ Samuel Hynes suggests in On War and Writing, a new selection of his essays exploring the traditions of war writing from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. ‘The closest we can come is reading the records of men who were there, ordinary young guys, most of them.’ Hynes, the Woodrow Wilson Emeritus Professor of Literature at Princeton, now in his nineties, has the personal credentials to make this claim: he is an established critic of war literature who, as a young man serving as a pilot in the Marine Corps in the Pacific theatre in World War II, received the Distinguished Flying Cross.

War experience alone does not guarantee writing well about battle.

As Hynes suggests, some of the best war books have been written by those

with no direct knowledge of combat. It does help to have an imagination and the literary wherewithal to express it.

One of the most compelling chapters in On War and Writing is a critical appreciation of a work by Thomas Hardy, who never heard a bullet fired in anger. Hardy’s monstrous poetic drama about the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts (1908), is in Hynes’s opinion ‘the nearest English poetry has come to a war epic’. It is also ‘the last one we shall ever have, because it was written in the last decade in English history in which a war epic was possible’.

Hynes is alluding to the cataclysmic effect of World War I on the way war is represented and remembered. As Hynes suggested in The Auden Generation (1976), World War I deserves to be known as the ‘Great War’ because of its seismic impact on the social, political, and indeed literal landscape of Europe. But it was also a great literary event. The advent of the machine gun, mustard gas, and especially long-range heavy artillery mocked any pretensions to prowess. The conventions of heroic war storytelling dating back to Homer were now useless; an Achilles was as impotent before the impersonal force of a high-explosive shell as the most inept weakling. The scale and intensity of the fighting along the Western Front compelled writers, Hynes pungently observed, ‘to find new ways for describing the ways in which men kill men’.

In On War and Writing, Hynes returns to this theme, particularly in the key essay ‘A Critic Looks at War’.

After the mechanised slaughter on the Western Front, war stories would have to be told ‘without Big Words’.

Hynes quotes Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms (1929): ‘Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.’ In his own scholarly discourse about war, Hynes recommends avoiding ‘windy words’.

War history, he says, should not be turned into ‘a Veterans Day parade’.

(This is advice that should be heeded in Australia.) One of Hynes’s most dispiriting insights is that, in the end,

the good efforts of poets like Wilfred Owen to discredit the romance of war and the inanity of patriotic self-sacrifice have come to nothing. In popular culture and the political rhetoric that both feeds and draws sustenance from it, the ‘old Lie’, as Owen dubbed it, lives on.

Hynes recognises war as ‘a primal human activity’, but shies away from investigating the political and psychological reasons why. Finally, in the last essay in the collection, Hynes gives personal voice to a sense of the surfeit of war that burdens human history. It comes at the end of an account of his long-distance flight from south-east England across the Channel, then east over northern France to Verdun and back. It was around 1990, early in his retirement, and Hynes was combining his love of flying with his scholarly interest in war.

He flew over the old Western Front, a landscape now marked by a multitude of monuments and by the tourist multitudes doing the World War I trail.

The flying itself was an ‘intense and special pleasure’. But Hynes’s feelings at the journey’s end are ‘tangled and contradictory’. ‘I have spent two days looking down at the story of war that is written on the French earth,’ he writes, ‘and I feel heavy with the sadness of cemeteries.’ It is a touching if typically unhistrionic note on which to end this fine reconsideration of war and its literary remembrance. g

Robin Gerster is Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His books include a study of the Occupation of Japan, Travels in Atomic Sunshine (2008), and the critique of Australian war writing, Big-noting (1987).

LITERARY STUDIES

55

Open Page

OPEN PAGE with

Kristina Olsson

Why do you write?

It’s always about a question; the book is my attempt at answering it. The learning curve is what lures me to the desk each day.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

On and off, but I rarely get the spectacular or the memorable.

Where are you happiest?

With my family, on a walking track, among trees and fields. Also, on a sofa with a book in my hands.

What is your favourite film?

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Courage. Humility.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

It took me a while to come to Virginia Woolf; I spent a lot of time wallowing around in more contemporary British women writers like Margaret Drabble, Penelope Lively, Pat Barker, Edna O’Brien.

Now I reread To the Lighthouse whenever there’s a gap, and am about to dive into her diaries. I’ve also come late to Thoreau who, coincidentally, was much admired by Woolf.

A recent favourite is The King’s Choice, a Norwegian movie that centres around issues of political neutrality I was trying to look at in Shell (2018). Each Scandinavian country faced excruciating choices, and this one involved King Haakon VII and his actions in the face of the Nazi invasion.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

And your favourite book?

What do you think of the state of criticism?

As we speak: Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), followed closely by Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (1977).

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

W.G. Sebald, Jørn Utzon, Tove Jansson, and Debbie Kilroy. That’s four, I realise.

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

Two words used together: all good. It rarely is.

Then: imbroglio.

Who is your favourite author?

Michael Ondaatje, with Marilynne Robinson and Barbara Kingsolver close behind.

And your favourite literary hero and heroine?

John Ames in Gilead, and a tie between Olive Kitteridge in the book of the same name, and Little My in Tove Jansson’s Moomins series.

56 O CTOBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Fear. It also drives it.

How do you regard publishers?

Askance, apart from my own: Scribner Australia.

I’m a little in love with every person on staff.

Mixed. But those doing it well are among the best in the world.

And writers’ festivals?

So varied. I admire those with pluck and verve, those that treat artists and audiences as intelligent and discriminating beings.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes, up to a point, beyond which they’re treated with suspicion and irony.

What are you working on now?

A book of hybrid non-fiction, digging down through the geological layers beneath inner Brisbane to the volcanic rock that influenced its shape, its fauna and flora, its myths and narratives. And me.

Kristina Olsson is an Australian writer,

journalist and teacher. Her most recent novel, Shell, has just been released by Scribner Australia.

Devilry David Dick SATAN REPENTANT

by Michael Aiken

I

UWA Publishing $22.99 pb, 140 pp, 9781742589770

t is time to repent my sins. Recently, I have been asking myself if poetry is exempt from a need to entertain.

Is the act of reading a poem or a book of poetry an escapist, amusing, joyous diversion from the rigours of reality?

Or is it something more tedious, coldblooded, blandly intellectual – an act not of enjoyment, but of control and imposition?

If you scan enough poetry criticism, it would be fair to assume that entertainment is a distant consideration in measuring poetic quality. The contemporary critic seems less intent on enjoying the work than on trying to explain it; in effect, coming to own it, being smarter than it, displacing it for the critic’s own broad theories and elucidations. Poetry criticism is a show whose performative message is, ‘I belong here. I get this.’

This is not to say that poetry is innocent of inviting these kinds of readings. Too much poetry exists in a niche, solipsistic space. This poetry does nothing interesting and says little in doing it, despite the protestations of its critics who find meaning only through the awkwardly forced machinations of their own analyses. To be openly and verbosely critical of another poet, to call their work impenetrably dull, and dare being labelled populist, is to potentially fracture a delicate ecosystem that thrives on keeping its borders closed to the public and its language (appeal, even) meaningful only to those who dwell within.

I know this: I have committed these sins; I have written and defended bad, boring, supposedly ‘experimental’ poetry lacking in entertainment, a chore to digest.

Then you read a book like Michael Aiken’s Satan Repentant – a work possessed of a devilish energy, intellect, and glorious control of the utterly grotesque, humanly divine, and divinely human

– and you recall how joyful and entertaining poetry can be, especially when it features a version of Satan resisting his fate as the Enemy of all. Slipping away from the Serious Poetic Tradition one assumes Aiken’s work might associate with given its portentous title, Satan Repentant is a book-length poem skilfully dirty dancing with the oral tradition of poetry. It is designed to enrapture an audience as it wilfully waltzes with notions of individuality, religious scepticism (particularly the latent hypocrisies of its dogma), the role of art, and the meaning of being human, but never in a manner that draws away from the brutal, celestial drama at the core of its narrative.

It begins with Aiken’s masterful control of language, a song ‘of nothing’ from which everything grows. The events in the book exist within the lurid landscapes crafted by its rhetoric.

It gives the reader the ethereal gates of Heaven, the septic sewers of Hell, and an Earth helplessly stuck between them.

It is a voice that is archaic but modern, always shifting registers, trimmed of the fat of any unnecessary words. It is a voice that points to, but never leans on, Walt Whitman and Charles Olson, breathing in tune to the rugged jolts of its frequent recourse to short and sharp sounds, with lines often ending abruptly, lending the scansion a hurried, irregular, but declamatory syntax. It is a voice of the slowly corrupted angels and monstrously cheeky devils; of an ‘enraged, / enfeebled’ God; of the perfectly imperfect ‘three-in-one’ Jesus; of the unspeakably cruel Teresa of Calcutta, ‘that awful God-witch’ whose ‘tentacled mouths consume the souls of babies’; of the deliriously verbose, flabby ‘pig king’ Beelzebub; and of the poet–artist Satan, who speaks for the work’s free verse: ‘A poet is not one / to labour greatly and in time be master / of all the terms in the world. I do not /crack a whip, insist my lines play nice.’ It is a voice that seems to bellow from the vocal chords of a loquacious scumbag priest, drunk on sacrament wine, whose sermons reference slasher flicks and pornos, William Blake and David Fincher, Romanticism and Surrealism, all the while holding true to a faith in the human spirit, even as it loses faith in the divine.

Through this language, Aiken gives the reader a hero’s journey: Satan’s awakening to his own unease and ‘shame’ at being so long at the beckoning of his base nature; his desire ‘to no longer be / the Enemy of everything’. Sent by God to experience a life of human suffering to earn his redemption, Satan rejects the temptations of his hellish servants who, unlike their master, cannot refuse their nature, and evades, not always successfully, the cruel tricks of the empyreans keen to restore their myopic view of moral order. Instead, he comes to seek and find meaning in poetry and art, its vital and life-affirming ability ‘to rethink all creation’. No longer is Satan the debonair anti-hero, as so often seems to be the case in fiction; rather, he becomes Lucifer, the Light Bringer, the heroically stoic poet–philosopher, refusing and recognising the fallacies of Heaven and Hell’s confused absolutes of good and evil: its ‘vile hierarchy’. He uncovers his own divinity as a creator, and in the brutal, destructive everyplace of the book’s conclusion (Heaven and Hell intermingled on Earth), as all is undone, Satan/Lucifer mutters his status as a god, inviting in its final line ‘a language to speak of itself ’ to birth a new world. It is poetic and redemptive.

Satan Repentant – which grew out of Michael Aiken’s ABR Laureate’s Fellowship in 2016 – is a book that ultimately needs no explication, giving us characters that are visceral, fleshy, and conflicted, and a story filled with memorable set-pieces, description, and astounding flights of oration. It is not only rich in symbol and theme but needing neither to be explained nor enjoyed. Aiken’s book, entertaining and intellectually fulfilling, eschews the withdrawn navel-gazing of so much contemporary poetry. Amen. g

David Dick is a Melbourne-based poet and critic.

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Conspiracy of secrets

THE YELLOW HOUSE

by Emily O’Grady

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 314 pp, 9781760632854

The clamour and comfort of friends in four YA novels

ub lives next door to the yellow house. The girl also lives in the shadow of her grandfather, Les, who once owned that property, and who died years ago, after doing ‘ugly things’ to women. Indeed, Les’s crimes seem to cast a pall over Cub’s entire family. This is a family where warmth is in short supply. The parents speak in harsh, defensive tones. They refuse to discuss Les’s misdemeanours.

Also, Cub’s parents refuse to allow their children to grow their hair, and react violently when this rule is disobeyed. Then Ian, a young man who is obsessed with Les, befriends Cub’s brother.

The novel’s blurb promises a narrative about ‘the legacies of violence and the possibilities of redemption’. This reviewer groaned, expecting a cloying family melodrama about exorcising old demons. Happily, that description is misleading. The Yellow House offers neither redemption nor facile resolutions to the problems facing its characters. The novel’s key strength is its ability to make the reader identify with its youthful protagonist. There is a wonderfully understated air of suspense and intrigue as Cub (and the reader) attempts to piece together the family mystery that her neighbours and classmates all know about.

There is also a constant threat of violence, evident in even minor details: for example, the peeling of potatoes is likened to ‘skinning an animal’. More specifically, there is the threat of violence against women. Les ultimately comes across less as an evil ‘ghost’ (that word appears several times throughout the text), and more as yet another example of brutish masculinity.

The Yellow House – winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award 2018 – is Emily O’Grady’s first novel.

O’Grady is a talented storyteller; it’s her narrative skills that make this grim tome so compelling.

Jay Daniel Thompson

Margaret Robson Kett

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riendship can be a powerful force for change in a young adult’s life.

These four new books explore the full gamut of the unlikely, advantageous, and destructive consequences of relationships.

Between Us (Black Inc., $19.99 pb, 275 pp, 9781760640217) is told by Clare Atkins in three voices. Anahita – known as KIN016 in the detention centre where she is incarcerated – has been given permission to attend a Darwin high school. Kenny is a Vietnamese-born man newly employed as an officer at the centre. While escorting her to the school bus, he tells Anahita that his son Jono is also a student there and incautiously suggests that they might become friends.

Jono is wounded by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, compounded by his girlfriend’s departure. At first he speaks in choppy, self-absorbed sentences; later, there is self-revelation and a shy friendship with Anahita.

As the three of them connect, the realities of their separate pain become apparent to the reader – made easier by the design of the pages, so that characters’ names appear above each of their narrations. Anahita’s care for her depressed and heavily pregnant mother, as well as for her little brother, is well drawn, and the memories of her life in Iran put the reader in touch with the trauma she has endured – appropriately, these are in bold black print.

It is unusual for a parent’s voice to be so constant in a Young Adult novel, but there is a parallel story being told.

Although the storyline of Kenny’s conflict about his role in the centre is not as well developed as it could be, his sister Minh’s story is compelling. She tells of making the journey from Vietnam on a boat, and the book recalls the welcome those survivors received from ordinary people in Darwin harbour. This sketch

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of Jono’s aunt hints that this ‘easy’ entry has not made her life as an Australian any less complicated. Its telling signals a turning point for Kenny and Jono’s relationship. I hope this able writer will take the story and expand it.

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post-apocalyptic wor ld – beloved of Young Adult writers – is given a new twist by the accomplished A.J. Betts in Hive (Pan Macmillan, $16.99 pb, 261 pp, 9781760556433). Difference disrupts the smooth workings of most societies, but within the small settlement that Hayley lives in, illness must be concealed. Her blinding headaches remain a secret, except to her best friend, Celia. It is in the perfect place that she finds for self-healing that her world begins to unravel; the ruse that Hayley uses to enter a forbidden area literally comes back to bite her.

The system of child education, the benevolent and yet inflexible working roles, the demarcated society bound by strict religious practices, as well as the restriction on printed literacy, all sound, for the reader, like a society remaking itself. As a result of her rulebreaking, Hayley forms ambivalent, fleeting attachments that might have blossomed into romance in a more conventional teen novel. (Betts’s 2013 book Zac and Mia, about a similarly nuanced relationship, has recently been adapted for the screen.)

The complications that could arise from breeding within a restricted population are managed by the hierarchy with a system of arranged ‘marriages’ within days of a death. Hayley expects that Celia’s impending ceremony will divide them forever, but its unexpected collapse precipitates a potential escape for her. Betts’s splendid imagining of what catering for a wedding might look

like when the only purpose is a pregnancy is an example of her considerable skill at storytelling. (The second in this two-part series will appear in 2019.)

I

Had Such Friends laments narrator Hamish in Meg Gatland-Veness’s new novel (Pantera Press, $19.99 pb, 278 pp, 9781925700015). Hamish, laying himself bare, addresses us directly from his isolation on a rural property.

His family have suffered the tragic loss of his younger sister in a terrifyingly trivial accident, and it becomes apparent that he has never recovered from his role in it, albeit as a helpless observer.

His parents are locked into the neverending work cycle that is primary production, and his one friend, Martin, is similarly a loner. This all changes when Charlie Parker, the shining star in his peer group, dies in a car accident and the whole school is consumed by grief.

Change erupts on all sides, seemingly triggered by Charlie’s death, and new and unlikely attachments force Hamish to confront everything he thinks he knows about himself.

Gatland-Veness packs a lot into this novel, and the narrator, Hamish, speaks directly to the reader. This is not always as effective as it could be: on more than one occasion the author slips into an instructional voice, in case the reader doesn’t ‘get it’. The author’s day job as a drama teacher at a regional high school ‘enables her to capture the modern-day Australian teenage experience’, according to her publisher. She definitely has an ear for the way young people speak.

Hanging out with Peter Bridges, the bad boy in town – Charlie’s former ‘best friend’ – Hamish discovers his true self.

When his sexual identity ends up a key factor in his emotional recovery from grief and into selfhood, some clichés surface. It is hard to imagine that a boy born in the twenty-first century would never have heard or thought about sexual difference. The idea, articulated

by Hamish, that his father would never have known or liked a gay person, is puzzling – Dad may grow cabbages, but he isn’t one (at the very least he is a product of the 1980s himself ). Perhaps Gatland-Veness wants to convey typical teenagers’ belief that their parents

are ignorant of, or immune to, sexual knowledge of any kind. More seriously, another potentially devastating death ends the book. The author swiftly moves Hamish through it and out into the ‘real’ world of the big city where he can be himself.

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liza Henry-Jones’s third published book, and her first for younger readers, is titled P is for Pearl (Angus & Robertson, $19.99 pb, 978140754931). Gwendolen P. Pearson is living in a small seaside town in Tasmania, and studying hard – towards a future she can’t see clearly. Not even sure of her name, she experiments with scribbling ‘Pearl’, but composes diary entries in her full name (I’ll call her Gwen for the rest of this review).

Her father has remarried a former teacher who is a loving mother. Gwen’s stepbrother Tyrone, a combination of surfer on a spiritual quest and a vicious practical joker, is nevertheless there for Gwen when she needs him. Her best friend, Loretta, is sure that the future lies on the mainland and is doing her best to persuade her to come too.

Along with a New Age shop owner, an eccentric horse-riding artist, and a local police officer with a ready ear and supply of biscuits, there should be nothing Gwen lacks in the way of emotional support, and yet she is haunted by unanswered questions about the deaths of her brother and mother.

The sea is a balm for her anxiety, with visions of mermaids providing comfort.

Her search for information that will help to clarify her disjointed childhood memories is complicated by the arrival of newcomer Ben and his sister Amber.

What is their secret?

The conspiracy of secrets that is both possible, and impossible, within the literary country town is explored well by the author. The portraits are largely warmly eccentric; Henry-Jones has clearly had fun creating them. Both the clamour and comfort of friends of all generations are demonstrated in these contemporary Australian novels for young people. g

Margaret Robson Kett is a writer, editor, and founder of Kettlestitch Press.

THE COVES

by David Whish-Wilson

Fremantle Press $27.99 pb, 211 pp, 9781925591279

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small bay is a cove, and so is a man, according to old-fashioned slang. The Coves takes advantage of this coincidence: it’s a story about the gang of men who rule ‘Sydney Cove’ in the mid nineteenth century. But this is not the familiar Sydney Cove in New South Wales. There is another one across the Pacific in San Francisco, where arrivals from Australia, ‘pioneers in … viciousness and depravity’, were said to commit ‘atrocious crimes’, according to the novel’s epigraph from Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast (1933).

We first encounter Sam Bellamy, a resourceful and basically decent boy on the cusp of puberty, attempting to appease the mutineers on a whaling ship en route from Sydney to the Californian gold fields. Alone in the world, he is heading to America in search of his mother. Life is cheap both on the ship and on land.

In a lawless society, he survives on finely tuned instincts: telling the right stories when he’s noticed, knowing where to hide when he’s not. He and his dog: ‘had survived by reading the faces of men.’

If you like your villains barbaric, your headcount high, and your fallen women soft-hearted, The Coves may be the book for you. Young Sam is likeable and ingenuous: when he rates the Coves’ leader, Thomas Keane, as one of the ‘finest men he’d met’ – despite being a standover man, a killer, and a thief – it no doubt reflects the quality of humans he has encountered so far.

Whish-Wilson’s prose aims for an antique register with elements of both poetry and contemporary slang which it rarely achieves, straining too often under adjectival overload.

He nevertheless tells a vivid adventure story and at the same time reveals a little-known chapter in Australian–American history.

Gillian Dooley Y O U N G A D U LT F I C T I O N

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Publisher of the Month with

Chris Feik Circuitous and fortuitous, seeming inevitable only in retrospect. After university, where I studied literature and social theory, I did many bookish jobs: helping with the mail-out at ABR under Helen Daniel, reviewing books, receiving books, selling books, buying books – all at Readings – editing books, teaching editing, and so on. Eventually, I lucked into a job with Black Inc. and found myself on the ground floor of an expanding enterprise with a simpatico and highly creative boss.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Most years I publish around twenty-five new books.

There are also new formats of previously published books. Overall, Black Inc. publishes around seventy books each year.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

est challenge, I am glad to say, although sometimes expectations need to be ‘managed’.

Do you write yourself ? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?

I have written occasional pieces over the years – reviews, essays, talks – but I don’t think it has informed my work as a publisher very much.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire (from any era)?

Some inspiring internationals: Robert Silvers, Carmen Callil, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Christopher MacLehose, Lennie Goodings. And some local independents (confining myself to the present): Morry Schwartz, Michael Heyward, Henry Rosenbloom, Julianne Schultz, Phillipa McGuinness, Peter Browne.

Not a book, but a series: the seventy-first Quarterly Essay was published recently. I have worked on the series since the beginning and became editor with issue twelve. It is a source of torment and delight.

We have published a wide range of fine writers and thinkers. I am most proud of working closely as an editor with these writers to create the series. I don’t know if there is anything quite like it anywhere else in the world.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?

Do you edit the books you commission?

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

In many cases, yes.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Genius. In a non-fiction writer, an original mind.

In a fiction writer, an instinct for drama. Often I sense something original or impressive in a writer without quite knowing what it is, but think I would like to read more of this, to know where it will go.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

The greatest pleasure is helping authors make their work the best version of itself. There is no great60 O CTOBER 2018

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

I don’t think so.

On publication, which is more gratifying – a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?

I’ll plump for sales, although some very good books sell very slowly.

Same as it ever was: fortune favours the brave; hope springs eternal.

Chris Feik is publisher at Black Inc., editor of Quarterly Essay, and publishing director of La Trobe University Press. He co-edited the book The Words That Made Australia (2012).

(Photograph by Thomas Deverall)

What was your pathway to publishing?

Art | Dance | Film | Music | Opera | Theatre

ABR Arts

Regina Pilawuk Wilson, a Ngan’gikurrungurr woman, painting Syaw (Fishnet)

Sally Grant on Marking the Infinite Dance

Dark Emu

Maryrose Casey

Film

You Were Never Really Here Anwen Crawford

Theatre

The Harp in the South Laura Hartnell

ABR Arts is generously supported 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

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The Harp in the South 

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Laura Hartnell

ustralian classics have been surging onto our stages of late: Matthew Lutton and Tom Wright’s adaptation of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock recently enjoyed success in London as well as Australia; Andrew Bovell’s stage version of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River toured the country to critical acclaim; and Leah Purcell’s adaptation of Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is one of the most lauded Australian playscripts in recent memory. Kate Mulvany’s masterful adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South trilogy – whose sprawling two-part, six-and-a-half-hour form is reminiscent of Nick Enright’s stage version of Cloudstreet – stands alongside these productions as an empathetic landmark event in the Australian theatrical canon.

Park’s celebrated trilogy – The Harp in the South (1948), Poor Man’s Orange (1949), and the prequel, Missus (1985) – follows four generations of the IrishCatholic Darcy family, who move from rural New South Wales to the slums of Surry Hills in the 1940s, searching for ‘something more’. Over the decades, the residents of Twelve-and-a-Half Plymouth Street struggle to subsist in squalid conditions. They lose friends and family members, witness the suffering of their children, and lose hope.

Eventually, developers force them from their homes.

Like the novels, Mulvany’s adaptation is colourful, evocative, and intimate. At the core of Park’s trilogy is a fierce commitment to the inner worlds of working-class women; this is also the driving force of Mulvany’s script.

Clearly in love with Park’s characters, Mulvany feels their world deeply and evokes the residents of Plymouth Street with empathy and humour. Of her relationship with the audience, Mulvany has remarked that she should ‘make them laugh then break their hearts’. This philosophy is evident in the play’s two-part structure.

The first is a joyous fairground ride of brash humour and vaudeville-esque energy; the second exposes the pain that pervades the characters’ lives.

The intricate script is at times flattened by Kip Williams’s direction, which tends towards broad brush62 O CTOBER 2018

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strokes rather than a forensic commitment to emotion.

Particularly in Part One, Williams wallows in the play’s humour but tends to shy away from its pathos. With such a long play, it is understandable why he chose this path: the first four hours rollick along so seamlessly you barely register the passage of time, but Williams’s direction often feels as though the production is afraid of its own potential to evoke grief, loss, and longing. The direction is subtler in Part Two, with the actors given more space to explore their characters’ inner lives, but there are deeper layers to Mulvany’s writing, and these feel unexplored.

The nineteen-person cast evokes the Surry Hills community beautifully and with admirable flexibility.

All the actors are well-cast and each of them skilfully handles multiple characters across an expansive timeline.

Rose Riley’s depiction of Roie – the eldest child of the Darcy family, who feels ‘like an island’ floating through the rough streets – balances her quiet strength with the desperate confusion of a young woman finding her way in the world. Contessa Treffone portrays Roie’s younger sister Dolour with humour and spirit, transforming her across the decades from whirlwind child to self-assured young woman. Margaret, the big-hearted matriarch of the Darcy family, is conjured with grace and complexity

by Anita Hegh, who makes Margaret’s stoic suppression of grief and rage feel like an extra member of the household, until it boils over during a scene in Part Two that is among the best moments in the play. As Hughey, Jack Finsterer charts a heartbreaking descent from the earnest hope of a young provider, to the unrelenting despair of an ageing drunk – trapped as he is by the deadening mid-century expectations of manhood that give him no room for connection. Heather Mitchell’s performance as Eny Kilker will resonate deeply in the hearts of anyone with an Irish grandmother, and Helen Thompson brings the notorious madam Delie Stock to life with empathy and compassion.

David Fleischer has designed a stark, expansive two-storey set that shifts from home to streetscape to city skyline, but mostly the stage is bare. This is a clever, bold move that allows the actors and Nick Schlieper’s beautiful lighting to do much of the storytelling. Renée Mulder’s period costume design is touchingly personal to each character – no easy task with such a large cast.

The Harp in the South remains fiercely relevant. It balances riotous humour with deep human connection, but also confronts the issues of sexism, racism, and gentrification that dominate contemporary debates. Kate Mulvany’s adaptation is an astonishing achievement that will doubtless leave an indelible mark on the Australian theatre landscape. g The Harp in the South is being performed at the Roslyn Packer Theatre by Sydney Theatre Company from 27 August to 6 October 2018.

Laura Hartnell is a writer, director, and theatre academic. ❖

Marking the Infinite Sally Grant

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this review contains images or names of people who have since passed away.

D

uring 2015 and 2016, the exhibition No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australia Contemporary Abstract Painting travelled to different venues in the United States. Drawn from the collection of an American couple, Debra and Dennis Scholl, the featured works were by nine senior Australian Aboriginal men.

The exhibition presented the paintings of these male artists, and Indigenous Australian art more broadly, as vital examples of contemporary art conceived of on the most global scale.

Now another travelling exhibition, Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, which is currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, does the same for nine female artists. Like No Boundaries, the Marking the Infinite exhibition consists of works from the Schollses’ collection. This time around, however, roughly half of these were commissioned directly from the artists, and many of the pieces are on a larger scale than the artists had previously executed. The results are striking.

Both exhibitions were organised by William L. Fox, director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, and Henry F. Skerritt, an Australian art historian who is the curator of the Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia. The title of the current show references a theme that unites the included artworks: that human markmaking can conjure an intense palpability of place and address the universal. As Skerritt observes in the opening essay of the informative accompanying catalogue, ‘over the past three decades, women artists from Aboriginal Australia have provided some of the most compelling and prescient examples of this type of world-picturing’.

The Phillips version of Marking the Infinite was arranged by Klaus Ottmann, the museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs, and the

installation frames this thematic connection well. Wall panels contextualise the works in relation to ancient Aboriginal Australian traditions and to global contemporary society (though more explanations of such complex cultural concepts as the Dreaming and songlines would have been helpful). Ottmann’s decision to present the works on walls of various colours, in largely warm, earthy hues, was particularly inspired, for it lends the show a grounded quietness, recalling the colours of the remote Australian landscapes where the women live and work. Against this unifying physical and thematic background, each artist’s distinct formal inventiveness lends the exhibition an exhilarating aesthetic liveliness.

For instance, three prominent bark painters from Arnhem Land’s Yolngu people are included: Nonggirrnga Marawili (c.1939), Nyapanyapa Yunupingu (c.1945), and Gulumbu Yunupingu (c.1943–2012). While each draws upon the ancestral symbols specific to their clan, all three artists also emphasise their own personal interpretation of the iconography, distancing it from its sacred origins and realising a singular aesthetic. By way of each artist’s careful repetition of marks, they create patterns that powerfully evoke the natural landscape; for Gulumbu Yunupingu, the Yolngu creation stories regarding the stars take on a more universal meaning in her multifariously patterned renditions of Ganyu (Stars) (ranging from 2002 to 2010).

A similar concern is displayed in the four large Bush Plum canvases (ranging from 2006 to 2015) of Utopia artist Angelina Pwerle (c.1946), where thousands of painted dots reference the bush plum plant, its Dreaming tale, and, by their precise application on vast canvases, the celestial sphere. The paintings of Yukultji Napangati (c.1971), on the other hand, are more evocative of the desert landscape. Three compositions depicting Women’s Ceremonies at Marrapinti (all 2015) are displayed together at the Phillips, and this multiplication intensifies the startling visual impact of the individual works. Set on dark backgrounds, the countless repetition of yellow and orange dots, which merge to form short trails that continually shift in orientation, creates a sense of movement that evokes shifting sand and the journeys of the artist’s ancestors. That the canvases display the visual effect of shimmer, as though an invisible force field on the plane of the painting flickers momentarily into view, only enhances the thrill of the viewing experience.

Carlene West (c.1944) also uses trails of dots to denote ancestral pathways in her Country of Tjitjiti, the vast salt lake in Western Australia, but in a series of large-scale paintings from 2015, each of which is called Tjitjiti, she combines these precise markings with expansive sweeps and eddies of paint. Applied on a smooth black background, these brushstrokes, which combine washes of synthetic polymer with sections of impasto, create magnificently expressive depictions of the salt lake. That this land form, which initially reads as ABR ARTS

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Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Syaw (Fishnet), 2014. Collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl ©Regina Pilawuk Wilson, courtesy Durrmu Arts, Peppimenarti (photograph by Sid Hoeltzell)

white, is in fact created from hues of white, cream, rose, pale yellow, and beige, emphasises its physical nature, as though through the application of paint West creates not merely a simulacrum of Tjitjiti, but a living embodiment of her land and Dreaming.

Hanging alongside West’s canvases are paintings by Wintjiya Napaltjarri (c.1930–2014), where the process of mark-making similarly enacts cultural meaning. In the five included renditions of Women’s Ceremonies at Watanuma (ranging from 2006 to 2011), Napaltjarri uses abstract symbols to tell the stories of her ancestors.

Rather than depicting the symbols on top of the canvas background, however, she builds up fields of thick white acrylic paint that eventually surround and construct the required shapes. It is the intensely engaged, physical act of applying the porcelain-like finish – a process akin to the ceremony of body painting – that enables the sacred tales to emerge.

The theme of interconnectedness between a humble mark and the vastness of the universe is particularly apparent in the exhibition’s main gallery. In what is a splendid installation, paintings by Gulumbu Yunupingu and Yukultji Napangati, and decorated wooden Larrakitj poles by Gulumbu Yunupingu and Nonggirrnga Marawili, are displayed alongside works by Lena Yarinkura (1961–) and Regina Pilawuk Wilson (1948–).

Both of these latter artists engage with connective yarns in a quite literal sense.

Yarinkura, who lives and works in Arnhem Land, was taught how to weave by her mother, Lena Djamarrayku, and has since gone on to pioneer new forms in Aboriginal fibre art. Included here are two examples of Yawkyawk (female water spirits) and two of Spider (all 2015). These supremely characterful, large-scale sculp64 O CTOBER 2018

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tural works combine woven nets and webs with totemic creatures in such a way that – as the artist is clear to emphasise – the traditional symbols of her Dreaming are re-presented anew. Similarly innovative are Wilson’s large-scale painted abstractions of fishing nets. Syaw (Fishnet) from 2015, for instance, is a vast, vibrant canvas that resembles a colourful patchwork quilt or bright plaid blanket. Its intricate combination of colour and line in fact resurrects the weave of traditional Aboriginal fishing nets, a technique that was lost following white settlement. Wilson, who also travelled to the Phillips Collection to paint a wall mural in its courtyard, was originally a fibre artist, and through the transferral of the syaw from woven bush vines to acrylic paint on canvas she imparts new, vigorous life to ancient heritage.

In recent years, women have been at the forefront of contemporary Aboriginal Australian art. The innovative pictorial and conceptual tapestries included in Marking the Infinite demonstrate why. Through a weave of intimate marks, the nine artists map their knowledge of sacred Country, but such is the generous expansiveness of their works that they are not curtailed by these bounds. It is energising to think that women from one of the world’s oldest cultures, working in remote parts of Australia, are making some of the most globally relevant art today. g Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia, which was on show at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC until 9 September 2018, will be at the Museum of Anthropology, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, from 1 November 2018 until 31 March 2019.

Sally Grant is a freelance arts and culture writer based in New York.

You Were Never Really Here 

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Anwen Crawford

began to lose count of the murders in You Were Never Really Here around the halfway mark. Sometimes, the violence takes place just beyond the frame. Several gruesomely bloody scenes are interspersed with many bloodless yet no less visceral ones. The film’s opening shot shows a man with a plastic bag tied over his head, close to suffocation. Things only get more brutal after that.

You Were Never Really Here concerns a hitman, known only as Joe ( Joaquin Phoenix), who specialises in extracting young girls from situations of sexual trafficking. Joe is the kind of guy who enters a building by the fire escape and then leaves again the same way, having caused mayhem in between. When he’s not out and about murdering traffickers, he looks after his ageing, fragile mother ( Judith Roberts) and engages in rounds of auto-asphyxiation.

(It’s Joe we see in the opening shot, suffocating himself.) Staccato flashbacks throughout the film yank us back to Joe’s childhood, which was marred by domestic violence, and to his former career as a US army soldier.

Phoenix combines nervous energy and nervous exhaustion in his portrayal of a man whose life has been blighted by fear and violence. He has transformed himself physically for the role, grown bearded and bulky, and his presence must carry a film that has little dialogue and few roles, apart from his. There isn’t a great deal of plot, either.

For $50,000, Joe is hired to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), a young runaway who has fallen into the clutches of a New York paedophile ring. Nina’s father happens to be a high-ranking city politician; he demands of Joe both secrecy and ruthlessness. ‘I want you to hurt them,’ he says.

But the rescue goes wrong, which was probably bound to happen: it’s hard to maintain discretion when you’ve hired a hitman whose weapon of choice is a hammer.

The film’s director, Lynne Ramsay, has a small but impressive body of work behind her (three features before this one), centred on the relationship between physical violence and emotional guilt. Her début, Ratcatcher (1999), which was set in Ramsay’s home city of Glasgow during the early 1970s, was about a young boy implicated in the death of

a playmate. Morvern Callar (2002), also set in Scotland, is named for its protagonist. The film opens just after the suicide of Morvern’s boyfriend on Christmas morning: Morvern’s difficult and secretive bereavement becomes the motor of the plot. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Ramsay’s previous film, starred Tilda Swinton as a mother whose son, a teenage murderer, is a living torment to her.

Ramsay’s skill in framing and composition is second to none; she builds her films meticulously, shot by shot, like visual poems. Dialogue and plot are sparse because narrative is of secondary interest to her; sensory impressions are key. Her eye is drawn to everyday objects made strange or sinister by her characters’ emotional afflictions. In You Were Never Really Here, such objects include silver cutlery, a coffee percolator, discarded tissues, and, rather memorably, jelly beans. In this film she often frames people’s torsos, rather than their faces, to create a visual analogue for the fragmented, traumatised way in which Joe experiences the world. And when it comes to onscreen violence, she uses visually distancing devices – filming reflections, for instance, or surveillance footage – to emphasise Joe’s profound alienation from himself and from his actions.

Ramsay’s eye is matched by the ear of her sound designer, Paul Davies, whose work here is calculated to unnerve. The film’s diegetic sound – the rustle of a plastic bag, a cat’s purr, the conversation of passers-by – is deliberately too crisp and loud, conveying the sense of a protagonist at the edge of his wits, while occasional mismatches between sound and image heighten the disorientation of Joe’s flashbacks.

There is enough going on in the sound design to make the film’s scraping, atonal score by Jonny Greenwood – who also scored We Need to Talk About Kevin – feel largely extraneous.

The score also feels rhythmically adrift from the editing, as if chunks of it have simply been laid on top of the visuals.

This is one of the film’s few technical shortcomings.

It’s hard to fault You Were Never Really Here on the level of craft – it’s surely the most beautiful-looking film about cold-blooded murder that you’re likely to see this year.

And yet I remained unconvinced by it. For all the emotional strangeness and estrangement that characterises Ramsay’s style, her earlier films retained a potent connection to the realities of ordinary life; it was the combination of extremity and banality that made them haunting. You Were Never Really Here feels much more remote and unreal in its scenario, and though it has been compared several times already to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), I’m not sure that the comparison holds weight. Part of the power of Taxi Driver is that Travis Bickle is, well, a taxi driver: an ordinary man disguised as an avenging angel (or vice versa). Joe is much more of an assassin, a genre character in a film that tries very hard to rise above the level of genre filmmaking but that might have been better off digging down into the muck of it. g You Were Never Really Here (Umbrella Entertainment), 90 minutes, directed by Lynne Ramsay. (Longer version online)

Anwen Crawford is a Sydney-based writer and critic.

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Dark Emu

Thomas and Warren Foster shared their expertise about their country’s knowledge and practices.

The eponymous dark emu refers to the shape of  the animal in the stars in the night sky. Representing Baiame, a creator figure and the land bird that feeds on grains, the image resonates with food production to angarra Dance Theatre has been Australia’s premier sustain life. Different sections evoke the dark emu in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance com- the sky looking down on the earth, the germination of pany for nearly thirty years. Although the company seeds, the role of fire in replenishing the land, people includes dancers from every language grouping, it col- feasting on plentiful foods such as Bogong moths, and laborates with specific traditional owners. This attention the destruction of centuries of cyclical growing and harvesting that followed colonisation. Throughout, to specificity is an important part of Bangarra’s recognition of the different groupings across the Australian mainland sequences emphasise rebirth, resilience, and survival.

The costumes add layers of beauty to the perforand islands, and the islands of the Torres Strait. Led by Artistic Director Stephen Page, Bangarra draws on tech- mance. Driven by the work’s exploration of earth and niques that include traditional Indigenous dance as well as sky, the woven fabrics contribute further resonances contemporary world techniques. The company’s previous to the link between flora and fauna. As designer Jenworks include Praying Mantis Dreaming, Ochres, Skin, nifer Irwin describes them, kangaroo grass is conjured through shredded silk linen; fire is painted on loosely Corroboree, Unaipon, CLAN, Mathinna, and Bennelong.

Dark Emu, which premièred in Sydney in June 2018, crocheted skirts bleeding out from under hems. These layers of tissue-thin fabric and is based on Bruce Pascoe’s Dark fishnet underscore the story.

Emu: Black seeds: Agriculture or Irwin describes the costumes accident? (2014). Pascoe’s book as evolving art pieces that shift challenged persistent depicand change throughout the tions of Indigenous Australperformance. ians as hunter gatherers and Music has always been an nomads. This representation important element in Banof Aboriginal people, which garra’s work. From the outset, played an integral part in the David Page made an extraorcolonial project, effectively dedinary contribution with his nied Aboriginal ownership of soundscapes. Since his death and connection with the land, in 2016, others have increased thereby justifying the notion Dark Emu (photograph by Daniel Boud) their contribution. Steve Franof terra nullius. Despite the cis is composer for Dark Emu. fact that scholarly studies and archaeological evidence have long disputed the label of His score – a player in its own right – echoes wind, hunter gatherers, the idea persisted in white Australia. rain, fire, moths, flies, and cattle. Instruments morph Pascoe, whose book is aimed at a general readership, into vocals and then into the sounds of the landscape, brings together numerous stories recorded by European driving the dancers, supporting them, and then echoing explorers and settlers. They prove that, prior to European them as the audience shares the physical experiences settlement, Aboriginal people across the continent were through music and visuals. The score, drawn from the domesticating plants, sowing and harvesting crops, language of the Yuin groupings, includes a ‘Whale’ song, a Baiame song, and vocals in language for songs about farming fish and eels, and managing the land.

Bangarra has created a dance piece to express some fire and rocks. Incorporated into the soundscape is a song of these narratives in a physical and visceral dialogue performed by Lynne Thomas’s father, who sings about between dance and text. Three choreographers – Stephen ancestors moving through Country. Bruce Pascoe reads Page, Daniel Riley, Yolande Brown – offer a beautiful from his book and recites a poem by Alana Valentine. evocation of the living relationship between people and These multiple layers enrich the work.

Dark Emu is a flowing and generous work. As the plants and the impact of colonisation.

Bangarra operates as an Indigenous company on project’s dramaturg Alana Valentine states, it unites many levels. It identifies the origin of the dances and a dazzling array of elements into a cohesive work of draws on community consultations and relevant elders. dramatic beauty. g With Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which ranges across the conDark Emu, performed by the Bangarra Dance Theatre, was staged at tinent, a decision was made to deal with stories from the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne from 6 to 15 September 2018. the Yuin region, both to ground the performance and to respect the differences in cultural language and know- Maryrose Casey is an Associate Professor with the ledge in different regions. Cultural consultants Lynne Monash Indigenous Studies Centre. ❖

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Maryrose Casey

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

London and New York Three decades of collective

Patrick McCaughey MODERNISTS AND MAVERICKS: BACON, FREUD, HOCKNEY AND THE LONDON PAINTERS

by Martin Gayford Thames & Hudson, $50 hb, 340 pp, 9780500239773

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he geography of art post 1945 has a boringly settled look and needs disturbing. This engaging and readable book makes a useful starting point. The standard view begins with the switch of the centre from Paris to New York, and so it remained for the next fifty years or so until the shoals of postminimalism washed up on the stony beach of postmodernism.

Europe had individual masters such as Francis Bacon, Antoni Tàpies, Anselm Kiefer, and Alberto Burri.

Sculpture had Alberto Giacometti, Anthony Caro, and Henry Bore (aka Moore), a darling of American corporate taste. There were even transient movements in European art, which attracted international attention, notably the Italian Transavanguardia – Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, and Mimmo Paladino – and the German neo-expressionists A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, and Sigmar Polke. But New York stubbornly retained its centrality, buoyed by the dominance and excess of its contemporary art market. Late into the 1980s, Frank Stella could still claim, unwisely, unblushingly, that major art could not be made outside of New York.

But how dominant was New York in the period from 1945 to 1995? It’s an open question. The pattern of Western art was not synonymous with the course of American art as Martin Gayford’s informal history of the School of London tactfully implies. Gayford avidly records artists’ thoughts and opinions.

His Eckermann-like account of Lucian Freud in The Man in the Blue Scarf documents the experience of having your portrait painted by the Rembrandt of Kensington Church Street. The present book Gayford calls ‘a collective inter-

view or multiple biography … recorded over three decades’, ranging from Frank Auerbach and Gillian Ayres to John Virtue and John Wonnacott. The method has assets and imitations: there is a sympathetic intimacy with artists, but it cauterises critical judgement.

It elicits, however, such startling remarks as Gillian Ayres’s statement that really links the disparate School of London. The abiding issue for Ayres was: ‘What can be done with painting?’. It was both question and assertion. It made for a self-questioning, self-doubting mode and privileged highly individual styles and idiosyncratic subjects. The School of London embraced such antithetical sensibilities as the diffidence of Michael Andrews and the brute force of Francis Bacon. Could you have two more different virtuosos of the brush than Lucian Freud and David Hockney?

Hence comes the characterisation ‘maverick’. Frank Auerbach, as central to the school as anyone, sees Hockney, Bacon, and Freud coming from a line of British maverick artists, ‘people who did exactly what they wanted to do, such as Hogarth, Blake, Spencer, Bomberg’.

Such a situation gave women artists a better chance than elsewhere.

Of course, they had to struggle, but Ayres, the first woman to head a painting department in the United Kingdom, at the Winchester School, was an inspirational teacher. Prunella Clough was given a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960 and another in 1975 at the Serpentine Gallery. Sandra Blow was taken up early in her career by Gimpel Fils, a leading international art dealer. Most prominently, Bridget Riley lived down and painted through her early, sensational op art

style to become a major force in British art. Paula Rego was their heir. Collectively, they broke into the ‘boys only’ atmosphere of the School of London.

The Brits enjoyed an anomalous relationship with New York. Most contemporary British artists were aware of American-type painting from the early 1950s – some, like Alan Davie, even earlier. Fred Williams remembered seeing Blue Poles at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1952, and the Jackson Pollock retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1958 had a galvanic effect.

Gayford notes that David Hockney hitchhiked down from Bradford to see it.

Bacon was studiously unimpressed.

Pollock reminded him of ‘a collection of old lace’, and he went on to make the out-

The geography of art post 1945 has a boringly settled look rageous claim that Elinor BellinghamSmith, a still-life and landscape painter, and wife of the artist Rodrigo Moynihan, was a better artist. Auerbach, always the more generous and perceptive, was unambiguous: ‘What the Americans did was to re-assert the standards of grandeur.’

Pollock offered a freedom to British artists away from the edicts of the lifedrawing classroom. How you moved the paint around was what mattered. Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, both rooted in the grimier aspects of the London scene, found release in Pollock’s energetic abstraction. Both had sought out David Bomberg as a mentor in the unfashionable Borough Polytechnic on the wrong side of the river and had taken to heart his mantra seeking ‘the spirit in the mass’. Harold Rosenberg’s phrase that the canvas had become ‘an arena in which to act’ struck a nerve in Ayres. She produced the most advanced abstract painting in Britain in the 1950s under its aegis.

Martin Gayford develops the theme of British delight in all things American from popular culture and cinema to skyscrapers and cereal packaging in the late 1950s. They would be the fuse and detonator of British Pop Art. UnABR ARTS

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questionably, British Pop Art preceded the American version. In the hands of Richard Hamilton, Richard Smith, and Peter Blake, it had a richer, more painterly quality than their transatlantic coevals. British Pop Art petered out in the 1970s. Only Patrick Caulfield had a sustained career in a pop mode to match Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or James Rosenquist. But it nurtured the genius of David Hockney, whose liberating passion for America, from Los Angeles swimming pools and their denizens to the Grand Canyon, gave the middle period of his art its brilliance and complexity.

The geography of contemporary art remains a puzzle. If you asked the cognoscenti in London for the names of the most important figures in recent art, you would get: Bacon, Freud, and Hockney, possibly Howard Hodgkin, one hopes Riley, Auerbach, and Kossoff, maybe Ayres for the well informed.

None of these would be on a New Yorker’s top ten: Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and the minimalists would all precede them. At the time of writing, only one of the seven Bacons in MoMA’s collection is on view. The Modern has no painting by Lucian Freud later than 1949.

If, however, we were to interleave the School of London and other major European figures with American art and artists, it would profoundly enhance the story of late modernism. It would possess a richer texture, more humanist in outlook, less conceptual, resonating the anxieties and aspirations of the age. g

Patrick McCaughey is a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art. 68 O CTOBER 2018

Red herring David McInnis SHAKESPEARE’S LIBRARY: UNLOCKING THE GREATEST MYSTERY IN LITERATURE

by Stuart Kells

Text Publishing $34.99 pb, 352 pp, 9781925603774

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he search for Shakespeare’s library (the books ostensibly owned by Shakespeare but dispersed without a trace after his death) is driven largely by the hope that marginalia, notes, and drafts might provide unfettered access to authorial intention. Inevitably, the missing library turns out to be central to a number of the anti-Stratfordian cases, including Diana Price’s convoluted and ill-informed set of precepts for determining literary credentials, which yields the ludicrous conclusion that ‘Shakespeare’ was a ‘collective conspiracy’. She deems this more likely than the possibility that Shakespeare’s papers once existed but have simply been lost.

Stuart Kells, in Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature, calls her argument ‘intellectually courageous’. Indeed, to the detriment of his own handling of evidence, Kells devotes an inordinate amount of time to the affectionately dubbed ‘Indiana Jones school of Shakespeare studies, whose adherents continue in their efforts to dig up clues, unravel ciphers and commune with the dead’.

Occasionally, Kells’s claims are overstated for rhetorical effect, to create excitement about Shakespeare’s conspicuous absence from the archive.

He queries how Shakespeare could

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

possibly have enjoyed ‘such a rapid rise’ to the ‘top of the theatre world’ in London. But of course we cannot tell how rapid his rise may have been. He asks how Shakespeare could purchase New Place in Stratford at a time when his playing company was ‘in financial distress’ (it was not, really; its lease on its regular venue, the Theatre, had expired, but the company moved to its first purpose-built venue, the Globe, shortly thereafter).

Marlowe is incorrectly said to have left behind a play in manuscript (perhaps Kells means the ‘Collier fragment’, a single page of dialogue from The Massacre at Paris), but Shakespeare’s three-page contribution to the Sir Thomas More play-text is ‘small’ and ‘contentious’.

Other times, evidence is misunderstood or neglected. There is nothing suspicious about the fact that Rose playhouse manager Philip Henslowe failed to mention Shakespeare anywhere in his diary. Contrary to Kells, there isn’t any evidence that Shakespeare ‘supposedly wrote and acted’ for Henslowe (at best, the companies at the Rose had one or two Shakespearean plays in their repertory). Shakespeare’s absence from other diarists’ accounts of the period is also remarked upon, but the inconvenience of Frances Meres’s praise of Shakespeare in 1598 is strategically ignored for another 150 pages. Nothing is made of Heather Wolfe’s recent discovery of documentary evidence from within Shakespeare’s lifetime (a sketch of his coat of Arms clearly labelled ‘Shakespeare the Player’) confirming that the man who died in Stratford wrote plays in London.

At its best, Kells’s book is not a search for Shakespeare’s library but a book about the search for Shakespeare’s library. Having canvassed a number of possibilities for locating the enigmatic lost library, including tracing provenance through Shakespeare’s descendants, Kells hits his stride with an entertaining overview of postseventeenth-century attempts to locate Shakespeare’s books. Here we have an erudite and witty account of early editors (such as Nicholas Rowe) misled by anecdote and apocryphal stories; of notorious forgers (William Henry Ireland) whose interventions threw investigators off the scent; and of how the failure to

locate any of Shakespeare’s manuscripts or books led some ( John Fry) to doubt that Shakespeare wrote the plays we attribute to him at all. This genuinely engaging section passes all too quickly, however, and Kells’s own exposure to a raft of anti-Stratfordians and their preferred authorial candidates (Marlowe, Bacon, Neville) informs a significant chunk of the central chapters. Documenting the case for Neville as the true author of Shakespeare becomes a preoccupation of the second part of the book (there are only three parts in total), and even though those cases are eventually critiqued – at length, to be fair – one might question whether the discussion would have been served better without this excursion.

Kells’s ultimate advice to the reader is a reminder that imitation and appropriation, not originality, were essential elements of a playwright’s task in Shakespeare’s day. Shakespeare drew heavily on source texts and in turn reaches us through the heavily mediated process of scholarly editing and publishing.

Kells thus refers to Shakespeare’s role as an ‘inbetweener’ in this process; one who collaborated, refined, and adapted, who didn’t need a university education or aristocratic background, and who may not even have owned a library. Accordingly, while ‘Shakespeare’s missing library was a boon for heretics like Diana Price and Brenda James … Shakespeare’s library of sources … is the heretics’ downfall.’

This is, of course, the uncontroversial scholarly consensus on the commercial playwright’s work habits (though it is billed here as a ‘new paradigm’).This anticlimactic rebuttal to the extensive foregoing discussion of authorship theories is further diluted when Kells extends an olive branch to the conspiracy theorists, encouraging the possibility that various frustrated aristocrats silently collaborated with Shakespeare on his writing. Puzzlingly, he alludes to Shakespeare scholars and anti-Stratfordians apparently reaching ‘some kind of middle ground’ or ‘convergence’ on the question of authorship, suggesting that their ‘principal disagreements have withered’.

(This simply isn’t the case; see David Kathman and Terry Ross’s helpful website, The Shakespeare Authorship Page.)

Having eventually conceded that Shakespeare’s lost library is largely a red herring, and acknowledged that ‘one thing we know for certain’ is that ‘Time is a destroyer of books’, Kells offers in his final section a series of fanciful models for what a Shakespearean library might nonetheless have looked like: the Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales; Ben Jonson’s own now-dispersed library; a ‘Shakespearean

porn library’; Penguin’s promulgation of accessible critical editions as ‘a modern Shakespeare library’. There is much of interest in individual chapters, but this is an uneven book, with flashes of erudition interspersed haphazardly with unhelpful conjecture. g David McInnis is the Gerry Higgins Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Here to stay

A history of the ubiquitous piano

Gillian Wills A COVETED POSSESSION: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE PIANO IN AUSTRALIA

by Michael Atherton La Trobe University Press, $34.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781863959919

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n Australia’s golden age of piano production, between 1870 and 1930, the piano was, as Michael Atherton notes, ‘as much a coveted possession as a smartphone or an iPad is today’.

The First Fleet imported an eclectic assortment of items, including dogs, rabbits, cattle, seedlings, and a ‘Frederick Beck’ piano. The latter belonged to the naval surgeon George Wogan, who played it on the long voyage. Pianist and historian Geoffrey Lancaster maintains that a piano, of the same brand, now in a collection of 130 instruments owned by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, is Wogan’s piano.

Topical in recent times, the piano is the focus of Anna Goldsworthy’s awardwinning memoir, Piano Lessons (2009).

Girls at the Piano (2018), by Virginia Lloyd, reflects on the experience of two women pianists worlds and generations apart. A Coveted Possession explores the piano from a broader reach and from an Australian viewpoint. The outcome is engaging: a detailed, well-researched, and loving contemplation of how the piano became integral to Australia’s search for identity, and how the continent prospered as ‘a colony of pianos’.

Atherton scrutinises its significance from historical, economic, cultural, social, and gender-driven perspectives.

In the early days of settlement, the author asserts that the instrument represented a nostalgic connection to the Mother Country, and, as such, became a talisman of home comforts left behind. Its pride of place in domestic quarters assuaged the alienation of the recently arrived. But when pianos were unloaded from cargo ships on arrival, many ended up stranded on the beach.

Crestfallen, Mrs Hindmarsh, the South Australian Governor’s wife, observed her eagerly awaited piano ‘floating ashore at Glenelg’.

Just as the piano became a symbol of superior social status, Atherton says it was considered an appropriate instrument for women. The player sits demurely, legs together, there is no unseemly ‘straddling of cellos’ or the necessity for puckered lips in playing an oboe or flute. Even so, there were those who disapproved of women’s delight at the keyboard, in case household duties were forgotten.

Successive governments approved of the piano as calmative, a recreational ABR ARTS

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ian made’ was a galvanising mantra. The continent’s piano producers, in particular Beale in Sydney and Wertheim in Melbourne, ran ‘superb piano factories’.

These entrepreneurs devised innovative technology and pioneered the use of local timbers better suited to the continent’s climatic conditions. Parallels are drawn between these producers and today’s Stuart & Sons, who have pioneered a trailblazer with 104 keys, nine octaves, and four pedals. This structurally enhanced model has inspired new piano repertoire.

Major importers such as Allans Music and W.H. Paling & Company lobbied fiercely for tariffs to be removed from imported instruments so that German models could compete with Australian varieties. The history is complex because the consumer’s hunger for the piano waxed and waned.

Australia’s piano industry was adversely affected during World War I, when German pianos were banned and local Australian soldiers attempting to fix a piano in New Guinea, 1943 production slow(Australian War Memorial) ed. Piano sales also slumped due Its presence, increasingly ubiquitous, to the advent of the pianola (a selfwas no longer confined to domestic use, playing piano) and the radio.

In 1918, German models were chalky classrooms, pubs, and church halls. Despatched to the trenches, once again imported, and the conflict it cheered soldiers on battle lines, between importers of European brands patients in hospitals, inmates of asy- and Australian producers fuelled sabrelums, travellers on troop ships, those rattling piano wars, where overseas interred in prisoner-of-war camps, merchants attempted to buy out Aussie and the frequenters of brothels. In manufacturers and close them down. the infamous Changi Prison during The fierce rivalry led to unscrupulous World War II, a dozen men escaped to practices, where false brand names were retrieve a piano abandoned by the navy attached to obliterate existing ones.

Extensive though Atherton’s canvas a kilometre and a half away. Carried through jungle and somehow smuggled is, not to give more than a couple of into Changi, it encouraged communal lines to the Australian Music Examination Board is surprising because the singing and boosted morale.

At the time of Federation, ‘Austral- organisation motivated piano students, distraction from Europe’s political unrest. On a humbler scale, it was admired as decorative furniture, especially Australian varieties, because these were often intricately carved with local flora and fauna. For some, the piano was admired as a depository for treasured photographs or floral arrangements. Here, Atherton’s disapproval peels through the pages.

In wartime, the piano was invested with therapeutic power. It was the transformative hero of the various Cheer-Up Squads in South Australia, whose mission was to restore the spirits of broken soldiers during World War I.

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served in a benchmarking capacity, and commissioned Aussie composers. Repertoire by locals appeared in graded anthologies from 1934. By 1942, pieces by ten Australian composers had appeared in syllabuses.

Similarly, the discussion of how the trend for sheet music like Paling’s ‘Sydney Railway Waltz’ and Theakstone’s ‘Federal Waltz’ further developed Australian identity and contributed to the democratisation of music, could have flowed into a survey of the nation’s current composers who have penned distinctive piano repertoire: for example, Carl Vine, Nigel Butterley, Ross Edwards, and Elena Kats-Chernin.

While the stories of Australia at war and the country’s once-inspired piano industry resonate with authenticity, the survey of virtuoso pianists is the least convincing passage in this otherwise rewarding book.

In ‘Where do old pianos go to die?’ it is poignant to read of this instrument, once celebrated as a panacea for all ills, now abandoned in junk shops and waste dumps, hacked to pieces in performance art, or ritually burned in music happenings. And yet, despite the digital revolution, the electric piano, and prominence of the guitar, the author reassuringly claims the ‘instrument is here to stay’. g

Gillian Wills studied piano performance at the Royal Academy of Music.

In 1995, she was awarded an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of Music for distinguished services to the music profession.

Evita 

I

Peter Tregear

confess that I do not share the knee-jerk negative view of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that many of my colleagues profess. His best works, especially those conceived with librettist Tim Rice, stake a legitimate claim on our attention, if only for their consummate skill in identifying and exploring subject matter for music theatre that captures, and holds, the popular imagination.

Their three early successes – Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968), Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), and Evita (1976) – have a common theme: the power of fame both to elevate and corrupt those upon whom it is bestowed. To this end, Evita is not really ‘a departure from their biblical creations’, as the program essay in this revival of Hal Prince’s original 1978 production by John Frost and Opera Australia claims. The celebrity status of actress and politician Eva María Duarte Perón (1919–52) was such that she eventually took on something of the character of the Mater Dolorosa, a woman who seemed both to intercede, and – when eventually struck down with cancer – suffer for her beloved ‘descamisados’.

Rice and Lloyd Webber clearly relished the opportunity to work with this mythic material and the opportunities for grand theatrical set pieces it presented.

Emerging initially as a rock concept album in 1976 (the première followed in London in 1978), Evita is more an interconnected set of musical numbers than a conversation drama. Complex character development is thus not the work’s forte. Rice’s decision to include a narrator (known in the score as ‘Che’), however, provides a vehicle for constant and explicit political commentary, even if the nigh-irresistible association of that character with Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (which Hal Prince emphasises) inevitably weakens the force of this critique because of Guevara’s own pop-cultural associations.

In any event, Evita does not claim to present a rigorous historical or political account of Eva Duarte and Peronism. Instead, like nineteenth-century Grand Opera, it is concerned with exploring the theatrical nature of politics itself, an exploration that serendipitously reaches its denouement with the hit song ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’. Here, Australian pop icon Tina Arena

unquestionably delivers. Her performance of both it, and the later song ‘You Must Love Me’ that was added for the 1996 film version (directed by Alan Parker), is characterised by both pathos and unforced lyricism.

On opening night, however, Arena’s overall performance came across as rather tentative, the reasons for which might lie as much in the sound design as in any possible reticence from Arena herself. The Joan Sutherland Theatre’s new sound reinforcement and electro-acoustic enhancement system was prominent during the performance. The challenge for a sound designer is to avoid giving the impression that the action on stage is being mimed to a soundtrack. Here, the acoustic connection between singer and orchestra, and thus between stage and audience, was often lost in in the midst of a blanket of sound. The rhythm section, and bass frequencies more generally, were muffled – thus some of the big set-piece dance numbers lacked the requisite rhythmic drive. David Cullen’s arrangements also seem to have played down the seedy Latin nightclub feel of the original score. The twenty-nine-piece orchestra, directed

by Guy Simpson, was in any case always going to struggle to match the impact of a score that many audience members will have first encountered in an original cast recording that used the full resources of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the issues in amplification only made the contrast all the more obvious.

On stage, other issues were apparent. Kurt Kansley’s performance of Che’s opening number, ‘Oh What a Circus, Oh What a Show’, was delivered in staccatolike phrases that seemed to suggest a reticence towards sustained vocal production, but he was not helped by the curious (and, in my opinion, unnecessary and distracting) decision to have all the cast sing in Latin-American accents. Brazilian Baritone Paulo Szot, however, demonstrated great vocal and physical presence as Juan Perón, and Alexis van Maanen delivered ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’ with the requisite delicacy and pathos.

The chorus work was also uniformly strong; the male ensemble in particular delivering choreographer Larry Fuller’s extraordinary projection of the Argentinian army as toy soldiers with relish and aplomb.

Overall, Hal Prince’s quasi-Brechtian production remains a model of dramatic clarity and economy. Video projections, too, convey a sense of time and place without being too distracting. It has all stood the test of time well.

Likewise, given that we now have a television celebrity as US president, and a fashion model as First Lady, so too (for better or worse) has Evita itself. g Evita, presented by Opera Australia, continues in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House until 3 November 2018.

It then transfers to Arts Centre Melbourne from 5 December to 10 March 2019.

Peter Tregear’s most recent books are Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013) and Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking tertiary music education (2014).

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*INc. GST

September 2008 No. 304 $8.95*

David Trigger: A Death on Palm Island

Norman Abjorensen: Death of the Howard Government

Rachel Robertson: Whose Story Is It?

Geoff Gallop on clive Hamilton

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Being Manning clark John Thompson on the new book of letters

‘clark’s aspiration to be a better man than he was or could be remained strong until the end.

There are some wilful cruelties and dismissals, and there is much pain and angst. But there is idealism too...’ in w & s! w t o ke n e t ic R iB R e s c e at B su th

Don’t miss RichaRD holmes’s seymouR lectuRe full Details insiDe the John Button ReaDeRs’ awaRD ABR ReaDeRs to DeciDe

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From the ABR Archive

David Trigger reviewed Chloe Hooper’s book The Tall Man (Hamish Hamilton) in the September 2008 issue. Here is an extract: the full version (which also covered Jeff Waters’ book Gone For A Song: A death in custody on Palm Island) appears online.

hloe Hooper has written an insightful and intensely personal book about the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody on Palm Island off Townsville in north Queensland. In late 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, aged thirty-six, died after being arrested by Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley. The Tall Man follows the initial internal police investigations, the riot on Palm Island, which was prompted by an announcement that the death was accidental, several stages of the inquest, and the drawn-out process whereby Hurley was eventually charged with manslaughter and acquitted by a Townsville jury.

The race politics that arose were complex in their historical origins and in what the case says about the experience of many Aboriginal people with the Australian judicial process. Hooper’s achievement is to portray the issues without the superficial point-scoring so prevalent in writings about Indigenous affairs. While she has great empathy for the Aboriginal families involved, this is no simplistic or one-dimensional account. Hooper thinks deeply about the circumstances of both the deceased Aboriginal man and the policeman, and about their families and backgrounds.

Unlike those who might proclaim unswerving and exclusive allegiance either to the Aboriginal cause or the moral uprightness of police, Chloe Hooper explains that she tries ‘to look at things from every angle’.

Hooper, in her investigations, formed close associations with some of Cameron Doomadgee’s family on Palm Island.

She also visited Doomadgee, in north-west Queensland, the location of his mother’s and his stepfather’s traditional country. As a result, the reader feels the emotions of an author trying to understand how Australia’s colonial history has produced the dysfunction – and the transformed yet distinctive cultural differences – that permeate contemporary Aboriginal towns. Her access to the police subculture that protectively enveloped the accused officer was clearly more limited. Hooper was not able to speak to Senior Sergeant Hurley, and her interactions with his supporters were decidedly constrained in comparison with her dealings with the Aboriginal women.

Hooper examines the contested details as to whether Hurley (tall and heavily built) was guilty of causing the death of the smaller, and drunk, Aboriginal man. The real success of the book lies in what the case reveals about those who were associated with both the dead man and the accused; and in what is revealed about the wider societal processes and forces that influence and structure the protagonists’ actions and beliefs. The police officer emerges as a tough man who chose for some years the work of law enforcement across a number of Indigenous communities in northern Queensland. He was not someone who avoided

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close contact with Aboriginal people; he did voluntary work with children and had an interest in reconciliation.

Cameron Doomadgee, though the same age as the police officer, lived life ‘in a different country’ where ‘to reach puberty is for many to reach the edge of the abyss’. Hospital records list various illness and injuries during Doomadgee’s short life. These include alcohol-related seizures, renal trauma, stab wounds, and broken ribs. Eighteen months after his own death, Doomadgee’s seventeen-year-old son committed suicide by hanging himself.

Hooper describes the residents of Palm Island as ‘refugees from Wild Time’, the colonial frontier period so named by the Doomadgee family’s relatives in the Gulf Country.

It is now the police (mostly, though not exclusively, white) who face the dispiriting task of keeping the peace among a population harbouring at least as much dislike as respect.

The difficulty of the job should not be underestimated.

Hooper tells us that the ‘war’ between police and Indigenous people in places like Palm Island is really a ‘false battleground’. She writes, ‘the spotlight on Hurley and Doomadgee locked in a death struggle ignored the great horror taking place offstage’. The case demonstrated the enormous chasm between everyday life in white and black Australia. Most of the lawyers ‘could barely comprehend the Palm Islanders’ language’. This gulf is even apparent in well-intentioned attempts at cross-cultural sensitivity.

Frustratingly for Doomadgee’s Gulf Country relatives, ‘Mulrunji’ became the name for him that lawyers and the media used repeatedly. It had been inaccurately transcribed as the traditional term for a recently deceased person: ‘moordinyi’. Even if the term had been transcribed correctly, Hooper points out that ‘the family and witnesses continued to call the dead man Cameron’.

Hooper’s literary flair helps to reveal the informal signifiers of two worlds: for example, evoking the often decrepit and ill-fitting clothes worn by Aboriginal witnesses in court: ‘[h]unched slightly in her faded clothes, rolls of fat on her back, [she] stood for everything white Australians don’t want to know about black Australia.’ In the public gallery, Doomadgee’s partner ‘looked broken and exhausted in an old faded shirt over a cotton dress and, despite the rain, thongs’. The policeman’s girlfriend, by contrast, was ‘pert, neat, tailored, made-up, bejewelled’.

Not all interpretations are convincing, one jarring example being the description of ‘surreal’ voting at a police rally, with arms held ‘out at a 45-degree angle’ rather than straight up, presumably intending to suggest Nazi-like sentiment. However, the book’s recounting of the author’s personal experiences mostly works well and presents a rich narrative that will both inform and dismay. g